William L. Borden

William Liscum Borden (February 6, 1920October 8, 1985) was an American lawyer and congressional staffer.

Borden was born in Washington, D.C., on February 6, 1920, 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.

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, 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.

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.

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."

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.

The other was in August 1945 upon learning of the atomic bombings of Japan, which he said had a "galvanic effect" on him.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Borden then graduated from law school in September 1947, after which he returned home to Washington.

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.

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.