However, and so far as the U.S. government was concerned, this particular debate was officially ended on January 19, when Truman summoned Admiral Souers to the White House to tell him, in person, of what would come to be seen as one of the truly momentous decisions of his presidency. Developing the new superbomb, Truman told him, finally “made a lot of sense . . . that was what we should do” (my emphasis).
On January 31 the president made the necessary formal pronouncement that he had commanded the AEC to begin the necessary research. Enough money had been made available in the budget. America had to have the bomb, he said to his cabinet colleagues, because although no one ever wanted to use it, its possession would offer a bargaining chip during future negotiations with the Soviets. That alone was the pitiless rationale that finally squared the circle, at least for President Truman, in the moral debate.
The AEC duly began its work, in secret, and with great speed. Within a year the musings had become material. The technical challenges of fashioning a thermonuclear bomb were essentially solved. A first, small prototype device, known as George, was exploded three months later, on May 8, 1951. Then, on November 1, 1952, the first true thermonuclear test weapon, known as Mike, was detonated. Then the largest of them all—a weapon that was tested despite a memorable miscalculation that triggered results both unforgivable and unforgiven—was detonated sixteen months after that.
And owing to their daunting size, all these thermonuclear devices were exploded in the middle of the once pacific Pacific Ocean.
So far as the ocean was concerned, the journey to this point began in 1946, on the mid-sea atoll that shares its name with the much-reduced new style of bathing costume introduced that same year. A costume that a disconcerted Le Monde editorial archly described as displaying “the extreme minimization of modesty” and, rather presciently, as “quite as shocking as an explosion.” The swimsuit’s creator, Louis Réard, had said much the same thing, though intending his remark to be more PR than pejorative: “Like the bomb, the bikini is small and devastating.”
As was the island story.
There was in the Pacific an Arcadian time, of course, when all its islands belonged, if belonged is the proper word, to those who had made their livings there for generations. But one by one, group by group, European discoverers happened upon these islands, and one by one, group by group, they lost their easy innocence. The islands that in due time would interest the American bomb testers were first spotted in the eighteenth century by an English seafarer named John Marshall: his fleet came across a vast scattering of atolls in an otherwise empty sea a thousand miles north of the great island of New Guinea. The island inhabitants—Micronesians, as they came to be called by anthropologists—were part Malay, part Polynesian. For thirty previous centuries, they had lived peaceably enough on the atolls that would soon be called the Marshall Islands. They had fished and gathered coconuts, and aside from occasional tussles and skirmishes among one another, they had seldom troubled anyone beyond.
But then came their “discovery,” and in turn a bewildering succession of outsiders who claimed to own and then to rule them, and the Elysian order of old was rudely and permanently interrupted.
As mentioned in the prologue, the Spaniards were the first to arrive, and though they ruled large tracts of the western Pacific from Manila in the Philippines from the sixteenth century onward, they considered the Marshalls too far away to be of much interest. Moreover, the Spaniards’ eventual loss of the Philippines to the United States in the Spanish-American War left their administration of these more distant islands well-nigh impossible—there were an estimated six thousand of them, and it was quite impractical to try to rule them from faraway Madrid.
A few American missionaries, who were busy converting the Hawaiians to Christianity, had stopped by the Marshalls earlier in the nineteenth century, en route to Japan. They left the islanders with a smattering of English, some vague awareness of biblical teachings, and the occasional use of the all-covering Christian version of the Muslim niqab, the Mother Hubbard dress—all influences that remain today. (The Marshalls are overwhelmingly Christian, and Protestant.) These missionaries were not acting as stalking horses for American colonists; that would come later. Instead, it was left to the then more adventurous and imperially inclined Germans, who arrived in the ocean in the later nineteenth century—stout Hamburg traders who discovered goods of one kind and another that could be sent back home to Germany.
Unlike the Spaniards, the Germans believed it was practical and commercially advantageous to try to rule here. They first set up commercial trading stations on the atolls, then established settlements, and finally, with the help of Lutheran missionaries, so entirely convinced the Marshallese that their future would be brighter under the kaiser’s rule that the islands became German colonies. A simple treaty, signed in 1899 with the Spanish and accompanied by a payment of twenty-five million pesetas, transferred ownership of all Spain’s Pacific islands from Madrid to Berlin.1 So, from 1906 onward, the islanders enjoyed an entirely new status. They were no longer overlooked outposts of Spain, but subjects of the Imperial German Pacific Protectorate; were ruled from a Papuan city named Herbertshöhe, fifteen hundred miles away to the southwest; had governors who sported names such as Rudiger, Hahl, and Skopnik; and were persuaded that to get on in life, they had to forget any Spanish they might have known, and learn German instead.
It would have been a somewhat wasted effort. Just eight years later, in 1914, and though few locally were aware of the Great War raging on the far side of the world, its effects became immediately apparent. Japanese warships suddenly appeared on the horizon, Japanese troops—who at the time were allied to the faraway British—marched ashore, and all the Germans were commanded to leave. They were replaced this time by administrators plucked from the ministries in Tokyo. Once the Germans had been properly vanquished in Europe in 1918, an official League of Nations mandate allowed Japan to run the islands entirely, making the Marshall Islanders “subjects of the Empire of Japan resident in the South Seas Mandate.” They were now to be ruled not from Papua, but from a new colonial headquarters in Saipan, fifteen hundred miles away to the northwest, and run by governors who sported names such as Tawara, Matsuda, and Hiyashi. The islanders were persuaded that to get on in life, they had to forget all their Spanish and German, and learn Japanese.
Then came the Second World War, and everything changed yet again. So far as the Marshall Islands were concerned, it did so most violently, during the last days of January 1944 and the Battle of Kwajalein, when a large force of American marines killed all but fifty-one of the thirty-five hundred Japanese in the garrison. That spring, governance of the Marshall Islands changed hands once more, with the puzzled locals accepting the rule of a third set of masters in forty years. They were now subjects of the faraway United States of America; were ruled in theory from Washington, DC; paid some kind of notional fealty to President Roosevelt (and soon to Truman); and were advised that to get on in the world, they had best forget all the Spanish and German and Japanese they might have remembered, and learn how to speak English.
They might have supposed that this was to be the final chapter. In fact, it was only the beginning. A new nightmare was about to unfold.
At the end of the war—though the Soviet Union was well on the way—the United States was the only nation to possess atomic weapons, and it had exploded three of them. All had exploited the physics of the fissioning of heavy metals. The first had been a test weapon in the New Mexico desert; the second and third were the live weapons dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Given the utter devastation of the two bombs that had been dropped in anger, and how quickly they helped end Japan’s war-fighting abilities, President Truman had no doubts: these new devices, terrible though they might be, should now become a core element in America’s arsenal. He instructed his Pentagon chiefs to make more of them, to test them, to perfect them, and to create ever better and more lethal versions—and so make quite certain that in matters atomic, the United States retained an absolute military lead over the rest of the world.
It was