Fear Itself (109 page)

50
See http://www.trumanlibrary.org/whistlestop/study_collections/coldwar/documents/pdf/6-6.pdf. An incisive critique of the Long Telegram—“one of the two or three most important texts of the early cold war”—can be found in Anders Stephanson,
Kennan and the Art of Foreign Policy
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989), pp. 45–53; see also H. W. Brands,
What America Owes the World: The Struggle for the Soul of Foreign Policy
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 144–56.

51
X [George Kennan], “The Sources of Soviet Conduct,”
Foreign Affairs
25 (1947): 575, 582.

52
Louis J. Halle,
The Cold War as History
(New York: Harper & Row, 1967), p. 105.

53
New York Times,
March 1, 1946.

54
See http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/churchill-iron.asp. For a discussion of the iron curtain metaphor, see Patrick Wright,
Iron Curtain: From Stage to Cold War
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2007). By 1948, Churchill was making the case for a preemptive war against the Soviet Union. Arguing that he thought eight more years would be required for the USSR to obtain the bomb, he proposed that “we ought not to wait until Russia is ready.” Seeking a showdown when the United States still possessed a monopoly, he asked the House of Commons to imagine what the behavior of the Soviets would be like “when they got the atomic bomb and accumulated a large store. . . . No one in his senses can believe we have a limitless period before us.” He thus counseled the Truman administration to offer an ultimatum to the Russians: Withdraw from East Germany or face an American atomic assault. See Marc Trachtenberg, “A ‘Wasting Asset’: American Strategy and the Shifting Nuclear Balance, 1949–1954,”
International Security
13 (1988/1989): 9–10.

55
Martin Gilbert,
A History of the Twentieth Century
,
Vol. 2,
1933–1951
(New York: William Morrow, 1998), p. 740; the text of the March 13, 1946, interview can be found at http://marxism.halkcephesi.net/Stalin/volume%2014%20to%2018/pravda031346.htm.

56
Wall Street Journal,
February 25, 1946.

57
Dexter Masters and Katharine Way, eds.,
One World or None
(New York: McGraw Hill, 1946). The first quotation appears in the inside front cover; the second in the contribution by Harold C. Urey, “How Does It All Add Up?,” p. 59.

58
Philip Morrison, “If the Bomb Gets Out of Hand,” in ibid., pp. 1–6.

59
E. U. Condon, “The New Technique of Private War,” in ibid., pp. 39–42; Condon was a key target of attention for HUAC, one of whose subcommittes, composed of the Republican Richard Vail of Illinois and the Georgia Democrat John S. Wood, labeled him in 1948 as “one of the weakest links in our atomic security.” For a fair-minded consideration of the attack on Condon based on his associations with left-wing organizations alleged to be Communist fronts, see Jessica Wang, “Science, Security, and the Cold War: The Case of E. U. Condon,”
Isis
83 (1992): 238, 246.

60
Reinhold Niebuhr, “Our Relations with Japan,”
Christianity and Crisis,
September 17, 1945, p. 5. This is a theme he continued to develop; see the “Foreword” he wrote for Harrison Brown and James Real,
Community of Fear
(Santa Barbara, CA: Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions, 1960). During the year following Hiroshima and Nagasaki, popular books that explained the principles of the atomic bomb began to appear. Two examples are Gessner G. Hawley and Sigmund W. Leifson,
Atomic Energy in War and Peace
(New York: Reinhold, 1946); and J. K. Robertson,
Atomic Artillery and the Atomic Bomb
(New York: D. Van Nostrand, 1946). In May 1946, a committee of the American Psychological Association warned that the effects of nuclear fears were indeterminate, as they might lead either to escapist thinking that minimized the problem or to a sense of desperation that would increase the prospects of atomic warfare. See
New York Times
, May 26, 1946.

61
This analysis appeared in a nine-part series on “Control of Atomic Energy” published by Walter Lippmann in his syndicated column between March 27 and April 6, 1946. For his conclusions about the choice facing the world, see the last two essays,
Los Angeles Times,
April 5 and April 6, 1946. He had first advanced his ideas about atomic energy, including the idea that agreements about the bomb be binding not only on nations but on individual leaders, in his “Today and Tomorrow” column half a year earlier. See
Washington Post,
November 17, 1945.

62
Washington Post,
April 3, 1946. Later that year, Joseph Alsop urged Washington to use its period of monopoly to “seek an understanding with the Soviet Union,” for once they catch up, he warned, “war will then be almost certain,” and “the military advantage will be all on the Soviet side.” See
Washington Post,
September 25, 1946.

63
John Hersey,
Hiroshima
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1946);
Billboard,
September 14, 1946, p. 10. The editors explained, “The
New Yorker
this week devotes its entire editorial space to an article on the almost complete obliteration of a city by one atomic bomb, and what happened to the people of that city. It does so in the conviction that few of us have yet comprehended the all but incredible destructive power of this weapon, and that everyone might take time to consider the terrible implications of its use.” See
The New Yorker,
August 31, 1946, p. 15. A Japanese translation of
Hiroshima
was not permitted until 1949 by the U.S. occupation administration. See Matthew Jones,
After Hiroshima: The United States, Race and Nuclear Weapons in Asia, 1945–1965
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), p. 33.

64
Paul S. Boyer,
By the Bomb’s Early Light: American Thought and Culture at the Dawn of the Atomic Age
(New York: Pantheon, 1985), p. 74.

65
Brodie clarified why this is the case:

The reasons why the same plane can be effective over much greater distances with atomic bombs than with chemical bombs concern basically the intricate relationships between such factors as the amount of bombs which a plane can carry over any given distance, the total military effort expended in carrying it over that distance, and the tolerable rate of loss of attacking planes. Since the atomic bomb does enormously more damage than an equivalent load of chemical bombs, the cost per sortie which is acceptable with atomic bombs is also proportionately greater—great enough, in fact, to include 100 percent loss of planes on successful attacks. The greater acceptable cost; the fact that the plane itself need not be retrieved (whatever the arrangements made for the rescue of the crew); and the additional fact that a single atomic bomb, whatever its weight, is always a sufficient payload for any distance which the plane is capable of carrying it, will have the effect of at least doubling the maximum effective bombing range of any plane of B-29 size or greater.

See Bernard Brodie, “The Atom Bomb as Policy Maker,”
Foreign Affairs
27 (1948): 25.

66
Hanson W. Baldwin,
Power and Politics: The Price of Security in the Atomic Age
(Claremont, CA: Claremont University, 1950), pp. 66, 68. For an earlier statement, see Baldwin, “Two Great Delusions about the A-Bomb,”
New York Times,
July 10, 1949.

67
Warner R. Schilling, “The H-Bomb Decision: How to Decide without Actually Choosing,”
Political Science Quarterly
76 (1961): 27. Gen. A. G. L. McNaughton, who served as Canada’s representative to the United Nations Atomic Energy Commission in 1946 and 1947, explained, at the start of his service as a permanent delegate to the UN in early 1948, why changes in weight and explosiveness had made it possible for bombers to achieve a radius of some five thousand miles and why defense against their attacks, as well as those by guided missile, approached the impossible. McNaughton, “National and International Control of Atomic Energy,”
International Journal
3 (1947/1948): 14–16. McNaughton and Baruch clashed at the UN over the insistence by the United States that the USSR forgo its veto rights in the Security Council regarding the enforcement of inspections of atomic facilities and programs. See
New York Times,
December 20, 1946.

68
Schilling, “The H-Bomb Decision,” p. 25.

69
These points are made by Brodie, “The Atom Bomb as Policy Maker,” pp. 26, 33.

70
Harry S. Truman,
Memoirs,
vol. 2,
Years of Trial and Hope
(Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1956), p. 106. For the development of the Truman Doctrine, see Richard M. Freeland,
The Truman Doctrine and the Origins of McCarthyism
(New York: NYU Press, 1985), pp. 71–114.

71
See http://www.historyguide.org/europe/truman1947.html.

72
For an assessment of the Truman Doctrine as “a policy that might be as important for America as the Monroe Doctrine of 1823 and the Roosevelt Lend Lease Program of 1941,” see the
New York Times,
March 16, 1947. On Marshall’s commencement talk, see ibid., June 6, 1947. The text of his speech can be found at http://www.oecd.org/document/10/0,3746,en_2649_201185_1876938_1_1_1_1,00.html. At a Paris gathering of the foreign ministers of Britain, France, and the USSR, Vyacheslav Molotov opposed the Marshall Plan, warning of “grave consequences” if the program of aid went ahead. No Soviet-bloc country joined in, and the French Communist Party, under pressure from Moscow, withdrew from the country’s postwar coalition government.

73
For a bracing discussion, stressing often surprising organizational and normative continuities with the League of Nations, see Mark Mazower,
No Enchanted Palace: The End of Empire and the Ideological Origins of the United Nations
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009); see also Townsend Hoopes and Douglas Brinkley,
FDR and the Creation of the UN
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000).

74
The inherent limits of the United Nations are underscored in F. H. Hinsley,
Power and the Pursuit of Peace
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1963), pp. 335–45. When the United Nations Security Council voted on July 7, 1950, to recommend that member states join a unified military command under the leadership of the United States to aid the Republic of Korea, the USSR was boycotting the council for not having admitted the People’s Republic of China.

75
New York Times,
December 28, 1945. The Moscow meeting followed the mid-November gathering of President Truman and Prime Ministers Clement Attlee of Great Britain and W. L. Mackenzie King of Canada. After five days of discussion at the White House, they had declared on behalf of the “three countries which possess the knowledge essential to the use of atomic energy” the need to find “a constructive solution to the problem of the atomic bomb.” Their declaration included the offer to share the secrets of atomic energy under the auspices of the United Nations, but only with the establishment of “effective, reciprocal, and enforceable safeguards acceptable to all nations.” See
New York Times,
November 16, 1945.

76
New York Times,
June 15, 1946. The U.S. position in the UN on controls and inspections was guided in part by
A Report on the International Control of Atomic Energy
(Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, March 16, 1946). The report was sent to Secretary of State James Byrnes by the Secretary of State’s Committee on Atomic Energy, which he had appointed on January 7, 1946. The committee, chaired by Dean Acheson, and whose members included Vannevar Bush, James Conant, Leslie Groves, and John J. McCloy, designated a board of consultants (Chester I. Barnard, J. Robert Oppenheimer, Charles A. Thomas, Henry Winner, and, as chair, David Lilienthal), which did the bulk of the work. The Department of War fought an internal administration battle against the internationalization of atomic energy. A leaked departmental assessment in the early spring of 1947 warned that “other nations could wage atomic war on equal footing with the United States within six years after the adoption of the United States plan for international control of atomic energy.” See
New York Times,
April 9, 1947.

77
New York Times,
June 20, 1946;
Washington Post,
June 20, 1946. In March 1947, in a seventy-eight-minute speech to the Security Council, Gromyko denounced the American proposals as “thoroughly vicious and unacceptable” and “incompatible with state sovereignty.” See
Chicago Daily Tribune,
March 6, 1947. On May 19, 1947, Gromyko once again flatly rejected an inspection regime, and he warned against the “illusion” that the United States would long keep its atomic bomb monopoly. See
Los Angeles Times,
May 20, 1947. In turn, the head of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, David Lilienthal, told the UN’s Atomic Energy Commission that absent a “foolproof” system of inspection, the United States intended to maintain and improve its atomic weapons stockpile. See
New York Times,
June 3, 1947. Two days later, the country’s deputy spokesman in the UN commission, Frederick Osborn, called the Soviet plan a “fraud on the peoples of the world.” See
Washington Post,
June 5, 1947. Looking back at the situation when at the Truman Library in 1974, Osborn recalled that “there was a great deal of talk” among American officials “about how long it would be before Russia had atomic weapons.” Estimates then ranged up to twenty-five years. “Of course, they were well along. This we didn’t know during our negotiations. The Russians were almost at the point of exploding an atomic bomb during the negotiations. None of us had any idea of this. We all thought that this was a long way off.” See http://www.trumanlibrary.org/oralhist/osbornf.htm#transcript.