William Liscum Borden (6 February 1920-8 October 1985) was an American lawyer and congressional staffer who served as executive director of the Atomic Energy Committee from 1949 to 1953, becoming one of the most powerful advocates for nuclear weapons development.
Biography[]
William Liscum Borden was born in Washington DC in 1920, and he attended Yale College and was initially a utopian supporter of isolationism. However, he later became an interventionist on the eve of the attack on Pearl Harbor, and he graduated from Yale in 1942 and joined the US Air Force, serving as a bomber pilot during World War II. During his service in Europe, he flew a nighttime mission to Holland to drop supplies to the Dutch Resistance, but, during his return flight, he witnessed a German V-2 rocket in flight on its way to strike London, causing him to fear that rockets could expose America to direct, transoceanic attack. After the war, Borden graduated from law school and worked for the Department of Justice and as a congressional aide to Democratic US Senator Brien McMahon. Borden influenced McMahon into supporting the development of the hydrogen bomb after the Soviets conducted their first atomic bomb test in 1949, and he believed that a nuclear-power aircraft carrying thermonuclear weapons was the best weapon for an "inevitable" war with the USSR. After McMahon's death and the Republican electoral victories of 1952, Borden's influence declined. Borden entered private industry in 1953, but Lewis Strauss handed over Boris Pash's files on J. Robert Oppenheimer's past communist ties to Oppenheimer's former acquaintance Borden, who proceeded to accuse Oppenheimer of being a Soviet agent. This accusation resulted in the 1954 Oppenheimer security hearing, where Oppenheimer's security clearance was revoked. Borden was castigated for his role in the Oppenheimer case, and he disappeared from history due to his perceived villainy and obsession with nuclear force against the Soviet menace. He died in Watertown, New York in 1985.