Meme Scholar with Madness (PhD)

[EndtheMadnessNow]

Jan 31, 1950: President Harry Truman ordered the Atomic Energy Commission to develop “the so-called hydrogen or super-bomb” thermonuclear weapons even though the Joint Chiefs of Staff concluded in January 1948 “the majority of targets do not require a more powerful bomb because of area limitations." "It is part of my responsibility as Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces to see to it that our country is able to defend itself against any possible aggressor," Truman said. "The Bristish Communist party and the 'Red' Dean of Canterbury were first to criticize it."




Truman announced the development of the H-bomb or "Hellbomb" as the New York Daily News put it in their February 1, 1950 edition.





In other words, less than three years after using just one relatively small atomic bomb apiece to level Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the US military had already decided existing atomic bombs were more than sufficient to pulverize Soviet cities and destroy most military installations.

Truman’s decision also defied the AEC’s eight-member General Advisory Committee (GAC), led by J. Robert Oppenheimer, which in October 1949 issued a unanimous recommendation against pursuing crash development of the so-called Super bomb, presciently arguing:


General Advisory Committee's Majority and Minority Reports on Building the H-Bomb



Major General Leslie Groves (1896 - 1970) (left), head of the Mahattan Project (which he named), talks with David E. Lilienthal (1899 - 1981), chairman of Secretary of State James Byrnes' Committee on Atomic Energy, Oak Ridge, Tennessee, October 1946. In 1947, Groves and the military handed control of the project over the newly created Atomic Energy Commission, whose first head was Lilienthal. (Photo by Pictorial Parade/Getty image)

A majority of the AEC agreed with the GAC, but Teller, Lawrence, and Alvarez strongly dissented. AEC chair David Lilienthal told Truman on Nov. 9, 1949, that building H-bombs would “intensify in a new way” the arms race and lead to a “costly cycle of misconception and illusion.”
Source: Supplying the Nuclear Arsenal by Rodney P. Carlisle, original published 1996 (PDF, pg 69)

Indeed, this decision—followed by an equally if not more momentous one Truman approved two years later—paved the way for the largely unrestricted (and often one-sided) nuclear arms race that defined the decades ahead and continues to affect us all today.

Jan 16, 1952: President Truman in a top secret meeting approved the congressional Joint Committee on Atomic Energy’s so-called 50-150 expansion program, directing the Atomic Energy Commission to arbitrarily increase production of plutonium by 50% and highly enriched uranium by 150%.

Truman Library, PSF–Subject file, “Atomic Energy—Expansion of the Fissionable”


Press Conference at Atomic Energy Committee Room:

(Original Caption) Newsmen were given a "peek" for the first time of the new "protected" Joint Atomic energy Committee Room at the Capitol. Senator Brien McMahon, (D-Ct.), third from left, Chairman of the Committee, explains to newsmen some of the protective features of the room, such as bars and electrical tapes on the windows to prevent tampering. The Committee room is said to have the best security protection of any in the Capitol.
Photo source: Getty




American astronomer and director of Harvard College Observatory, Harlow Shapley (1885-1972) on left, hands a piece of Uranium ore to United States Senator from Connecticut, Brien McMahon (1903-July 28, 1952), Chairman of the Senate Special Committee on Atomic Energy in Washington DC, United States on 2nd April 1946. (Photo by Paul Popper/Popperfoto via Getty Images)


Although the 50-150 program was highly-classified information, JCAE chairman Senator Brien McMahon (D-Connecticut) leaked word of it to the press immediately after meeting with Truman about it on January 17.



He was pro H-bomb arsenal.

U.S. Nuclear Stockpile Secrecy: A View from 1949

By Steven Aftergood • September 2, 2010

The question of whether or not to disclose the number of nuclear weapons in the U.S. arsenal “goes to the very heart of our democratic system of government,” said Senator Brien McMahon (D-CT) in a newly rediscovered 1949 speech (pdf) on secrecy in nuclear weapons policy.

“Do we possess five bombs, or fifty bombs, or five hundred bombs?  Are we strong or weak in the field of atomic weapons?  Only the Atomic Energy Commissioners, high-ranking military men, and a few others know the correct answer to these vital questions,” Sen. McMahon said.

Sen. McMahon (1903-1952) was the principal author of the Atomic Energy Act of 1946, which established the Atomic Energy Commission and placed control of nuclear weapons in civilian hands.

“Though I have been a member of the Joint Congressional Committee on Atomic Energy since its inception, and though I have just been elected its chairman, I do not myself know how many bombs we possess or how rapidly we are making new ones,” he said.

“It is interesting to note that concealment of atomic production rates is secrecy of a scope which has never been attempted before during peacetime in the United States,” Sen. McMahon said. He indicated that he had not reached a definite conclusion as to whether the size of the stockpile size should be made public.

The text of Senator McMahon’s January 31, 1949 address to the Economic Club of Detroit was entered into his rather voluminous FBI file, which was obtained by researcher Michael Ravnitzky.

Illustrating the often glacial pace of secrecy reform, it was not until May 3 of this year that the current size of the nuclear arsenal was officially revealed for the first time.

From the Brien McMahon PDF linked above:



Elugelab was an island, part of the Enewetak Atoll in the Marshall Islands. It was destroyed by the world's first true hydrogen bomb test on November 1, 1952, a test which was codenamed "Mike" shot of Operation Ivy. Prior to being destroyed, the island was described as "just another small naked island of the atoll".

"The island of Elugelab is missing!" President Eisenhower heard this short report on the Mike shot in Operation IVY from Gordon Dean, Chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission.

Source is Operation IVY "Q-Clearance" sanitized video.