THE AMERICAN EMPIRE AND THE COMING CLASS WAR------Episode 29

                    THE KOREAN WAR ENDED IN A DRAW BUT
              THERE WERE DEFINITELY LOSERS 

One casualty of the Korean War was American manhood. One postwar study found that 70 percent of U.S. POWs had "collapsed" and collaborated with their captors. Some attributed this cowardice to Communist brainwashing. Others pointed to something more troubling. One army doctor who traveled about the camps to treat U.S. prisoners reported, "the strong regularly took food from the weak. . . Many men were sick, and these men, instead of being helped and nursed by the others, were ignored, or worse . . . On winter nights, helpless men with dysentery were rolled outside the huts by their comrades and left to die in the cold." An astounding 38 percent of U.S. prisoners died. Most withdrew into themselves and made little effort to find food or keep clean. The doctor attributed this to "some new failure in the childhood and adolescent training of our young men ---- a new softness."

If American men were getting soft, American technology would compensate. Just three days before Eisenhower's election, the United States tested its first prototype hydrogen bomb on the island of Elugelab in the Enewetak Atoll in the Marshall Islands. The island burned for six hours under a mushroom cloud a hundred miles across and then disappeared. A sailor commented, "You would swear the whole world was on fire." Physicist Harold Agnew was aboard ship twenty-five miles away. He observed, "something I'll never forget was the heat. Not the blast . . . the heat just kept coming on and on and on. And it was really scary." Eisenhower acknowledged the new reality in his inaugural address. "Science," he warned, "seems ready to confer upon us . . . the power to erase human life from the planet." Yet his policies over the next eight years propelled us ever more disastrously toward realizing that threat. It was as if Lewis Mumford's brilliant 1946 essay about the madness of American leaders had been written with the future Eisenhower in mind. 

As with his anticommunism, Eisenhower's embrace of nuclearism came later in life. He had opposed the atomic bombing of Japan on both military and moral grounds. He was actually in Moscow when he learned about Hiroshima. He told a journalist, "Before the atom bomb was used, . . . I was sure we could keep the peace with Russia. Now, I don't know. I had hoped the bomb wouldn't figure in this war. Until now I would have said that we three, Britain . . . , America . . . , and Russia . . . could have guaranteed the peace of the world for a long time to come. But now, I don't know. People are frightened and disturbed all over. Everyone feels insecure again."

After the war, he supported efforts at international control, wanting atomic bombs to be turned over to the United Nations and destroyed. He spoke out consistently for civilian rather than military control of the bomb. And he continued to raise moral concerns about the use of such a weapon. In 1947, he told a luncheon, "I decry loose and sometimes gloating talk about the degree of security implicit in a weapon that might destroy millions overnight." 

As David Rosenberg notes, "Dwight D. Eisenhower entered the presidency in January 1953 with more thorough knowledge of nuclear weapons than any President before or since." As army chief of staff, temporary chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and NATO supreme commander, he had been intimately involved in early nuclear-war planning. During those years, his abhorrence of nuclear weapons abated considerably, but it had not disappeared. In March 1953, he warned his cabinet not to think of the bomb as "a cheap way to solve things." He reminded them, "It is cold comfort for any citizen of Western Europe to be assured that --- after his country is overrun and he is pushing up daisies ---someone still alive will drop a bomb on the Kremlin." 

He was determined to build on the United States' lead in the nuclear arms race. In summer 1953, the CIA reported reassuringly that there was no evidence that the Soviets were working on a hydrogen bomb. On August 12, 1953, much to the CIA's chagrin, the Soviets exploded what was believed to have been a 400-kiloton hydrogen bomb in Kazakhstan. Though far less powerful than the U.S. model, the Soviet bomb was not only deliverable, it was "dry," needing no refrigeration. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists moved the hands of the Doomsday Clock to two minutes before midnight. It had stood at three since the Soviet atomic bomb test in 1949. The Soviets were closing the gap at a stunning pace. 

THE RACE TO DOOMSDAY CONTINUES.