Before the Cold War (perhaps even as early as the late 1930s), capitalists were interested in possessing nuclear weapons for anticommunist purposes, and by late 1945 they devised their first formal plans for committing nuclear strikes against the U.S.S.R.[156] After four decades, the only scientist to leave the Manhattan Project finally admitted this in 1985:
During one such conversation Groves said that, of course, the real purpose in making the bomb was to subdue the Soviets. (Whatever his exact words, his real meaning was clear.) […] Until then I had thought that our work was to prevent [an Axis] victory, and now I was told that the weapon [that] we were preparing was intended for use against the people who were making extreme sacrifices for that very aim. […] When it became evident, toward the end of 1944, that the [Axis] had abandoned their bomb project, […] I asked for permission to leave and return to Britain.
—Joseph Rotblat, [157]
A former military analyst and the U.S.’s highest‐ranking civilian with a military equivalency rank, somebody who had more access to war plans than even the head of state, confirmed this in the 2010s:
- The basic elements of American readiness for nuclear war remain today what they were almost sixty years ago: Thousands of nuclear weapons remain on hair-trigger alert, aimed mainly at Russian military targets including command and control, many in or near cities. The declared official rationale for such a system has always been primarily the supposed need to deter—or if necessary respond to—an aggressive Russian nuclear first strike against the United States. That widely believed public rationale is a deliberate deception. Deterring a surprise Soviet nuclear attack—or responding to such an attack—has never been the only or even the primary purpose of our nuclear plans and preparations. The nature, scale, and posture of our strategic nuclear forces has always been shaped by the requirements of quite different purposes: to attempt to limit the damage to the United States from Soviet or Russian retaliation to a U.S. first strike against the USSR or Russia. This capability is, in particular, intended to strengthen the credibility of U.S. threats to initiate limited nuclear attacks, or escalate them—U.S. threats of “first use”—to prevail in regional, initially non-nuclear conflicts involving Soviet or Russian forces or their allies.
- The required U.S. strategic capabilities have always been for a first-strike force: not, under any president, for a U.S. surprise attack, unprovoked or “a bolt out of the blue,” but not, either, with an aim of striking “second” under any circumstances, if that can be avoided by preemption. Though officially denied, preemptive “launch on warning” (LOW)—either on tactical warning of an incoming attack or strategic warning that nuclear escalation is probably impending—has always been at the heart of our strategic alert.
—Daniel Ellsberg (emphasis original), [158]
Simply put, first the anticommunists launch, and then their missile defense mops up any retaliation from the few surviving launch sites. Missile defense could not stop a first strike from the U.S.S.R., therefore a highly capable missile defense system in the hands of the anticommunists was a first strike weapon. A common misconception is that the Soviets’ own work on atomic weapons would have been impossible had they not stolen from the Anglosphere. This is an exaggeration.
When a couple of Berlin’s scientists discovered nuclear fission in December 1938, the Soviets were as quick to react as the liberal states were, but the Soviets were too busy catching up with modernity to prioritize their own nuclear research. When four million anticommunists reinvaded Soviet Eurasia, the Soviets had to temporarily suspend all of their atomic research until a Soviet physicist persuaded Moscow otherwise in 1942, having noticed the extreme secrecy of the Anglosphere’s own atomic research.[159] Then the Soviets witnessed what their Western allies did to Hiroshima:
[T]he news had an acutely depressing effect on everybody. It was clearly realized that this was a New Fact in the world’s power politics, that the bomb constituted a threat to [the Soviet Union], and some Russian pessimists I talked to that day dismally remarked that the [Soviet Union]’s desperately hard victory over the [Third Reich] was now “as good as wasted”.
—Alexander Werth, [160]
Of course, these are by no means the only arguments against the myth that the atomic bombings were military necessities, but one could argue that they are the strongest.