David Marcus - Permanent Emergency: The Bomb and the Democratic Process
In 1946, Congress passed an innocuous-sounding bill called
the Atomic Energy Act that granted the president sole authority over the use of
the atomic bomb. At the time, the bill did not seem to depart drastically from
the status quo. During the Second World War, Congress had already extended the
president’s war powers so that the executive branch could respond more
effectively to wartime emergencies—an extension of executive power that helped
Roosevelt to secretly develop the atomic weapons program and that allowed
Truman to deploy the bomb over Hiroshima and Nagasaki with devastating,
horrifying effect.
But the Atomic Energy Act and the National Security Act that
followed in 1947 have had much greater implications than the war powers given
to the presidency during the Second World War. As Garry Wills details in his history of the atomic bomb and the rise
of the modern presidency, they helped create the security and surveillance
systems that we still live with today, granting the executive branch an
extraordinary amount of power to act on its own not only in times of war but
also in those of peace. The
president could now build an elaborate network of cloak-and-dagger agencies
(the Atomic Energy Commission, the CIA, the NSA) that were only accountable to
himself and his cabinet, and he could disburse funds, administer espionage
networks, and employ the most frightening of all weapons with very little congressional
or judicial oversight.
While our security policies needed to be expanded after
the Second World War, the authority granted to these institutions dangerously
threatened our democratic process. As the political scientist Robert Dahl
warned in a 1953 examination of these new powers, “as a plain statement of
fact, the proposition is scarcely debatable: the political processes of
democracy do not operate effectively with respect to atomic
energy policy.”
The permanent emergency powers were invoked during the
Korean War, the botched Bay of Pigs coup in Cuba, the 1965 occupation of the
Dominican Republic, and the invasions of Grenada and Panama—all military
actions that were escalated without a congressional declaration of war. But
perhaps one of the darkest legacies of the Atomic Energy and National Security
Acts has been the past two decades, when the Bush administration embarked on
one of the greatest circumventions of our democratic process, breaching civil
liberties and human rights norms, employing rendition, torture, and indefinite
detentions, and building an elaborate surveillance network that intercepted the
communications of American citizens without warrants.
One could argue that these security powers, invoked in the
wake of September 11, were unrelated to those granted after the dropping of the
bomb over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But that was not how the Bush administration
saw it... read more:
