Churchill was under the strain at that time of preparing for the Normandy invasion and was aware that the bomb would be a fundamental measure of national prestige, something he believed his nearly bankrupt nation would need. Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill of that millennial change in 1944, a year before the bombs were ready, hoping the two leaders would share the secret of its ongoing development with Joseph Stalin and negotiate together for its postwar control. The great Danish physicist Niels Bohr put it most succinctly: “We are in a completely new situation,” he told a friend in 1948, “that cannot be resolved by war.” Bohr tried to convince President Franklin D. Yet the physicists who built or supported the building of the first nuclear weapons believed that the bomb changed everything, including the very nature of war. From Presidents Truman and Eisenhower through Reagan and Obama, there was always a bipartisan Congressional majority in support of billions of dollars for nuclear weaponry, without the usual “how are you going to pay for it?” posturing. Whether the Republican or the Democratic Party held power in Washington, the underlying assumption remained the same: a “balance of terror” was the only way to ensure peace. Ever since the development of the atomic bomb in the mid-1940s, the governing consensus among American liberals and conservatives alike has been that nuclear weapons are an essential part of military preparedness.
0 kommentar(er)
