Nevertheless, the sense of urgency about countering the dangers to civilization from “nukes” is nowhere near what it was in 1945–46. Shortly after the Hiroshima bombing, the Danish physicist Niels Bohr publicly sounded the alarm about “the crisis of humanity” that nuclear weapons posed. As early as 1944, Bohr had used his prominence in the Anglo-American effort to split the atom and build a bomb to lobby Roosevelt and Churchill against a future arms race by planning for international control. Where Roosevelt had encouraged Bohr’s hopes with an ambiguous response, Churchill rebuffed Bohr’s overture in a face-to-face conversation and convinced the president to include a provision in a 1944 aide-mémoire agreeing to guard against any leak of atomic information to the Russians, with whom Bohr had contacts at their London embassy.
The agreement signaled the difficulties in the way of international control. But postwar pressures for inhibiting the spread of nuclear weapons were too great to be ignored. The popular Ladies’ Home Journal counseled its readers to make the prevention of an atomic war a matter of constant concern: it was “the thought you should wake up to, go to sleep with, and carry with you all day.” The subject dominated the print media and radio during the last months of 1945 and throughout 1946.
The novelist Norman Mailer, who was serving in the Pacific, wrote to his wife two days after Hiroshima that “the news of the atom bomb has created more talk out here than the news of V-E day, and as much as President Roosevelt’s death.” Although he approved of anything that would shorten the war and get him home sooner, the bomb was “a terrifying perspective,” and he could imagine “humanity destroying itself.” He saw it as the “final victory of the machine…. The vista is horrifying. There will be another war, if not in twenty years, then in fifty, and if half of mankind survives, then what of the next war.” He expected “the world cities of tomorrow” to be “built a mile beneath the earth…. He [man] will have descended a thousand fathoms nearer to Hell.”
At the end of 1945, concerned scholars established the Federation of Atomic Scientists (FAS). In order to prevent an arms race, they described the dangers to humankind and urged United Nations control of the fissile material required to build the bomb. When U.S. military and defense chiefs encouraged congressional action to put all atomic research and development in their hands, the FAS lobbied the White House and Congress to assure civilian dominance. The result was a division of control between civil and military authority vested in an Atomic Energy Commission. The commission was ostensibly a civilian agency with David Lilienthal, a nonmilitary chief, as director, but the final legislation in July 1946 established a Military Liaison Board with power to review any issue involving atomic weapons.
The public fears persuaded the Truman administration to work for some kind of restraint, not only because it seemed essential to human survival but also because it was good politics. In January 1946, after the United Nations agreed to establish its Atomic Energy Commission to work for international control, the State Department announced the appointment of a high-level committee chaired by Undersecretary Dean Acheson and including establishment figures—former assistant secretary of war John J. McCloy, prominent scientists Vannevar Bush and James Conant, and the Manhattan Project’s military chief, General Leslie R. Groves—to prepare a proposal for submission to the UN.
Because Acheson believed it essential on so important an issue to have expert advice in crafting committee recommendations, he asked five “wise men” to become committee consultants: most prominently David Lilienthal, then chairman of the Tennessee Valley Authority, a major FDR program that had employed numerous engineers; Robert J. Oppenheimer, the country’s most famous atomic scientist; and the corporate chiefs at General Electric, Monsanto Chemical, and New Jersey Bell.
Despite the committee’s determination to reduce or eliminate dangers of future nuclear competition, hopes of international control were doomed from the start. Stalin’s February 9 speech, coupled with the revelations about the Ottawa spy ring, had aroused too much fear in the United States to allow the Truman administration to come forward with a selfless proposal that might have convinced the Soviets that the United States was determined to forego a nuclear monopoly or international dominance of the technology to produce and warehouse weapons. Numerous members of the U.S. Congress and those responsible for the country’s national security in the War, Navy, and State departments believed that even the most generous offer to transfer control of atomic energy to an international agency would not deter Moscow from trying to develop a bomb. They saw an unqualified giveaway of America’s atomic advantage as a naive action that would leave the United States vulnerable to Soviet nuclear blackmail.
The dilemma for what became known as the Acheson-Lilienthal committee was how to come up with something that both protected U.S. interests and convinced Moscow and other nations that Washington had no malign intentions or plans to use its nuclear advantage to advance America’s global economic and political control. But a workable solution was out of reach.
The committee’s one-hundred-plus-page report of March 28, 1946, included an apocalyptic warning: “Only if the dangerous aspects of atomic energy are taken out of national hands … is there any reasonable prospect of devising safeguards against the use of atomic energy for atomic bombs.” Acheson called the document “brilliant and profound.” It was, but excellence could not overcome suspicions and assumptions about self-interest.
Principally drafted by Oppenheimer, the report called for the establishment of an International Atomic Development Authority that would control all “uranium mines, atomic power plants and laboratories.” Nations would give up the possibility of building bombs, and nuclear materials could only be used for peaceful purposes. The report proposed no inspection regime, since it would be impossible to assure against rogue actions by this means, or so Oppenheimer and his colleagues believed. The United States would retain control of its handful of atomic bombs until the agency could be up and running. The report included no sanctions against nations violating the terms of the agreement, relying instead on the faith in every nation’s understanding that a world ultimately free of nuclear weapons served all countries’ national security.
The report could not disarm mutual Soviet-American distrust. Stalin assumed that even if the United States dismantled its handful of atomic bombs, it would still have the wherewithal to build new ones, giving it an advantage over a Soviet Union that forswore developing the technology.
Doubts in the United States about Soviet intentions were a match for those in Moscow. In March 1946, Winston Churchill publicly counseled Americans not “to entrust the secret knowledge or experience of the atomic bomb … to the world organization, while still in its infancy. It would be criminal madness to cast it adrift in this still agitated and un-united world.” While people everywhere could sleep soundly as long as the United States held a monopoly over bomb technology, it would be different if “some Communist or neo-Fascist State” had this power. Only “when the essential brotherhood of man is truly embodied and expressed in a world organization with all the necessary practical safeguards to make it effective, these powers would naturally be confided to that world organization.”
Truman and most of his advisers had no intention of reducing America’s military advantage over the Soviet Union or any other nation that might try to exceed American power. Although White House public pronouncements could not have been more supportive of the Acheson-Lilienthal proposals, the president’s actions belied his rhetoric. He approved a proposal from military chiefs for atomic tests in July that promised “rapid engineering breakthroughs.” The White House indicated that the coming talks on international control would be no deterrent to “American testing, production, and stockpiling” of atomic weapons.
As revealing, Truman asked the seventy-five-year-old Bernard Baruch, someone with no scientific expertise but with considerable influence with Congress, to lead the American delegation to the UN Atomic Energy Commission talks. A millionaire financier with
close ties to Secretary Byrnes and members of both political parties, to whom he had made generous campaign contributions, Baruch eased conservative fears that the administration was intent on some pie-in-the-sky arrangements with the world organization that would ultimately undermine U.S. national security. It was quickly evident that Baruch would reflect the views of America’s military chiefs in the coming talks and fulfill Truman’s private comment that the United States “should not under any circumstances throw away our gun until we are sure the rest of the world cannot arm against us.”
Baruch’s appointment distressed Acheson and Lilienthal, who saw him as entirely unqualified to discuss atomic energy or exhibit the skills needed in difficult negotiations with the Russians. Lilienthal complained that Baruch would convince the Russians that his only objective was “to put them in a hole, not caring about international cooperation.” Truman didn’t much care for Baruch either, saying after a conversation with him about chairing the delegation that he “wants to run the world, the moon and maybe Jupiter—but we will see.” Despite Truman’s complaint, Baruch was clearly an instrument of the president’s purposes. Knowing full well that Baruch would insist on inspections of potential nuclear plants in Russia and elsewhere as well as sanctions against any nation violating restrictions on atomic development, conditions that seemed certain to antagonize Moscow and undermine prospects for an agreement, Truman gave him the freedom to shape the U.S. proposal at the UN.
Baruch, who was an effective showman, launched America’s part in the discussions at the UN in June with a dramatic speech: the world needed to choose between “the quick and the dead,” he declared. Just what that meant was never clear, but the substance of what Baruch presented left no doubt that the AEC deliberations were a contest between American and Soviet power. Baruch insisted that any control agreement had to include inspections, sanctions against violators, no Security Council veto of UN-voted punishment of rogue nations, and an effective limitation accord before the United States relinquished control of its atomic weapons. The Soviets responded with demands for a prompt end to every nation’s acquisition, stockpiling, or use of atomic bombs. No demand was made for elimination of a veto over sanctions against any nation breaching the agreement, since the only country with the wherewithal to violate the agreement was the United States.
Although negotiations would continue for months, it was a foregone conclusion that the United States and the Soviet Union would fail to find common ground on how to rein in the building of revolutionary weapons of mass destruction. The culprits in this escalation of human capacity to produce unprecedented destruction in another total war were initially Hitler and the Japanese militarists, who drove the world into the 1939–45 conflict that led to the manufacture of nuclear bombs. After the war, neither Russians nor Americans could put aside their suspicions of each other; it drove them to see possession of such weapons as essential for their survival. The British, French, Chinese, Indians, Pakistanis, and Israelis would follow suit in the postwar decades, with the North Koreans and Iranians hoping to assure their security and gain international status by joining the twenty-first-century nuclear club.
It is sobering to recognize that the controlling personalities and circumstances of early 1946 made any sort of accommodation between East and West that could have headed off a long-term cold war nearly impossible. By giving his speech of February 9 and instructing his subordinates to strike similar chords in their subsequent talks, Stalin had to understand that he was challenging Truman and Britain’s leaders to answer in kind. But he had faced down Hitler, and he had every confidence that he could outlast the Americans and British in a contest of wills. In fact, a tough response from Washington and London was not without appeal to him. To provoke his former comrades in arms into an open contest for world domination was the sort of grandiose contest that gave meaning to his life.
Stalin saw the emerging tensions as an inevitable part of some grand historical struggle between Marxism and capitalism, outwardly depicting himself as no more than an agent of forces beyond any individual’s control. It is hard to believe, however, that he didn’t privately view himself as more than a part of some impersonal historical development—more, in fact, a shaper of history than a passive actor in its grand designs. And indeed, if individuals have any impact on human affairs, Stalin is a prime example of someone who changed things for the worse because of an inability to rise above his paranoia about enemies at home and abroad. To be sure, Stalin had real opponents eager to bring him down, but much of the animosity toward him was the consequence of ruthless initiatives. A different man with a different outlook might have sought different outcomes. But this implies an alternate history than that produced by the rise and course of Stalin and Soviet Russia.
Churchill, like Stalin, lived for the grand gesture—the dramatic confrontation that could shape the movements of peoples and nations. Consequently, when an invitation came to him from the obscure Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri, to speak in March 1946, he seized the opportunity to have an American pulpit from which he could once again influence public affairs, especially because his absence from his former high position meant less opportunity to assert himself.
Truman was very enthusiastic about the proposal for Churchill to speak. When the president of the college saw Truman at the White House with a copy of the invitation to Churchill, the president wrote in longhand: “This is a wonderful school in my home state. Hope you can do it. I’ll introduce you.” Churchill responded: “Under your auspices anything I say will command some attention and there is the opportunity for doing some good to this bewildered, baffled and breathless world.”
Since he was out of office, Churchill had nothing to lose politically by speaking forcefully about Stalin’s challenge to the West. For Truman, however, any association with an attack on Moscow, which continued to have strong sympathizers in the United States, had domestic political consequences he tried to mute. Behind the scenes, he was entirely ready to join Churchill in designing a tough response. While vacationing in Florida, Churchill used two visits to Washington to discuss his intentions with Truman and Admiral William D. Leahy, FDR’s former chief of staff, to call for a “full” Anglo-American “military collaboration” against Moscow’s threat to world peace. The president and Leahy had no objection to Churchill’s proposed remarks, and they, along with a coterie of other White House aides and a large contingent of journalists, escorted Churchill by train to Missouri. As they rode through the American heartland, Churchill polished his speech, which he distributed in advance to the press. Truman told him that it would capture wide attention and “do nothing but good.”
It certainly commanded headlines, as Churchill hoped it would. “The President has traveled a thousand miles to dignify and magnify our meeting here today,” Churchill declared in his opening remarks to the college audience assembled in the main campus auditorium, “and to give me an opportunity of addressing this kindred nation, as well as my own countrymen across the ocean, and perhaps some other countries too,” pointedly suggesting that he hoped the Soviets would pay heed to what he had to say. Lest his pronouncements be seen as official policy or a statement of hostile intent toward the Communists by the American and British governments, Churchill declared that he had “no official mission or status of any kind, and that I speak only for myself.” Moreover, he declared that “we aim at nothing but mutual assistance and collaboration with Russia.”
Yet he did not mince words about his objective—which was “to try to make sure … that what has [been] gained with so much sacrifice and suffering shall be preserved for the future glory and safety of mankind.” America’s newfound power made it the world’s defender against “two giant marauders, war and tyranny,” he said. Eventually, he hoped that a world army or United Nations force would become the international peacekeeper. When the UN’s military might had matured into a reliable defender, it could be armed with nuclear weapons or have exclusive control of these weapons of mas
s destruction. In the meantime, his advice about a U.S. monopoly on the atom bomb should hold. Moreover, it seemed wise to expand Anglo-American military cooperation—not as an alternative to the United Nations but as a supplement to international stability.
It was “tyranny,” however, on which he felt compelled to dwell—the abuse of those freedoms that were the hallmarks of the Anglo-American democracies. He saw no “duty … to interfere forcibly in the internal affairs of countries which we have not conquered in war,” but he saw an obligation “to proclaim in fearless tones the great principles of freedom” that “are the joint inheritance of the English-speaking world.” In short, Washington and London had no military plans to strike the Soviet Union or its satellites, he assured Moscow, but a verbal assault on their repressive governments was another matter.
“It is my duty to place before you certain facts about the present position in Europe,” Churchill announced, famously explaining, “From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic an iron curtain has descended across the Continent. Behind the line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe. Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest and Sofia, all these famous cities and the populations around them lie in what I must call the Soviet sphere, and all are subject to one form or another, not only to Soviet influence but to a very high and, in some cases, increasing measure of control from Moscow…. Police governments are prevailing in nearly every case, and so far, except in Czechoslovakia, there is no true democracy…. Whatever conclusions may be drawn from these facts—and facts they are—this is certainly not the Liberated Europe we fought to build up. Nor is it one which contains the essentials of permanent peace.”
The danger now was to other countries around the world from Communist subversion directed from Moscow, though not in either the British Commonwealth or the United States, “where communism is in its infancy. These are somber facts,” Churchill declared, “but we should be most unwise not to face them squarely while time remains.” None of this was meant to suggest that “a new war is inevitable” or even imminent. He had every confidence that America and Britain had the power “to save the future.” Moreover, he was convinced that the Soviets did not desire war. “What they desire is the fruits of war and the indefinite expansion of their power and doctrines.” The goal now was not to show weakness; “nothing for which they [the Russians] have less respect … especially military weakness.” Rather, it was to demonstrate strength or resolve to stand together against tyranny with all Anglo-American “moral and material forces and convictions”; then “the highroads of the future will be clear, not only for our time, but for a century to come.”
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