On September 23, 1949, a group of White House correspondents was just leaving its usual session with Charles G. Ross, President Harry Truman’s press secretary, when Ross’s secretary told everyone to stick around. The journalists returned to Ross’s office, the door was closed, and Ross handed out copies of a statement by Truman. One reporter scanned it and called out, “Russia has the atomic bomb!” The President’s careful statement did not say that, exactly, but, rather, “We have evidence that within recent weeks an atomic explosion occurred in the U.S.S.R.” Few, though, doubted that this was the end of the American nuclear monopoly, which had lasted since the Trinity test, in Alamogordo, New Mexico, on July 16, 1945.
Unlike the Russian bomb, the announcement, last week, that North Korea had conducted its fifth underground nuclear test, and its most powerful to date, was not at all surprising, but it was similarly worrisome. In 1949, even after the explosion, Truman still seemed to doubt that the Russians had the know-how to make a functioning atomic bomb, just as some Western experts doubted North Korea’s claim, in January, that it had successfully tested a small hydrogen bomb. Detection of the Soviet explosion in 1949 was described by what press accounts referred to as “a source close to Truman” as a “miracle of intelligence”; uncertainty about the January event may bespeak a need for better intelligence. There is nonetheless widespread agreement that North Korea is getting closer to its boast of making a nuclear warhead that can be miniaturized and attached to a ballistic missile. North Korea may have a funny-looking leader, but a few months ago the man with the goofy haircut bragged about being able to obliterate Manhattan.
The explosions North Korea has staged so far are small by modern nuclear standards—but that’s not much comfort. Progress can come rapidly. Within two months of the 1949 Soviet test, the Defense Department and Atomic Energy Commission announced a series of secret atomic tests at the Eniwetok Atoll, in the central Pacific. (The United States by then had set off eight atomic explosions, including Trinity and the devices dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, in August, 1945.) Like the North Korean tests, each one advanced the knowledge of nuclear destruction. In 1950, Truman announced a program to build the first thermonuclear weapon—the hydrogen bomb. The nuclear physicist John von Neumann, in the mid-nineteen-fifties, called that combination—a thermonuclear warhead and a missile able to travel from continent to continent in minutes—“the thermonuclear breakthrough,” the ultimate weapon for mass murder.
The Republican Presidential candidate Donald J. Trump, a reality-show host and real-estate developer not known for his keen understanding of the world, has tried to blame his Democratic opponent, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, for North Korea’s nuclear program, even though the country’s first, one-kiloton test came in October, 2006, when George W. Bush was President. That didn’t stop Trump from saying that “it's just one more massive failure from a failed Secretary of State,” but facts often seem to get in Trump’s way. (A month before the Iowa caucuses, when Trump was asked about Kim Jong-un, he sounded almost admiring: "If you look at North Korea, this guy, I mean, he's like a maniac, O.K.? And you've got to give him credit. How many young guys—he was like twenty-six or twenty-five when his father died—take over these tough generals?”)
For her part, Clinton last week talked about sanctions on a nation that has been sanctioned endlessly, and said**,** “We are not going to let North Korea pursue a nuclear weapon with the ballistic-missile capacity to deliver it to United States territory. That is absolutely a bottom line.” It’s hard to tell what she meant by that—there’s been a lot of talk in recent years about bottom lines and red lines—but it’s probably just as well that she didn’t try to spell it out. Both candidates fall back on the unobjectionable idea that China has a lot of responsibility for the behavior of its curious, dangerous ally.
In the early autumn of 1949, after the White House announcement of the Red Bomb, the atmosphere in Washington was described as “quiet and restrained,” but it was also realistic, and deeply concerned. Senator Scott Lucas**,** of Illinois, the Majority Leader, called for new efforts at nuclear control, saying, according to the Times, “The future of our civilization may hinge upon it.” The city was also on edge: George Kenney, an Air Force general, said that Russia did not have a long-range bomber equal to the American B-36, but had planes “that could carry an atomic bomb over the ocean.” In October, 1949, a month after the Russian test, some sixteen thousand people watched Truman and others speak at a cornerstone ceremony for the new United Nations building, at Forty-second Street and the East River. The U.N. Secretary-General**,** Trygve Lie**,** tried to imagine a better future and said that “only the success of the United Nations can prevent a third World War and achieve a lasting peace.” Nearly seventy years later, though, the arms race continues, with no effective way to control the spread of nuclear weapons, or to keep them away from rogue-like nations. What could be more important? Yet**,** in this strangest of American Presidential campaigns, it’s as if no one even wants to think about it.