Read Online Sleepwalking With the Bomb by John C. Wohlstetter - Free Book Online

Pledge Union formed and collected 10 million “Peace Ballots” (from a British population of 46 million), with 87 percent of those casting ballots voting to totally disarm and have the League of Nations keep world peace. Yet another future prime minister, Clement Atlee, told the House of Commons on December 21, 1933: “We are unalterably opposed to anything in the nature of rearmament.”
    But the leaders of the world’s democracies were to discover that treaties with German nationalists and Nazis, and with Japanese militarists as well, could and would be broken. Put simply, they learned that with arms accords it matters greatly whether your partners are friends, neutrals, or adversaries.
    In 1934 the Japanese began breaking out of the ship size limits of the 1922 Washington Naval Treaty, which had limited, with a few grandfathered exceptions, single-ship tonnage to 35,000 and gun bore widths to 16 inches. Japan built the two largest battleships ever to ride the high seas: the 70,000-ton leviathans
Yamato
and
Musashi
. They carried nine 18.1-inch guns, the largest ever mounted on a ship; the guns’ recoil was so powerful that all nine could not be fired at once, lest the ship roll over. They could hurl a 3,200-pound projectile—a half-ton heavier than an American 16-inch shell—26 miles with unmatched accuracy.
    Disarmament efforts fared no better with Nazi Germany. The June 18, 1935, Anglo-German Naval Treaty limited the German Navy to 35 percent of the British Royal Navy’s tonnage. But on July 1, 1936, the keel of the super battleship
Bismarck
, a 45,000-ton behemoth to be fitted with eight 15-inch guns, was laid. By September 1938—as British prime minister Neville Chamberlain returned from Munich proclaiming to his countrymen that he had achieved “peace in our time”—the
Bismarck
was complete to the upper deck level, and it was launched a few months later. The keel of her sister ship,
Tirpitz
, was laid in November 1936, and the 47,000-ton ship was launched in April 1939. Hitler denounced the treaty on April 28, 1939, having already swallowed up the Rhineland, Austria, and Czechoslovakia. In the event, neither the German nor Japanese super ships played a decisive role in maritime combat during the war. 6
    World War II rendered ship size limits moot. Yet the prewar arms-control concepts endured—limits upon platform size (ships then, submarines and bombers today), explosive payload (shells then, bombs and warheads now), and finally sites (bases then, silos now). They would return to bedevil arms-control efforts after the war, because the complexity of modern strategic systems made setting appropriate benchmarks nearly impossible.
How Much Is Enough?: Early Cold War Arms Talks
    T HE NEAR-NUCLEAR miss of the Cuban Missile Crisis spurred renewed efforts to secure superpower disarmament. During arms negotiations between the U.S. and the USSR, much was made about the folly of adding yet more weapons to already gigantic stockpiles. Was their sole utility to “make the rubble bounce” after Armageddon? These talks were based upon what Western arms controllers presumed was a common interest with the USSR in reducing massive stockpiles of nuclear weapons and potential vulnerability to surprise attack.
    The “rubble” metaphor was superficially appealing but misleading. A “bolt from the blue” attack could be totally successful (and thus inviting) if a country did not have enough armaments remaining to retaliate afterwards. (Recall the previous chapter’s discussion of why the ability to absorb a surprise first strike, with enough force left to retaliate, is so important.) The attacked country’s entire force, then, must incorporate a multiple of the requisite destructive retaliatory power needed. If, as some strategic planners feared early on, the Soviets in a best-case attack possibly could destroy 90 percent of America’s land-based ICBMs, half of America’s submarines sitting in port, and 90 percent of