William Liscum Borden (February 6, 1920October 8, 1985) was an American lawyer and congressional staffer. As executive director of the United States Congress Joint Committee on Atomic Energy from 1949 to 1953, he became one of the most powerful people advocating for nuclear weapons development in the United States government. Borden is best known for having written a letter accusing physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer of being an agent of the Soviet Union, an accusation that led to the Oppenheimer security hearing of 1954.
Early life, college, and military service Borden was born in Washington, D.C., on February 6, 1920,Index record for William Borden, via Fold3. Confirmed by images of his draft registration card from 1941 with his birth date, February 6, 1920, via Ancestry.com. and grew up in the city. His father served in the Army Medical Corps and became president of the Medical Society of the District of Columbia. The importance his mother attached to honorable behavior left a strong impression on him.McMillan, The Ruin of J. Robert Oppenheimer, pp. 173–174. 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.
Raised in affluent circumstances, Borden attended the private St. Albans School in Washington,Herken, Counsels of War, p. 10. from where he was graduated in 1938.
Borden went to Yale College,Rhodes, Dark Sun, p. 357. where he fit into the rich and clubby pre-war Ivy League environment. He was president of the Yale Political Union and belonged to the literary-minded Elizabethan Club. Borden at this time has been described by author Richard Rhodes as "bright, ardent and utopian". He was editor of the Yale Daily News and columns he wrote for that paper reflected his gradual switch from traditional American isolationism to interventionism, an evolution in thinking common among his contemporaries. His conversion became complete shortly before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.
Earning a bachelor's degree, Borden graduated from Yale in 1942, ranking at the top of his class. He married Georgia Inglehart, a teacher who had graduated from Smith College, in June 1942. They would go on to have two children.
Borden enlisted in the United States Army Air Forces in July 1942, shortly after graduation and marriage, and volunteered for training as a bomber pilot. He became a pilot of the Consolidated B-24 Liberator, based in England with the Eighth Air Force. He flew thirty missions there, volunteering for service with a unit, the 856th Bombardment Squadron of the 492d Bombardment Group, that was part of Operation Carpetbagger and was based at USAAF Station 179 at RAF Harrington. As part of these operations, Borden flew specially equipped B-24s at night over Germany and Nazi-occupied Western Europe, dropping by parachute spies and Jedburgh saboteur teams as well as supplies to resistance groups. Having completed his tour of duty, Borden was discharged from military service in 1945.
Two technological developments during the war greatly affected Borden's thinking. One came in November 1944: while returning from a nighttime mission over Holland after dropping supplies to the Dutch resistance, he saw a German V-2 rocket in flight on its way to strike London. "It resembled a meteor, streaming red sparks and whizzing past us as though the aircraft were motionless ... I became convinced that it was only a matter of time until rockets would expose the United States to direct, transoceanic attack."Herken, Counsels of War, p. 11. 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. The volume's urgently phrased message – there will be no time – would reflect Borden's perspective. The undertaking of this ambitious task reflected Borden's capability for independent thought and his ability to write clearly.Hewlett and Duncan, Atomic Shield, p. 180.
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. Borden posited that war was inevitable and the use of the new atomic weapon in wars was also inevitable. Furthermore, such a war was very likely to happen and it would happen in the quite near future.Herken, Counsels of War, p. 40. 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. Instead, furious exchanges of counterforce strikes against the other side's nuclear bases was likely.Herken, Counsels of War, p. 260. 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 only alternative Borden saw to this bleak outlook was the formation of a world government.McMillan, The Ruin of J. Robert Oppenheimer, p. 173.
The book was one of the first to appear on the topic of nuclear weapons strategy. It gained some attention at the time, including a respectful appraisal in The New York Times Book Review and a putative narrative of World War III based on it in The Boston Globe. It sold a modest number of copies.Rhodes, Dark Sun, p. 358.
Borden then graduated from law school in September 1947,In the Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer, p. 2837. after which he returned home to Washington. There he initially got a job with the U.S. Department of Justice, working as an attorney in its Office of Alien Property.In the Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer, p. 2838. 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." Borden came to the attention of the U.S. Senator from Connecticut Brien McMahon, who was a prominent member of the United States Congress Joint Committee on Atomic Energy (JCAE) and under whose earlier aegis the Atomic Energy Act of 1946 had been passed.Rhodes, Dark Sun, pp. 279, 358. (Accounts differ as to whether the Inflammatory Document was published as an advertisement that McMahon saw, or whether a letter containing the document was sent directly to McMahon, or whether it was actually Borden's book that McMahon saw and liked. McMahon was also a neighbor of Borden's parents.)
Borden was initially hired in August 1948 as a legislative secretary for the Connecticut Senator. He was only twenty-eight years old at the time. Then after Democrats regained control in the United States Senate elections, 1948, McMahon became chair of the JCAE when the new Congress was formed in January 1949, and Borden became executive director of the committee at that time. In this capacity he had around twenty staffers working with him.
Staff of the JCAE developed ongoing relationships with line operations Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) personnel in Washington and elsewhere, and as a consequence some staff members became more knowledgeable about such AEC aspects than the AEC commissioners themselves. Borden was an especially influential and powerful staff member in this regard,Stephen I. Schwartz, "Congressional Oversight of the Bomb", in Atomic Audit, p. 504, 504n45.McMillan, The Ruin of J. Robert Oppenheimer, p. 97. in particular because McMahon often relied on his staff to master specifics of legislation and policyRhodes, Dark Sun, p. 279. and Borden was smart and full of energy. Borden frequently drafted letters that went out under McMahon's name.Hewlett and Duncan, Atomic Shield, pp. 371–372, 393. (Borden's rhetoric tended towards the overheated, though, and sometimes McMahon chose not to send out a letter.McMillan, The Ruin of J. Robert Oppenheimer, pp. 174, 175.) Overall, Borden worked towards making the committee more effective in determining policy.Hewlett and Duncan, Atomic Shield, pp. 449–450.
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.Young and Schilling, Super Bomb, pp. 156–157. 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.McMillan, The Ruin of J. Robert Oppenheimer, p. 174. Borden felt his mission was to help bring about what he would call "atomic abundance".Wellerstein, "John Wheeler's H-bomb blues", p. 45.Herken, Counsels of War, p. 41. 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.Kevin O'Neill, "Building the Bomb", in Atomic Audit, p. 66. This fit with his view of the future in which there would be no chance to build more weapons once war began.Rhodes, Dark Sun, p. 389.
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".Young and Schilling, Super Bomb, p. 24. 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".Young and Schilling, Super Bomb, p. 1. Borden influenced McMahon into supporting development of the Super, even if its military usefulness was not yet clear.Rhodes, Dark Sun, p. 380. 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.Young and Schilling, Super Bomb, pp. 45–47. Borden drafted a 5,000-word letter under McMahon's name that attacked the GAC report as embodying "false, horror-inspired logic".Bundy, Danger and Survival, p. 211. Throughout this period, the JCAE placed consistent pressure on Truman to support going ahead with an urgent program to build the Super,Young and Schilling, Super Bomb, pp. 55–56, 58 59, 62. and Borden and McMahon, along with AEC commissioner Lewis Strauss and physicist Edward Teller, were leading advocates of that course of action.Rhodes, Dark Sun, p. 402.
The Super debate was decided on January 31, 1950, when Truman gave the order to go ahead with the new weapon.Young and Schilling, Super Bomb, pp. 62–65. 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.Young and Schilling, Super Bomb, p. 91. 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.Galison and Bernstein, In Any Light, pp. 314–315.