by Oliver Stone
Brave young Americans like Paul Fussell and their Soviet and British counterparts defeated Japan in World War II. Many lost their lives in the process. Yet the myth has been promulgated by Truman, Stimson, and others that the atomic bomb was responsible for the Allied victory and that it saved hundreds of thousands of American lives by ending the war without a U.S. invasion. In 1991, former President George Herbert Walker Bush went so far as to defend Truman’s “tough, calculating decision, [which] spared millions of American lives.”151 The facts show otherwise. Though the atomic bombs certainly contributed to the Japanese decision to surrender, they were ancillary to U.S. island hopping, bombing, and blockade and to the dramatic impact of the Soviet invasion, which convinced the Japanese leaders that even holding on for the last decisive battle on the Japanese mainland was no longer a viable option. Nor was it for the Americans. As Leahy confessed, “I was unable to see any justification, from a national-defense point of view, for an invasion of an already thoroughly defeated Japan.”152
Nor did dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki make the Soviet Union more pliable. It merely convinced Stalin that the United States would stop at nothing to impose its will and that the Soviets must speed the development of their own atomic bomb as a deterrent to the bloodthirsty Americans.
And in what many consider a cruel irony, the United States allowed Japan to keep the emperor, whose retention, most experts believed, was essential to postwar social stability. Contrary to Byrnes’s admonitions, Truman suffered no political repercussions from that decision.
The nuclear arms race that Szilard and others feared was now under way. Truman had helped make real his nightmarish vision of a world poised on the brink of annihilation. Stimson made the same point in his 1947 defense of the bombing, writing, “In this last great action of the Second World War we were given final proof that war is death. War in the twentieth century has grown steadily more barbarous, more destructive, more debased in all its aspects. Now, with the release of atomic energy, man’s ability to destroy himself is very nearly complete.”153
Truman always claimed that he felt no remorse, even bragging that he “never lost any sleep over that decision.”154 When television interviewer Edward R. Murrow asked him, “Any regrets?” he responded, “Not the slightest—not the slightest in the world.”155 When another interviewer asked if the decision had been morally difficult to make, he responded, “Hell no, I made it like that,” snapping his fingers.156
General Douglas MacArthur with Emperor Hirohito. In what many consider a cruel irony, the United States allowed Japan to keep the emperor, whose retention, most experts believed, was essential to postwar social stability. Contrary to Byrnes’s admonitions, Truman suffered no political repercussions from that decision.
Truman met Oppenheimer for the first time on October 25, 1945, and asked him to guess when the Soviets would develop a bomb. When Oppenheimer admitted that he didn’t know, Truman declared that he did: “Never.” Unnerved by this truculent display of ignorance, Oppenheimer said at one point, “Mr. President, I feel I have blood on my hands.” Truman responded angrily. “I told him the blood was on my hands—to let me worry about that.” Afterward Truman told Dean Acheson, “I don’t want to see that son-of-a-bitch in this office ever again.” He later called Oppenheimer a “cry-baby scientist.” 157
The horrors and bloodshed of World War II hardened a lot of people to the suffering of others. Future renowned physicist Freeman Dyson, who was then ready to go to Okinawa as part of the Tiger Force fleet of three hundred British bombers, tried to illuminate the process:
I found this continuing slaughter of defenseless Japanese even more sickening than the slaughter of well-defended Germans. But still I did not quit. By that time I had been at war so long that I could hardly remember peace. No living poet had words to describe that emptiness of the soul which allowed me to go on killing without hatred and without remorse. But Shakespeare understood it, and he gave Macbeth the words: “. . . I am in blood/Stepp’d in so that, should I wade no more,/Returning were as tedious as going o’er.”158
Writer and social critic Dwight Macdonald captured this dehumanization even before Hiroshima’s devastation. He traced the transformation from the “unbelieving horror and indignation” people felt when Franco’s planes killed hundreds of Spanish civilians in 1938 to the abject indifference to hundreds of thousands of victims in Tokyo: “We have grown callous to massacre. King Mithridates is said to have immunized himself against poison by taking small doses which he increased slowly. So the gradually increasing horrors of the last decade have made each of us to some extent a moral Mithridates, immunized against human sympathy.”159
Not all were immunized against human sympathy. Many of the scientists involved in the bomb project became lifelong antinuclear activists, like Leo Szilard, who switched from physics to biology and founded the Council for a Livable World; Albert Einstein, who became the chair of the Emergency Committee of Atomic Scientists in 1946; and Joseph Rotblat, who campaigned tirelessly for nuclear abolition until his death at age ninety-six and won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1995.
Even British Prime Minister Winston Churchill recognized the difficulty of defending the atomic bombings. Churchill visited Truman toward the end of his presidency. Truman threw a small dinner to which he invited Robert Lovett, Omar Bradley, Harriman, and Acheson. Margaret, the president’s daughter, described the scene: “Everyone was in an ebullient mood, especially Dad. Without warning, Mr. Churchill turned to him and said, ‘Mr. President, I hope you have your answer ready for that hour when you and I stand before Saint Peter and he says, “I understand you two are responsible for putting off those atomic bombs. What have you got to say for yourselves?’ ”160 The atomic bombings would not be the only thing Churchill and Truman would have to answer for as the United States and Great Britain charged toward confrontation with the Soviet Union.
The person who did the most to try to stop that confrontation, Henry Wallace, has been largely lost to history. Few people remember how close Wallace came to getting the vice presidential nomination on that steamy Chicago night in July 1944. What might this country have become had Wallace succeeded Roosevelt in April 1945 instead of Truman? Would atomic bombs still have been used in World War II? Could we have avoided the nuclear arms race and the Cold War? Would civil rights and women’s rights have triumphed in the immediate postwar years? Might colonialism have ended decades earlier and the fruits of science and technology been spread more equitably around the globe? We’ll never know.
Chapter 5
THE COLD WAR:
Who Started It?
“Men and women a century from now will very likely find the Cold War as obscure and incomprehensible as we today find the Thirty Years War—the terrible conflict that devastated much of Europe not too long ago. Looking back at the 20th century,” Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., wisely observed, “our descendants will very likely be astonished at the disproportion between the causes of the Cold War, which may well seem trivial, and the consequences, which could have meant the veritable end of history.”1 Did the Cold War have to be fought the way it was—with U.S. and Soviet nuclear weapons poised to destroy each other and wipe out all of the rest of humanity as collateral damage? Could the Cold War have been avoided entirely? Were there statesmen who offered a dramatically different vision of a postwar world based on peaceful and friendly competition that would uplift all of humanity?
The early Cold War would be animated by the clash between two fundamentally different visions of the U.S. role in the world—Henry Luce’s hegemonic vision of the twentieth century as the “American Century” and Henry Wallace’s utopian vision of the “Century of the Common Man.” The stakes would be enormous.
On September 2, 1945, the Second World War officially ended. Though Americans everywhere were cheered by that news, a strange pall hung over the nation as Americans envisioned their own future in the burned-out ruins of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. On August 12, CBS ne
wsman Edward R. Murrow observed, “Seldom, if ever, has a war ended leaving the victors with such a sense of uncertainty and fear, with such a realization that the future is obscure and that survival is not assured.” Public discourse was rife with apocalyptic forebodings, as Americans were struck by what historian Paul Boyer describes as a “primal fear of extinction.”2 The St. Louis Post-Dispatch worried that science may have “signed the mammalian world’s death certificate.” John Campbell, editor of Astounding Science Fiction magazine, admitted that he had been contemplating this development for fifteen years and added, “Frankly, I am scared.” This was not just a new bomb; it was, he explained, “the power to kill the human race.”3 The New York Times regretted that humans could now “blow ourselves and perhaps the planet itself to drifting dust.”4 The Washington Post lamented that the life expectancy of the human species had “dwindled immeasurably in the course of two brief weeks.”5
War’s end left much of Europe and Asia in tatters. As many as 70 million people lay dead. Civilian deaths outnumbered military deaths by more than three to two. The Soviet losses were unparalleled, as retreating German troops destroyed everything in their path. President John F. Kennedy later remarked, “No nation in the history of battle ever suffered more than the Soviet Union in the Second World War. At least 20 million lost their lives. Countless millions of homes and families were burned or sacked. A third of the nation’s territory, including two-thirds of its industrial base, were turned into a wasteland—a loss equivalent to the destruction of this country east of Chicago.”6
Only the United States escaped such destruction. The U.S. economy was booming. GNP and exports more than doubled prewar levels. Industrial production soared, growing during the war at a record 15 percent annually. The United States held two-thirds of the world’s gold reserves and three-quarters of its invested capital. It produced a phenomenal 50 percent of the world’s goods and services. Yet businessmen and planners worried that the end of wartime spending augured a return to prewar depression conditions. They particularly feared the consequences should Europe adopt economic spheres closed to American trade and investment.
With Franklin Roosevelt at the helm, the United States skillfully steered a middle course between Great Britain and the Soviet Union. Most Americans looked askance at British imperialism and disapproved of Great Britain’s repressive policies in Greece, India, and elsewhere. Many also mistrusted Soviet-style socialism and decried the Soviet Union’s heavy-handed treatment of Eastern Europe. After the war, the United States used a $3.75 billion credit to pry open the British Empire, gaining equal access for American capital and goods. It also canceled Great Britain’s lend-lease debt. The United States disappointed the Soviet Union by not offering similar aid, although it had dangled the prospect of a large credit during wartime discussions. Harry Truman, unfortunately, showed none of Roosevelt’s dexterity in navigating an independent course as he tacked increasingly toward the British camp, ignoring Soviet concerns at a time of maximum U.S. strength and relative Soviet weakness.
Ruins in London, Warsaw, and Kiev. The end of World War II left much of Europe and Asia in tatters. Perhaps as many as 70 million lay dead. Civilian deaths outnumbered military deaths by more than three to two.
In mid-September, Secretary of State James Byrnes traveled to London to confer with Vyacheslav Molotov and other foreign ministers. Before leaving, he made clear his intention to use the U.S. atomic monopoly to force Soviet compliance with U.S. demands. But whenever Byrnes insisted the Soviets open up Eastern Europe, Molotov pointed to exclusionary U.S. policies in Italy, Greece, and Japan. Tired of Byrnes’s belligerence, Molotov finally asked if he was hiding an atomic bomb in his coat pocket, to which Byrnes replied, “You don’t know southerners. We carry our artillery in our pocket. If you don’t cut out all this stalling . . . , I’m going to pull an atomic bomb out of my hip pocket and let you have it.”7
U.S. atomic diplomacy, in its first iteration, had clearly failed to produce the desired results. Secretary of War Henry Stimson objected to such crude intimidation. In a September memo, Stimson had advised Truman that bullying the Soviets with atomic weapons would backfire and only speed the Soviet Union’s efforts to attain its own atomic arsenal:
our satisfactory relations with Russia [are] not merely connected with but . . . virtually dominated by the problem of the atomic bomb . . . if we . . . hav[e] this weapon rather ostentatiously on our hip, their suspicions and their distrust of our purposes and motives will increase. . . . The chief lesson that I have learned in a long life is that the only way you can make a man trustworthy is to trust him; and the surest way to make him untrustworthy is to distrust him and show your distrust.8
Stimson boldly called for halting U.S. development of atomic bombs if Great Britain and the Soviet Union did likewise and impounding those the United States had already built. Truman dedicated the September 21 cabinet meeting to Stimson’s urgent appeal to strengthen the U.S. friendship with the Soviet Union before it developed its own atomic bombs. The meeting, occurring on Stimson’s seventy-eighth birthday, would be the last for the retiring statesman. The cabinet split sharply over Stimson’s proposals, with Secretary of Commerce Henry Wallace rallying supporters and Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal leading the opposition. Forrestal would play an important role in the hardening of U.S. policy toward the Soviet Union. He had earned a fortune on Wall Street and married a former Ziegfeld Follies girl before joining the White House staff in 1939. Like most other Wall Streeters, he deeply distrusted the Soviet Union. He leaked a phony account of the cabinet discussion to the press. The next day, the New York Times reported that Wallace had proposed sharing “the secret of the atomic bomb” with the USSR.9 Though Truman immediately repudiated this flagrant falsehood and set the record straight, Wallace could see the writing on the wall.
Having just returned from a conference on atomic energy at the University of Chicago, Wallace understood the real stakes better than Truman and other administration officials. The experts agreed that whatever secret there might have been to the atomic bomb had vanished when the United States dropped the first one on Hiroshima. They also knew, as the Franck Committee had warned in June, that the Soviet Union would soon develop its own atomic arsenal. The scientists in attendance drove home the fact that the current generation of atomic weapons paled by comparison to what would soon be available. Therefore, they concluded, steps to curb an arms race were essential and urgent. Wallace had told the gathering that “any nation that violates the international moral law, sooner or later gets into trouble—the British have done that in relation to colonial peoples and the United States [is] in danger of doing it with the atomic bomb.” He conveyed that same message to his fellow cabinet members.10
A few days later, Wallace received a letter from physicist Arthur Holly Compton. Compton alerted Wallace to ominous developments at the weapons laboratories. “There is a reasonable chance,” he reported, “that a concentrated scientific and technical effort, comparable with that spent on the development of the present atom bomb, could develop a super bomb” of staggering destructive capability. He expressed the deeply held view among the members of the Scientific Panel of the Interim Committee. “We feel that this . . . should not be undertaken . . . because we . . . prefer defeat in war to a victory obtained at the expense of the enormous human disaster that would be caused by its . . . use.” Compton presented some rough figures to show just how powerful a bomb he was talking about: The “area completely destroyed by 1 atomic bomb, 4 square miles. Area completely destroyable by 1000 atomic bombs, as in a future war, 4000 square miles. Area completely destroyable by 1000 super bombs, about 1,000,000 square miles. Area of continental United States, about 3,000,000 square miles.” What worried Compton was that “the theoretical basis of the super bomb has arisen spontaneously with at least four persons working on our project who have independently brought the idea to me. This means that it will occur likewise to those in other nations engaged on similar
developments. If developed here, other great powers must follow suit.” Wallace and Compton both felt that only some form of world government could meet such a challenge.11
Wallace fought a rearguard action against the powerful forces propelling the country toward war with the Soviet Union. Truman’s ouster of the few remaining New Dealers from his cabinet, left Wallace increasingly isolated. Now Stimson too was gone. As Soviet intelligence noted, the rightward shift in Truman’s economic and foreign policy advisors was unmistakable.
Wallace, undeterred, met with Truman on October 15 to press him on softening his tone toward the Soviet Union, and gave him a report he had written titled “The Significance of the Atomic Age.” Truman read it sentence by sentence in his presence. It warned, “When many nations have atomic bombs [it] will require only the smallest spark to set off a worldwide humanity-destroying explosion. Steps should be taken at once to call into being a vital international organization based on the elimination of all weapons of offensive warfare, the pooling of the constructive aspects of atomic energy, and the adoption of the principle of international trusteeship for certain areas of the world.” Truman agreed completely, telling Wallace that “this was what he had been trying to say right along.” He also remarked, somewhat overgenerously, that “Stalin was a fine man who wanted to do the right thing.” Truman even agreed with Wallace’s statement that “the purpose of Britain was to promote an unbreachable break between us and Russia.”12 Wallace’s efforts bore fruit. In the fall of 1945, Truman told a press conference, “Russia’s interests and ours do not clash, and never have. We have always been friends, and I hope we always will be.”13