¡Colores!; 1301; A Commitment to Peace; Lawrence S. Wittner, Interview 1

Well, I'm trying to get you a coke. Adams for Peace shows up about four months after Oppenheimer's security clearance is removed or not renewed. Why do you think the Eisenhower administration distanced themselves from Oppenheimer, those scientists that were seeking moderation in weapons development? Well, I think a key figure in Eisenhower's thinking about the nuclear arms race and nuclear weapons and nuclear Saturday generally was Lewis Strauss who was chair of the Atomic Energy Commission and Strauss took a very hard line toward Oppenheimer and for this

reason I think Eisenhower simply went along with the hard line and that hard line meant to a brute Oppenheimer from his prominent role in the U.S. nuclear weapons program. He had been chair of course of the General Advisory Committee of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission but at this point Strauss was determined to purge Oppenheimer and I think Eisenhower simply agreed with that. Why do you think Strauss had a problem with Oppenheimer? I think the key fact was that when President Truman had solicited opinions from the Atomic Energy Commission and from its advisory committee back in 1950 as the building of a hydrogen bomb Oppenheimer and other prominent scientists had opposed building the bomb. Building H bomb they felt that atomic bomb was all the

United States needed certainly at that time and that the goal at that point should be an arms control and disarmament treaty rather than this plunge forward in nuclear arms race. So do you think Oppenheimer and Strauss then were at two ends of this spectrum? Well I think in certain ways that was true and the spectrum had to do with the nuclear arms race. Strauss was committed to it and Oppenheimer had raised serious questions about it. However once the loyalty a secured hearings began as to Oppenheimer the Strauss people began to retreat from their critique of Oppenheimer as a soft liner when it came to the arms race and began to raise questions about his character and in the end it was the character question that led to his being rejected by the panel scrutinizing his record. Do you think Oppenheimer was a pacifist? No not at all.

Not at all. Oh all right sorry yes. I think Oppenheimer was far from being a pacifist and indeed had been one of the key figures in terms of the development of the atomic bomb and the use of the atomic bomb during the Second World War. He was concerned though I believe about the ongoing nuclear arms race about this plunge toward Armageddon and therefore he was one of those figures increasingly inside the federal government that was committed to bringing the arms race under control and from the standpoint of more hawkish people such as Strauss who now came into their own with the Eisenhower administration he had to be purged. So who was Eisenhower listening to them? Who was his nuclear confident that was whispering in his ear and you know making

those those midnight liaison sort of speaker of decision making? I think Strauss was probably the the key figure for the vast bulk of the Eisenhower administration. He left later in 1958 pretty much forced out of power by Democrats who didn't like his his hard-line stand but other people such as John Foster, Dulles and top figures in the Republican Party were committed to emphasis on nuclear weaponry as the guarantor of U.S. national security during the early 1950s. So in Dulles for example talked about massive retaliation as the appropriate response to Soviet or communist aggression that that really meant a willingness to use nuclear weapons just as the United States had used conventional weapons in the past regularizing nuclear weapons making them the

same as conventional weapons. Do you have a layman's definition of massive retaliation? Well Dulles used the term in this rather vague way but it became clear in terms of his other statements and the statements of the Eisenhower administration that what he really meant by massive retaliation was a nuclear attack on the Soviet Union or other communist states that would not necessarily be a response to a nuclear attack by those states but might be a response to a conventional attack by those states or anything that the U.S. government defined as aggression on the world scene. So in that sense the Eisenhower administration was upping the ante in terms of armed response to what it defined as communist aggression. Yes, yes I would call it that.

Does it and I want you to help purpose my yes I'm sorry I didn't do it then. Yes yes I think this was an example of the escalation of the Cold War and the nuclear arms race and in general the willingness of the U.S. government to use massive force what Dulles called massive retaliation in its Cold War confrontation with the Soviet Union and that meant heightened nuclear danger for the United States and for the people of the world and of course it was in this context that popular protests began to grow because many people sensed that things were getting out of hand at this point. He certainly seemed like one

and I think in many ways that was true of his presidency I'm sorry I didn't do that all right Eisenhower seemed like a hawk at the beginning of his presidency and a dove at the end of his presidency and perhaps that's too extreme a characterization of him since I think in many ways Eisenhower was sensitive to the dangers and the disaster of nuclear war. Nonetheless it's true when he came to the presidency he came with this assumption that nuclear weapons should be made a regular part of the U.S. Cold War arsenal and when he left the presidency he had pretty much scrapped that notion or at least a drawn back from it to a great degree and I think the reason was that as the

public began to protest against this developing nuclear arms race this arms race it seemed to be spiraling out of control including these vast hydrogen bomb tests with their huge clouds of radioactive fallout as the opinion polls showed more and more Americans concerned about the arms race and determined to end nuclear testing then President Eisenhower as an elected public official as a leader of one of the world's largest democracies began to draw back from this early massive retaliation program and began to state more and more that the nuclear arms race had to be brought under control and that the first step along these lines would be ending nuclear testing. Eisenhower really seemed to gain momentum and I think from what I read in your book the great goal of his second

administration was to get a test band treaty but things went wrong. YouTube comes down. The Paris Summit gets canceled. Christian Watson apology all this stuff happens and do you think Eisenhower was kind of crushed at the end that he wasn't able to kind of bring under control what he had a heavy hand in starting? I think Eisenhower certainly during his second term genuinely wanted a nuclear test band treaty and was committed to that but what happened was that the Cold War Hawks on both sides gave him and gave a Khrushchev as well a difficult time because they recognized that a nuclear test band treaty would be a de-escalation of the nuclear arms race and would be a move toward

Daytonk between the United States and the Soviet Union and figures like Louis Strauss in the United States and the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Secretary of Defense opposed this kind of de-escalation of the nuclear arms race. They genuinely believed that American national security was guaranteed only by the U.S. lead in the nuclear arms race and similarly inside the Soviet Union Khrushchev faced forces that didn't want this kind of de-escalation and furthermore he faced rivalry from the Chinese government at that time that was determined to build its nuclear weapons and didn't want to stop nuclear testing at this point because they needed such testing to develop their own atomic and hydrogen bombs and for these reasons the Hawks on on both sides of the Cold War divide seized on on incidents such as the U2 incident in the

Soviet Union to scrap whatever progress was was made toward a nuclear test band treaty. I think he desired it and sorry I think Eisenhower desired a nuclear test band treaty very much wanted it but was unwilling to break with hardliners in the United States and indeed felt renewed resistance from the Soviet Union and and therefore was willing to actually resume nuclear testing by the end of his administration however what happened of course was the Democrats specifically John Kennedy defeated the Republicans for the White House defeated Richard Nixon and Nixon I'm sure would have

resumed nuclear testing at that point had he won but the Eisenhower administration didn't want to resume and damaged Nixon's chances for re-election or for election at that point and furthermore once Kennedy had won Eisenhower felt that it was unfair to commit the Kennedy administration to that resumption of nuclear testing that decision had to be Kennedy's and Kennedy made a different decision than Eisenhower would have made. I'm gonna beat you up here but I really I think Eisenhower genuinely wanted a test band treaty but he wanted it on US terms and Khrushchev wanted it on Soviet terms and I think both men left their encounter of the late 1950s with regrets that

they didn't secure that test band treaty on their own terms and the possibilities for both nuclear datons and more broadly a Cold War datons were chilled at that point. Let's move on. You said you had a good story about the Cuban Missile Crisis. Yes about my own reaction to it after time and let me say the more these can be condensed the better. Yes I recall during my graduate school years at the University of Wisconsin when I was there in the fall of 1962 the Cuban Missile Crisis developed at that point and I went to class that morning to attend a lecture on American foreign policy given as it turned out by a very prominent foreign policy historian William Alpeman Williams and

Williams was very irate about the Kennedy administration's threat of nuclear war over the presence of Soviet missiles in Cuba and the class too was dismayed by the confrontation that had developed the the the fact that we did seem on the verge of nuclear war and I remember after that class a friend and I went to the campus Donnie Hall looking out over the lake and we're talking during lunch and we thought about this and we said you know we we may be at the point when the world is about to come to an end maybe we shouldn't be going to classes should we be doing our class assignments tonight or should we be doing something else should we be saying goodbye to our families should we just keep on performing as usual and in short in these circumstances and we

talked about it for some time and finally concluded there wasn't much else we could do except to continue as usual so we continue going to classes and continue doing our work and I suspect most people at the time did because they had a sense of powerlessness the phrase friends and I I kicked around was no extermination without representation and in fact we did feel we were about to be destroyed in this nuclear war that these two national leaders were threatening but we had no control over I think the atmospheric test band treaty was very significant it was significant as the first nuclear arms

control measure in history it was significant too in what it symbolized the willingness of the United States and the Soviet Union to sign a major agreement dealing with their top national security concern the danger of nuclear war and in that sense it was a real breakthrough for these two governments and for humanity generally speaking because up to that time there had only been escalation in the nuclear arms race there had never been any respite from this notion that one nation was more secure if one developed more nuclear weapons and more dangerous nuclear weapons and now finally there was a breakthrough toward arms control and toward peace

don't worry about that I think we're okay all right I'm shifting gears a little bit here the Japanese peace movement I'm talking you go ahead cut well because yeah what do you believe that the the Japanese were truly against war that they have they had had a revolution in thought or were they just lamenting the atomic bombing and trying to find blames somewhere how sincere do you think the Japanese peace movement was I think that at the end of the war the bulk of the Japanese population not all to be sure but the vast bulk of the population was increasingly sensitive to the question of war and to the question especially of nuclear war the destruction brought in Japan by the second world war as well as the atomic bombings brought home to the Japanese people the the horrors of war especially nuclear war and therefore there was a sense in Japan that this

immense suffering had to mean something had to lead to some benefit for for people the world had to learn from this horror that there had to be no more war and certainly no nuclear war and so the survivors of the war in Japan and especially the survivors of the atomic bombing at Hiroshima and Nagasaki dedicated themselves to bringing to the world's attention the dangers that loom before the world if nations plunged ahead with the old game of war which in the future would mean nuclear war I think there was a truly a revolution of thought going on I think there was a genuine revolution in in thought in Japan the polls all show it and not only a section of the Japanese Constitution article nine that banned the maintenance of armed forces by the

Japanese government but a broader sense in the anxiety as a whole that the arms race had to be stopped if humanity were to survive what did you hear that oh that's slamming the door yeah should we do it again okay I think there was a genuine revolution of thought in Japan beginning at the end of the war a sense that the world had to be alerted to the dangers of the old game of war which nation states were bound to take up once more and this time take up armed with nuclear weapons rather than merely with the conventional weapons of the past and therefore many people in Japan pulled away from the old thinking about war which is to say that national security is guaranteed by the most powerful weaponry and began to

think in terms of what Eisenhower sorry I blew it there they began to to think in in terms of what Einstein had called a new way of thinking that war and especially nuclear war were no longer acceptable if humanity were to survive I think that the atomic bombing was a deeply moving experience for those Japanese citizens who survived it deeply moving in that they saw their families annihilated their their children die as they attended grade school or secondary school that that morning their friends and neighbors die horribly through the vast firestorms that swept through their cities or the

or or die more slowly through radiation poisoning and leukemia and therefore the danger of nuclear war was brought home to them very directly and they felt they had a mission after that to tell the world of this kind of suffering that the world must never experience this sort of thing again how do you think the human spirit changes after it's been through that kind of tragedy I think the human spirit and the Japanese spirit more specifically changed in a in a way that confronted the realities of human existence that no longer dodged as so many people tend to do the the dangers of war what it does to people both physically and morally and they swept aside all those secondary

and tertiary satisfaction or complaints they had and confronted directly not only the horror of their own death but the horror of the world's suicide through a nuclear war okay how's that in terms of what you want I'm revolution of thought that that that profundity of confronting your own mortality on not just a personal level but just almost on a national level how does that change someone's view on their place in the world well I think that the Japanese people during the Second World War had in most cases at at least been supportive of the Japanese war effort and had been committed to their

nation in the same way other warring peoples were committed to their nations but the use of the atomic bomb at the end of the war on Japanese cities on civilian populations brought home to the Japanese people the lesson that all the people of the world should have learned from that conflict namely that war had become too terrible to continue with the means of mass destruction the Second World War of course had destroyed 50 million people mostly with conventional weapons but nuclear war would be far more horrible and the Japanese people understood this at the end of the war indeed people in other countries began to understand it as well but the lesson was especially well-learned by the Japanese who saw their children die in schools who saw their friends destroyed on the city streets as they headed for work that

that morning of August 6 1945 and who felt that this must never happen again that the world had to be alerted to the disaster of war and the ultimate suicidal disaster of nuclear war what do you think is this spirit you've been there you go to the peace park what's the spirit of that place I think the spirit of the peace park in Hiroshima is one of a broad humanitarian vision that world destruction would be a disaster that nuclear war would be a disaster and that the suffering of the Japanese people can only be compensated for and some small way by a turn away from war by the nation states of the world is there a tone or mood there when you when you walk into the Louvre it's like

I'm in the Louvre right you know look at those paintings I mean there's a presence is there a certain presence at the peace park I'm not sure I can answer that question properly I've I've never been there by the way to the peace park no no no no no I felt it was too painful to go there okay on the on the Senate half Santa Taff Santa Taff okay it says to some degree we will rest peacefully we will not repeat evil or repeat the same well it's in Japanese I think yeah what do you think that means I think that the statement on the Senate half in the Hiroshima Memorial Park which assures the people of the world that the Japanese and they can rest in peace that they will not repeat the sin of nuclear war in many ways symbolizes the new understanding that the Japanese

people had about war and especially about nuclear war that the evil I think that the statement on the Senate half reflects the profound shift in the thinking of the Japanese people and of many people around the world that nuclear war must never happen again and indeed the world must avoid war or a nuclear exchange would be very possible indeed likely I must feel like they're saying when it says they will not repeat evil or we will not repeat the evil or sin they're taking responsibility or they're saying we are going to set an example we will

never participate again in this fashion is that it do you think that's a that's true I think that the statement on the Senate half means that the Japanese people have recognized the horror of nuclear war and they have renounced it in fact the Japanese public as shown by polls totally rejects the idea of developing nuclear weapons although certainly Japan has a scientific and technological capacity to develop those weapons and its government as well under popular pressure has retreated from the nuclear option and has decided to force where nuclear development that other great powers have won't you take it