Abstract
So long as the United States enjoyed a monopoly of atomic bombs hard choices on military policy and strategy could be avoided. Security threats were manageable without the sort of effort required during the recent war. In part this also reflected a favourable geographical position. There was no danger of a direct invasion which is why traditionally there had been little interest in a large standing army for territorial defence. All potential enemies were distant and so a strong navy should keep them at bay. Airpower promised to keep any enemy’s political and economic centres at risk and now with atom bombs no great exertions in battle would be required to defeat and punish an aggressor. America could protect itself from the effects of war while still emerging victorious.
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Notes
- 1.
Walter Lippmann, ‘Why are we disarming ourselves?’, Redbrook Magazine (September 1946), p. 106.
- 2.
Walter Lippman, The Cold War (Boston: Little Brown, 1947). Ronald Steel, Walter Lippmann and the American Century (London: Bodley Head, 1980), p. 445 For more on the various claims to have introduced the term see William Safire, Safire’s New Political Dictionary (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 134–5. The novelist George Orwell had used the term as early as 1945 when he did envisage a Cold War in which the major powers had ‘a tacit agreement never to use the bomb against one another.’ George Orwell, “You and the Atomic Bomb,” Tribune, October 19, 1945, reprinted in Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus, eds., The Collected Essays; Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, vol. 4 (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1968), pp. 8–10.
- 3.
Bernard Brodie, ‘The atom bomb as policy-maker’, Foreign Affairs, XXVII:1 (October 1948), p. 21.
- 4.
William Fox, The Superpowers: The United States, Britain and the Soviet Union and Their Responsibility for Peace (New York: Harcourt & Brace, 1944), p. 102.
- 5.
Perry Smith, The Air Force Plans for Peace, pp. 52–3.
- 6.
William Fox, Atomic Energy and International Relations, p. 14.
- 7.
Campbell Craig and Sergey Radchenko, The Atomic Bomb and the Origins of the Cold War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008).
- 8.
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- 9.
‘X’, ‘The sources of Soviet conduct’, Foreign Affairs, XXV (July 1947); George F. Kennan, Memoirs, 1925–1950 (Boston, Little Brown: 1967), p. 358. John Gaddis, George F. Kennan: An American Life (New York: Norton, 2011), pp. 251–2.
- 10.
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- 11.
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- 12.
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- 13.
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- 14.
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- 15.
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- 17.
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- 18.
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- 21.
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- 22.
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- 23.
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- 24.
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- 25.
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- 26.
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- 27.
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- 28.
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- 29.
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- 31.
In 1949, cited in Raymond L. Garthoff, Soviet Military Doctrine (Illinois: The Free Press, 1953), p. 174.
- 32.
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- 33.
David Holloway, Stalin and the Bomb: The Soviet Union and Atomic Energy, 1936–1956 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994), p. 242.
- 34.
Garthoff (1953), p. 67.
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- 36.
Zaloga, p. 7.
- 37.
Holloway, pp. 225–6, 240–1.
- 38.
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Freedman, L., Michaels, J. (2019). Strategy for an Atomic Monopoly. In: The Evolution of Nuclear Strategy. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-57350-6_5
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