CHAPTER XIV
JANUARY 1946–JULY 1949
The year 1946 is notable for the long and persistent effort to achieve agreement on the international control of atomic energy, an effort which raised the hopes of many millions of believers in international cooperation very high, though the end of the year found little chance of agreement remaining.
In fulfilment of the December agreement at Moscow to work for atomic control through the United Nations, Secretary of State Byrnes appointed, on January 7, 1946, an advisory committee “to study the subject of controls and safeguards necessary to protect this government.”1 The committee consisted of Assistant Secretary of State Dean Acheson, Dr. Vannevar Bush, Dr. James B. Conant, Major General Leslie R. Groves and Mr. John J. McCloy.
At its first meeting, on January 14, this group concluded that the UN Atomic Energy Commission would expect the U.S.A. to present a plan for control and that an able group of men should be designated to prepare such a plan. The resulting Board of Consultants was composed of:
Mr. David E. Lilienthal, Chairman of the Tennessee Valley Authority, who acted as Chairman; Mr. Chester I. Barnard, President of the New Jersey Bell Telephone Company; Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer, of the California Institute of Technology and the University of California; Dr. Charles Allen Thomas, Vice-President and Technical Director, Monsanto Chemical Company, and Mr. Harry A. Winne, Vice-President in Charge of Engineering Policy, General Electric Company.
The Acheson Lilienthal Report
The Board met promptly and devoted its full time and energy to the problem until its report was issued on March 17. It rejected international inspection as a means of control, on the ground that it would be ineffective. The number of inspectors would have to be very large. Their work would be detective in character, policing and auditing, which would not attract the real scientists who would alone be capable of doing the work. The result would be friction with governments and failure to know what each nation was doing.
An Atomic Development Authority. To avoid this result the Consultants proposed that all atomic energy activities, the world over, be controlled by an Atomic Development Authority, which would own or control directly all supplies of uranium and thorium and all plants for the production of fissionable materials. These plants would be distributed over the world in such a way as to preserve strategic balance. That is, no one country would have enough plants to be able to gain atomic supremacy by suddenly seizing them. Enough plants would be left in other areas to enable the rest of the world to start ahead in an atomic arms race, or to attack the aggressor at once.
The report held that there were three dangerous activities: the provision of raw materials; the production of the fissionable materials, plutonium and U235; and the use of these materials for the making of atomic weapons. All of these activities should be concentrated completely in the hands of ADA and strictly forbidden to all others. On the other hand, certain safe activities could be conceded to national or private agencies by a license from the ADA.
These were: research reactors for which the Authority would furnish denatured plutonium or U235; the construction and operation of reactors for the making of radioactive materials, the fissionable materials used to be denatured and obtained from ADA; and the construction and operation of power piles, to be supplied by the Authority with denatured plutonium or U235.
Power plants for peaceful purposes could thus be operated, provided that they used denatured fissionable materials from the plants of the Authority, and provided that they were so constructed that uranium or thorium could not be introduced into them. This would ensure that the materials supplied by ADA would gradually be consumed in these power plants and that they could not become independent units, “breeding” or increasing the amount of fissionable materials as they operated. Great confidence was placed in the effectiveness of denaturing the materials supplied. The denaturant could be removed, but this would be a complicated and difficult process.
These specifications would permit the U.S.S.R. to have atomic power plants, presumably within the limits of the fissionable materials produced by the primary ADA plants located in the Soviet Union. The necessity of locating plants to “permit the disposition of by-product power and heat in areas where they are most needed” was specifically recognized, along with the problem of disposing of “the vast amounts of by-product power” produced by “an international agency operating geographically within a national economy.” It was estimated that “if atomic energy were developed on a large scale about half of it might be available for competitive exploitation.”
The Consultants were certain that any attempt at control merely by inspection and regulation would fail. Only if the controllers had the affirmative, constructive functions of development assigned to them in the ADA plan could there be continuous, harmonious management of both the dangerous activities and the peaceful uses. “If the only legal ownership and development of uranium ore is in the hands of an international agency” then the detection of evasions would be tremendously simplified. The mere fact of mining or possessing uranium would establish guilt. It would not be necessary to prove that the product of a mine would be used illegally. “The very opening of a mine” would be sufficient. Similarly any move to build a plutonium pile would be illegal.
Beyond these advantages the ADA would in practice be a real organ of world government, for a limited but crucial purpose. The consultants believed it would substitute cooperative, constructive international effort for national competition in the evasion of inspection.
A Sincere Effort. It has been suggested frequently that the Lilienthal Board knew that this idealistic scheme was bound to fail, but that they proposed it as a means of enlisting public opinion behind the preservation of the American atomic monopoly.
I do not believe that for a moment. The Chairman of the Board, Mr. Lilienthal, had had years of successful, thrilling experience in blazing a new trail in human relationships. He had seen a new idea, the Tennessee Valley Authority, very largely remake the lives of several millions of people, improving their living standards very sharply, conserving their soils, preventing age-old floods and developing private business of every kind, along with a cooperative community spirit on a new and unheard of scale.
It was very natural that Lilienthal should expand the basic ideas involved in TVA to the larger and more complex problem of atomic energy control. Knowing how TVA, with its broad yet limited objective had expanded the lives of the people it served, without decreasing anybody’s liberty, he was bound to vision a great release of atomic energy for peaceful purposes to the many peoples of the world. This aspect of the project would appeal strongly to the two business men on the Board, though they may have shrunk at first from the expansion of governmental authority to the world scene. That the plan would appeal to Dr. Oppenheimer, as the representative of the deeply uneasy company of scientists who had created the A-bomb, goes without saying. His scientific mind would want something thorough and effective.
The result was that the Board gave their minds the free scope which the vast problem required and they produced a plan which, if accepted by the U.S.S.R. would: (a) free the world from the greatest threat which has ever hung over it; and (b) also launch it upon a course of world cooperation which would quite probably enable the United Nations to evolve fairly rapidly into an effective world government.
The plan was bold and imaginative. It was also technically practical and workable. These were great attributes. On the other hand, it left out of account the chief human and political factors which would cause its failure.
This was not originally the fault of the consultants. It was Secretary Byrnes’ duty to search out for the Board of Consultants the best authority on Russian history since 1917 that he could find, and add an economist who had specialized on Russia, and to supplement them by some American engineer who had worked long in the Soviet Union. An army officer with Colonel Faymonville’s deep understanding of Russian psychology would also have been very useful.
Men like these, joined with the other members of the Board, might have produced a plan of control that the Russians would accept. I only say that they might have. As the great endeavor did develop, the Consultants consulted other men like themselves. They spent “days consulting with numerous scientists, industrial experts, and geologists, authorities in the technical fields concerned with atomic energy.” This was their obvious duty, but the report contains no suggestion that they talked with any social scientists or any independent experts on Russia, when it was urgently imperative that they should obtain the assistance of “numerous” men in these fields.
Russian Objections. Had this indispensable contribution to any study of the problem been made, the following considerations would have been demonstrated:
1. That the Soviet Government was altogether unlikely to admit foreigners to free residence and travel in the Soviet Union for the purpose of controlling an activity believed to be vital to Russian defense.
Against such permission would be arrayed: (a) the centuries old Russian suspicion of foreigners, so deep as to be almost second nature; (b) the total conviction of Russia’s rulers that they had won the war against Hitler because they had destroyed his fifth column and kept him in ignorance about Russian defense capacities and preparations. The Consultants thought of the ADA men as really loyal and responsible to it, putting national allegiance behind them. The Russians would be certain to regard them as camouflaged spies of the United States and British Governments, as indeed a percentage of them were almost certain to be, if only a minority.
2. The Red regime would run the following large risks in allowing foreigners to circulate freely over its territories:
(a) that the police state side of its activities, including data on its forced labor system, would become widely known in detail abroad; (b) that information about the much higher standard of living in the Western world, already dangerously prevalent because of the travels of Russian troops, would become still more widespread in the Soviet Union; (c) that knowledge of the civil liberties and personal freedoms enjoyed in the West would become disseminated, adding to the discontent germinated by (b); and (d) that the terrible state of Russia’s weakness due to the devastations and unproductive expenditures of the war would become vividly known to her rivals, precipitating stronger diplomatic pressure upon her, perhaps even military pressure.
The Consultants did not “contemplate any systematic or large-scale inspection activities for the Authority except those directed to the control of raw materials,” and they hoped to limit these, “but at all times the right of access to any region for re-survey in the light of new knowledge would be necessary.” Coupled with the right to “inspect and visit at frequent intervals” the safe atomic plants permitted to the Soviet Union, these activities were sure to appear to Russia’s rulers as equivalent to fairly widespread knowledge of Soviet activities and contact with Soviet citizens.
3. The international ownership and management of the basic atomic energy plants would probably be even more objectionable to Soviet state-socialist industry executives than to American capitalists.
The latter would dread and resent the competition of a new source of power, if they could not control it, but the Soviet state-planners and executives would tend to regard an important segment of power production beyond their control as something unnatural and intolerable.
4. Soviet planners would almost certainly attach far more importance to atomic energy as a source of power.
The United States is rich in other kinds of developed power: coal, water and oil. In 1945 the Soviet Union had these same sources, but far less developed. It has also vast areas of desert, tundra and frozen lands in which the older kinds of power are not present, or are very inadequate. In Russia the transportation of coal or of electric power is an immense problem, for its area is nearly three times as large as the United States. In some great regions it is almost prohibitive in effort and cost. Soviet executives would therefore grasp at atomic energy as a kind of power which might have great importance in their huge out-of-the-way places. In the North the heat generated would also be an attractive consideration.
They might greatly overestimate the practicality of atomic power, but they were almost certain to dream about it and to build great plans upon it which would undoubtedly be circumscribed by the restraints of the ADA. The Lilienthal report discussed the principle of strategic balance no less than six times, enough to raise grave doubts in Soviet minds as to the extent that atomic energy development would be permitted in the U.S.S.R. The U.S.A. might well choose not to develop atomic power, in which case the U.S.S.R. could make little headway with it. Would Russia be allowed as many primary plants as the United States? Or would the ADA divide the world into several areas, say the U.S.A., Britain, West Europe, East Asia, India, Latin America and the U.S.S.R.—all restricted to the same number of primary atomic plants?
The latter conclusion is the more probable. The Atomic Scientists Committee of Great Britain, which approved the Acheson-Lilienthal Report, explained that new large-scale plants should be “distributed throughout the world” so that seizure of plants by any nation would leave the other nations in possession of “an overwhelming superiority in the production of fissionable material.”2
The application of this principle could hardly have any other effect than to limit permanently the development of atomic power in the area of the globe where it could receive its widest application. In any event the allocation would certainly be made by a commission controlled by the United States, already far in the lead in atomic energy production. Wouldn’t it be better for Soviet tycoons to bide their time, push hard on the production of atomic energy and thus develop it for power purposes without let or hindrance?
5. Did Russian national pride and sovereignty permit acceptance of the Lilienthal plan?
In the immediate background there was the hasty use of the atomic bomb against Japan, the many American statements indicating or flatly saying that the Russians could not be trusted with the atomic secrets, the long wait before any start was made toward international control, and the making of that move subject to a careful gradation of stages which would make it impossible for the Russians to attack their neighbors by preventing them from ever getting their hands on any atomic bombs.
The preliminary statement by the Acheson Committee which accompanied the Lilienthal report was careful to make it clear that atomic information would be turned over to the ADA only in cautiously controlled stages. Four were suggested, with the observation that various others might be developed by further study. The transfer of authority over physical things, plants for example, would also proceed slowly by stages and meanwhile the United States would continue the manufacture of bombs.
Writing in The Nation for April 13, 1946, I. F. Stone correctly foresaw that “It is on this question of timing of the disclosures that the whole fight may be lost, and it is on this question that attention must be focused.” He noted that the report asked for “an immediate quid for a distant quo” and that the report itself put into words the very thought that would alarm foreign opinion, when it said: “should there be a breakdown in the plan at any time during the transition, we shall be in a favorable position with regard to atomic weapons.”
Neither the events beginning with Potsdam nor the Acheson-Lilienthal prospectus suggested that the Russians would be entrusted very rapidly with atomic energy. If there had been mutual confidence and good will among the Allies the Soviets might have hoped to get along faster by going the ADA way than by going ahead on their own. Already it was plain, however, that this was not the case and that Russia would receive atomic facilities only when the increasingly hostile governments of the West decided that another stage might be ventured.
These were the principal considerations which would determine the Kremlin’s response to the American initiative as Moscow pondered its reply from March 17, 1946, when our plan was published, until the UN Atomic Energy Commission met in mid-June.
From the American standpoint the Acheson-Lilienthal groups had produced a perfect plan for preserving the American monopoly until it could gradually be turned over to a world authority, which would continue to be under the guidance and control of the United States and Britain, through the votes of their many friends and satellites in any United Nations body. To us it was an act of unparalleled generosity. We would actually share our greatest discovery with the Russians, helping them to set up atomic energy plants and asking in return only that they join us in making it impossible for any nation to suddenly attack another with A-bombs. This was all that we asked the Russians to give up, we believed.
From their viewpoint the Russian leaders were likely to conclude that acceptance of the plan would, or might, imperil their military security, endanger their entire political and social system, and limit its ability to push the industrialization of the Soviet Union by the untrammelled development of atomic power, without offering any advantages other than a lessening of American and British post-Hiroshima tensions.
Whether a different plan would have met greater success may well be argued. Perhaps no plan could have succeeded. What we have to deal with is the plan offered and, as I see it, we must conclude that it was a brave pioneering effort toward world government which would not advance our objective of achieving security against atomic attack by the Russians. Having survived the mightiest military assault ever delivered on this planet, and having achieved an amount of world power they would have thought incredible ten years before, the Soviet chiefs were almost certain to regard our terms as too high.
The Soviet Proposal
The Soviet reply to the Acheson-Lilienthal plan was delivered by Andrei Gromyko at the second meeting of the United Nations Atomic Energy Commission meeting at Hunter College, New York, on June 19, 1946.3
The Russian proposal hailed the epochal nature of the conquest of the atom, mentioned its first use as a weapon and held it to be “the general opinion that humanity stands at the threshold of a wide application of atomic energy for peaceful purposes; for the good of the peoples as a means of raising their standards of welfare and their living conditions; for the good of and with a view to the development of science and culture.” There could be no effective system of peace unless the discovery were placed in the service of humanity and “applied to peaceful purposes only.”
The Soviet Delegation therefore proposed a draft treaty forbidding the production and use of any atomic energy weapon and calling for the destruction within three months of all stocks of atomic bombs. The high contracting parties would enforce the treaty within six months by passing “legislation providing severe punishment for the violation of the terms of this agreement.”
There was no historical warrant for believing that such a treaty would be effective. The First Hague Conference in 1899 had secured agreements that undefended towns would not be attacked or gas used as a weapon. Yet virtually all towns were soon objects of attack and gas was used by Germany in World War I. It was not used in World War II because the diminishing control of the air made its use too risky for the Nazis after the period of their blitz victories was over. If a new war came the chief deterrent to the use of atomic weapons would be the fear of retaliation, a fear, however, which would operate much more strongly upon the Russians than upon us, because of our greatly superior ability to deliver A-bombs over their cities.
This fear might be a strong deterrent in the future, but it had no present value to the Americans, since they had decided in the beginning that the Russians could not be trusted with atomic bombs. To them such a treaty was worse than useless. It would be positively dangerous in promoting unjustified relaxation. When pressed hard to explain how the treaty could be effective, Gromyko could only reply, on July 31, that the entire structure of the United Nations depended on the desire and determination of the member states to cooperate for peace and international security and that no system of control would be any good unless based on international trust and confidence.
This might be true, but we did not intend to place any confidence in what the Russians would do with atomic energy. We wanted a foolproof system which would make it forever impossible for them to have any atomic bombs, unless they gave the whole world vibrant warning of their belligerent intentions by seizing ADA atomic plants. We certainly had no intention to destroy our own atomic bombs without being certain that the Russians were not making any, and if in possession of fissionable materials they might quickly make them at any time.
Such assurance was not ruled out in the Russian proposal. Indeed it proposed to charge the second of two proposed committees with “The elaboration and creation of methods to forbid the production of weapons based upon the use of atomic energy and to prevent the use of all other similar weapons of mass destruction.” The Soviet plan also called for “Measures, systems and organizations of control in the use of atomic energy to insure the observance of the conditions above-mentioned in the international agreement for the outlawing of atomic weapons,” and “the elaboration of a system of sanctions for application against the unlawful use of atomic energy.”
If words have any meaning these Soviet proposals involved the creation of some kind of international control organization, yet the Russians long resisted international inspection as an infringement of their sovereignty.
The Baruch Plan
The American position was stated by Bernard M. Baruch, our Representative on the UN Atomic Energy Commission, on June 14, in a moving address which solidified a large majority of the American public behind a stiffened version of the Lilienthal report.
Mr. Baruch phrased the alternatives sharply: “a choice between the quick and the dead” and “World Peace or World Destruction.” To avoid the latter fate “we must provide immediate, swift and sure punishment of those who violate the agreements that are reached by the nations. Penalization is essential if peace is to be more than a feverish interlude between wars.”
The offenses for which a nation should be punished, and the necessity of making sure that punishment would be certain, were made explicit as follows:
“Now as to violations: in the agreements, penalties of as serious a nature as the nations may wish and as immediate and certain in their execution as possible, should be fixed for:
“1. Illegal possession or use of an atomic bomb;
“2. Illegal possession, or separation, of atomic material suitable for use in an atomic bomb;
“3. Seizure of any plant or other property belonging to or licensed by the Authority;
“4. Wilful interference with the activities of the Authority;
“5. Creation or operation of dangerous projects in a manner contrary to, or in the absence of, a license granted by the international control body.
“It would be a deception, to which I am unwilling to lend myself, were I not to say to you and to our peoples, that the matter of punishment lies at the very heart of our present security system. It might as well be admitted, here and now, that the subject goes straight to the veto power contained in the Charter of the United Nations so far as it relates to the field of atomic energy. The Charter permits penalization only by concurrence of each of the five great powers—the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, China, France and the United States.
“I want to make very plain that I am concerned here with the veto power only as it affects this particular problem. There must be no veto to protect those who violate their solemn agreements not to develop or use atomic energy for destructive purposes.
“The bomb does not wait upon debate. To delay may be to die. The time between violation and preventive action or punishment would be all too short for extended discussion as to the course to be followed.”
The illegal seizure of an Atomic Development Authority plant might permit “a malevolent nation” to produce a bomb in twelve months, or even less, showing “how imperative speed is in detecting and penalizing violations.”
The belief that a great government could be punished and penalized rested, of course, on the atomic bomb itself. Without it everyone would agree that the imposition of sanctions on one of the two greatest powers in the world would mean a world war, though perhaps one in behalf of law and order.
With the bomb it seemed feasible for a vetoless UN Security Council to bring the offender to time by dropping atomic bombs on the seized atomic plants or upon his cities, without any great and painful military effort. As time elapsed this would gradually be recognized as an illusion, but in the afterglow of Hiroshima it seemed that an effective sanction was at hand.
That the end of our accumulation of bombs was to be the last step in a long chain of prior developments was explained in these terms:
“When an adequate system for control of atomic energy, including the renunciation of the bomb as a weapon, has been agreed upon and put into effective operation and condign punishments set up for violations of the rules of control which are to be stigmatized as international crimes, we propose that:
“1. Manufacture of atomic bombs shall stop;
“2. Existing bombs shall be disposed of pursuant to the terms of the treaty, and
“3. the Authority shall be in possession of full information as to the know-how for the production of atomic knowledge.”
A later paragraph seemed to say what could hardly have been meant, that our safety would have to be guaranteed against all weapons of mass destruction, and against war itself, before we would destroy our A-bombs. It read: “But before a country is ready to relinquish any winning weapons, it must have more than words to reassure it. It must have a guarantee of safety, not only against the offenders in the atomic area, but against the illegal users of other weapons—bacteriological, biological, gas—perhaps—and why not? against war itself.”
The Veto Issue. As a deep and wholly sincere patriot Mr. Baruch meant to secure total protection for his country from atomic attack by the Russians. Nothing was to be left to chance or to the future. The United States would continue making bombs until the Atomic Development Authority was in complete control of the world, atomically speaking. Then if “a malevolent nation” seized one of its plants punishment must be swift and certain, without any delay due to the Soviet Union’s veto power in the Security Council.
Baruch’s veto on the veto was wholly logical. If the Russians seized their ADA plant they must not be able to come into the Security Council and prevent quick sanctions against them. Nothing could be more obvious.
Nevertheless, the frontal attack on the veto attempted more than could be achieved. The Russians were still sore and smarting from their defeats in the Security Council during the first half of the year, especially from the spanking they had received in the Iran case. The certainty that the West controlled heavy majorities in the UN made the veto more precious than ever to them as a defensive weapon. To attack it was to make failure sure.
Having advance knowledge of the veto prohibition, Alfred Friendly suggested in the Washington Post, on June 9, 1946, that it would be an “unparalleled tragedy” if the negotiations failed on this issue. This opinion was supported by Vera M. Dean, Research Director of the Foreign Policy Association, who wrote that “it was tactically unfortunate that the United States, irked by Russia’s frequent invocation of the veto in the Security Council, raised that issue in the Atomic Energy Commission,” since this could readily be interpreted in Moscow “as a sinister backdoor move to deprive Russia of the veto which, along with the United States, it had insisted on including in the United Nations Charter.”4
The issue was, moreover, one which would not be important in the eventuality. If the Russians seized the facilities of the ADA in the Soviet Union the West would be so positive that aggression was intended that no formal veto by the Russians would stand in the way of retaliatory action. The same point would be reached also, though more gradually, in the case of “wilful interference with the activities of the authority.” If the West were really alarmed by Russian acts, Russia’s veto would not prevent counter action.
Nor would the absence of the veto right prevent the U.S.S.R. from resisting any sanctions taken against her by a majority vote of the Security Council. The veto power is inherent in any world power as great as the U.S.S.R. or the U.S.A. Both governments wield such tremendous power, and are so keenly alive to the fact, that neither would permit itself to be punished militarily by vote of any council or commission. If the veto were “abolished” by a vote of such a body it would still be there. In fact the will to resist the will of the other, and mainly lesser, powers would be stronger than before. As Samuel Grafton observed, “Nothing has made the veto firmer and harder or has insured its life more than the effort to abolish it.”
Actually, he continued, the veto is not the issue. It “became an issue when Russia and the West failed to agree; but our chief problem remains this failure to agree and not the absence of a legal gadget which could stop the mouths of one party to the disagreement.”5
Mutual Trust Required. Aside from the impossibility of abolishing the Russian veto, or of applying sanctions to the U.S.S.R. without precipitating a third world war, reflection upon the probable course of developments suggests that there would have been danger of constant trouble of a grave character in the operation of the American plan. The instinct of the West would be to keep the number of primary plants in the U.S.S.R. low, for military reasons. We tended strongly also to minimize the use of atomic energy for power, not only because of our superior power resources but also because of a strong feeling that the military danger was so great that the use of atomic energy for power might be foregone altogether. If therefore the Russians insisted on another power plant and were voted down by a majority in the Atomic Energy Commission, as they almost certainly would be, a crisis would arise and if the Russians took drastic action or denounced the atomic charter war could easily result. The opportunities for friction between the AEC and the U.S.S.R. would be continuous and explosive.
Trying to think through the operation of ADA in Russia reveals the dilemma upon which we were impaled. If the Russians would only put their whole confidence in us and give the ADA free scope, trusting us not to turn it against them as a great atomic alliance and believing that we would help them develop atomic power rapidly and generously, real peace would result.
Our purposes were not aggressive. We sought only safety for ourselves. If they would only submit loyally to ADA all would be well, with them and us too. A grand cooperative project would advance us all rapidly toward world government and permanent peace.
Conversely, too, if we trusted the Russians we could accept their proposed treaty outlawing atomic bombs and let it go at that. Knowing that they meant us no harm we could go about our business and sleep soundly at night. But since our distrust of the Russians was very great we had to have guarantees, absolute guarantees, made iron bound and fool proof far into the future. To gain our confidence at all they had to give up the veto to begin with, as an advance payment signifying that they would never make us any trouble.
On their part the Russians, feeling that our atomic bombs were a threat to them, demanded that they be reassured by the destruction of the bombs. Then perhaps they would be reassured enough to consider an inspection system. The trouble was not in the Baruch plan; it was in the world. Nations which could not come together in sympathy and understanding could not be saved by legalistic formulas.6
Stages. The matter of stages illustrated further the impossibility of agreement on the Baruch plan. Since we did not trust the Russians we would proceed with the greatest caution by stages. The first stage would be a worldwide search by ADA prospectors to locate and catalog all of the known sources of uranium and thorium. ADA officials would necessarily be chosen from various nations, but would be mainly Western since the West had the great bulk of the atomic “know how.” They alone had the “proven competence” required. Accordingly, the West would acquire a great deal of military information about the U.S.S.R. which would not be compensated by corresponding Russian gains. In the Russian view their military security would be gravely, perhaps fatally weakened by the minute examination of their realm which would be involved at the very start of the plan.
The last stage in the proposed sequence would be the stoppage of American bomb manufacture, the destruction of our bombs and the turning over of the secrets of their manufacture to the AEC, upon which Russia would be represented. The day on which this supreme discretion would be exercised could not be fixed in the atomic charter. It was left, in the majority report of the AEC in September, to a two-thirds vote of that body. The real gains of the plan to Russia might accordingly be postponed repeatedly and indefinitely, as the West waited for sure proof that the Russians were non-aggressive, cooperative and willing to play the game according to the rules as the West interpreted them.
Was Acceptance Expected? The extreme improbability that the Russians would ever put themselves in this position has led the British scientist Blackett to suggest that some of the American support of the Baruch plan may have been given by those who knew it would fail and that no control would result.7
Doubtless important elements did hope that this would be the outcome. After Gromyko had made his proposals, on June 19, the conservative columnist David Lawrence wrote from Washington that there was “quite a sigh of relief here” among those who had never wanted to give up the secret.
They had feared that the Russians might accept the Baruch plan.8 However, this feeling of relief was certainly not shared by Baruch and the able men of affairs who were his principal advisers.9
They had been slow to accept the Lilienthal plan as the basis of their plan of action, but long and close study of it had convinced them that it was a great plan, one which would really make the United States, and everybody else, safe from a sudden atomic attack. Careful thought convinced them also that it was the only plan which could achieve this great objective. Deeply steeped in American traditions and in the success of American methods, they came to believe that the plan was not only good but practical.
The Lilienthal group had had the same experience. They had been driven by degrees to the plan they proposed. In short, everybody who studied the great problem was forced to come to the same conclusion, that only the heroic step ahead which the Consultants proposed would regain for us the security we had lost at Hiroshima.
Having gone through this stimulating educational experience themselves, and knowing that others had, the Baruch group came to hope and believe that when the Russians went through the same process they would arrive at the same conclusion. After the first round of formal meetings had indicated deadlock the negotiations were accordingly turned into the Scientific Committee, which suited the Russians since one of the two committees they had asked for in their plan was a committee for the exchange of scientific information, at all levels.
This committee had many meetings. The scientists got on well together, so well that the Russians were occasionally restrained from getting too chummy by their political overseers. The discussions all pointed toward the feasibility of international control technically, and the Technical Committee so reported, without dissent.
The difficulty was that the political gulf still remained.
The Carnegie Plan
At this point it is pertinent to examine another American plan for the international control of atomic energy, the draft convention proposed by the Legal Subcommittee of the Committee on Atomic Energy of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.10
The Carnegie report was a complete detailed draft of a treaty. It accepted the report of the Carnegie Subcommittee on Inspection of Raw Materials that a control system could be based on international inspection and built the treaty upon a basis of mutual cooperation between an International Atomic Energy Commission and national commissions in each signatory state. The authority of the IAEC to regulate and control all atomic energy activity was spelled out in great detail. It had full inspection powers, and the power to allocate raw materials among the member states on the basis of need for peaceful purposes. The Commission was to be composed of representatives of the five great powers and of four others. Its decisions were to be by majority vote.
These powers of the AEC were balanced by the full authority of the national commissions to carry on atomic activities in their various domains. The national commission alone had this power. It was bound in many specified ways to enforce the authority of the AEC, which in turn ordinarily worked through it. Each had its field, but working unity was the goal. All military activity was forbidden, unless by authority of the Security Council.
The veto power of the great powers was accepted. In case of violation, reported or suspected, the Commission was bound to invite the suspected state to supply explanations and to join in investigation on the spot. Meanwhile all signatory states would suspend every kind of atomic relations with the state being investigated, including transit and transportation. The Commission’s report to the Security Council, which would be simultaneously published, could include recommendations for action. Pending such action all signatories were bound, according to the provisions of Article 51 of the Charter of the United Nations, “to retaliate immediately and with all the means at their disposal against any State” which used atomic weapons without a specific authorization of the Security Council.
The Carnegie draft might have been rejected by Russia, because it was based on international inspection and because it provided for essentially the same stages as the American plan did. On the other hand, the paramount authority of the Security Council was accepted, and there was no attack on the idea of national sovereignty. The inspectors and officials of the AEC were forbidden to give orders to any local officials. A national assessor would accompany them for that purpose.
The draft did not guarantee complete security to any signatory. It did not attempt to put it beyond the ability of a great power to violate the treaty. No state was assumed to be malevolent, to be controlled but never trusted. On the contrary, by assuming throughout a willing partnership between the national commissions and the AEC the draft laid a basis for cooperative relationships and for rivalry in living up to obligations. It was erected upon the only foundation which could carry the structure of an undertaking so great, the assumption that the member States would act in good faith to regulate atomic energy for the common good.
Being much more flexible than the official American plan, it left provision for the possible legal use of atomic weapons, by authority of the Security Council and in retaliation for atomic attack, and created an assumption that power development could proceed rapidly in the countries which needed it most, subject to continuous regulation and proof of peaceful use. Undoubtedly the principle of strategic balance would have led the States and the AEC to see that development was not excessive in any one state.
To those who could not see how you could abrogate national sovereignty in one vital field, as under the Lilienthal-Baruch plan, without going the whole way into giving a world state enough powers to prevent war itself, the Carnegie draft seemed dreadfully pedestrian, quaintly like the League of Nations. Certainly, too, it did not leap ahead dramatically. Yet, if accepted, it would have established day-to-day international cooperation in a crucial field. The AEC would have been controlled by the West. The veto would have continued to protect the U.S.S.R. against legal sanctions. The large but not total amount of inspection provided for would have given a corresponding assurance against any surprise atomic aggression, and if it occurred instant world-wide retaliation would have been both legal and arranged for in advance—in itself a strong deterrent against aggression.
The Carnegie draft did not attempt to restore to North America that nostalgic degree of safety which we had when fleets of American planes could burn an entire Japanese city in a night or demolish a German city with TNT between dawn and dusk, without any fear of retaliation, but it offered a basis for the world control of the atomic menace which might have led to a treaty.
At least there was a fair chance that the conciliatory, impartial spirit of the draft might have led to hard negotiation over the definite, detailed provisions concerning inspection and stages, the two key issues posed in the draft.
To avoid any appearance of countering official policy the Carnegie plan was published too late to have any effect on the course of events. When it was issued, on June 17, 1946, the Baruch plan had already received the allegiance of American public opinion. Mr. Baruch’s great personal prestige, coupled with the pioneering nature of the proposals, had convinced a great majority that here was a generous offer which the Russians ought to accept. A heavy preponderance of our editors and commentators in press and radio agreed that it was a constructive, forward-looking plan and all public opinion polls showed a large majority in agreement with them. To a somewhat lesser extent this was also true throughout the West, and continues to be true. In the ideological conflict which had already begun the Baruch plan was a marked triumph for the West.
Impasse
The Internationalists Quiescent. The diffidence of the Carnegie Endowment in advancing its plan until too late to have influence symbolized the failure of the great body of long term American internationalists to affect the atomic energy negotiations, or the debacle in Russo-American relations after the war. Bemused by the vision of swift passage over into the promised land which was contained in the Acheson-Lilienthal report, our internationalists failed to hold up firmly and early the cautionary signals that their decades of hard experience would have suggested. They waited until the demand for the abolition of the veto polarized all the extremists on both sides. Even then there was no pronounced protest, or organized effort in behalf of moderation. The deaths of Roosevelt and Willkie doubtless demoralized to some extent the large body of moderate internationalists who should have influenced the post-war developments. The violence of the Russian press also helped to silence them, and the violence of our own press and radio largely completed the process.
Nationalist Opinion Vocal. The only pronounced opposition to either the Lilienthal report or the Baruch plan came from the isolationists and nationalists. The Hearst press greeted the Baruch proposal as “An Abject Abandonment of U.S. Sovereignty.” Russia might “agree” to abstain from abuse of her power, but “We know too well the utter unreliability of Russian promises and agreements to ever rely upon any of them. Soviet Russia never honors any agreement except in its breach.”11 But there was little dissent about the generosity of the American plan. Senator Brien McMahon, Chairman of the Senate Atomic Energy Committee, speaking at the Democratic National Convention in 1948, described the Baruch plan as just, generous and “unique in the history of international relations. Never before had a great nation voluntarily offered to give up a winning weapon which it alone possessed, for the sole purpose of promoting the cause of peace and international understanding.” This offer was “the most generous in the history of nations.” It had become “a beacon to all nations except one.”12
Making some allowance for campaign oratory this continued to be the American view of the impasse over atomic energy control. Russia’s opposition to the plan made it automatically popular with many people. An editorial in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, June 1947, noted that “many of our conservatives . . . applaud the Baruch plan only because they noticed that the Soviet Union is violently opposed to it. Otherwise, how could one explain the fact that many a Senator has praised Baruch as a patriot, while denouncing Lilienthal as an internationalist.” The editor thought it strange that men should condemn the international control as a sacrifice of our sovereignty and then praise it when “coupled with a second sacrifice of sovereignty—renunciation of the veto.”
Deadlock on the Veto Question. It was the expectation that Russia would refuse to give up the veto power and reject inspection of its industrial activities which led the London correspondent of the New York Herald Tribune to report, June 17, that the belief that Russia would negate the plan “amounts almost to a conviction in official circles here.” By June 20 Lippmann had apparently come to the same conclusion, for he attacked the Baruch veto proposal in a strongly worded article. The Baruch plan itself was founded on a powerful American veto, the right to reject any atomic agreement which did not satisfy us, a rejection which would kill any proposed treaty.
On the other hand, Lippmann continued, the Russians could not later veto the control provisions of any treaty which they had once accepted. That is, the day-to-day activities of the ADA spelled out clearly and with precision in the treaty could not be vetoed. As for the other fear revealed by Baruch’s veto of the veto, the fear that the Russians would secretly break the treaty by making atomic weapons, that was a contingency which no treaty could solve. The Constitution of the United States was silent on the great issue of what to do if a state seceded or nullified federal law. The United Nations Charter was also mute on the same crucial issue. In both cases the reason was the same; the only remedy left would be war and no veto could prevent its application. It was therefore not true to say that the Constitution or the Charter protected “those who violate their solemn agreements.” Nor could any atomic treaty prevent the signatories from violating its provisions.
The veto proposal, Lippmann concluded, was based upon misconceptions of what a treaty could do, both negatively and positively. The idea was dangerous because it would give a majority of other nations the right to vote the United States into war in the future, even without our consent. He did not believe that the Senate could bind any future Congress to go to war. The problem of how or whether to coerce a great power could not be solved in advance.13
This view was contested by the New York Times, on June 21, in comparing the Russian and American plans. The Times thought that any treaty must guarantee the world against an atomic ambush. The international control agency must have “authority beyond any veto power.” The Herald Tribune on the same day thought that the Russian plan had chilled the prospects for agreement but had kept the avenues for negotiation open. Lippmann believed it to be more favorable to the United States militarily than our own plan, since we would be left with the atomic know-how and the means for making atomic bombs quickly for a long time. Merely getting rid of our present supply of atomic bombs would not prevent dangerous national rivalry in developing atomic energy, but neither would it abolish our long head start in the field.
A Legalistic Debate. The dismal outlook for any agreement between the Soviet Union and the West was revealed by two informed comments following the presentation of the American and Russian plans.14 Anne O’Hare McCormick observed that the quarrels in the Security Council had focused attention on the disagreements among UN members. The dramatization of disputes might be said to have “perpetuated the atmosphere and psychology of war” to such an extent that “the thinking of governments has literally gone stale.” She hoped that the Baruch proposals might turn the minds of peoples and governments from the negative to the positive approach to security.
Four days later, on June 23, in a well balanced, impartial article James Reston revealed his conviction that this hope would not materialize. The debate on atomic energy was like all the others. It was “a legalistic debate centering on the specific and the technical” which evaded the central issue that the big states did not trust each other and were making “very little progress in removing the source of their distrust.” It was generally admitted on both sides “that with good faith either plan could be made to work.” Ably summarizing the fears and unilateral actions of both sides he noted that the press on each side daily fomented these fears and attacked the acts of the other side in the United Nations, “where both think they are acting for defensive reasons and fear that the other side is acting with aggressive purpose.”
Bikini
The atomic deliberations in New York were punctuated on July 1 by the test explosion of an atomic bomb at Bikini lagoon in the South Pacific. The target was a large fleet of 98 warships, containing samples of almost every kind of fighting ship, including some German and Japanese vessels. It was a large operation, involving 40,000 men. Its purpose seemed to be to demonstrate that the atomic bomb had not made navies obsolete.15
Two bombs were exploded. The bomb dropped from the air fell wide of the central ship target, but nevertheless sank five ships and badly damaged fourteen others. It was the underwater explosion, on July 24, which provided the most disturbing evidence, since the ships were covered with such a deadly coating of radioactive material that nothing less than the scraping off of all paint and rust and the replacement of all wooden decks could make the ships habitable, if indeed this would serve.
The peril to mankind of loosing so much radioactivity in the air, water and on the land was sharply dramatized, but there was no marked effect on the atomic negotiations. Pravda asserted that the tests proved that the United States was not aiming at the restriction of atomic weapons but at their perfection. Intent to influence the negotiations was charged.16
The Struggle Over Domestic Control
At the end of July a long and closely fought struggle over the domestic control of atomic energy came to a close with the enactment of the McMahon bill. The outcome of this conflict had great implications for the future of the United States and important ones internationally.
The May-Johnson Bill. When President Truman urged the enactment of a law for the domestic control of the atom, on October 3, 1945, the Army was ready with a bill which had been drawn up by a civilian committee after several months’ work including conferences with leading atomic scientists. It was promptly introduced in the House by Chairman Andrew D. May of the Military Affairs Committee and Senator Edwin C. Johnson was ready to sponsor it in the Senate. However, Senator Vandenberg objected strenuously to its reference to the Senate Military Affairs Committee, asserting that atomic energy was not a military question and that the Foreign Relations Committee had just as much right to jurisdiction. Since he was supported by Senator Connally and several other Democrats the bill was tabled and a deadlock developed over the question of jurisdiction.
It was broken by the happy thought of a new junior Senator from Connecticut, Brien McMahon, Democrat. He proposed that a special Atomic Energy Committee be appointed and on October 23 the Senate agreed. After a few days’ hesitation the President pro-tem of the Senate, Senator McKellar, followed the usual custom and appointed McMahon chairman of the committee of eleven. The other members were the leaders of the two important committees which had stymied each other. This totally unexpected and unpredictable development had very great consequences.
In the meantime, Representative May was driving the bill submitted by the armed forces through his committee with his usual efficiency. On October 9 he held a five hour hearing and declared the hearings closed. Four days later he refused to reopen them, but on the 18th he did grant one more session.17 The McMahon Committee held hearings during the first half of December and in January McMahon presented a bill calling for strong civilian control of atomic energy. Faced with apparently solid support of the Administration for the May-Johnson bill the atomic scientists had formed a federation, on November 9, bringing together 90 per cent of the 1300 scientists who had worked on the war time atomic project. This formidable body pulled strongly for civilian control, while General Groves advocated a board of part time commissioners, with retired army men on it but no scientists. They were not “disinterested.” Secretary of the Navy Forrestal closed his testimony to the committee with the statement that “we must not limit the military until the world has reached the pattern we all hope for.”18
On January 31, Secretary of Commerce Henry Wallace testified that the peculiar wording of the May-Johnson Bill “would set up the most undemocratic, dictatorial arrangements that have ever, to my knowledge, been proposed to Congress in a major legislative measure.”
Truman For Civilian Control. Two days later McMahon read to the reporters a letter from President Truman, which McMahon had drafted himself hoping to express the views of the most influential members of his committee. “The government must be the exclusive owner and producer of fissionable material.”
Devices for using it should be made “fully available for private development through compulsory, non-exclusive licensing of private patents.” There must be “genuine freedom to conduct independent research” and guarantees that controls over the dissemination of information would not stifle it. The atomic control commission should be composed “exclusively of civilians.”19
The Vandenberg Amendment. McMahon had made it difficult for the armed forces to denounce the principles of his bill, but he could not keep his own committee from emasculating it. On March 12, 1945, after the committee had had dinner with General Eisenhower and Admiral Nimitz, it voted to provide for a military liaison committee, composed of army and navy men, which would be appointed by the President. It would have the right to know the full proceedings of the committee and to appeal to the President on any matter concerning national security. The amendment was proposed by Senator Vandenberg and adopted first by a vote of 6 to 1 and later by a poll of 10 to 1 when all members were present. Vandenberg declared that world conditions made it imperative to give the military a major role.20
Chairman McMahon was alone in opposing this development, and he was similarly helpless when Senator Thomas C. Hart, of Connecticut, a former Admiral, proposed an amendment to create an advisory committee of nine to advise the civilian commission.
The Vandenberg amendment appeared to be satisfactory on its face, yet in operation it would have given the military men the controlling voice. If they did not like what the civilian commission was doing they could always go to the President and tell him that the national security was affected or endangered and it would be very difficult for him to deny them. McMahon quickly realized this and though completely isolated in his blue-ribbon committee he declared on March 14:
“Of course the military should be consulted on the military aspects of atomic energy and this is as far as any civilian commission should be required to go.
“The military is noted for its reactionary position in the field of scientific research and development. The most successful weapons of war throughout history have been conceived and developed by civilians and the atomic bomb was no exception.
“It is because I am concerned about the nation’s security, as well as the development for peaceful use of atomic energy, that I want civilians to control this force unhindered by the military.”
Asserting that the Vandenberg amendment would give the military men power to “check every telephone call, every memorandum written and the hiring of personnel,” McMahon declared that he would carry his fight to the floor of the Senate and, if necessary, to the country.21
Strong Public Protest. Then it developed that McMahon was not alone in the nation. His courage rallied support. On March 21, representatives of 59 civilian organizations met in Washington to organize a drive to defeat military control of the atom. The Federation of Atomic Scientists delivered a petition to the McMahon committee with 8,000 important names on it. Many other bulky petitions poured in, along with resolutions voted by organizations in all parts of the country. Some 70,972 letters were received, all but a half dozen backing civilian control. Of these 34,725 were directed against the May-Johnson bill and 24,851 against the Vandenberg amendment.22
Civilian Control Restored. Beneath this avalanche of protest the McMahon Committee thought again. The meeting was held on April 2 and in a new Vandenberg amendment the military liaison committee lost jurisdiction over the “common defense and security.” Its territory shrank to “the military applications of atomic energy.” It would also be appointed by the Secretaries of War and Navy, and would exercise its right of appeal to them, instead of to the President. Senator Vandenberg told the press that he “found in exploring the situation that we all have a common objective in view.”23
Military Control Provided in the House. The principle of civilian control, thus secured and buttressed by public demand, remained firmly in the Senate bill, but Andrew May was still to be reckoned with. He was on the point of reporting the May-Johnson bill to the House, in the wake of the Vandenberg amendment, when the outcry against it deterred him. So he waited until the McMahon bill came into his hands, while rumours spread over Washington that the scientists were a bunch of Communists trying to seize control of the government. General Groves was at May’s elbow, advising him about amendments.24
One amendment placed two military men on the five man atomic commission. Another authorized the Army to continue its atomic work independently, which would mean control of the big atomic plants. The Army was also authorized, with Presidential authority, to keep on making atomic bombs. “We are very definitely giving the Army more control,” declared committee member J. Parnell Thomas, Republican, of New Jersey.25
Senate Victory. After a confused and angry debate in the House the McMahon bill was passed with enough amendments to militarize it thoroughly. Then it went to a conference committee of the two Houses, where McMahon and his assistants patiently conducted an educational seminar for the representatives of the House. Little by little they were won over. Vandenberg did yeoman service for the Senate bill. Every minor point was conceded to the House while the major issues were held back.
Then another unexpected event occurred. The senate War Investigating Committee which had been investigating Andrew May’s war time connections with a Mid-Western munitions combine, announced that it was summoning May to testify. That evening May’s physician announced that he had had a heart attack and he retired to Kentucky and disappeared from public life.
The McMahon bill emerged from conference without any important changes and became law on August 1, 1946. Reflecting our acute preoccupation with the A-bomb it was the greatest grant of power ever made by the Congress at any time. Nevertheless, the commission was so hedged about with restrictions that its work was seriously hampered. For this reason no satisfactory team work with Great Britain and Canada on atomic research could be developed. Nor could the Congress or the American people know what the great atomic empire was doing. Even the McMahon committee could not know how many atomic bombs we had, a fact which was hidden also from nearly all Executive officials. Both military and foreign policy became to a large degree blindfolded. The “atomic jitters” produced the twin illusions that secrecy equals security and that the A-bomb is an absolute weapon.26
Partly for these very reasons it was a fortunate thing for us that the accidents of McMahon’s advent to leadership and May’s sudden exit from it enabled public opinion, led by the atomic scientists, to achieve civilian control of atomic energy. An able commission was eventually confirmed, after a long drawn out fight by Senator McKellar on Chairman Lilienthal, composed of David E. Lilienthal, Robert F. Bacher, Sumner T. Pike, Lewis Strauss and W. W. Waymack.
Thereafter this commission rebuilt the atomic organization and devoted the great bulk of its energy to making A-bombs. The effect upon the Soviet bloc was not reassuring, but the American people and their allies felt that the bombs were not intended for offensive use and that they were not in the hands of military officials who might honestly advise on tense occasions that their preventive use was imperatively demanded. Had this been the case world tension would have been higher than it was in the uneasy years which followed.
Diplomatic Sparring in Paris and the UN
The Paris Peace Conference. On July 28, 1946, the conference to make peace with the satellite states met in Paris. Twenty-one nations were represented, those which had fought the Axis or its satellites.
Battle was at once joined over procedure, whether recommendations to the Council of Foreign Ministers should be made by ordinary or two-thirds majorities. Molotov, feeling that he might be able to control a third of the votes plus one argued for the two-thirds vote and contended long against deciding things by “a game of votes.” Unanimity was the goal. The Russian preference for decisions among the smallest possible number of great powers was so evident that many of the delegates were offended and voted with the Anglo-American side more consistently than they might have. The Soviet charge of bloc formation had the effect of consolidating a hostile bloc.27 On August 9 the conference voted, 15 to 6, for recommendations by majority votes. Byrnes denounced the talk of an Anglo-Saxon bloc as “loose and wicked.” The Herald Tribune, on August 10, doubted the wisdom of this statement in a dispute in which there was much right on both sides.
Eventually the conference debated the draft treaties prepared by the Foreign Ministers and many other details not decided by them. It adopted 53 recommendations by a two-thirds majority and 41 by a simple majority, before it adjourned on October 15. Of these 47 and 24 respectively were accepted by the Council of Foreign Ministers in New York, near the end of its session on December 11, when Molotov ended six weeks of additional opposition and accepted them rapidly.28
The Paris Peace Conference had been something new in the history of international relations. There was very little negotiation in it. Instead there was a long series of public speeches ventilating charges and counter charges. In the end the Russians held their ground on virtually all important points. They succeeded in demonstrating repeatedly the unfairness of making decisions in Eastern Europe by the majority votes of small and distant countries. On the other hand, it was not possible for the democracies to agree that the lesser allies who had actually fought the Axis should have no voice whatever in the fixing of terms of peace for the Axis satellites.
More fundamental was the question whether our strategy had been right in making peace with the satellites first, instead of attacking the central problem of Germany at once. Lippmann questioned this decision sharply on October 15. He contended that Byrnes and his senatorial colleagues had failed because they were attempting the impossible. They had been trying by force of argument to reduce the power and influence of the Soviet Union in territories occupied by the Red Army. In other words they had been trying to talk the Soviets out of their conquests in Eastern Europe, challenging them where they were strongest and where we had least to offer. Then, argument having failed, we had resorted by means of the Paris Conference to appeals to majority votes and public opinion. In this effort we had lost again, since we could arouse Western opinion but could not reach opinion in the Soviet orbit. It was an unequal propaganda contest. At Paris the new Soviet satellites had all been obliged to commit themselves publicly and irrevocably, thus consolidating the Soviet position in East Europe. If the same method were applied to Germany it would end in auction bidding between the East and the West for the favor of the German nationalists. Soviet power in Eastern Europe and in Germany could be reduced only as part of a world settlement.29
We had spent a year in making peace with the satellites in the Russian orbit in the vain hope that such treaties would compel the Red army to retire from Eastern Europe, said Lippmann. If we were ever to resume diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union we would have to begin with a serious discussion of the world distribution of power among the Big Three.30
At the UN Assembly. On October 23 the United Nations Assembly meeting was opened in New York by President Truman. Afterward Molotov ignored diplomatic protocol by walking up to the President to tell him that he had made a great speech. Mr. Truman had said: “The exercise of neither veto rights nor majority rights can make peace.”
In his opening speech Molotov maintained that there was no doubt or hesitation in the Soviet Union that peaceful competition and friendly cooperation between nations were “entirely in keeping with the interests of our country.” He strongly opposed the Churchill doctrine and objected to the Baruch plan as attempting to protect in veiled form the monopolistic position of the United States. He denied that the atomic bomb was a decisive weapon against ground troops. Calling for action on an earlier Soviet proposal to count the troops and air bases of members of the United Nations in the territory of other members, he proposed that the manufacture and use of atomic weapons be banned and a general reduction of armaments initiated.
Molotov’s counter attack was broad. He fixed attention on Spain and Greece. He called attention to British and American troops dispersed in many parts of the world. He appealed from our preoccupation with the atom to a general reduction of arms.
The Western powers countered by amending the troop count proposal to include all troops in home countries. Molotov fought this move, coming out the short end of seven of the eight ballots involved, “but retained good humor and equanimity all the way.”31 Eventually the troop and bases count was dropped over Russia’s objection after she had almost secured an impromptu British acceptance for a count of both troops and weapons—A-bombs!
Atomic Control and Inspection Accepted. In the matter of general disarmament Molotov made greater progress. This was partly because, on November 28, he quoted a recent statement by Stalin that “strict international control of atomic energy is necessary” and followed it up by declaring that “special organs of inspection” should be established, within the framework of the Security Council. He asked for two commissions, one to control the general reduction of arms and the other to police the prohibition of atomic energy use for military purposes.32
This was far from an acceptance of the American plan for the control of atomic energy but it was a clear acceptance of international inspection as a means of implementing “strict international control.”
Sir Hartley Shawcross for Great Britain welcomed the proposal but warned against words, pious resolutions and “a mere sham, a fraud to be used for the purposes of political propaganda or to lull unsuspecting peoples into a false sense of security.” Others suspected that Russia would insist that only Russian “inspectors” operate inside the U.S.S.R. Vishinsky was hammered repeatedly, on the 29th, to determine whether the Security Council could veto inspection.
Some suspicions were lessened slightly, on December 4, when Molotov stated that the U.S.S.R. would consider the adoption of three points as essential first steps toward disarmament. The third was that “it is necessary to establish a reliable system of international control over the reduction of armaments and the prohibition of atomic weapons which will allow for inspection in all countries.” Since the United States’ resolution was closest to that of the U.S.S.R. he would take it as the basis for discussion. He proposed an amendment to establish, within the framework of the Security Council, special organs of inspection. To dispel any misunderstanding about the application of the unanimity rule he stated that in establishing control commissions the Security Council would act by the unanimity rule, laying down the rules under which they would operate. After that the unanimity rule had nothing to do with the work of the control commissions. No permanent member could “veto” the implementation of the control system. Any attempt to prevent an inspection would constitute a violation of the Security Council’s decision.33
This statement did not guarantee that the U.S.S.R. would accept a system of inspection free and untrammelled enough to satisfy the West, but it did establish that the Soviet Union would accept international inspection for the control of armaments and that the veto would not apply to its day to day operation. In case of a serious dispute the veto would still apply in the Security council against any sanctions against the U.S.S.R. Obviously everything would depend upon the willingness of the Soviet Union to make the system work. That, however, would be true of other nations as well.
The American Plan Adopted
On December 5, Baruch urged the American plan for atomic control in the Atomic Energy Commission, warning that “the world is not to be fooled by lip service. The world will resent and reject deception.”34 On the 16th he pressed for a quick vote, a move which was resisted by Canada. General McNaughton felt that the passage of the Assembly resolution made necessary a rewording of the American draft. Other delegates were reported to be disturbed.35 On December 20, the UNAEC voted 10 to 0, Russia and Poland abstaining, to accept the American plan in principle, subject to redrafting.
The Canadian delegation objected especially to going beyond the Assembly resolution to press for the abolition of the veto on sanctions.36 Britain also sought to de-emphasize the elimination of the veto on punishments.37 Baruch, however, demanded that the veto on violations be specifically excluded.
Otherwise the United States would not take part in any atomic control plan and the American people would withdraw support from the United Nations, if there was any possibility that a criminal state would escape the consequences of its acts. Both Britain and France urged that the veto be not mentioned.
The commission seemed to be about evenly divided.38 On the 29th the Herald Tribune thought there was “a queer and disheartening air of unreality” over the controversy, with “the primary target of the American drive—Russia” contributing nothing but eloquent silence, but the Times was hopeful that Russia would take “the logical final step, by which she and other nations will surrender the power to do evil in return for guarantees of lasting peace.”
On the 28th Gromyko countered by asking the Security Council to create the disarmament commission called for by the Assembly, with instructions to report a plan for general disarmament within 90 days. On December 30 the UNAEC adopted the Baruch plan, including the veto on punishments, 10 to 0, Russia and Poland abstaining. In a statement before the vote Gromyko made no criticism of its technical findings and accepted as “indisputable” the necessity for a control system with real powers to control and to insure that nations fulfil their obligations under it. Sanctions, he insisted, must be subject to the unanimity rule in the Council.39
In reviewing the veto issue once more, Lippmann insisted that it was unreal, since there would never be “a violator” of the proposed atomic treaty. No nation would dare to violate it unless it had first assembled what it believed to be a winning coalition of nations. Then the veto would not matter. The problem was not to insure that Russia would never use her veto, but to achieve a world wide settlement which would prevent two rival coalitions between which there could be no mediator.40
Thus ended, for years at least, any serious prospect of achieving control of atomic weapons. The attempt foundered on the rock of the veto, an obstacle which had become terribly real in the view of most Americans, and was a chimera in the opinion of others. Whichever it was it prevented the further exploration of any paths toward armament control, either the bright vision which came out of the Lilienthal Committee or the more prosaic routes proposed by others and opened up in the late 1946 negotiations.
On January 5, 1947, Baruch and all of his principal advisors resigned from the American delegation to UNAEC. On February 18 Gromyko submitted twelve amendments to the American plan. He rejected interference with the veto, but agreed that violations of atomic controls could be treated as “international crimes” and that article 51 of the UN charter applied to them. Inspectors should be “unhindered by national or local authorities,” but the right of inspection should not be unlimited.41
Compromise Not Considered. On January 20, the Council of the British Atomic Scientists Association said it was unfortunate that the veto question should have been raised to such prominence in the early phase of the discussion. It was clear that there could not be two independent bodies responsible for the enforcement of international agreements. Since the ADA could not supersede the Security Council, it had to be subject to the Council in matters of policy. It could not take upon itself the functions of defining and punishing a violation of the agreement.
The British scientists also questioned whether it was essential that the ADA should have full ownership of plants, involving the right to decide whether power plants could be built, or power used. Perhaps only the right to see that dangerous products were consumed in power plants would be sufficient.
It was desirable also that the right of inspection should be “circumscribed as far as possible and should not be used as a means of excessive prying into legitimate industrial or other activities.” Inspection which limited itself to satisfaction that a given mine or plant was not handling large quantities of uranium or thorium, or that it was not a separation plant, should supply a basis for compromise.42
These proposals offered a reasonable and promising basis for a control system, one not absolutely perfect but probably workable, but they got little support in the United States. Scientist Harold C. Urey, of the University of Chicago, was able to see that the government of the U.S.S.R. believed that the proposed ADA “supported overwhelmingly by the western democracies would result in economic and military domination of the Soviet Union,” but Senator Brien McMahon was so convinced of the righteousness of the American plan, by repeated examination and re-examination of it in the early hours of the dawn, that on May 21, 1947, he proposed a world assembly to invite all peace loving nations to adhere to the plan and to declare that any nation which refused by a specified date to accept the plan would be “denominated an aggressor.” He asserted that “for the first time in human history the failure to agree to a sane, effective and righteous control of a weapon of war constitutes in and of itself an act of aggression.”43
If a man as liberal and God-fearing as Senator McMahon could come thus to the brink of a preventive war, the number of more bellicose Americans who had arrived at that point must have been large. Dr. David Bradley has recorded the comment of one of the editors of a well known magazine, who said: “The very possession of atomic energy by a foreign country constitutes, to my mind, an act of aggression—and should be taken care of now.”44
Later Developments
A Russian Control Plan. Perhaps it was a realization of this state of mind in high American places which led the U.S.S.R. to propose on June 11, 1947, something like the outline of a Soviet control plan. An International Control Commission would establish its own rules. Its personnel would be selected on an international basis. It would periodically inspect mines and plants, carry on special investigations when suspicion arose, observe the fulfilment of prescribed rules, request information and explanations and make recommendations both to the governments and to the Security Council.45
The Soviet scheme was detailed enough to have served as a basis for negotiation in a different atmosphere, or perhaps if advanced a year earlier, but in the developing “climate of enmity and suspicion between the United States and the Soviet Union” it was riddled, on March 29, 1948, by a report to the UNAEC on the part of the representatives of Great Britain, Canada, China and France, the British delegate reporting. This long document rejected the Soviet demand for a prior prohibition of atomic weapons and showed in the greatest detail that the Soviet inspection plan would not give the security embodied in the American plan.46
Third Report. The UNAEC therefore presented a Third Report, on May 17, 1948, ending its work and referring its assignment back to the Security Council. The vote was 9 to 2, the Soviet Union and the Ukraine opposing.47
Simultaneous Treaties Conceded. When the General Assembly met in Paris in the autumn of 1948 the United States sought “to obtain an overwhelming condemnation of the Soviet Union as the one power responsible for the deadlock of atomic energy control negotiations, and to have the General Assembly sanction sine die suspension of the UNAEC.”48 The Soviet Union countered this drive with an offer to negotiate a control convention simultaneously with a treaty to outlaw the atomic bomb. Up to this point Russia had always insisted that outlawry must come first. This concession, coupled with a widespread feeling among the small powers that the negotiations must not end even if without result, led to the passage of a resolution asking the AEC to try again.49
The Deadlock Analyzed. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists felt that the Russian concession of two simultaneous treaties should have been matched by an offer on our part to drop the veto question. The Russian idea of a prior treaty to outlaw the bomb had always been trivial and ineffective. On the other hand, the veto question obscured the true spirit of our plan, which was to create a common stake of all nations in the development of atomic energy. This community of interest was to have been the main deterrent to violations and the knowledge that they would not remain secret the main safeguard. The veto issue had changed the spirit of the whole plan, focusing attention on the capacity, or incapacity, of the UN to impose sanctions on the U.S.S.R.50
In other words, the American plan could succeed only if we managed to convince the Russians of the advantages, to them, of a great cooperative undertaking. It was bound to fail if the emphasis was upon the certainty of means for punishing them. This was like asking a man to join a ball game after signing a written contract that he would be soundly thrashed the first time he violated the rules or irritated the umpire.
In his long analysis of the failure of UNAEC, Edward A. Shils, a sociologist of the Universities of Chicago and London, held that the veto issue had opened the breach and kept it open. On their part the Soviets had been dilatory, slow in deciding against management control and slower still in coming to accept inspection. They had also refused constantly to clothe their June 11, 1947, proposals with reassuring details. Throughout the whole period the Russians had been rigid and stiff necked, yet the Americans had done nothing to telescope the period during which other nations would be under control while we still retained bombs. Nor did we make any concessions to the Russians on the prohibitory convention, such as an offer to outlaw the use of A-bombs, but not their production, on the model of the poison gas treaty so often cited by the Russians. The two apparently spectacular concessions made by the Soviets had not been matched by anything comparable on our part. Indeed, Shils concluded, American zeal for our control scheme seemed to have been replaced by the desire to use our morally advantageous position for propaganda purposes.51
What Followed? What could be done next was the subject of a number of articles. Daniel F. Cavers, of the Harvard University Law School, demonstrated that the Commission had left virtually untouched the three major problems involved in the application of its control plan: (1) sanctions without veto, (2) strategic balance, and (3) stages. Discussion of the latter would show, for example, that ADA plants would have to be distributed among the two blocs of nations, presumably equally, not among fifty nations.52
British scientist M. L. Oliphant felt that some better method of negotiation would have to be found. In the early days of the UNAEC, “where there was no discussion, no spontaneity, but only political speech, the scientific advisors present knew they had failed.” British physicist N. F. Mott thought the best hope now lay in falling back upon inspection, perhaps centering around two atomic research laboratories, each containing scientists from both the U.S.S.R. and the West. He warned that in any atomic war between these two giants Britain would be destroyed by the improved V-2 weapons armed with atomic warheads if the Russians could occupy the channel ports, and atomic bombs could not stop them from doing so. This sobering thought was also stressed by the Council of the British Atomic Scientists in July, 1948. The Council was sure that Western Europe would be devastated but did not believe that either of the titans could win a war quickly, over a great power possessing widely dispersed industries, with atomic weapons alone.53
Toward an Atomic Blitz
Such considerations did not restrain some American military men from publicly considering the use of the A-bomb as a means of mass destruction. On May 17, 1948, Newsweek reported a speech by General George C. Kenney, commander of the Strategic Air Command, and on July 5, 1948, Life featured an article by General Carl Spaatz, retired Chief of Staff of the U.S. Air Force. Assuming that we might be forced into war soon by Soviet aggressiveness, both discussed in a matter of fact way the atomic bombing of Soviet cities and industrial centers. The editors of B.A.S. thought it was both morally and politically wrong for generals and magazines with mass circulation to combine in such propaganda. It was politically wrong because it advertised an intention to war on the masses of the Soviet people and warned all peoples that we would make such use of our power. Articles of this kind also soothed in advance the moral revulsion which we should have against such slaughter. Having already achieved the leadership in the mass killing of civilians, were we now being conditioned for genocide itself? Americans should awaken to the realization that if the world is not organized for peace they themselves “will become co-responsible for the most gigantic and indiscriminate mass murder in history.”54
In a second article in Life, August 16, 1948, General Spaatz himself warned that “In Germany we ruined an industrial and commercial complex that must be rebuilt if Europe is ever to stand on its own feet again. In Japan we persisted in carrying the war to the home cities of an already beaten enemy.” We might win another war, “but what sort of victory would it be, and what would be its rewards, if it required the destruction of half the world?”
“At the First Sign of Aggression.” Others were not deterred by such a prospect. Lt.-General James H. Doolittle asserted in a public speech that “the fact that we and we alone have the atomic bomb and the means of delivering it with assurance and precision to any point on the earth is the greatest deterrent to Russia’s planned aggression.” We must, he continued, “be prepared, physically, mentally and morally, to drop atom bombs on Russian centers of industry at the first sign of aggression. She must be made to realize that we will do so, and our own people must be conditioned to the necessity for this type of retaliation.”55
What American generals would say if a similar threat were uttered from Moscow does not need to be detailed. Nor do we need to imagine how the average American would feel if told that Russian A-bombs would descend upon his cities “at the first sign of aggression.” That is an exceedingly elastic term. It could cover any step to promote or conserve American national interests, as we conceived them.
By 1949 it was a commonplace that the United States commanded air bases all around the perimeter of the Soviet Union. On March 20, 1949, the New York Times published a map showing our bases encircling Russia, except for a south Asiatic gap.
“Within a Week” A month later Representative Clarence Cannon, Chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, told the world what these bases were for. Speaking in the House he explained that if there should be another war we would have, after the signing of the Atlantic Pact, “ample land bases and within a week we could blast every nerve center” in the Soviet Union. Of course troops for occupation would be necessary, but why not let our allies “contribute some of the boys necessary to occupy enemy territory after we have demoralized and annihilated [it] from the air?”56
This diplomatic masterpiece put into few words the idea of the atomic blitz which dominated the thinking of so many American leaders in the first post-Hiroshima years. For us it would be a cheap, bloodless operation. Usually no occupation was envisaged. Cannon added the embellishment that if there was bloody ground work to do, our Allies would be good for that. This was hardly an alluring prospect for the average European, as he did not wish to be liberated from Russian occupation by great American air fleets.
“Promptly and Without Compunction.” Usually the previews of the atomic destruction of Russia were preceded by the qualifying phrase “if Russia attacks,” but occasionally this preliminary was dispensed with. On February 12, 1946, Dr. Virgil Jordan, President of the National Industrial Conference Board, an organization supported by large corporations, made an address at the Union League Club in Philadelphia. His distinguished audience included many leading American industrialists, and his address was published both as a pamphlet and in Vital Speeches for May 1, 1946.57
Dr. Jordan excoriated the New Deal, denying that there was “that New Deal revolution which was indigenous, native or natural to the mind or morals of America.” It was as much and as fundamentally a foreign invasion as though an army of Nazi soldiers, administrators and economists, or Soviet commissars had landed in Chesapeake Bay and occupied the capital. But the source of “such a conspiracy to sterilize the strength and paralyze the purpose of America” was to be found in “the alarming image of Communist Russia and its manners, morals and economics.”
Russia, said Jordan, is a “primitive, impoverished, predatory Asiatic despotism” which “rests today as it did in the time of Tamerlane or Attila on a vast pyramid of human skulls.” It is “empty of any real capacity, power or purpose except that of plunder and oppression. Soviet Russia is insolvent in everything but in resources of insolence, intrigue, treachery and terrorism, bankrupt of all assets but brutality and bluff, which since the war she has capitalized to the utmost in the forced march of communist imperialism through Europe, Asia and the Arctic, almost to the shores of Alaska.”
In these words of hatred Dr. Jordan dissolved that Great Power which had in a short space of time created a heavy industry strong enough to provide the fundamentals, and the trained army, for defeating the mighty German war machine. In the same spirit he transferred Russia’s advances in Europe, Asia, “and the Arctic,” whatever that meant, from war operations into “the forced march of communist imperialism” after the war.
Lumping the democratic socialism of England with the dictatorial socialism of Russia, as if they were not the bitterest of enemies, Jordan constructed a fatal encirclement for the United States. He alleged that the ideas accepted in England and Russia “assume it as an imperative condition for their success that this country be brought within the same system permanently.” “The brutal fact is,” he asserted, “that the war has left us facing an encircling world of beggars or robbers, whom it has bankrupted of spiritual and material resources for peaceful, self-supporting life henceforth.”
Being thus encircled, what were we to do? It was “either-or,” everything or nothing, either “socialist serfdom” or “economic freedom” for the whole world, a choice from which the bankrupt UN could not save us. On the contrary, it was “a massive device directed to the end of immobilizing, sterilizing, sapping and dissipating the power of a free America in the determination of world affairs.”
The grim “dilemma” facing us was this: “We have in our hands, almost alone, the decisive instrument of overwhelming military and industrial strength.” The American people are forced to subdue the world “or it will destroy them.” Let us therefore “proceed to the inescapable task before us swiftly and in the full confidence that at this crucial moment we still command the power to implement and complete it.”
“Let us first offer” [Jordan continued] “the utmost capacity of our economic power for reconstruction to every people who will undertake to abolish all national military expenditure and disarm down to the level of the local constabulary. Let us, secondly, demand the unlimited right of continuous inspection and control of every industrial operation and process, of every public policy which may have the most remote relationship to armament and warfare. And finally, let us make, keep and improve our atomic bombs for this imperative purpose; let us suspend them in principle over every place in the world where we have any reason to suspect evasion or conspiracy against this purpose; and let us drop them in fact, promptly and without compunction wherever it is defied.”
Pax Americana. No Nazi exponent of the right of Germany to rule the world had ever stated the claim more baldly. Jordan, of course, stated his purpose in high terms, to give the world “peace and freedom.” Otherwise, “America and all that it connotes or signifies in human welfare will finally be forever erased.”
In this fashion was the doctrine of inevitable war married to the dogma of preventive war. The Pax Americana must be established at once and enforced by the atomic bomb. Jordan knew that our power was overwhelming both militarily and industrially. He so stated, but he had no confidence in the ability of American capitalism to maintain itself in the future. If it didn’t smash the powerless, “insolvent,” “bankrupt” Soviet Union now, then all was lost. This derelict monster with an impossible economic system would erase America finally and forever.
Illogic could hardly go further, or more effectively convince the Russians that the United States is aggressive, bent like the Germans on world imperialism or downfall. All Marxist doctrine aside, there can be no doubt what we would think if we read similar statements from highly placed Russian leaders, some talking calmly of obliterating many millions of Americans, at the first sign of aggression, and others demanding the total abolition of armaments outside the Soviet Union, a demand to be enforced with atomic bombs, dropped “promptly and without compunction.”
It is important to remember also the date of this wild demand for American world hegemony. It was February 12, 1946, before the Russians had rejected our plan for the control of atomic energy and while the Cold War was still young. In other words, it expressed the long term feelings of the speaker. The Russian leaders would be naïve indeed if they did not take account of utterances like these by highly placed Americans. The American people should also assess their full significance, for no world imperium enforced by atomic bombs could be administered by a free people. We would have to accept fascism in order to maintain the attempt to rule the world.
The feelings of a powerful segment of the top strata of American society are a factor of permanent importance. Fear of communism merges into hatred of democratic socialism, the New Deal, the Fair Deal and every other governmental limitation on the unlimited acquisition of wealth and economic power.
Some Unresolved Issues
1. Could An Atomic Blitz Destroy the Soviet Government?
In 1949 a strong segment of the psychology of the Cold War was based upon the belief that in the A-bomb we had achieved a weapon which could swiftly and cheaply destroy the Red monster in its lair. From a ring of friendly bases around the Soviet Union the great American planes would take off and within hours Moscow, Leningrad, Vladivostock and scores of other cities would be smoking, radioactive ruins.
The most fervid thinking of this type did not go much further. With their cities and industries smashed, and many millions of dead or wounded, the Soviet Government would cease to exist and those of the “enslaved” Soviet peoples who remained would gladly throw off their chains and espouse free enterprise again. Slightly less embattled thinkers granted that enough nuclei of the Communist Party would remain to continue the war, and even to occupy Western Europe, but added that our bombers would smash their supply lines so thoroughly that the Red armies would have to go back home again. It would be bad for Western Europe again for a time. Even Britain might be severely mauled, but it would not be necessary to conscript and send over any great American armies. The bombers would do the job, and at the cost of only a few billions. We would be rid of the Red nightmare forever and the world could breathe again.
A much larger number of people whose anti-Soviet feelings were not so virulent doubted that it would be quite that simple, but believed that if the Russians overstepped somewhere the line laid down by the Truman Doctrine, our A-bombers could smash them so thoroughly that, though all arms would have to be used, it would be a relatively cheap war, one which would settle everything by smashing the last remaining Ism.
We Would Win. Probably a larger number still, of those who felt that the Reds must be scotched while we were much the strongest, believed that the war would be very costly and probably long, but were nevertheless sure that we would “win” it. This probability was so strong as to amount almost to a certainty, given an all-out effort on our part. Our undamaged technology was so superior to the devastated Russian industrial structure that the final military result could hardly be in doubt, a knowledge which fortified our leaders in taking the offensive in the Cold War at vital points. It was this knowledge, said Warburg, which made our foreign policy “reckless and irresponsible.”58
Belief in the world sovereignty of the A-bomb also dominated military thinking. The New York Herald Tribune observed, on April 15, 1949, that “there cannot be much mistake about the present tendency. It is all in the direction of concentration upon the Air Force, upon the strategic bombing theory of warfare and upon the atomic bomb.”
“Smash the Soviet Monster” The most ruthless advocate of the A-blitz was Major George Fielding Eliot, wartime military writer for the New York Herald Tribune. He argued that we had, in mid-1949, 552 big planes which could drop on the Soviet Union in one mission twice as much destructive force as we dropped on Germany in two years of intensive warfare. We had enough A-bombs to blast all of Russia’s industrial centers, centers of authority (i.e. cities), railway centers and oil fields. The bombers would get through to the targets. Then the Soviet armies in West Europe would lose heart and become relatively harmless (instead of exacting a terrible vengeance upon the Europeans). The American National Guard divisions and the British Territorials could probably take care of them.
If the Soviet Union were not promptly destroyed by air Eliot thought West Europe would become a hostage against the destruction of Russia by A-bombs. The Russians would threaten the complete massacre of the West Europeans, if Russia were A-bombed. Therefore “the only way to prevent, or mitigate, such massacre would be to strike quick and hard at the centers of Soviet power, and so shatter the will and smash the strength of the Soviet monster that his reactions against helpless people will be no more than dying convulsions.” Consequently, “Every man, every pound of metal, every effort that is not imperatively needed for the maintenance of security should go into the creation and delivery of offensive air-atomic blows against the source of our danger—the Soviet Union itself.”59
Eliot called his book If Russia Strikes, a clear misnomer since he made it wholly plain that if she did not strike in 1949 we must strike her some time before 1952 when she would presumably have A-bombs. He stated flatly that “We cannot allow the present Soviet government to come into possession of the atomic bomb plus the means to deliver atomic bombs in North America.” If the Soviets had this power they might seize Alaskan air bases and destroy our cities, or do so from submarines off our coasts. Therefore “we must use our military superiority to support an ultimatum” which would require the Soviets to accept our atomic control plan, “or suffer the destruction of its atomic plants by our own atomic weapons.”60
Blackett’s Challenge. The first sharp challenge to the atom-blitz theory was delivered by an English physicist, Nobel prize winner P. M. S. Blackett, in his Fear, War and the Bomb. He reasoned that even total destruction of Russian factories would not be felt critically in the field for many months, during which the Red armies could occupy West Europe and seize its factories. He asserted that thousands of American A-bombs would be required to produce decisive results and pointed out that Russian A-bombs would be very valuable in West Europe as tactical weapons, for such use as destroying docks and harbors.
He believed also that great formations of planes would probably be necessary to get one A-bomb laden plane through a long distance attack over hostile territory and argued that repeated deep penetration was likely to be a very expensive operation. Until such time as jet propelled bombers came into use the jet propelled fighters would have such an advantage as to compel long range bombing in very great force, and require the previous winning of at least partial air superiority. Finally, he pointed out that the most successful atomic bombardments could hardly do more damage than the thorough destruction achieved by the German Army in Russia, yet the Russians fought on.
Was the Destruction of Russia Practical? The consequences of destroying the life and livelihood of the Soviet peoples, with all their hopes and dreams, were callously brushed aside by George Fielding Eliot. Whatever was left “it would not be the Soviet rule, for the heart would have been blasted out of the Soviet system, the arteries cut.” The “major cities would lie in ruins,” but “the peasants, by and large, would survive and could feed themselves and their families.” There would be no central authority left, no guidance for local authorities, only “a series of local military or civilian regimes, largely agricultural in their economy,” burdened with the refugees from the cities, “torn by the clash of personal ambitions and long smothered hatreds.” Meanwhile, the American bombers, using A-bombs now only “for particularly suitable targets,” would be smashing any remaining core of resistance, ending up with the destruction of Central Siberia.
Then we could come home in the consciousness of duty well done. We wouldn’t even have to try “to police Russia at all.” This was just “a bogeyman,” said Eliot. We would simply leave them to survive or perish in the midst of their ruins.61
This seemed simple and easy until one reflected that the very type of mind which would destroy the homes and wealth of the Soviet peoples so casually would at once begin to fear retaliation. Maybe we had overlooked some A-bomb factory. What if some surviving Soviet scientists got together and discovered a successor to the A-bomb? These were the kind of doubts which would begin to assail our nation killers. They would have to make sure that the Russians never rose again.
This factor aside, what was to be said of the wisdom of destroying with A-bombs all organized life over one-sixth of the earth’s surface, if it could be done? It was idle to say that the peasants would still feed themselves, and tens of millions of city refugees “by and large.” Soviet agriculture was collectivized and farmed overwhelmingly with machines, tractors and combines, all of which would be useless when we had smashed Russia’s oil wells and the whole machinery of civilization. There would be no way of preventing a gigantic famine, one speeded by the raging spread of typhus, cholera, and scurvy, the malnutrition diseases which are always endemic in Russia. For scores of millions of helpless people there would be no succor, either of food or medical care, no housing, no consumer goods of any kind. People would have to fight with tooth and claw, with club and gun for what little sustenance and shelter would be left, with no prospect that there could be more.
What the state of mind of the Soviet peoples would be also needed to be thought through. They would be glad to be rid of the secret police and labor camps, but how would they feel about seeing the great industrial civilization which they had built, with much enthusiasm and infinite sacrifice, and rebuilt after the Germans had done their work, lying in poisonous radioactive ruins? How would the ultimate survivors of famine and pestilence feel about the certainty that the Americans would never permit them to rebuild their heavy industries again, even if they could?
Warnings from Eisenhower and Bradley. It is difficult to believe that the American people had begun to grasp what was involved in the floods of talk and thinking about atom bombing Russia. Fortunately some few of our leaders did speak out. While he was still Chief of Staff, General Eisenhower said at St. Louis: “I decry loose and sometimes gloating talk about the high degree of security implicit in a weapon that might destroy millions overnight.”
This was the timely voice of moral indignation, but Eisenhower also spoke as a responsible strategist, continuing: “Those who measure security solely in terms of offensive capacity distort its meaning and mislead those who pay them heed. No modern nation has ever equalled the crushing offensive power attained by the German war machine in 1939. No modern nation was broken and smashed as was Germany six years later.”62
On February 4, 1949, General Omar Bradley, also speaking as Chief of Staff, warned against “too heavy trust in air power, against reckoning our safety on phantasy rather than facts.” Bradley cautioned that “by reckless reliance upon a knockout blow in the opening months of a conflict, we might unwittingly risk defeat” and attacked the immorality of the A-blitz idea, saying: “Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants. We know more about war than we know about peace, more about killing than about living.”63
Caution from British Military Experts. This anomaly was spelled out further by the British military expert, retired Major-General J. F. C. Fuller. Referring to our preoccupation with the atomic bomb, he asked: “Whither can all this striving to destroy lead us? To a veritable religion of death, in which the scientist becomes an immolating priest and humanity the sacrificial victim.”64
These were strong words, but not strong enough. It was easy for fear or hate-blinded men to plan the atomic killing of many millions of people, but the enormity of the thing in practice would recoil on our own souls, at the same time that a world-wide revulsion against us steeled a great part of the human race to resist our world sway.
Another moral factor had also escaped the A-blitz advocates. The British military authority, Captain B. H. Liddell Hart, stressed it in giving his opinion that superior air power alone could not prevent the Red Army from advancing across Western Europe. Questioning the “very prevalent view in the West” that the Soviets could not maintain their equipment and machines, he reminded us of the “unimpressionability” of the Russians and “their exceptional capacity to carry on without proper supplies.”65
Other factors overlooked by air blitz advocates were the ability of the Red Army to move on foot, clinging to tanks or flat-cars and by animal power, and its unsurpassed ability to live off the land. Though equipped with all modern weapons it was still very close to the hard life of the peasant and able to live and fight with a primitive, animal vigor and endurance which made it able to endure privation better than some others.
In other words, the Russians could take an atomic blitz as perhaps no other people in the world could. As in the last war the killing of millions of them, and infinite devastation of their land, would only steel them to fight on. It needed to be remembered also that from Napoleon to Hitler the Russians have always scorched their own land thoroughly as a war weapon. Nor would the destruction of property affect them as it would us, since most of it belongs to the state, and they believe the state would reconstruct it. So far it had.
Furthermore, it should have been foreseen that the destruction of Russia’s cities, if it could be done, would automatically create millions of desperate guerrilla fighters, who would not only have a supreme motive for fighting but would find in it their best means of survival. The entire history of World War II proved that communists in every part of Europe were unsurpassed guerrilla fighters.
Another closely related factor should have given our A-blitz advocates long pause—the certainty of a deadly civil conflict in virtually every European country, not to speak of many others. Class war would engulf some nations in bloody strife that atom bombs could not smother. Even families would be divided; brother would kill brother.
Asked if he thought a war with Russia would be a short war, ended by atomic bombing within a few months, Lieutenant-General Walter Bedell Smith, fresh from his ambassadorship in Russia, replied that he could not imagine a short war, because: “It’s often said that a civil war is the most terrible of all wars, because that’s the only war in which fighting men have a pretty good idea what they are fighting for. A war with Russia would be a civil war of humanity, and I can’t think that it would be anything but a prolonged, protracted, disastrous war, which nobody would win. Nobody wins a modern war anyway. . . .”66
Admiral Gallery. It remained for Rear Admiral D. V. Gallery, Assistant Chief of Staff for Guided Missiles, to deliver a broadside attack on the advocates of atom-blitz. Writing in the Saturday Evening Post for June 25, 1949, he noted that starting in the previous December the country had been snowed under with gamble propaganda assuring “Quick and Sure Victory—at Bargain Rates.” The drive centered in the Air Force Association and William Bradford Huie, with the aid of the Reader’s Digest. The threat of “instant and devastating retaliation from the air” would keep the peace, or secure victory if war came. The Air Force Association had been “promoting this doctrine with consummate skill” for two years. There was great danger that the campaign would succeed “on the basis of hysteria, whipped up by publicity stunts and sensational headlines.” Already the thirty day blitz idea had become a sort of religious crusade.
Noting that the very fact that this crusade offered something for nothing, a painless war, ought to arouse our suspicions, Gallery put his finger on the astounding assumption of the A-blitz promoters. They calmly planned war against a whole population, against the common people. The newspapers carried stories saying that after painstaking study our experts had selected seventy strategic targets in a possible enemy country for destruction in case of war. It was as simple as that: seventy cities; seventy air groups; seventy bombs! The prophets of blitz openly advocated the simple destruction of cities, mass killing unlimited. Faced with the choice of blitzing Paris, Rome and Brussels they “might win the war in thirty days and lose it for the next 300 years.”
On technical grounds Admiral Gallery, a top notch air man himself, observed that bombers could not operate deep in enemy country beyond the range of escort and that fighter escort was “out of the question when you talk about 3,000 mile bombers.” The whole quest for cheap and sure security from war was a will-o’-the-wisp. In war between two powerful nations the issue would be settled only by blood, sweat and tears “at a cost of billions of man-hours and millions of lives.” In General Bradley’s words, victory would come “over dead bodies—those of our soldiers on the ground.”
Toward National Suicide. This was the result of an A-blitz war toward which all past experience pointed, millions of American soldiers driving millions of Russians out of the whole of a Europe so ruined that twenty Marshall plans could not begin to restore it, or to assuage the hatred of the people of the continent.
No better way of creating legions of passionate communists could be devised, and no surer method of arousing the people in the entire Russian orbit to their defense could be invented than the constant public advocacy of such a war. Actually, the Russian leaders had never believed that an atomic blitz could succeed. They were firm believers that a mighty coordination of all arms was essential to victory in war. It was, however, certain that they would use the American atomic blitz campaign to convince their peoples of American aggressive intent.
If attempted, an A-blitz of the Soviet Union would have been an adventure which, pursued wildly and savagely at the start, would either have failed disastrously or by its very success dragged us relentlessly into an effort to police and rule Eurasia—an undertaking which would have broken our backs economically, politically and morally.
2. Would the Soviets Attack American Cities as Soon as They Had A-Bombs?
This assumption had been made numberless times and by so many high authorities that in 1949 it was treasonous to question it.
How did this obsession originate? Its origins were many. The Russian leaders were such diabolical people that of course they were planning to destroy us. They were out to conquer the world; therefore the mass destruction of our cities on the first night they had enough bombs. But beyond the phobias of our Red-haters was the fact that so many of them had been yearning and planning to stage an A-blitz on Russia. Having told themselves that this would be a natural and righteous thing to do—are the Reds not anti-Christian?—they took it as a matter of course that the Reds must be planning to do the same thing to them. One could not admit even to himself that the Russians could be less barbaric than he was.
Not a Russian Method. In the background, also, was the established fact that it was the Anglo-Saxons who had set the pattern of mass destruction in war. The British began it, partly because the RAF had planned such a campaign long in advance, and partly out of frustration. They could not think of any other way to strike at Hitler. The German blitz on London, which began September 7, 1940, did not begin until after many British attacks on German cities, and until Berlin had been attacked at night for six successive nights. Warning of reprisal was given by Germany, and Liddell Hart classes the German action as such. Later, an offer to stop city bombing was refused by the British,67 and they began large-scale night attacks on German cities, bound to be indiscriminate, with the object of dehousing the German workers and destroying their morale.68 The workers were dehoused and large numbers of them killed, but their morale was not destroyed.
Our own record in the European war appears to have been somewhat better. We did much more daylight bombing and bombed specific targets. It was in Japan that we used fire bombs and explosives in great quantities upon cities, with the object of breaking national morale. In Japan we had already practised the mass destruction and dehousing of civilians without limit before Hiroshima and Nagasaki appeared to set the seal of victory upon mass destruction warfare.
Thereafter it was easy to conclude that of course the barbarian Russians would do to us what we civilized Christian Americans had done to the Japanese. Yet there is no record of any Russian belief in or practice of mass destruction. In the first Finnish-Soviet war the official Finnish figures reported 646 civilians killed by air raids. When Russian bombers had full opportunity to carry out mass raids on Finnish cities they did not do so.69 Against Germany they did not do any considerable amount of mass bombing. They had almost no aircraft for such purpose, nearly all of their planes being built for strictly military work in close conjunction with the ground forces. Nor does Russian military writing show any belief in the efficacy of mass destruction as a method of warfare.
How? If the Russians should desire to stage an atomic Pearl Harbor upon us the question arose, with what? When the Nazi threat arose on their horizon they appear to have discarded big bombers and concentrated on smaller defensive machines, a policy which paid them well. The ominous threat of American atomic attack might well produce the same reaction. Every big bomber built would cut sharply the number of jet fighters available to intercept the American bombers.
If, however, the Russians were equipped with heavy bombers for attack upon us, how were they to use them? Unlike our circle of bases around them they had no bases close to us, nor any likely means of getting any. Much was said of their hopping blithely across the North Pole to destroy us, but in 1949 few thought that long and extremely hazardous route of attack a serious one. Even Major Eliot could not make much out of a Soviet effort to seize Alaska by air, from rail heads and industrial centers 3000 miles away. If the feat were accomplished then they could hurt us for a time, but he was forced to conclude “nothing decisive, nothing really crippling.”70 A few bombers might reach our urban centers but that would have been both silly and suicidal. A Russian blitz upon us could make no sense unless it were delivered with overwhelming power.
Possony estimated that at that time at least 10,000 atomic bombs would be required for an extermination attack upon our cities, a fantastic number from the standpoint of scarce uranium and costly manufacture. He took it for granted that surprise atomic attack would never again be achieved. Especially for a tremendous A-blitz the preparations would be so enormous that they could hardly be concealed. If the United States made appropriate use of its resources he found it incomprehensible that the United States should fear the new weapon. In no other field was President Roosevelt’s dictum more justified that “There is nothing to fear but fear itself.”71
What Profit? The corollary of our great atomic preponderance needed to be clearly understood. The Russians being much weaker in atomic production would be impelled to save their A-bombs for defensive purposes, to use against military targets in Western Europe if they should be attacked, or for such retaliation against the United States as they would be capable of. The certainty of overwhelming retaliation from the United States all but precluded an atomic attack on us, and the need to husband defense reinforced the same reasoning.
It was a matter of record that the Germans did not dare to use poison gas in the late war. Though in possession of a superb chemical industry and equipped with large stocks of gas, they could not use it, even in the agony of national defeat and disintegration, because they feared retaliation. This was an acid test. It indicated strongly that the fear of crushing retaliation was the greatest fear of all, one not only quite powerful enough to prevent atomic aggression by a weaker atomic power but to deter him from beginning the use of atomic weapons—with their deadly radiation capacity—at any time during a war.
In the pre-nuclear years it was difficult to see how any power except the United States could risk the first use of atomic weapons.
The Soviet Union had also suffered too deeply and too recently to gamble on an attempt to conquer the other side of the world by an A-blitz. It would be a decade before the Soviet Union could hope to have enough power to see such a mad adventure through and then more conservative use of its power would be safer and more profitable.
That the sorely wounded Soviet Union, with the largest and one of the richest land areas in the world to develop should desire our sudden destruction, and plan for it, was a figment of super-heated emotions. Only the certainty that we had encircled them and meant to stage a blitz assault upon them could induce a people so situated to attack us. That could do it, but first the Russians would have to have power comparable to our own, a situation which was not on the horizon in the early post-war years.
3. Did Mass Destruction Pay?
Underneath all plans for atomic war was the practical question whether mass destruction pays.
The careful studies made by the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey had shown that despite the Anglo-American bombing of Germany total war production increased until the summer of 1944, when the ground armies were closing in on Germany from both sides. It was not until this late date that the Allied bombing campaign was equipped with the great numbers of planes and bombs necessary for saturation bombing. By this time, also, the previous attempts at bombing had led to the destruction of the defensive German fighter forces, opening Germany to bombing virtually at will. Thereafter saturation bombing nearly destroyed sixty German cities. Even then, however, the greatest effect upon German production was gained in the belated bombing of transportation, and the greatest effect on war-making capacity by the destruction of synthetic oil factories. Electric power plants, especially hydroelectric plants, the destruction of which would largely have paralyzed German industry were largely overlooked.
Was it then necessary to destroy so many German cities? The burning of Hamburg, killing 60,000 people, produced temporary panic in other German cities, but within five months 80 per cent of Hamburg’s productive capacity was restored. A million German civilian casualties from bombing, 300,000 dead, did not win the war. The campaign to destroy housing ruined 3,600,000 homes and made twice as many people homeless, but it did not interfere seriously with war production.
Victory Delayed. In reviewing the whole story after the war, British Major-General Fuller, retired, believed that strategic bombing actually prolonged the war. He concluded that if Churchill had not allocated “half the resources of his country to make the enemy bum and bleed,” he could have built enough landing craft and transport planes to end the war a year sooner.72
British Air Commodore L. MacLean has reinforced the same conclusion. Saying that the true story of the bomber offensive is unknown, he writes that it began to be an effective factor in the war only when it was “closely integrated with military requirements in the over-all invasion plan and was undeviatingly directed toward objectives which would positively assist the military operations leading to the occupation of German soil. We must, therefore, face the cold fact that, for some years, the bombing war was conducted at prodigious cost in money and trained lives, for no positive yield whatever.”73
In addition to the vast cost of the bomber offensive to us, including 150,000 of our top notch young men, it did a vast amount of damage to German cities which did nobody any good. From everybody’s standpoint the bulk of it was sheer waste. We were led to believe that German military output was being greatly reduced, yet the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey records that from 1942 to the fall of 1944, while the great strategic offensive was being developed, “Germany’s military output in aircraft weapons and ammunition was raised three fold; in tanks nearly six fold.” Nor was the great bombing drive on submarine pens, shipyards and submarine building facilities any more productive. The Survey records that “the effect on output was negligible; the actual production of submarines was up to schedule throughout the period.” Output was “well maintained until the end of 1944.” Despite the great campaign against German aircraft factories in the first half of 1944 “aircraft production doubled.” It was not until the bombers were diverted from “strategic” bombing to the work of demolishing the German transportation system and working closely with our invading armies that the German economy collapsed. Up to that time, says the Strategic Bombing Survey, there is no evidence that shortages of civilian goods ever reached a point where the German authorities were forced to transfer resources from the war production in order to prevent disintegration on the home front.74
Quoting the official history of The Army Air Forces in World War II to the effect that “Eighth Air Force claims were far more exaggerated than even their severest critics had assumed,” Baldwin concluded that “There is no doubt that the effectiveness of the strategic bombing campaign was grossly exaggerated; not until strategic and tactical bombing merged and air power was harnessed with land and sea power to a common objective were the great potentialities of air power adequately realized.”75
This judgment suggested that if this was the experience of strategic bombing over the nearby and small target Germany, even the A-bomb would not enable us to win a war with the 9,000,000 square mile Soviet Union without an all-out conflict involving all arms and all our resources.
Japanese Masses Burned. It might be that the same conclusion would not apply to the war against Japan. Yet there was the gravest doubt that the burning of Japanese cities was a justifiable way to win the war, or a necessary method. The Japanese leaders deserved all the fire which could be dropped on them. Yet we deliberately refrained from bombing the Imperial Palace. The Emperor was carefully preserved while 90,000 to 120,000 Japanese people were killed in the fire raid of March 9, 1945, on Tokyo. As in Germany, it was not the evil leaders who perished, but the ordinary Japanese people; men, women and children, old, sick and young.
This continued to be true in other Japanese cities, and finally, to persuade the evil Japanese leaders to permit the Emperor to make peace, we atomized above 100,000 rank and file Japanese at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Granted that the war was shortened a little by these methods, was the mass killing of civilians justified thereby?
Cities Casually Destroyed. Another difficulty with the killing of cities is that it is almost certain to get out of hand or to be done irresponsibly and perhaps for non-military reasons. Blackett raises some legitimate questions. Why were the cities of North Italy bombed in 1943, after the fall of Mussolini, when the Italian partisans expected and had been promised arms and help instead? Why, also, was the huge Skoda works one-third destroyed on April 25, 1945, a few days before Czechoslovakia was liberated? Why were some of the finest cities of Eastern Germany demolished only a few months before the end, when it was clearly in sight? The lovely city of Dresden was destroyed only four months before VE day. It was crowded with refugees and 50,000 people were killed. Were some of these devastations carried out for political reasons, and others only because we had the habit and nobody stopped to ask why?
Again, the German cities Augsburg, Bochum, Leipzig, Hagen, Dortmund, Oberhausen, Schweinfurt and Bremen were subjected to severe area attacks. Yet their contributions to total German industrial production were very small. In the order named the percentages were : 0·3, 0·9, 1·7, 0·3, 0·9, 0·5, 0·2 and 1·2 per cent. In all of these cities there were just three big war plants, the steel works in Dortmund and the aircraft plants at Bremen and Leipzig, each of which could have been bombed separately.76
On what basis was the death of these eight cities decided upon? We have elaborate precautions to prevent the execution of one innocent individual. He must be clearly guilty, beyond peradventure of doubt, but when we are engaged in mass destruction the death of cities will be decided by a few military men, doubtless estimable men, who write down the names of the doomed cities on a piece of paper.
Does a board of generals gravely decide that ten more cities must die? Or does a single man condemn ten cities to death by putting their names on the list of the doomed?
Genocide Next. The next step was clearly genocide itself, the attempt to destroy a nation. The slogan, moreover, was ready at hand, already tried and true. We had to slay German and Japanese civilians in great numbers because they followed evil, dictatorial leaders. These men were now disposed of, but there were others whom we did not like, though they had recently been valued allies. They still ruled the Soviet peoples. Everyone agreed that the Russian people were kindly and good, but it seemed to be necessary to destroy many millions of them in atomic attacks on their cities, in order to rid them of their bad leaders.
The killing of a nation of 200,000,000 people was the next logical step in the psychology of mass destruction which we appeared to have accepted as an inevitable accompaniment of any future war. It was also a step which could finally complete the brutalization of humanity to a degree that would recoil disastrously and inexorably upon ourselves.
In a careful article Baldwin recorded as a fact the acceptance in Washington of the city-killing mass destruction of civilians of all ages as the method of war against Russia. He said: “The assumption that we will use the bomb to defeat Russia is the basic assumption underlying the dominant strategic concept that, with the advent of Louis Johnson as Defense Secretary, has now gained the ascendancy,” and he added: “It is the basic assumption underlying much of our political thinking.”77
“Moral Suicide.” The adoption of such a military plan was horrifying enough on military grounds, since it promised to lead us into endless slaughter and irreparable chaos, but the moral side of it was equally abhorrent. It was well phrased by Rev. Edward A. Conway, associate editor of the Catholic magazine, America, on July 24, 1949 when he expressed the conviction that the policy of indiscriminate bombing of civilian populations had led this country to the brink of “moral suicide.” He did not believe there was “any question about the criminal iniquitous conception of such a doctrine which would bomb civilian populations for a radius of four miles.”78
Dangerous Politically. Was this method of warfare, and the threat of it, good politics? Professor N. F. Mott, President of the British Atomic Scientists Association, reasoned that security could best be obtained by weapons and policy which provide the greatest deterrent against aggression, but the least threat if none occurs.79 Strategic bombing failed on both counts. If war came it would not be decisive militarily and it would swing world opinion against us. Used as a threat it is “of the most provocative kind, against which any Russian government is bound to take steps.” The obvious Soviet reply was to deprive the Anglo-American strategic bombers of any bases on the European continent, either before hostilities start or in their early stages.
In other words, no other reason than the strategic bombing threat was needed to cause Russia to consolidate her hold on East Europe, and the same threat kept West Europe in peril of a preventive Russian seizure and doomed her to immolation if war came.
Renunciation Proposed. For these reasons Mott proposed that the American and British governments make a voluntary declaration as follows: “That in any future conflict they will not bomb civilian centers of population, either with atomic or any other weapons, unless our own cities or those of an ally are first attacked in this way.”
This renunciation of our deeply cherished atomic threat would have deprived us of the dream of smashing the Reds cheaply and without much American bloodshed, but that dream was only a chimera anyway. The only real deterrent to Russian aggression, if aggression had been planned, was the certainty of having to fight a long war against the entire resources of the United States and its many allies. Before the H-bomb nothing else would defeat them. The threat of atomic bombing did not bluff them, but it gave them the most powerful incentive to keep adding space to the vast cushion of it which they already enjoyed.
The renunciation of mass bombing which Mott proposed would have removed us from the terrible peril of embarking on genocide as a means of “defense,” the peril of losing our own souls, along with the good repute of mankind, and of losing the right and the ability to live in a civilized world.80
4. Would Atomic Hysteria Destroy Us?
On May 12, 1949, Representative W. Sterling Cole, Republican of New York, revealed what he called a “strange and incredible occurrence.” One Hans Friestadt, a graduate student and part time teacher at the University of North Carolina, had been granted one of a large number of fellowships financed by the Government for basic research. These grants had been recommended by the AEC and after Friestadt had received one it transpired that he was a Communist.
On May 17, the FBI revealed that it had investigated the case of the uranium oxide missing from the Argonne Laboratory in Chicago, one of the units working under the AEC.
The first press reports indicated that some three-quarters of a pound of U-235 had escaped to the Russians. On May 18, Senator McMahon announced that 1·05 ounces was involved. Of the 32 grams missing 25 had been recovered through an analysis of waste materials. Search for the remaining 7 grams and the bottle which had originally contained the oxide, was continuing.
“Incredible Mismanagement.” On May 23, Senator Hickenlooper, Republican of Iowa, a member of the Joint Atomic Energy Committee of Congress, held a press conference and demanded the resignation of Chairman David E. Lilienthal, of the AEC, charging that he was guilty of “incredible mismanagement.” He attacked Lilienthal for his attitude about the lost uranium, referring to it as “two-thirds of a pound of uranium compound”, and for the award of AEC research fellowships to bad risks. There was “perhaps even more serious evidence of maladministration” than was revealed by “these two highly publicized fiascoes.”81
The next day the Joint Atomic Energy Committee was in urgent executive session from 10:00 a.m. until 7:00 p.m. After hearing Dr. Zinn, head of the Argonne Laboratory, and others, the Committee decided to order an independent investigation of the uranium loss. The committee was evidently made uneasy by the suggested possibility that the atomic secrets might escape. The very thought caused alarm. The entire committee was critical of the delay in calling in the FBI. The New York Times’ report said that Senator Arthur H. Vandenberg “added his voice today to the swelling chorus of criticism of the AEC.” Lilienthal had been in many respects “an able administrator,” said Vandenberg, “but these security phases are paramount, and my final judgment must be governed by the facts. The importance of the matter cannot be ignored.”
On that very day the gravity of the crisis deepened when it became known that a security officer in the AEC plant at Hanford, Washington, had taken two bars of uranium and put them in a safe. It was three months before the “theft” was discovered. The General Electric Company, which operated the plant thought this was not a fair test, since no one except an individual given full clearance could have gained access to the area, but it looked ominous in Washington.
The AEC had been sending radio isotopes abroad for research purposes, by a vote of 4 to 1, and the Committee now heard from Admiral Lewis Strauss, the dissenter, that he had contended that the United States should not take “a calculated risk, even if it was slight,” of aiding weapon production abroad.
On May 26, Senator Cain, Republican of Washington, filed a bill to abolish the AEC and give control of atomic energy to the military.
On June 2 the missing bottle that had contained the U-235 was found in Chicago in the Argonne Laboratory’s own “grave yard” of radioactive materials. The bottle was exhumed and identified in the presence of agents of the FBI. After this the great sensation of the missing uranium of necessity fizzled out, though not before the radio commentators had shaken the air waves and the headlines had shrieked alarm for many days.
The Congressional investigation of the AEC continued for weeks, it becoming constantly clearer that Senator Hickenlooper’s charges lacked foundation. The outcry about the Communist student compelled the AEC to reverse its practice of not inquiring into the politics of fellowship holders who were engaged in non-secret research. All now had to take loyalty oaths and Friestadt was dismissed from his job at the University of North Carolina. This, however, was not sufficient. On August 2, 1949, the Senate passed a law to require FBI investigations of all fellowship applicants, inquiring into their loyalty and associations, and the House soon concurred.
“Hog-Wild” Investigations. This long continued furore stirred deep alarm in the minds of many serious observers. The Washington Post thought that blind attacks such as Senator Hickenlooper loosed played “into the hands of the cabal itching to clamp tight military control on atomic energy.” The irresponsible and undocumented charges “that the AEC is shot through with Communist sympathizers are indicative of a fear obsession with a new force that the inquisitors know very little about.” The country simply could not afford to become so fearful of anything that might help Russia as to ignore the handicap caused by the “creeping secrecy at home.” The hullabaloo about Friestadt had given impetus to “the fantastic notion of loyalty tests for all persons receiving government support, however remote their connection with the national security.” Under this notion the inquisition could be pushed to cover a large portion of the population.82 Before long it was.
The same reasoning applied to the Army’s new habit of labelling as “unemployable” those whom some officer in the Pentagon did not believe were sufficiently conservative. In the same Spring Gordon R. Clapp, Chairman of the Tennessee Valley Authority, was so classified for work in Germany, and on June 15 four well known professors were added to the category. If they were “unemployable” in Germany among the ex-Nazis, how could they be tolerated among the Americans themselves?
In the same febrile season the House Committee on Un-American Activities asked colleges over the country, especially the ones with liberal reputations, to send in a list of their social science text-books. But if these were purged there would remain innumerable books in the college libraries containing ideas more dangerous than those expressed in the more cautiously written text-books. These would need to be burned.
Under the heading “End This Disorderly Conduct” Walter Lippmann asked whether all this inquisitorial activity might not be providing Communist propaganda “with superb material to frighten our friends and cheer up our opponents.” Making all allowance for the good that some investigations had done, “the fact remains that these investigations are running hog wild. They are injuring not only individuals but the name and honor of the United States, and the very principles of free government.” Government could not be conducted in the kind of uproar which prevailed.83
Atomic Jitters. These comments indicated the danger that our agitated conservatives would go on to destroy the very liberties and institutions they were so intent on preserving unsullied from any taint. The “atomic jitters” which more than one commentator noted also indicated the inability of the politicians and military men to wrestle with the atom. From the very beginning the scientists had, almost unanimously and unceasingly, told them that the atomic “secrets” were fleeting and temporary, but the laymen would not believe them. They insisted on guarding the atom themselves, when only the scientists had the knowledge to do so.
The result was that the frantic effort to clutch the secret rapidly gave us a psychological Maginot Line. Hanson W. Baldwin warned that “the positive and well-nigh hysterical approach of Congress to the atomic investigation sprang from the fallacious belief that so long as we retained a monopoly on the secrets of the atomic bomb our security was insured.” The “outraged cries of protest, the wringing of hands, the stern denunciations and the loud lamentations which have accompanied the Congressional attacks are clear evidence of the panic that assails too many Congressmen, lest we be stripped of the ‘security’ that in so many minds the atomic bomb provides.”84
This obsession with the black magic of the bomb alarmed no one more deeply than the scientists, for they knew that not only their liberties and those of all other Americans were imperilled but that the spy mania and Red hysteria were all too likely to stifle scientific growth and leave the politico-military men clutching an obsolete weapon. The scientists understood well the aphorism of C. F. Kettering that “when you lock the laboratory door you lock out more than you lock in.”85
The Association of Oak Ridge Engineers and Scientists wrote to Senator McMahon on May 29, 1949, recalling how in the early stages of the atomic project the scientists themselves had had difficulty in convincing the military men of the importance of war time security measures. After the war, the statement continued, “we were alarmed to see the same procedures extended to virtually all branches of government work, including those not even remotely connected with national security.” Now there was an attempt to foist these procedures on academic institutions, by making a favorable FBI report a prerequisite for the granting of a government fellowship. “We feel that this general political atmosphere constitutes a grave threat to our American tradition of freedom of thought and speech.”86
On August 5, 1949, just as a Congressional conference committee was about to approve a law requiring FBI investigations of all student fellowship applicants, the General Advisory Committee of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission submitted a report condemning the proposal in the strongest terms. The nine distinguished scientists and educators unanimously agreed that they were “horrified” at the prospect of “moving a semi-police apparatus into the realm of youth.” The reputation of many young people might be adversely impaired by the rumors inspired by such a system. An atmosphere of uncertainty and suspicion was “likely to be generated by the activities of Federal agents among many groups of friends in colleges, universities and in local communities.” The area of interference with the private lives of citizens would be extended, with “a serious adverse effect on both the atmosphere of our educational institutions and the outlook of one age group of the entire nation.”87
The Committee might have added that government fellowships were likely to be awarded thereafter not on the basis of a student’s ability, or of his professors’ recommendations, but on the basis of what jealous or gossipy schoolmates told the investigation agent, under full protection of their identities and testimony. Awards would be made on the basis of whether the FBI man thought the student was sufficiently reliable politically.
Because one communist student had been about to secure a little money for non-secret research work the Congress would spend large sums annually in long police investigations of thousands of applicants. Because they had seen the apparition of one Red student studying atomic energy the legislators would extend the methods of the police state into every college campus in the nation. There was only one word which could accurately describe this state of mind. It was mania. Grown men were so obsessed with hate and fear that they would destroy the very freedom they professed to be defending.
Scientific Stagnation Promoted. Nor was this the worst of the secrecy mania, since the FBI was now policing the scientists themselves, refusing clearance to anyone whom it suspected of not being totally “reliable.” Dr. W. A. Higginbotham, of the Brookhaven National Laboratory, said in a public statement that he knew of at least 100 recognized atomic scientists who had failed to get clearance for government work and never learned the reason. He was certain they could have passed security had they been allowed to hear and answer the suspicions or charges held against them. The result was that a conviction was gaining ground in scientific circles that a man applying for AEC secret work might get into serious difficulty. Should he be turned down, for any reason, private laboratories dealing in government contracts would hesitate to hire him.88
As scientists in government service became more and more hunted, all were likely to develop anxiety neuroses. A casual word, indeed any act of their private lives, might be recorded by a secret government agent, and misinterpreted would perhaps mean professional and personal ruin. The atomic hysteria operated to kill the scientific goose effectively, and the widening Red jitters worked to make the lives of private employees uncertain. Private industries and universities holding AEC contracts began to impose loyalty oaths. Even insurance companies inquired into the associations of their agents before employing them. We might not go to the length of purging everybody in sight in a wild, uncontrollable outbreak of mutual distrust, as happened in Russia from 1936 to 1938, but we were moving rapidly toward the time when any citizen was likely to be hounded and proscribed for his political beliefs, unless they were wholly conservative.
Nothing could be more human or natural than that the over-clutching of the A-bomb secrets should cause stagnation in American scientific work and drive the scientists into seclusion or innocuous private employment. The same principle applied also to the gigantic clearing and screening of all government employees then in progress. Every person of ability and independence had to ask himself whether he should risk being pilloried for life by a government that would not depend on the loyalty even of its janitors. The wave of laws requiring loyalty oaths of teachers pointed in the same direction. These developments suggested that only mediocre conformists could man the nation’s scientific work, its government and its schools, while the men of fear policed them.
It was in this fashion that those who had little faith in the soundness of American institutions threatened to pull down the temple they purported to defend. For fear of the police state they would police everybody. To clutch the bomb secret they would make sure that no non-conformist had anything to do with their precious black magic. Dr. J. R. Oppenheimer pointed out to the Joint Committee how self defeating this kind of policing could be. It was “contrary to all experience to suppose that only those who, throughout their lives, held conformist views would make the great discoveries of the future.”89
What is Security? The logical end of the frantic effort to compel ideological uniformity would be that only men of sure conservative or reactionary mind would have scientific training and opportunities, men too satisfied with the world as it is to penetrate the future in order to usher in a new world. “Security, above all, is spirit and morale and progressive, advanced thinking, and secrecy is the enemy of these.” Secrecy, insisted Hanson W. Baldwin, “is not security, nor is the bomb an impregnable rampart. Security is things and people, and bombs, weapons and research and bases, intangibles as well as tangibles.”90
In a 1949 Commencement address David E. Lilienthal pleaded with his countrymen not to become so bewitched by the atomic bomb as to rely on what they believe to be its black and secret magic to keep the country secure. “The foundation of the republic is the moral sense of her people, a sense of what is right and what is wrong. The faiths we hold are the chief armament of democracy.”91
It was a measure of the stature of many influential minds that they seized upon the bomb as “a furious oversimplification of the world and its dilemmas.” They elevated secrecy about it into the chief guaranty of national existence, to such an extent that our whole future was made to depend on a door or a window left unlocked. In the end we found ourselves “searching frantically for the national destiny in the shape of a bottle in an atomic dump.”92
What Price Secrecy? Actually, if we had tried to tell the Russians how to build an A-bomb they would still have been a very long way from achieving one. They would first have to have fissionable material. And if our scientists had spent days telling the Russian scientists how to produce it, they would have had to build their own plants in their own way and by much trial and error work toward the bomb, in all probability a far weaker one than we would then have. How many months, or years would Russian bomb production have been advanced by a middle ground policy of non-secrecy?
To our horrified atom worshippers the answer was that five minutes would have been too much! Consider, however, where the opposite policy had led us. In addition to all the evils discussed above, it had hedged the Atomic Energy Commission about with all sorts of security restrictions which hampered its work, restrictions which have prevented the development of satisfactory teamwork with Canada and Britain on further research. Yet it was not our own genius which produced the bomb. It was a great team of scientists from many lands which did it. By walling ourselves in we threatened to defeat the very scientific progress upon which we so desperately relied for survival.
All Allies Distrusted. The result was that we did not even trust our closest allies. On July 14, 1949, a secret meeting was held in Washington. It was attended by fourteen top men in the American Government, Congressional and Executive, and presided over by the President. On Sunday, July 17, the New York Times related the purpose of the meeting. The British Government needed some help in its atomic project; certain metallurgical techniques in the final stages were giving them trouble. They wanted to know the answers. If given, they could soon produce A-bombs. They had “made the same request last year, but it was blocked by objections from Senator Hickenlooper, then Chairman of the Joint Committee.” The AEC was said to favor the request.93
However, immediate outcry arose in Congress. The British could not be trusted with A-bombs. Only we could have them. Senator William F. Knowland, Republican of California, and a member of the Joint Congressional Committee on Atomic Energy, served formal notice that he would fight any move to satisfy the British request. Unless Congress voted its approval or the Baruch plan was accepted he would vigorously oppose “any effort to transmit such atomic weapon information to any other nation on the face of the earth.” Once the information was imparted it could never be regained. He believed this issue was “of great magnitude to the future of our Republic.”94
This was the atomic delusion in a nut shell: (1) the atomic “secrets” give us security and power; (2) we will not share these blessings with our best friend on earth; (3) and if we clutch the secrets we can keep them. What is fair and right does not matter. Only our monopoly of the mighty atom counts.
The next day Senator Millard E. Tydings, Democrat of Maryland, extended the atomic interdiction to all of our new allies in the North Atlantic Pact, ratified in the Senate only the week before. Said he: “I think that is a weapon which is ours. We have the know-how. We are making them, we have the planes to deliver them, and it would be foolish to duplicate this effort over and over again in other countries [in the Atlantic Pact] even though they could.”95
Practical reasoning? Perhaps, but if the British should want the comforting possession of a few A-bombs, ready to use against any invader, they could not have them. It was our weapon. They must defend themselves with lesser means.
Bowing to the demands that our atomic monopoly be preserved at all costs, Secretary of State Acheson issued a formal statement for President Truman on July 27, 1949, in which he laid before the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy a plan for maintaining the status quo, permitting exchanges in limited areas not involving arms or industrial usage, and promising that no change in this policy would be made without further discussion with the Committee, at which time “it could be determined what Congressional action is needed.”96
Black Magic Clutched. It appeared that the Atomic Energy Act would have to be amended by a vote of Congress—if that were conceivably possible—and some of its strongest provisions relaxed before the President could accommodate the British, who had loyally pooled their resources with us in wartime to make the bomb, when they were pioneers in nuclear knowledge and well ahead of us. Newman and Miller describe “the atavistic depths” in us stirred by the release of atomic energy, as revealed in the information section of the Atomic Energy Act, with its death penalties, heavy fines and imprisonment, three times directed against anyone who would give atomic information “with intent to secure an advantage to any foreign nation.” Our legislative response to the greatest triumph of intelligence and the scientific method was “closely akin to the practice of magic among the most primitive tribes. Having in their possession a fearful image of the god of war, which makes them stronger than all their enemies, the tribe is obsessed with the fear that the image may be stolen or duplicated and their exclusive claim to the deity’s favor forever lost.”97
Secrecy is Not Security. The clearly outlined result of our obsession with the secret was our own scientific and perhaps political isolation, even from our friends. Obviously, if we could achieve absolute secrecy it “could only produce an absolute vacuum.” The misconception that secrecy is security is very old, and “wherever it has triumphed freedom has died—and security has proved illusory.”98
The creeping process of deliberately, and yet hysterically, destroying our own freedom was described in two unforgettable paragraphs by Chancellor Robert M. Hutchins of the University of Chicago at the 237th Convocation of that University.
Toward an American Police State.
“We are told that we must be afraid of Russia, yet we are busily engaged in adopting the most stupid and unjust of the ideas prevalent in Russia, and are doing so in the name of Americanism. The worst Russian ideas are the police state, the abolition of freedom of speech, thought, and association, and the notion that the individual exists for the state. These ideas are the basis of the cleavage between East and West.
“Yet every day in this country men and women are being deprived of their livelihood, or at least their reputation, by unsubstantiated charges. These charges are then treated as facts in further charges against their relatives or associates. We do not throw people into jail because they are alleged to differ with the official dogma. We throw them out of work and do our best to create the impression that they are subversive and hence dangerous, not only to the state, but also to everybody who comes near them.”99
To persecute people into conformity by the non-legal methods then popular, Hutchins continued, was little better than doing it by purges and pogroms. The lash fell only upon some for the sin of nonconformity, but the end result would reach all of us. Critics, even of the mildest sort, would be frightened into silence. Stupidity and injustice would go unchallenged “because no one will dare speak against them.”
“Tribal Self-Adoration.” The Red hysteria and the atomic jitters had combined to create a state of mind which would have seemed impossible in this land of freedom a decade before. Hutchins accurately described it as a “tribal self-adoration.” Its dreadful unanimity had been seen in full flower in Nazi Germany and it was sedulously fostered in Russia. Therefore we must also sink back to the tribal level.
Was Our Downfall Near? Or was there something deeper which is inseparable from our sudden ascent to the economic and military mastery of two-thirds of the world? In his great book, A Study of History, Arnold Toynbee had charted the course of civilizations which have risen and fallen for the past 5,000 years. He found that when a civilization comes into sudden power and domination over its neighbors a new and fairly short cycle almost immediately sets in. A kind of mental ossification begins. Rigid controls are imposed and the dominance of the military increases rapidly. Religion, science and the arts decay. Time after time these symptoms have preluded the decline and fall of a civilization.100
“The bones of nations that have tried to be too strong litter the graveyards of History.”101
Footnotes
1. “A Report on the International Control of Atomic Energy,” State Department publication 2498, Superintendent of Documents, Washington, D.C.
2. Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, June 15, 1945, p. 6.
3. See the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, July 1946, the New York Times for June 20, 1946, and United Nations Atomic Energy Commission, Official Records, No. 2.
4. Foreign Policy Bulletin, October 11, 1946.
5. Samuel Grafton, New York Post, July 29, 1946.
6. Ibid., June 19 and 21, 1946.
7. P. S. Blackett, Fear, War and the Bomb, New York, 1949, p. 157; published in England under the title Military and Political Consequences of Atomic Energy, London, Turnstile, 1949.
8. The New York Sun, June 21, 1946.
9. John M. Hancock, Ferdinand Eberstadt, Herbert B. Swope, Fred Searls, Jr., and Thomas F. Farrell. The group was composed of two bankers, an engineer, a mining expert and a former newspaper man. I was a member of Mr. Baruch’s staff, on an intermediate level, during the summer of 1946.
10. The Subcommittee members were: George A. Finch, Chairman; Joseph P. Chamberlain, Percy E. Corbett, Malcolm W. Davis, Clyde Eagleton, Manley O. Hudson, Herbert L. May, James T. Shotwell, Edgar Turlington and Louis B. Sohn. The parent committee, under the leadership of Dr. Shotwell, fathered several active subcommittees composed of experts in such fields as geology and mining, nuclear physics and law. For text see Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, July 1, 1946.
11. The New York Journal American, June 17, 1946.
12. Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (hereafter referred to as B.A.S.), September 1948, p. 262.
13. Walter Lippmann, New York Herald Tribune, June 20, 1946. The Nashville Tennessean reasoned (July 18 and August 9, 1946) that the veto “simply would not be applicable” to the body of law laid down in the atomic treaty.
14. The New York Times, June 19 and 23, 1946.
15. In his No Place to Hide, Boston, 1949; London, Hodder, 1949, Dr. David Bradley, who took part in the Bikini tests, says that they did not go according to plan. “The target fleet which was to have steamed back to Pearl Harbor and the Golden Gate, invincible as ever,” would remain at Bikini until they could be safely disposed of.
16. The New York Times, July 4, 1946.
17. Ibid., October 10, 14, 19 and 31.
18. A lively and penetrating account of this struggle is contained in Tris Coffin’s The Missouri Compromise, Boston, 1947. See pp. 218–24.
19. Ibid., pp. 223–5.
20. UP dispatch, the Nashville Tennessean, March 13, 1945.
21. The New York Times, March 15, 1946; the Nashville Tennessean, March 13, 1946.
22. The New York Times, March 28, April 12, 1946.
23. Ibid., April 3, 1946.
24. Coffin, op. cit., p. 234.
25. Ibid., p. 233; the New York Times, June 20, 1946.
26. Hanson W. Baldwin, military expert of the New York Times, “Two Great Delusions About the A-Bomb,” the Times Magazine, July 10, 1949, pp. 9 and 32.
27. For texts, see the New York Herald Tribune, August 7, 1946. Also Byrnes, Speaking Frankly, pp. 138–55.
28. Byrnes, op. cit., pp. 153–4.
29. Walter Lippmann, New York Herald Tribune, October 15, 1946.
30. New York Herald Tribune, October 29, 31, 1946.
31. John G. Rogers, New York Herald Tribune, November 28, 1946.
32. The New York Times, November 29, 1946.
33. B.A.S., January 1947, pp. 6–8.
34. The New York Times, December 6, 1946.
35. UP dispatch, Buffalo Evening News, December 20, 1946.
36. Thomas J. Hamilton, the Toronto Globe and Mail, December 24, 1946.
37. Peter Kihss, New York Herald Tribune, December 27, 1946.
38. Ibid., December 28, 1946; the New York Times, December 28, 1946.
39. New York Herald Tribune, December 31, 1946.
40. Walter Lippmann, New York Herald Tribune, December 31, 1946.
41. B.A.S., March, 1947.
42. Ibid., p. 42.
43. Ibid., June, 1947, p. 139; July, 1947, p. 192.
44. New York Herald Tribune Weekly Book Review, May 29, 1949.
45. B.A.S., August, 1947, p. 219.
46. Ibid., May, 1948.
47. Ibid., June, 1948.
48. Editorial, B.A.S., November, 1948.
49. B.A.S., January, 1949, p. 9.
50. B.A.S., November, 1948.
51. Ibid., July, 1948, pp. 205–10.
52. Ibid., December, 1948, p. 355.
53. Ibid., December, 1948, p. 365.
54. Ibid., September, 1948, p. 258.
55. New York Herald Tribune, May 1, 1949.
56. New York Herald Tribune, April 18, 1949.
Within a few days the following report of “Man Eater Cannon’s” lucubrations appeared in every newspaper in the Soviet Union: “With the signing of the North Atlantic pact we received the necessary bases. The only thing we now need is planes to deliver the bomb. We must deal a blow at Moscow and other cities of Russia within a week after the beginning of a future war. In three weeks we must turn into ruins every military center of the Soviet Union. It is unnecessary for us to send our troops there in a future war as we did during the last one. We must equip soldiers of other countries and let them send their youth to death instead of our sending our youth there.”
57. The Philadelphia Record reported, on February 13, an attendance of 500 at the dinner. The report of Dr. Jordan’s speech was headlined: “Use Atom Bomb As Police Club, Speaker Urges.”
58. James P. Warburg, Last Call for Common Sense, New York, Harcourt Brace, 1949, p. 19.
59. George Fielding Eliot, If Russia Strikes, Indianapolis, Bobbs-Merrill, 1949, pp. 235, 213, 206–52.
60. Ibid., pp. 21, 251.
61. George Fielding Eliot, op. cit., pp. 240–2.
62. Quoted by Max Werner in the Daily Compass, New York, July 1, 1949.
63. Ibid., July 1, 1949.
64. J. F. C. Fuller, The Second World War: a Strategical and Tactical History, New York, 1949, p. 411; London, Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1948.
65. The New York Times, June 28, 1949.
66. A radio interview printed in full in the American Mercury, June 1949. Smith said flatly that “life wouldn’t be worth living” if there wasn’t hope that we could come to a basic understanding with the Russians. Nevertheless, the New York Times on April 15, 1949, reported that Smith “indicated tonight that he believed the odds favored eventual war with Russia unless the Communists change their tune.” See Harpers Magazine, August 1949, p. 30.
67. Liddell Hart, The Revolution in Warfare, p. 72; London, Faber, 1946.
68. See also Air Marshal Sir Arthur Harris, Bomber Offensive, London, Collins, 1947, and Air Chief Marshal, Lord Tedder, Air Power in War, London, Hodder, 1948.
69. Blackett, op. cit., p. 14.
70. George Fielding Eliot, op. cit., pp. 178, 170–205.
71. Stefan T. Possony, Strategic Air Power, Toronto, 1949, pp. 32–3, 137.
72. J. F. C. Fuller, op. cit. pp. 234–5. Of course the advent of the H-bomb removed all doubt about bombing being the cheap and efficient way to destroy an enemy—and all his cities.
73. L. MacLean, The Fighting Forces, December 1948. Quoted by Hanson W. Baldwin, the New York Times, August 8, 1949.
74. The quotations from the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey are taken from an article by Hanson W. Baldwin in the New York Times, August 8, 1949, p. 14.
75. Ibid.
76. “U.S. Strategie Survey Bombing Reports,” quoted by Joseph E. Loftus in the Scientific Monthly for May, 1949, p. 317.
77. Hanson W. Baldwin, “What Kind of War?” Atlantic Monthly, July, 1949, p. 27.
78. The New York Times, July 25, 1949.
79. N. F. Mott, “Can Atomic Weapons Keep the Peace?” B.A.S., January, 1949, pp. 11–12.
80. Revealing a main source of his deep uneasiness, Mott said that a glance at the American Press would show that if war came “it is in the first instance by strategic bombing that the United States will wage it.”
81. The New York Times, May 24, 1949.
82. The Washington Post, May 14, 24, 26 and 27, 1949.
83. Walter Lippmann, the Washington Post, June 14, 1949.
84. Hanson W. Baldwin, military expert of the New York Times, in the Times, May 26, 29, 1949.
85. Quoted in The Control of Atomic Energy by James R. Newman and Byron S. Miller, New York, McGraw, 1948, p. 15; London, MacGraw, 1948. This is an excellent account of the organization and work of the USAEC. It includes a copy of the Atomic Energy Act in the Appendix.
86. The New York Times, May 30, 1949.
87. Ibid., August 6, 1949.
88. Ibid., May 29, 1949.
89. Ibid., May 18, 1949.
90. The New York Times, May 26, 1949.
91. The Washington Post, June 6, 1949.
92. Samuel Grafton, New York Post, June 8, 1949.
93. See also the authoritative article by Edwin L. James in the Sunday edition of the New York Times, July 17, 1949.
94. The New York Times, July 24, 1949.
95. Ibid., July 25, 1949.
96. Ibid., July 28, 1949. This pledge was sufficient for Senator Knowland, but Senator Wherry of Nebraska, Republican whip of the Senate, promptly demanded a law forbidding the President to disclose atomic information to our allies without the express authorization of Congress. Wherry made it plain that the Truman-Acheson statement was only a gentlemen’s agreement. That was not enough. It was his understanding that the President was “free to disclose to Socialist-ridden foreign governments the dearly bought secrets of the atomic bomb.”—Ibid., August 1, 1949.
97. J. R. Newman and B. S. Miller, op. cit., p. 14.
98. Hanson W. Baldwin, “Two Great Delusions about the Bomb,” The New York Times Magazine, July 10, 1949.
99. Dr. Hutchins’ address was published in full in a number of newspapers by the International Latex Corporation. See the Washington Post, June 30, 1949.
100. The Washington Post, May 31, 1949.
101. Hanson W. Baldwin, Atlantic Monthly, July 1949, p. 26.