Hiroshima_ The World's Bomb - Andrew J. Rotter [102]
Truman had his first meeting with Stalin that same day. After apologizing for arriving in Potsdam a day later than expected—he had been ill, and had been negotiating with the Chinese—Stalin raised a number of issues, and declared that his armies would be ready to go to war with Japan by mid-August, providing an agreement on territorial concessions could be reached with the Chinese. The meeting lasted two hours. Afterwards, Truman seemed satisfied, recording in his diary that Stalin was ‘honest— but smart as hell’, and a man he could ‘deal with’. Still not altogether sure of the magnitude of the Trinity test, the President appeared pleased to have Stalin’s pledge of help: ‘FiniJaps when that comes about,’ he wrote, though it may have been that his expectation of Japan’s demise had to do not only with the anticipated Soviet intervention (assuming successful negotiations with China) but with the use of atomic bombs even sooner.50
As reports from Alamogordo continued to arrive in Potsdam, carried dutifully by Stimson to Truman, Byrnes, and Churchill, the President’s confidence rose, and so did his doubts about the need for Soviet involvement in the war. By the 18th, Truman seemed to Stimson ‘greatly reenforced’ in his determination to make the Soviets see reason. The next day, as he boasted to Bess, he managed a ‘tough meeting’ with the Russians when he ‘reared up... and told ’em where to get off and they got off’. Having received a final, detailed report on Trinity on the 21st, Truman turned even more bumptious, quarreling vigorously with Stalin on Germany and the political future of Eastern Europe. Churchill was surprised at Truman’s performance—until Stimson gave him a copy of the latest Trinity report the following day. ‘Now I know what happened to Truman yesterday,’ the Prime Minister said. ‘When he got to the meeting after having read this report he was a changed man. He told the Russians just where they got on and off and generally bossed the whole meeting.’ It was not just the President’s attitude that had changed. Prodded by Byrnes, he now made it clear that he was disinclined to bend to Soviet demands, ‘apparently’, Stimson wrote privately, because he was ‘relying greatly upon the information as to Si’. The bomb meant, perhaps, that the Soviets would get less than they wanted from China—control of Outer Mongolia and the railways in Manchuria and leaseholds on the cities of Dairen and Port Arthur—that they would prove yielding in their occupied zones of Eastern Europe and Germany, and that, assuming the bomb ended the war quickly, they would not, in Byrnes’s words, ‘get so much in on the kill’ and thereby have only a small role to play in the post-surrender occupation of Japan.51
While the British, then, were promptly and fully informed about the Trinity test, the Russians were not, and the question remained: what, if anything, should they be told? Stimson and others thought Stalin should hear something about the bomb from official sources. Jimmy Byrnes wanted to stonewall, to let the Russians find out when others did, after the bomb had been dropped. Truman decided on a sort of compromise, though one tipped toward Byrnes’s position. At 7.30 in the evening of 24 July, the eighth plenary session of the Potsdam conference took a recess. Instructing Bohlen, his Russian interpreter, to stay put, Truman walked across the room to Stalin, turned him away from the group, and told him, with a casualness that was clearly strained, that the United States had ‘a new weapon of unusual destructive force