William L. Borden

Borden was born in Washington, D.C., on February 6, 1920, and grew up in the city. The family had a military tradition, and Borden's middle name came from a relative, Colonel Emerson H. Liscum, who had fallen in the Boxer Rebellion. from where he was graduated in 1938. Borden went to Yale College, where he fit into the rich and clubby pre-war Ivy League environment. in June 1942. They would go on to have two children. As part of these operations, Borden flew specially equipped B-24s at night over Germany and Nazi-occupied Western Europe, The other was in August 1945 upon learning of the atomic bombings of Japan, which he said had a "galvanic effect" on him. ==Law school and book author==

While waiting to start at Yale Law School, Borden began working on a book about the implications of the new weapons on national security. There Will Be No Time: The Revolution in Strategy was published in November 1946 by Macmillan. The tone of the book was generally strident in its call for a wholesale change in American strategic outlook. Attacks would take place quickly and at a distance, and so land armies would not play a part and nor would cities and industry matter much. Accordingly, the book argued, the United States needed to devote as its highest priority the development of forces for quick, rocket-based atomic strikes and counterstrikes. The book was one of the first to appear on the topic of nuclear weapons strategy. and a putative narrative of World War III based on it in The Boston Globe. It sold a modest number of copies. Borden then graduated from law school in September 1947, after which he returned home to Washington. The position attracted him due to the potential for foreign travel. ==Congressional staffer==

In 1947, in the context of the growing Cold War against the Soviet Union and its leader Joseph Stalin, Borden and two Yale classmates composed a so-called "Inflammatory Document", which advocated a very aggressive approach to foreign policy while the United States still held a nuclear monopoly and called upon President Harry S. Truman to issue a nuclear ultimatum to the Soviet Union: "Let Stalin decide: atomic war or atomic peace." (Accounts differ as to whether the Inflammatory Document was published as an advertisement that McMahon saw, in particular because McMahon often relied on his staff to master specifics of legislation and policy and Borden was smart and full of energy. (Borden's rhetoric tended towards the overheated, though, and sometimes McMahon chose not to send out a letter.) Overall, Borden worked towards making the committee more effective in determining policy. Due to secrecy requirements, the actual size of the American atomic weapons stockpile in the late 1940s was a subject of great confusion and uncertainty within the U.S. government, with members of the JCAE not knowing and often not wanting to know. Upon joining the JCAE, Borden was able to roughly guess the size of the stockpile and was disturbed by how few atomic weapons the United States actually possessed. Borden felt his mission was to help bring about what he would call "atomic abundance". He thus urged a rapid increase in atomic weapons manufacture and the creation of another nuclear production complex on the scale of the Hanford Site. This fit with his view of the future in which there would be no chance to build more weapons once war began. The first atomic bomb test by the Soviet Union in August 1949 came earlier than expected by Americans, and as Borden subsequently described, left the JCAE in a state of "tremendous shock". Over the next several months there was an intense debate within the U.S. government, military, and scientific communities regarding whether to proceed with development of the far more powerful hydrogen bomb, then known as "the Super". Borden influenced McMahon into supporting development of the Super, even if its military usefulness was not yet clear. Opposition to the new weapon was led by the AEC's General Advisory Committee (GAC), chaired by physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, which issued a report against it. Borden drafted a 5,000-word letter under McMahon's name that attacked the GAC report as embodying "false, horror-inspired logic". Throughout this period, the JCAE placed consistent pressure on Truman to support going ahead with an urgent program to build the Super, and Borden and McMahon, along with AEC commissioner Lewis Strauss and physicist Edward Teller, were leading advocates of that course of action. The Super debate was decided on January 31, 1950, when Truman gave the order to go ahead with the new weapon. But even after Truman's decision, success was not ensured; as the work to build the H-bomb hit technical troubles and resource limits, Teller successfully appealed to Borden and McMahon for added Congressional support of the effort. Borden also pushed to have the AEC hire people who favored building the H-bomb, thereby reducing the influence within that organization of those who had opposed Truman's decision. Borden's own ultimate vision of the best weapon for his inevitable war went even further, being that of a nuclear-powered aircraft carrying thermonuclear weapons. The first time Borden met Oppenheimer in person was at a GAC meeting where the physicist was belittling the idea of a nuclear-powered bomber. In any case, in the words of the official AEC history of this period, Borden had become "one of the most powerful and effective spokesmen for nuclear weapons in the atomic energy establishment." Borden received a modest amount of press attention during this time, such as in March 1952 when he was profiled for having achieved considerable influence in Washington by the age of thirty-two. He was also put in charge of an effort to write an internal chronology of the development of the H-bomb that would appear neutral on the surface but in fact would favor the pro-Super advocates and show opponents in a poor light. In the United States Senate elections, 1952, Republicans gained back control of the chamber and the committee. These two factors led to a decline in Borden's influence, Although Borden had some sympathy with aspects of Operation Candor, a push by the new Eisenhower administration to be more open with the American public about nuclear weapons matters, Borden's situation became worse following an incident in January 1953 where physicist John A. Wheeler, who was working on Policy and Progress in the H-Bomb Program, the chronology that Borden had commissioned, lost a highly sensitive excerpt from that document on an overnight train. Borden was considered sometimes lax with security procedures to begin with, and he was held as the person most responsible for this security breach. Wheeler himself was too important to remove from nuclear weapons work, but AEC chair Gordon Dean was eager to diminish the power of the JCAE and used the Wheeler incident as a lever with which to push Borden out. By end of May 1953, Borden was gone from the JCAE. ==The Oppenheimer letter==

Soon after leaving his congressional position, Borden entered private industry, working for Westinghouse Electric Corporation in Pittsburgh as an assistant to the manager of their civilian Atomic Power Division. There he worked on planning and coordinating tasks for the division. But Borden retained a focus on one matter from his past role, that of Oppenheimer. And a leader among those opponents in many of these efforts had been Oppenheimer, as he had been in his initial opposition to the weapon. Furthermore, Oppenheimer had made enemies along the way for his stances on nuclear policy issues; these enemies included high-ranking officials in the United States Air Force and most of all Strauss. Borden had spent his last few months with the JCAE repeatedly looking at Oppenheimer's security file and going over the physicist's actions and his past. But no one else opposed to Oppenheimer was willing to truly force the issue regarding his loyalty; Though Borden would testify against Oppenheimer in the hearings, Even Gordon Gray, who chaired the board conducting the hearing, thought Borden's allegations were extreme. In the end the board found against Oppenheimer and the physicist's ability to have a security clearance was revoked. The outcome broke some of Oppenheimer's spirits and colleagues said he was never quite the same again. Bitterness among the participants for and against would linger for years, and the case became celebrated – especially after the release of the hearing transcripts in June 1954 – resulting in ongoing reverberations of what had taken place in American political, scientific, and even artistic realms. The actions against Oppenheimer have often been associated with the McCarthyism of the time. However, Borden, whose letter triggered those actions, was a foe of Joseph McCarthy, not a supporter. (The question of Oppenheimer's past associations with Communist organizations would continue to be explored for many years after, but even historians who believe those associations were stronger than Oppenheimer let on do not believe he was acting as an agent for the Soviet Union.) Aftermath Borden has often been castigated for his role in the Oppenheimer case, with even his prior importance diminished; a writer for Commentary magazine has stated that Borden was "little known at the time and little known to history." Historian Rhodes does not go as far but writes that when the Oppenheimer proceedings wound up, Borden "left the hearing room and disappeared into history." A physicist who met him in 1952 later wrote, "Borden was like a new dog on the block who barked louder and bit harder than the old dogs. Wherever he looked, he saw conspiracies to slow down or derail weapons development in the United States." Borden was generally considered a zealot; The Oppenheimer case has often been viewed as a modern tragedy. Borden's career was affected as a result of his role in the Oppenheimer matter, especially once the role his letter played became public knowledge in June 1954. In particular, when Democrats again gained control of the White House following the United States presidential election, 1960, Borden's chance to get a job in the new Kennedy administration was blocked due to his role in the Oppenheimer affair. Indeed, he would never again have political influence in the nation's capital. Some treatments of Borden have been less severe. Scholar Warner R. Schilling, who interviewed Borden in 1956 but whose observations were not published until six decades later, found Borden to be congenial and helpful – "contrary to my expectation, [he] gave every impression of emotional maturity and intellectual clarity" – and ranked the Borden interview among the most insightful of the sixty-six he conducted of all major participants in the 1949–50 H-bomb decision. Oppenheimer biographer Priscilla J. McMillan painted an at least partially sympathetic portrayal of Borden's character traits, even though those traits were part of what eventually led him to write the Oppenheimer letter. Historian Gregg Herken took Borden's There Will Be No Time book seriously, comparing it with the works of the far-better-known nuclear strategist Bernard Brodie. Historian Barton J. Bernstein has written that "While Borden's suspicions and fears seem exaggerated to a later generation, they were not unusual among government officials and advisors in the 1950s." ==Later career and death==

For many years Borden continued to work as an executive at Westinghouse Electric, becoming vice president of their international division in 1965. Nonetheless, he composed a long meditation on the subject, "Springtime of the Nuclear Debate", for presentation to a symposium in 1984 at the West Point Academy, In retrospect he did view the Oppenheimer matter as having had a positive effect in that people began treating scientists with less reverence. Borden died on October 8, 1985, at age 65 in a hospital in Watertown, New York, near his summer home in Chaumont, New York, after suffering a heart attack. He is buried at Cedar Grove Cemetery. ==In media==

Borden is played by Ray Charleson in the 1980 BBC miniseries Oppenheimer. He is played by David Dastmalchian in Christopher Nolan's 2023 film Oppenheimer. ==Notes==