By the late 1940s, the nuclear arms race molded the relationships between the Soviet Union and the United States. While the former was testing its first fission bomb late in August 1949, the latter already had, stockpiled in its arsenals, more than two hundred atomic warheads. With the Communist takeover in China and the outbreak of the Korean War, the US administration decided to launch new programs for the upgrading of long-range bombers and guided missiles, with the specific aim of improving America's atomic efficiency and military capability.Footnote 1 These developments were the quintessential element of a widely accepted doctrine that came to be known as nuclear deterrence: the US had to retain “the best, the biggest and the most” atomic weapons in order to efficiently dissuade the Soviet Union from being aggressive.Footnote 2 The core tenet of this strategy implied not just the mere maintenance of US atomic supremacy – in quantitative terms – but also the qualitative upgrading of American nuclear weaponry, which had to include new and more powerful devices able of countering the global Communist epidemic once and for all.Footnote 3
In accordance with this doctrine, in 1950, President Truman authorized the production of the first American thermonuclear weapons, the so-called H-bombs, which were thousands of times more powerful than the fission bombs that the US had used against Japan.Footnote 4 The presidential policy-planning staff provided the administration with the most important boost to the production of these new devices and looked at a massive nuclear build-up as the best way to inhibit the USSR's increasing hostility. Only with the US reaching an “overwhelming atomic superiority,” Truman's advisers argued, could the USSR be sufficiently “deterred from employing its atomic weapons.”Footnote 5
As a consequence, the US was increasingly relying on its scientific superiority to achieve a stable equilibrium in the Cold War and it was gradually transforming its nuclear arsenal into the cornerstone of its national security and defense.Footnote 6 Such a reliance on technological developments generated an intense debate within the national scientific community and, in particular, two divergent standpoints emerged rapidly.
On the one hand, a few scientists working at the US Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) called for “an intensive effort” to build a “super-bomb,” arguing that only “a superior weapon” would retire an atomic one. Well-known atomic scientists such as Edward Teller, Ernest Lawrence, and Karl Compton defended the H-bomb as “critically useful against a large enemy force both as a weapon of offense and as a defensive measure.”Footnote 7 Teller, in particular, argued that a new, more powerful weapon could eventually interrupt the arms race itself, while international control of atomic energy was a false myth, a naive and dangerous attempt to crystallize the international balance of power.Footnote 8
On the other hand, a few dissenting voices questioned such a yearning for nuclear build-up. These dissenters championed another form of security and argued that nuclear deterrence could not preserve international stability and peace because it could not eliminate the risk of nuclear war.Footnote 9 The AEC General Advisory Committee, which was chaired by J. Robert Oppenheimer and composed of many prominent scientists such as James B. Conant, Enrico Fermi, Cyril Smith, Lee DuBridge, and Isador I. Rabi, notoriously brought these voices together.Footnote 10 These scientists knew that the hypothetical use of the new thermonuclear weapons “would bring about the destruction of innumerable human lives” and would carry “much further than the atomic bomb itself the policy of exterminating civilian populations.” For this reason, the “super-bomb” represented an intolerable “threat to the future of the human race,” and its use, which would have been an “inhuman application of force,” could be neither strategically justified nor ethically countenanced. In addition, the release of radioactivity related to the testing of these new devices would have provoked “very great natural catastrophes” and, the scientists argued, the retaliatory power of the US atomic stockpile was already adequate, so that the super-bomb program was absolutely superfluous.Footnote 11
Although the AEC director, David Lilienthal, agreed with the latter group of scientists and believed that the H-bomb could not represent the fulcrum of the US foreign policy, the hardliners eventually prevailed and forced Lilienthal into early retirement.Footnote 12 Between the late 1940s and the early 1950s, three factors seemed to favor America's nuclear build-up. First, Mao's successful revolution and the eruption of the Korean War fostered fear of a possible Communist global epidemic and propped up the so-called Cold War consensus, thus eroding public support for any antinuclear stance. Second, McCarthyism started labeling internal opponents as international enemies and contributed to the isolation of many American liberals, including the scientists who criticized the nuclear build-up. Finally, the scarcity of technical details and the secrecy and complexity of the matter often confined the early nuclear debate to military and scientific circles, where liberal scientists’ moral appeals were easily dismissed as quixotic.Footnote 13 Hence, in spite of the persistent dissent from part of the scientific community, the administration fully endorsed the development and testing of new thermonuclear weapons and condemned any alternative option as “foolhardy altruism.”Footnote 14
But were the opponents of such a nuclear build-up just “foolhardy” altruists absolutely at odds with the interests of national defense and security? This study tries to answer this question negatively, by uncovering the role that as prominent a figure as Eleanor Roosevelt played within the multifaceted debate on nuclear fallout. A skilled diplomat and a well-known progressive politician, throughout the early Cold War Mrs. Roosevelt challenged the attempt to discredit internal nuclear opposition. In defense of the innermost values of American democracy and as a part of her campaign to promote human rights and security, she constantly invited the American public to develop an independent and objective idea about the different positions that characterized the debate on nuclear weapons and testing.
While historians and biographers have already extensively reconstructed most of Eleanor Roosevelt's public and private achievements, as well as her career as a “consummate liberal power broker,” this essay wants to represent a preliminary attempt to reply to Allida Black's invitation to use Mrs. Roosevelt as “a prism through which to examine the issues of human rights, containment, and nuclear disarmament.”Footnote 15 The intention here is to highlight what kinds of ideal inspired her activism on nuclear disarmament and what effects her pronouncements on nuclear weapons produced on the domestic debate on nuclear fallout.
In contrast to Joan Hoff's idea that Eleanor Roosevelt's thinking on foreign policy had a somewhat protean nature, the historical analysis of her antinuclear dissent reveals instead the continuity of her lifelong commitment to international pacifism and humanitarianism.Footnote 16 In the interwar period, she had supported the League of Nations and US participation in the World Court in the hope that these international bodies could secure a lasting world peace. During the 1920s, she had contributed to the resurgence of American pacifism, joined several women's peace organizations, and written numerous articles on peace-related issues. As first lady, she had pressed toward greater US involvement in European and world affairs. In the immediate aftermath of World War II, she had kept promoting pacifist stances and, as a delegate to the first UN General Assembly, she had backed and helped draft the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Accordingly, her outspoken criticism of nuclear deterrence was an integral part of her involvement in the international promotion of human security and a result of her commitment to world peace. Moreover, her pragmatic pacifism helped her to recognize the intimate post-Clausewitzian nature of atomic weapons and nuclear warfare, to the point of defining the traditional discussion on national defense a “pure nonsense.”Footnote 17 In other words, she never accepted the idea that nuclear weapons could be used as an instrument of national security or foreign policy, because their destructive power had ultimately reshuffled the very meaning of war: since it could spell the extinction of the whole of mankind, war could no longer be considered a mere continuation of policy by other means.
Eleanor Roosevelt was therefore a peculiar protagonist of the transnational struggle against nuclear weapons that emerged worldwide between the mid-1940s and the early 1960s. She was part of a massive and popular campaign mounted by eminent members of the international scientific community, organized by several national and transnational groups, and inspired by many influential individuals whose main objective was to mold the public's understanding of nuclear weapons. She was very well-informed about the technical details of nuclear policymaking and politically very well connected and influential. Even though Eleanor Roosevelt was in the best position to lobby for nuclear disarmament, she did more than this. She tried to educate the public in order to help common people to grasp the real hazards of the nuclear arms race. Her acute rhetoric, filled as it was with stirring appeals and widely understandable metaphors, contributed to the opening of the nuclear fallout debate, thus gradually transforming her into a prominent antinuclear mass educator, to the point of becoming for many, as this essay argues, a reliable voice of conscience.
The essay first starts by describing the two different approaches that characterized the nuclear fallout debate, a widely shared nuclear optimism on the one hand, and a less common nuclear criticism on the other. Second, the article focusses on Mrs. Roosevelt's ideas on nuclear weapons and testing, and it explains her involvement in the nuclear fallout debate by bringing to the fore how she provided many American liberal scientists with the opportunity to expose their dissenting ideas freely and manifest their growing concern publicly. Through a fierce defense of the freedom of speech and thanks to her ability to deploy the mass media of her era, Eleanor Roosevelt helped these liberal scientists to come out of isolation and share with the general public their studies, opinions, and suggestions on nuclear fallout. Third, the article emphasizes how Eleanor Roosevelt was able to translate those liberal scientists’ antinuclear messages into layman's terms to enhance common understanding of the dire consequences of nuclear fallout. Accordingly, this study argues that Eleanor Roosevelt's most important impact on the nuclear debate of the early 1950s has been represented by her ability to connect the scientific antinuclear demands with large sections of US society. By endorsing antinuclear demands, promoting a ban on nuclear testing, supporting the international control of atomic energy, and defending an effective and multilateral nuclear disarmament, she was among the – not many – prominent public intellectuals who helped to fill the gap between the reasons of the somehow isolated nuclear opponents and the wisdom of the general public.
NUCLEAR CRITICISM VERSUS NUCLEAR TRIUMPHALISM
After she was confirmed as US representative to the UN General Assembly at the end of 1949, Mrs. Roosevelt had already spent more than thirty years of her life in the spotlight. The drafting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights had, of course, enhanced her international reputation. But domestically she had remained very familiar to most of the American people. She regularly hosted a radio show with her daughter Anna and a television program managed by her son Elliott. She also wrote daily and widely syndicated columns, held monthly pages in different magazines, and published books, including a two-volume autobiography. In addition, she sat on the boards of several private and influential organizations, as the Americans for Democratic Action (ADA) and the Americans Association for the United Nations.Footnote 18 She was constantly at the top of her country's “Most Admired Woman” list and her readers named her their “favorite American” over war heroes like Eisenhower and MacArthur or political celebrities such as George Marshall and Truman himself.Footnote 19 She was so popular that many Americans saw her as a potential presidential candidate, preferring her to well-known individuals and respected figures such as Henry Ford and Bernard Baruch.Footnote 20
Her personal character and political beliefs, however, placed her fully in the liberal camp.Footnote 21 She was one of the fiercest critics of the anticommunist campaign pervading a large part of US society in the early 1950s. She deplored the unauthorized Congressional intrusion into private citizens’ lives that was being carried out under the auspices of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC).Footnote 22 She considered HUAC's methods incompetent, unreliable, misleading, unwise, and unjust; akin to methods that had been used by fascists and potentially subversive.Footnote 23 To Mrs. Roosevelt, the HUAC epitomized how “hysterical and foolish” the US had become – a country permeated by an “atmosphere of a police state,” – in striking contrast to the idea of democracy that she believed the US had to represent and protect.Footnote 24
Mrs. Roosevelt publicly denounced Senator Joseph McCarthy as “the greatest menace to freedom” in the US, and ridiculed many of his charges and “ill informed” methods.Footnote 25 When the allegation of being soft on Communism reached organizations to which she belonged, like the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) or the ADA, she answered by serving as their chairperson.Footnote 26 She absolutely disdained the provocative and antidemocratic red-baiting campaign because it was stimulating what she called “the politics of fear” and conflicted with the very ideal of individual freedom that she had always promoted and tried to secure.Footnote 27
With regard to nuclear weapons, she had been even more vocal in questioning their strategic advisability. She had expressed her increasing apprehension and unease immediately after the A-bomb revealed its real power. Being well-informed about the technical details of the atomic chain reaction, she had been among the first civilians to explain publicly that the power of an atomic weapon could be “multiplied indefinitely, so that not only whole cities but large areas” could be “destroyed at one fell swoop.” She worried that, due to the enormous power of this new weapon, “in the next war whole peoples” might be wiped out.Footnote 28 While Hiroshima's soil and air were still burning, she wrote that the discovery of atomic power had to spell the end of war indefinitely, and it had to lead to the achievement of something entirely new in the world; that is, the acknowledgement of an inescapable situation in which human beings “have only two alternative choices: destruction and death – or construction and life!”Footnote 29 According to Mrs. Roosevelt, with the emergence of atomic weapons the world had “closed one phase of civilization and entered upon another.”Footnote 30 Science had given mankind the ultimate power over its own destiny, which was both a great step forward and “somewhat awe-inspiring.”Footnote 31
Eleanor Roosevelt also realized early on the geopolitical relevance of the new weapons and the potentially destructive effects that they could have in terms of global stability. As Blanche Wiesen Cook argues, this was what made her an untiring advocate of international arms control and disarmament.Footnote 32 Mrs. Roosevelt knew that the US could not hope to keep indefinitely secret the process that had led to the construction of the bomb. She also knew that the nuclear scientists working in other countries would soon discover the fundamental working principles of an atomic weapon. Thus an “educational undertaking in every country in the world” was imperative. Populations had to be made aware of the fact that annihilation would soon face them, “unless they learn to live in a peaceful world and to allow the policing of the world to be done by an international security agency.”Footnote 33 Having foreseen the risk of a large-scale atomic confrontation, already in 1945 Eleanor Roosevelt had stated that the renunciation of part of national sovereignty was not too high a price to pay for the preservation of human civilization. Was the world ready to live in constant dread? That was the most urgent dilemma facing human beings. Under the global atomic threat, indeed, “no one could go to bed at night with any sense of security.”Footnote 34
To make things even clearer, Mrs. Roosevelt argued that talking about “national defense as we did in the past” was “pure nonsense,” and she added,
Armies, navies, air forces, compulsory military service, all of these things have to be reconsidered in the light of a new era. It is comforting to read about doing things in the old way. It gives us a sense of familiarity with the world we live in, which had a rather severe shock when we first heard about the atomic bomb. But we had better not be lulled to sleep by any comfort of this kind, since it has no foundation in fact.
Being committed to the cause of multilateralism and internationalism, Mrs. Roosevelt predicted that, under nuclear threat, “failures in understanding among nations and in goodwill” would not be “accepted in the future,” since they would be “tantamount to self-destruction.”Footnote 35
Along with many other liberal commentators of her era, Eleanor Roosevelt was placing her disapproval of nuclear weapons under a more general critique of modernity. The foreseen risk was that modern society could eventually be dominated by uncontrollable and incontrovertible scientific progress.Footnote 36 For these reasons, public intellectuals such as Norman Cousins said that atomic weapons affected “every aspect of man's activities” and were able to subvert the values regulating any human relationship. British writer George Orwell also deplored the development of atomic arsenals because they could ultimately deprive people of their power to revolt and governments of their ability to negotiate.Footnote 37 English chemist and novelist Charles Percy Snow noted that, since “physicists became, almost overnight, the most important military resources a nation-state could call upon,” the atomic bomb forced a rethinking of the entire relationship between science and politics.Footnote 38
This criticism notwithstanding, the widest reaction to the discovery of the destructive power of the atomic weapons in the US was a triumphalist one. Nuclear enthusiasts considered nuclear weaponry a natural product of science and progress, and, during wartime, the most appropriate instrument to beat the Axis powers and put a rapid end to the conflict. According to this majoritarian viewpoint, the ability to split the atom and master its enormous intrinsic energy was the ultimate gift of science to mankind, the final realization of the ancestral dream of putting the most intimate forces of nature under human control.Footnote 39 William Laurence, a US government-paid reporter who witnessed the first atomic explosion in Alamogordo, described nuclear physics as the religion of the future and trumpeted “the Promised Land of Atomic Energy.”Footnote 40 Edward Teller, who was unanimously regarded as the father of the H-bomb, argued that this kind of weapon would eventually stabilize the international system. In two studies sponsored by the US Atomic Energy Commission, “The Atom in Our Foreign Policy” and “Radioactive Fallout and Test Suspension,” Willard Libby pointed out that nuclear deterrence was the first and most important guarantee of world peace, blatantly hoping that the US foreign policy would remain “truly atomic.” According to the American chemist, continued nuclear testing was “for the sake of the Free World's defense and general well-being.”Footnote 41 Hans J. Morgenthau, a renowned political scientist, also upheld the claim that nuclear deterrence was the way forward, and stigmatized nuclear disarmament as “a by-product of political settlement.”Footnote 42 Secretary of State James Byrnes recognized that the atomic bomb had given the US the “great power … to elicit concessions from the Soviets.”Footnote 43 Since America was – and, above all, perceived itself as – the strongest promoter and defender of individual rights and freedoms against the rise of dictatorship and socialism, its atomic predominance came to symbolize the ultimate guarantee against oppression in the international arena.
These triumphalist assumptions came to dominate the public debate mainly due to the fact that both the political elite and the mainstream media endorsed them. Historian James J. Farrell takes a convincing institutional approach to prove this result. According to him, the early nuclear discourse was led by such influential institutional actors as the “government, the military services, some corporations, the academy, and, eventually, the press,” all of which affected the majority's slant on nuclear weapons.Footnote 44 Thus, being for the most part committed to the defense of a triumphalist vision, all of these actors contributed to the institutionalization of a common optimistic and positive sense of nuclear arms.Footnote 45 As the so-called Cold War consensus gained momentum, atomic weapons gained wider acceptance, and emerging voices of dissent such as Eleanor Roosevelt's were usually characterized as naive at best, or traitorous and Communist at worst.
NUCLEAR WEAPONS AND DETERRENCE: A MATTER OF DEMOCRACY
The main problem for those who criticized American nuclear posture and the institutionalization of the Cold War consensus was to reach out to the general public in an effective way, so that people could gain a real understanding of all the risks involved in the nuclear arms race.
Mrs. Roosevelt was perfectly aware that a thorough exchange of opinions was fundamental to inform American people about the gravity, urgency, and seriousness of the nuclear debate. In her opinion, nuclear scientists had to be free to argue either in favor of nuclear deterrence or against the development of nuclear weapons.Footnote 46 For this reason, when she had to launch a new weekly television series, in February 1950, she purposely decided to invite a coterie of prominent scientists and let them explore freely all of the implications of American nuclear policy. For her, these implications were the most important issues of the time, because they directly affected human life and the hopes of future generations.
Arranging the show and putting together nuclear physicists, US Senators, academicians, and businessmen was a daunting task. For five weeks, Mrs. Roosevelt's son Elliot and his colleague, former NBC executive producer Martin Jones, had been very busy contacting all of the invited guests and convincing them to take part in the program. In the end, they succeeded in providing their guests with a safe haven – in a comfortable room at the Park Sheraton Hotel in New York City – in which to talk freely about H-bombs and atomic energy.Footnote 47
At the beginning of the show, Eleanor Roosevelt questioned the outgoing AEC chairman, David Lilienthal, about the public role of science.Footnote 48 Lilienthal replied that scientists’ chief responsibility resided in “the fostering of knowledge generally, the basic knowledge of farmers,” meaning it would be fundamental to inform the people about the forces of nature, which included the brightest as well as the darkest sides of nuclear power. Robert Oppenheimer, former codirector of the Manhattan Project, added that the growth of science was “a pre-condition to the health of our civilization.” According to him, this inextricable relation made an issue that touched “the very basis of our morality” out of “the decision to seek or not to seek international control of atomic energy, the decision to try to make or not to make the hydrogen bomb.” The man who had supervised the scientific production of the first atomic bombs condemned the fact that such crucial decisions were taken on the basis of secrets. Oppenheimer considered it a grave danger “not because those who contributed to the decisions or make them are lacking in wisdom, [but] because wisdom itself cannot flourish and even the truth not be established, without the give and take of debate and criticism.” He believed that, if guided by fear, the US would fail to accomplish any of its missions: “The answer to fear can't always lie in the dissipation of its cause, but sometimes it lies in courage,” he concluded icily.Footnote 49
Amused by Oppenheimer's magisterial pronouncement in defense of scientists’ freedom of thought, Eleanor Roosevelt passed the matter to Albert Einstein, who was introduced as “the dean of all scientists today.” She asked him whether the US, being pushed by fear of Communism and increasingly dwelling on national security, was creating something it might not be able to control. A grim-voiced Einstein, in his first public television appearance ever, warned of possible global annihilation. Within days, his speech appeared in the pages of a number of European, Russian, Australian, Japanese and, of course, American newspapers.Footnote 50 Einstein said that planning to achieve security through national armaments, in a nuclear era, was “a disastrous illusion.” The security-through-military scheme had an unbearable cost and it undermined the core values of American democracy. “Concentration of tremendous power in the hands of the military,” Einstein explained, along with “intimidation of people of independent political thinking, certain indoctrination of the public by radio, press, and schools,” prevented people from clearly understanding the meaning and consequences of America's national security strategies. In the end, the armament race, which was originally intended as a preventive measure, had assumed a “hysterical character” that permeated both the public debate and the political agenda. Influenced by the assertion that arms prevented confrontations, US strategists and policy planners were about to build new and more powerful bombs, specifically the hydrogen bombs, which “brought in the range of technical possibility” the radioactive poisoning of the atmosphere and annihilation of any life on Earth. Due to the catastrophic environmental consequences that dropping a thermonuclear bomb might have, Einstein invited American and Soviet leaders to realize that no peace could ever be achieved under such a hostile scheme. Peaceful international coexistence and even cooperation among nations was only possible by moving away from fear and mutual threats.
In line with Mrs. Roosevelt's long-standing internationalism, Einstein was forthright in speaking out against building, developing, and possessing these means of indiscriminate mass destruction. He stressed the importance of empowering supra-national organizations in order to make a renunciation of nuclear weaponry possible and efficient. He saw the dismantling of the elements of tension and the removal of the major obstacles to mutual understanding as the first and most important steps toward international peace. After all, as Einstein said, concluding his intervention with his usual taste for aphorisms, “every kind of peaceful cooperation among men is primarily based on mutual trust, and only secondly on institutions.”Footnote 51
A visible look of approval crossed Hans Bethe's face at the conclusion of Einstein's recorded speech. A physicist who had worked at the Los Alamos nuclear laboratories to provide the US with its first atomic bombs, Hans Bethe was the head of the Nuclear Studies Department at Cornell University at that time. Together with eleven colleagues of his, Bethe had drafted and signed a public appeal expressing utmost concern about the production of the H-bomb. While the A-bomb was introduced under the strain of war, he explained looking into Mrs. Roosevelt's eyes, the H-bomb was being introduced in a time of peace. The problem, according to Bethe, was thus to understand what this step would imply and, above all, what the US was ready to do with that weapon. This was not a rhetorical question, since “cities of the size of New York” could potentially “be obliterated by a single hydrogen bomb.” The difference between an atomic bomb and a thermonuclear one, as Bethe clarified, was that while the former could still be applied to military targets, the hydrogen bomb could only produce “a wholesale destruction of civilian population” and therefore it did not have any military value. Bethe reiterated this contradiction and connected it to the idea of American values as a whole: “We dislike the Russian system because of the means it uses. It is a dictatorship; it suppresses human liberty; it disregards human dignity and human life. We believe in these values. Shall we defend these values by obliterating all Russians cities and their population”? Notwithstanding the strategic argument informing the deterrence theory, which justified both US possession of the H-bomb and its threat of retaliatory use, Bethe suggested that the US officially declare it would never be the first to use the thermonuclear weapons. Such a unilateral action on the US side would not require the “frustrating negotiations” with Russians that had undermined and weakened the UN's role and efficiency. On the contrary, Bethe believed that moves like that would represent important steps away from a war of apocalyptic consequences.Footnote 52
In this regard, Eleanor Roosevelt was absolutely sympathetic to Bethe. The theme of outlawing the first use of the bomb, indeed, recurred in her speeches and articles many times that year. “I have always hoped that neither the atom nor hydrogen bomb would ever be used against any people,” she wrote in her column in July. The use of those weapons, she added, “would start such a chain of fear and hate throughout the world that [they] might well end our civilization.”Footnote 53 Later, she confessed to having heard people say, “If we wait for the children to grow up, perhaps we will all be destroyed by the atom bomb.” But she pointed out that this could happen only “if we are idiots enough to use it.” With irony, she hoped that the US would never use, nor ever feel that it had to use, its atomic bombs again: “But we have to be a very strong and sure people with great confidence in ourselves to have something and not use it except to keep the peace.”Footnote 54
To strengthen this point, during one of her popular radio shows, she encouraged a professor from Columbia University to debunk a few common misconceptions about the atomic and nuclear bombs.Footnote 55 By hearing about the differences between the bombs in terms of the blast, the heat, and the radioactive effects of an explosion, people were instructed in the effects of a hypothetical nuclear bombing: in a snap, the power of one thousand suns would push the temperature up to one million degrees, thus making living conditions impossible for decades. According to Mrs. Roosevelt, people had to realize that the use of the bomb was a universal issue, “a problem which no one can escape.” Any use of the bomb, she stated, would be a tragedy, a failure for the whole of mankind.Footnote 56
Objection to use of the bomb, however, was only one of the first issues concerning nuclear weapons that Eleanor Roosevelt publicly raised. To her, nuclear weapons and nuclear deterrence jeopardized some of the core principles of American democracy. First, she criticized the enormous waste of money that the arms race had generated and concurred with Senator Brian McMahon, a Democrat chairing the Joint Congressional Committee on Atomic Energy, in decrying the yearly investment of billions of dollars in weaponry. This element was particularly significant, because it easily bracketed the nuclear debate with the “sense of the responsibility that each individual citizen carries,” which Eleanor Roosevelt strongly promoted through her speeches and articles. Second, she deplored the secrecy surrounding nuclear policy, because she believed that only well-informed citizens would be able to fully understand the moral issues related to the spending of public money in the making of nuclear bombs. “The more facts we can gather about these weapons,” she argued, “the better able we will be to make our decisions about the advisability” of their use and their effectiveness.Footnote 57 Third, Mrs. Roosevelt rebuked Truman and Acheson for internationally promoting a negative image of the US as a belligerent nation. Instead, she emphasized the need for international control and verification of nuclear armaments so as to improve the international reputation of the United States. Finally, she warned the administration against deceiving public opinion on nuclear issues “by attaching the greatest importance to the proposed ends and only a secondary importance to the means by which we might attain these ends.”Footnote 58
As did many other liberals, Eleanor Roosevelt sincerely believed that the US would be able “to glimpse practical solutions” to the nuclear problems, but she was also convinced that, “in a world charged as ours is with suspicious and dangers,” American people had to be included in the search for these solutions.Footnote 59 She pressed the administration to avoid bombastic announcements and work strenuously to lessen the dangers of the nuclear arms race. Using one of her many metaphors, she stressed this point even further:
Like most Americans, I have a garden. I know that nothing can really grow if the soil has not been cultivated, ploughed, and fertilized. Nothing grows in a poor soil. After the war, Europe's soil was poor. We knew then that a lasting peace could not grow from the arid soil of human misery, among the shambles of war, in the cold shade of despair. Today nothing is perfect. But we are firmly convinced that an agreement [on nuclear weapons] is possible if all nations will approach this task with good faith and a will to peace.Footnote 60
In sum, at the dawn of the debate on nuclear fallout, Eleanor Roosevelt proved to be a disenchanted analyst of the strategic value of nuclear weapons. She was terrified by the possibility of starting an uncontrollable nuclear war, which would have led, beyond any shadow of doubt, to the complete destruction of civilization on Earth. Unfortunately, Mrs. Roosevelt, and many other public intellectuals and liberal scientists along with her, had to come to grasp just how difficult it was to persuade both public opinion and the politicians that that was the truth.Footnote 61
A NOTABLE AND OUTSPOKEN NUCLEAR CRITIC
On 17 December 1951, Eleanor Roosevelt addressed the UN General Assembly. The theme of her speech was “Freedoms We Do Not Want to Lose” and it perfectly epitomized her liberal approach on nuclear matters. She reminded her fellow international delegates that the people of the world wanted them “to translate promises into performance.” Due to the deteriorating international situation and the stalemate in nuclear negotiations, her reminder sounded immediately like an invitation to put under international control all kinds of weapons, including nuclear ones, so that warfare could be effectively outlawed. According to Mrs. Roosevelt, indeed, there would be no “peace-time usage” of atomic energy, nor would it be possible to reach any stable peace, unless the UN directly controlled the production of fissionable material. She explained this idea very clearly, with another of her straightforward metaphors:
Suppose I held in my right hand a small block of Uranium 235 … I am going to call it “the stuff that explodes.” This stuff is what people the world over want to have put under international control so it cannot be used in weapons. Suppose I held in my left hand a piece of paper on which I had written those words: “Cross my heart, I promise never to use the explosive stuff in a bomb if you will agree to let me keep it and use it as I please.” Now I ask you: do you want signatures of foreign ministers on this piece of paper, or do you want to have the United Nations control this stuff?Footnote 62
In that speech, Eleanor Roosevelt brought to the foreground the momentousness of international control of atomic energy and the urgency of nuclear disarmament. Both international control and multilateral disarmament were necessary to give substance to the UN Charter and consequently lessen people's mounting apprehension. As she had acknowledged during a radio show at the beginning of 1950, people of the world were eagerly asking their leaders for peace, “and in some curious way we cannot arrange to sit down around the table and do the discussing before we've killed the lot of our young people in the different nations, instead of afterwards.”Footnote 63 According to Mrs. Roosevelt, a mutual lack of understanding was hindering the progress of the nuclear negotiations and the more people realized that, the more they could call upon the authorities to do what was needed to lessen the dangers of the nuclear arms race:
In each possible area we must build knowledge in our people – not fear – knowledge – and we must build courage, and we must build faith in the future. This can be developed if we have patience and strength and courage. If we do, I think we really contribute to the leadership of the world.Footnote 64
Such an enlightened leadership would have let a pool of independent experts reach “nothing short of absolute control” of fissionable materials. Since disarmament and international control of atomic energy, indeed, had to be objective and absolute or they could not be at all, Mrs. Roosevelt assumed that the conscientious work of a group of experts would be “of much greater value than the signatures of many foreign ministers affixed to pieces of paper.” After all, the deteriorating international situation made the work of a commission of scientists more reliable than a mere declaration of principles. “Even if there is some interference” in the internal affairs of sovereign states, she used to reply to the critics of the international control of atomic energy, “it is a small price to pay for the elimination of a menace which hangs over us all.”Footnote 65
The main consequence of these public remarks in favor of a greater American involvement in nuclear disarmament, amidst an unsuccessful presidential campaign for her party, was that Eleanor Roosevelt's appointment at the UN became a political issue. Many Republicans questioned it and, after Eisenhower's victory, it came to an abrupt end.Footnote 66 Her year-long struggle for the promotion of international cooperation, human rights, multilateral diplomacy, disarmament, and peace was suddenly overshadowed by the new administration's posture on foreign and nuclear policy.
As regards the international role of the UN and its disarmament mission, both Eisenhower and his new Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, had been muscular in their public utterances. Their “policy of boldness,” as it came to be known, and the doctrine of “massive retaliation” that both of them were willing to pursue magnified the significance of nuclear weapons.Footnote 67 Eisenhower accepted many of the bases of Truman's national security policy and eventually incorporated them in the strong belief that “U. S. security in the Cold War required the establishment of a preponderance of American power.”Footnote 68 That preponderance of power was defined mainly in nuclear terms. Moreover, the decision to further invest in nuclear armaments was consistent with traditional Republican budget demands, meshing as it did with the claim that nuclear weapons would allow drastic cuts in conventional armaments. Accordingly, US nuclear weapons would have served a twofold purpose: to press the Soviets and to force a reassessment of the internal defense budget. The epitome of this new approach was the National Security Council paper no. 162/2, a document that set forth the broad outline of the Eisenhower administration's New Look defense strategy and, as historian David Holloway has pointed out, transformed nuclear deterrence into “the organizing principle” of the U.S. national security policy.Footnote 69 ”
This strategic turn deeply irritated Eleanor Roosevelt, who did not hide her discontent and, on the contrary, publicly supported many organizations advocating nuclear disarmament. She joined the Committee for World Development and World Disarmament, a subcommission of the New York chapter of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom funded by the Jane Addams Peace Association, in its demand for a bold program for total disarmament under the supervision of the United Nations.Footnote 70 The Women's National Organizations, an umbrella organization chaired by Mrs. William Barclay Parsons, asked her to publicly declare that the UN was the only hope for disarmament and peace in the future, because her appeal would have definitely reassured the “at least 26,000,000 women” that the organization claimed to represent and would have contrasted with the popular and mounting mistrust of the United Nations.Footnote 71 She also signed a declaration submitted by more than twenty organizations to the US ambassador at the UN, a document stating that American women welcomed the establishment of the Disarmament Commission and wished it
every success in its long and difficult task of developing comprehensive, coordinate plans, under international control, “for the regulation, limitation and balanced reduction of all armed forces and all armaments, for the elimination of all major weapons adoptable to mass destruction and for the effective international control of atomic energy to ensure the prohibition of atomic weapons and the use of atomic energy for peaceful purposes only.”Footnote 72
Due to her prominence, radical groups like the National Council against Conscription (NCAC) also contacted her to boost their pro-disarmament messages and spread their pacifist stances. The NCAC director and future national secretary of the Fellowship of Reconciliation, John M. Swomley Jr., asked her to embrace the dichotomy “total disarmament or total war.”Footnote 73 Religious organizations such as the Church Peace Union also proposed that she publicly emphasize the importance of disarmament and peace, since “international society has gone from spears and arrows to battleships and bombs, from tribal wars to world wars, from attacks upon armed warriors to attacks upon helpless men, women and children, and finally to the destruction of all life and all sources of life for years to come.”Footnote 74
But Eleanor Roosevelt's personal endorsement of all these pleas for nuclear disarmament did not exhaust her activism. She kept promoting antinuclear ideas and criticizing US assertive nuclear policy through her widely circulated columns. In a stirring article she vividly described the insanity behind the nuclear arms race and the subsequent necessity of nuclear disarmament:
It seems to me that the discovery of this latest bomb has actually outlawed the use of atomic bombs. The power of destruction is so great that unless we face the fact that no one in the world can possibly use it and therefore it must be outlawed as a weapon, we risk putting an end to all civilization.
Without committing itself to multilateral disarmament, the US would have persisted in threatening innocent people all over the world, and, “instead of having the sympathy of the world we would … have created fear and hatred of us.” That was the reason why it was extremely urgent that “every possible agency, primarily the U. N. and its negotiation machinery, should be called into play.”Footnote 75
Eleanor Roosevelt's stinging pen, her genuine endorsements, and her passionate appeals to “the mobilization of world opinion” were not enough to erode the widespread Cold War consensus permeating early 1950s American public opinion, which was still predominantly supportive of Eisenhower's assertive nuclear posture. Those who accused both superpowers of promoting war through their nuclear arms race, and those who regarded nuclear deterrence as “a vaccine that poses greater risks than the disease,” were often trivialized and labeled radicals or blamed for supporting Communist propaganda.Footnote 76 Eisenhower's boastful program to give atomic energy a positive image, exemplified by the Atoms for Peace campaign, succeeded in depicting the American nuclear arsenal as both an inevitable and a fairly innocuous element of US security and foreign policy.Footnote 77 On the whole, the administration's propaganda strengthened the idea that nuclear weapons were contributing to national prosperity as well as to international stability and peace.Footnote 78
A TURNING POINT: NUCLEAR FALLOUT EXPOSED
Triumphalism, however, was not appropriate in a period of nuclear confrontation. The hopes raised by the Korean armistice and Stalin's death in 1953 were short-lived, dulled by news of the first successful Soviet thermonuclear test, in mid-August of that year. This event exacerbated Western fear and induced American strategists to intensify nuclear testing.Footnote 79 Between 1953 and 1954, the AEC supervised the operations Upshot-Knothole and Castle, which consisted of a series of seventeen nuclear tests carried out in the desert of Nevada and on the Pacific atoll of Bikini, in the Marshall Islands. There, in March 1954, a fifteen-megaton bomb called Shrimp obliterated an entire island and produced a series of unexpected consequences that troubled the Eisenhower administration, which at that time was also paradoxically committed to the promotion of a positive image of atomic power.Footnote 80
The story of the Bikini accident is well known. Within a quarter of an hour, Shrimp's two-stage thermonuclear reaction released a dramatic amount of radiation into the atmosphere. The radiation level detected by American analysts at the control base of Eneu began to rise rapidly, due to the strong wind carrying the mushroom cloud over the ocean. An hour after the explosion, the radioactive level had reached forty roentgens per hour (R/hr).Footnote 81 The test's supervisory personnel were evacuated from the control room and forced into a safe underground bunker for eleven hours. Nuclear dust reached and contaminated a US Navy vessel, about thirty miles away from Bikini atoll, and the crew was ordered to withdraw immediately. The day after the test, twenty-eight people evacuated the weather station at Rongerik, about 133 miles from the test site. Furthermore, on the morning of 3 March, the second day after the test, 236 Marshallese inhabitants, who lived just a hundred miles from the explosion, were forced to leave their homes.Footnote 82 Also there was the contamination of a Japanese fishing boat, the Daigo Fukuryū Maru, or Lucky Dragon V, whose twenty-three crew members were exposed to nuclear radiation at a phenomenally high level of 300 R/hr.Footnote 83
The entire Bikini atoll was contaminated up to a radius of 280 miles from the site of the explosion.Footnote 84 The fallout generated by the test impressed the experts, further shook the scientific community, and embarrassed the Eisenhower administration. After the Lucky Dragon accident, fear of contamination became a vivid, inescapable, global issue. The debate over the dangerous health effects of high exposure to ionizing radiation could no longer be restricted to the narrow circles of military and scientific elites. The radioactive cloud had made many scientists’ long-standing concerns immediately and dramatically visible to the general public.Footnote 85 Even Secretary of State John F. Dulles had to warn AEC director Lewis Strauss of “the dire consequences” that these tests produced on global public opinion. According to the Secretary of State, “the general impression around the world is that Americans are appropriating a vast part of the ocean for their own use,” and therefore something had to be done in order to “moderate the wave of hysteria unleashed by the reactions to the testing results.”Footnote 86 The accident had publicly shown and scientifically clarified how uncontrollable radioactive fallout could be. The official analyses of the test results confirmed that a bomb like Shrimp could “be expected to deposit radiological fall-out over areas of about 5,000 square miles or more,” in unpredictable intensities.Footnote 87
Due to these developments, liberal scientists went to the barricades to denounce the insanity of nuclear testing. The editor of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Eugene Rabinowitch, wrote that the alarming news from the Pacific had only given a “frightening foretaste” of what massive retaliation could really mean. According to Rabinowitch, “only frank and thorough presentation of all the facts can give the people of America and of the world an understanding of the far-reaching military, economic, and political decisions, made imperative by the advent of atomic and thermonuclear weapons, and without which they will continue drifting toward disaster.”Footnote 88 Hans Bethe gloomily added that, in the field of atomic weapons, the US had “called the tune since the end of the war, both in quality and in quantity,” and therefore the USSR had no choice but to follow “or be a second-class power.” Reiterating such a pattern by continuously testing H-bombs was nothing but “a calamity.”Footnote 89
Once again, the national scientific community polarized into two competing and irreconcilable positions. On the one hand, the hard-liners tended to downsize the effects of nuclear fallout. By the end of March 1954, for instance, Strauss had declared that the increase in the level of harmful radiation produced by the tests was minimal.Footnote 90 Other AEC members, such as Willard Libby, Shields Warren, and Austin Brues, downplayed the absolutely hazardous nature of nuclear fallout and affirmed that a safe threshold did actually exist.Footnote 91 On the other hand, outstanding professors from some of the country's leading research institutes, like California Institute of Technology scientists Hermann Muller and Alfred H. Sturtevant, were far less optimistic than their colleagues. Sturtevant, for example, discussed evidence that proved the dangerous effects that radioactive fallout had on human health, including severe genetic mutations.Footnote 92 He ridiculed the idea of a safe threshold as “highly improbable” and implied that multiple exposures had a cumulative effect.Footnote 93 Nobel laureate Linus Pauling, quoting much research attesting to the direct relationship between nuclear radiation and harmful genetic mutations, asked Libby what argument he could possibly have “to show that there is no danger.”Footnote 94 Nuclear physicist and founding member of the Federation of American Scientists David Inglis, whose articles in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Saturday Review, and New Republic had been highly influential in raising public awareness of the dire implications of radioactive fallout, wrote in the Washington Post that, due to the newest technological advances, the entire architecture of US arms control policy was obsolete and the discussion of nuclear disarmament needed a dramatic fresh start.Footnote 95
Due to her personality and her broad humanitarian interests, Eleanor Roosevelt could hardly resist taking part in such a kaleidoscopic debate. A month after the US test in Bikini, she confessed to having “carefully read the explanation given about the H-bomb” and coming to the conclusion that, since scientists were not able to know beforehand the exact results of nuclear testing, the US should give “ample warming” to other nations before launching any new test. It also had to be ready “to negotiate within the United Nations for the control of these great and destructive forces.”Footnote 96 A passionate appeal followed a few days later. Mrs. Roosevelt invited people to pay attention to the socioeconomic consequences of nuclear fallout and to their impact on the international public image of the United States. “Whether we should continue the experiments is something I think our government should seriously consider,” she remarked.Footnote 97 Telling her readers how concerned Japanese people were about the fate of the contaminated fishermen, “who are slowly dying as a result of injuries incurred,” she invited American citizens to empathize with “everyone injured in connection with one of our experiments.”Footnote 98 In a radio interview on Meet the Press, she worried about the enormous expenditures and the huge investment in civil defense that the these new devices implied, and again pressed for further multilateral negotiations.Footnote 99
Eleanor Roosevelt also defined the claim of those scientists who said that they could produce a “clean” H-bomb with no fallout as just a “hope” which was largely contested by the national and international scientific community. Even if “the announcement by Dr. Edward Teller that we have achieved some success in this direction may have quieted the fears of many,” as Eleanor Roosevelt admitted, it surely did not work to allay popular concerns.Footnote 100 Stopping nuclear experimentation was, according to her, “in the in the self-interest of everyone.” For this reason, she strenuously continued to push for “a ban on all tests where there is radioactive fallout that really endangers the human race.”Footnote 101
It was under these circumstances, with a growing public interest in nuclear tests and policies, that Mrs. Roosevelt decided to pay a visit to the American Museum of Atomic Energy, an institution that was established in 1949 at the Oak Ridge Institute of Nuclear Studies, near Knoxville, Tennessee. She listened to director of the institute Dr. William G. Pollard's accurate explanation of nuclear reaction and was lectured about the release of ionizing radiation. With careful attention, Mrs. Roosevelt examined an advanced Geiger counter, the fundamental device used to measure the level of radiation in the atmosphere and therefore help populations avoid lethal irradiation. She was fascinated by all of the medical discoveries that would help dissipate any doubts about the real risk of nuclear fallout. Recounting that experience to the readers of her columns, she admitted having been “particularly interested” in a study “of the breeding records of cattle accidentally exposed to radiation effects following the test explosion of the first atomic bomb at Alamogordo.” The significance of that experiment, indeed, was the data it provided, which surely added new insights into “the possible effects on human beings exposed to radiation.”Footnote 102
The visit to Oak Ridge exacerbated Eleanor Roosevelt's criticism of nuclear weapons and testing. The ways in which nuclear testing affected citizens’ lives, threatened future generations, and destroyed the human environment distressed her even more than the ideological discussions over the strategic impact of keeping and upgrading an arsenal of such apocalyptic weapons. What she absolutely disliked was the fact that, in her opinion, the US government was not telling the truth to its citizens about the effects of radioactive fallout. Such an unfair exchange of information not only could undermine the basis of American democracy, but also represented a high risk in the nuclear era. Echoing Oppenheimer's appeals for clarity, she asked her readers, “What basis have we for making any decisions as to the types of defense we need if we are not kept fully informed as to the dangers?” She felt that “negotiations on these questions could be carried out with greater success” in an open and multilateral way, and therefore, “unless our government really contemplates the possibilities of war,” disarmament and test-ban negotiations with the Soviets had to start soon and lead to “some kind of satisfactory decisions.”Footnote 103
This approach placed Eleanor Roosevelt among those public commentators, intellectuals, and prominent figures who outspokenly criticized the new nuclear developments in the hope of awakening people's conscience.Footnote 104 For instance, she immediately endorsed Dr. Albert Schweitzer's famous Declaration of Conscience, a speech that had “a considerable impact on many people in many parts of the world,” as she later rightly argued. She considered it the basis for those who believed that a ban on nuclear tests was possible for the good of humanity. Radically contesting the idea that nuclear testing was necessary to the development of the peaceful uses of atomic energy, she clearly stated that nuclear testing was extremely dangerous and could be and had to be eliminated. Mrs. Roosevelt believed that only the United Nations had the authority to define the peacetime uses of atomic energy so that the world as a whole would benefit from “a fearless and genuine exchange of nuclear information” and no nation would gain any relative advantage in this field.Footnote 105
CONCLUSION
Eleanor Roosevelt's many public remarks against nuclear fallout and in favor of nuclear disarmament largely anticipated a wide transnational nuclear test-ban campaign that emerged from the second half of the 1950s onward. Eleanor Roosevelt was a leading protagonist of that campaign.Footnote 106 She was connected, mostly through personal bonds, with the main US antinuclear organization of the era, the National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy (SANE): she chaired SANE-sponsored events, endorsed SANE's petitions, and signed SANE's appeals until her death.Footnote 107 In doing so, she succeeded in fostering the American middle class's understanding of the hazards of nuclear testing.
Such a growing concern brought, between 1955 and 1956, two Americans out of three to fear an attack with H-bombs, 74 percent to back an international agreement banning the first use of nuclear weapons, and 67 percent to favor a multilateral reduction in nuclear armaments. In addition, almost 50 percent of American people supported a ban on US nuclear testing.Footnote 108 This mounting public pressure induced President Eisenhower to launch a unilateral moratorium on atmospheric tests that came into force in 1958 and President Kennedy to sign a treaty outlawing atmospheric and outer-space nuclear testing in 1963.
Within such a popular struggle against nuclear weapons and tests animating US politics and society between the late 1950s and the early 1960s, Eleanor Roosevelt played a twofold role. Through her radio shows and television appearances she kept providing liberal scientists and nuclear opponents with room to express their concerns and demands, thus defending the very ideal of freedom of expression. Through her articles and public speeches she also actively contributed to popularizing the issue of nuclear fallout and rendering the terms of the nuclear debate understandable to common citizens, thus putting the various antinuclear demands in contact with large sections of American society.
In an era when the administration was trying to promote the positive effects of a bold nuclear policy in a number of ways, including hiring Walt Disney and asking him to produce a cartoon that could uphold the supposed benefits of nuclear radiation, Eleanor Roosevelt often represented the voice of common sense.Footnote 109 Her plain words and lucid metaphors helped people to understand that nuclear radiation could effectively produce harmful effects on human health, in spite of what AEC scientists might keep saying. Her columns, which were syndicated through hundreds of newspapers, clarified that unbounded nuclear testing could multiply the risk of dangerous overexposure to nuclear radiation indefinitely. Her utterances were useful to unraveling the fallacy that a safe threshold level of nuclear fallout actually existed. Her hammering presence on the national media helped to discredit the logic of nuclear deterrence in which continuous nuclear testing was grounded.
Such a prominent antinuclear activism produced significant effects in both the short and the long term. In the short term, Eleanor Roosevelt helped the antinuclear leaders and organizations to open the nuclear debate to the general public and frame their opposition as a broader quest for human security. By doing so, Mrs. Roosevelt contributed to exceeding the ideological boundaries and prejudices affecting the early debate on nuclear issues and to enriching the whole American liberal camp at the same time: her unceasing criticism of nuclear deterrence boosted a demand for clarity and transparency, warned against the risks related to the huge diversion of resources from welfare to warfare that nuclear weapons implied, and promoted the intrinsic value of multilateral diplomacy. Her insistence on the supposed objective role of science and her claim that a pool of independent experts could reach a practical solution to some of the most controversial problems affecting nuclear negotiations proved to be right. Through the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs, a well-attended informal forum of international scientists coming from both sides of the Iron Curtain, it was possible, for instance, to develop the so-called “black box” method – the use of sealed boxes to monitor seismic activity remotely in order to distinguish underground tests from natural earthquakes without on-site inspections – an issue that had hindered nuclear negotiations for years – and eventually reach a workable test-ban agreement. Her fight against secrecy and deception also influenced the ways in which antinuclear movements and organizations, not only in the US, set up their struggle and slogans against nuclear proliferation.
Moreover, Eleanor Roosevelt's pleas for nuclear disarmament were particularly relevant because they addressed a subject that was traditionally filled with masculine arguments. As a result, many women's organizations banked on Eleanor Roosevelt as they started worrying about the possible consequences of nuclear testing. By appealing to the widely accepted idea of a concerned motherhood, according to which mothers were naturally more apprehensive about their children's future than fathers, Eleanor Roosevelt was asking her fellow female citizens to take full charge of their role in American society and democracy: as concerned mothers and fully aware citizens they had both the right to be adequately informed about the real consequences of nuclear fallout and the duty to oppose any policy that might put at stake their children's welfare. From this point of view, Eleanor Roosevelt's antinuclear activities were absolutely in line with the long-standing American tradition of female pacifism, which strenuously refused to separate issues of women's rights from the apparently unconnected, yet crucially relevant, debate on war and peace.Footnote 110
In the long term, however, Eleanor Roosevelt's most important contribution has perhaps been represented by her firm belief that nation-states should better renounce part of their sovereignty when negotiating nuclear issues. Not without difficulties, this idea has gradually become a widely accepted and still compelling principle.Footnote 111
