A Fresh Look at the Origins of the Nuclear Age

A major work that richly deserves attention and begins not in 1945 but rather earlier in the century, both with the background to invention and with a political competition to gain and develop ideas and technology. From 1945, however, example ensured that overhanging all else was the threat posed by nuclear weapons. In January 1946, Maj. Gen. Leslie Groves, the head of the American atomic bomb project, had warned ‘Either we must have a hard-boiled, realistic, enforceable, world-agreement ensuring the outlawing of atomic weapons or we and our dependable allies must have an exclusive supremacy in the field, which means that no other nation can be permitted to have atomic weapons’. However, there was to be no agreement, while, another possible outcome, the continuance of America’s nuclear monopoly, which appeared to offer a means to coerce the Soviet Union, lasted only until 1949. Then, thanks in part to successful spying on Western nuclear technology, the Soviet Union, at least two years before the CIA had predicted, completed its development of an effective bomb that was very similar to the American one.

This development had required a formidable effort, as the Soviet Union was devastated by the impact of World War Two, and it was pursued because Josef Stalin believed that only a position of nuclear equivalence would permit the Soviet Union to protect and advance its interests. However, such a policy, although apparently immediately necessary, was ruinous financially, seriously harmful to the economy, as it led to the distortion of research and investment choices, and militarily questionable, as resources were used that might otherwise have developed conventional military capability. Great cruelty was involved in the Soviet program, part of which was located in the labour camps (gulags), and drew on their coerced slave labour. The Communist governments that followed Stalin, after he died in 1953, introduced changes in some aspects of policy, but they did not break free from his legacy of nuclear competition, although nor did the Americans or British do the same.

Even when America alone had had the atomic bomb, the value of the weapon was limited. Its potential use was restricted because the delivery systems were not as well developed as they were later. Moreover, the atom bomb was insufficiently flexible (in terms of military and political application or acceptance of its use) to meet challenges other than that of full-scale war which is in practice still the situation. Thus, the Americans did not use the atom bomb (of which they then indeed had very few) to help their Nationalist Chinese allies in the Chinese Civil War of 1946–9. Similarly, American possession of the bomb did not deter the Soviets from trying to intimidate the West during the Berlin Crisis of 1948–9.

Nevertheless, the availability of the bomb encouraged American reliance on a nuclear deterrent, which made it possible to hasten the demobilisation that accorded with the public mood after World War Two. This policy left the USA more vulnerable when the Korean War broke out in 1950. In turn, the Soviet atomic bomb test in August 1949 encouraged Stalin to egg on the North Korean attack on South Korea.

The nuclear duopoly did not last long, as Britain, France, China, India and Pakistan followed with their own atomic weapons in 1952, 1960, 1964, 1974, and 1988 respectively. Israel, South Africa and North Korea also developed nuclear capabilities, although South Africa gave them up. Conversely, neither West Germany nor Japan developed such technology. In part, this reflected the absence of any policy of revanche on the part of the post-war leaderships that gained control after Western occupation ceased, which spoke well of the post-war Allied rebuilding effort. Nevertheless, West Germany wished to develop its own nuclear weapons as they were seen as a marker of state sovereignty. Although, they did not admit this in public, Konrad Adenauer, the Chancellor from 1949 to 1963, and, especially Franz Josef Strauss, the bombastic Minister of Defence from 1956 to 1962, were keen on the idea.

However, the lack of West German and Japanese atomic forces accorded with American-directed Western security policies. It proved an important as well as lasting aspect of the strategic and geopolitical landscapes. Had either West Germany or Japan sought to develop atomic forces, as opposed to the peaceful generation of atomic energy, then this would have contributed greatly to tension with the Soviet Union and China. Now, it is unclear how far there will be a further proliferation, and notably so in the Middle East.

Plokhy offers a very wide-ranging study that includes espionage, weaponry, procurement, public response, the conceptualisation of use, and the reach to the present, not least with the Russian war on Ukraine.

The politics, geopolitics, tactics, operational parameters, strategies, means and ethos of the nuclear age are now all changing at an unprecedented rate. This highly instructive book provides a very useful perspective on both past and present.

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Our Reviewer: Jeremy Black, Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Exeter, is a Senior Fellow of the Center for the Study of America and the West at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. He is the author of an impressive number of works in history and international affairs, frequently demonstrating unique interactions and trends among events, including The Great War and the Making of the Modern World, Combined Operations: A Global History of Amphibious and Airborne Warfare, and The War of 1812 in the Age of Napoleon. Works he has previously reviewed here include Empireworld: How British Imperialism Shaped the Globe, Why War?, Seapower in the Post-Modern World, Mobility and Coercion in an Age of Wars and Revolutions, Augustus the Strong, Military History for the Modern Strategist, The Great Siege of Malta, Hitler’s Fatal Miscalculation, Superpower Britain, Josephine Baker’s Secret War, Captives and Companions. A History of Slavery and the Slave Trade in the Islamic World, War and Power: Who Wins Wars—and Why, The Pacific’s New Navies, No More Napoleons, Republic and Empire. Crisis, Revolution, America’s Early Independence, The Fate of the Day, and The Maginot Line: A New History.

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