Hiroshima_ The World's Bomb - Andrew J. Rotter [155]
The atomic bomb played a role in the onset and intensification of the Cold War. ‘Before the atom bomb was used, I would have said, yes, I was sure we could keep the peace with Russia,’ said Dwight Eisenhower after visiting Moscow just after the war ended. ‘Now I don’t know... People are frightened and disturbed all over. Everyone feels insecure again.’ The bomb, argue Gar Alperovitz and Kai Bird, was ‘a primary catalyst of the Cold War’, not only initiating a dangerous arms race between the adversaries but enabling the American reconstruction of West Germany along capitalist lines, easing US strategic concerns for Western Europe enough to permit American interventions in Korea and Vietnam, and broadly negating any possibility of accommodation between the two powers because of Soviet suspicions regarding the bomb’s use and American efforts to preserve its secrets. Certainly the bomb lurked like a specter at the table during every Cold War colloquy. Certainly, too, the Soviets and Americans, along with their friends, allies, and international subordinates, regarded the bomb as an ominous presence even in their day-to-day affairs. Molotov’s weirdly jovial exchange with Byrnes—‘I’m going to pull an atomic bomb out of my hip pocket and let you have it’, Byrnes ‘joked’—in September 1945 indicated the Soviets’ acute consciousness of the bomb’s influence. ‘Atomic bombs’, Stalin told a British journalist a year later, ‘were meant to frighten those with weak nerves’, implying that his nerves were steady but perhaps leaving the opposite impression. In January 1948 he told the Yugoslav diplomat Milovan Djilas that the bomb was ‘a powerful thing, pow-er-ful!’ Djilas thought Stalin’s expression ‘full of admiration’. When six months later Stalin ordered a land blockade of Berlin, the United States responded with an airlift ofsupplies to the beleaguered residents of the West and, more pointedly, by sending sixty B-29s to bases in Britain. While the bombers were not armed with nuclear bombs nor even equipped to carry them, the Truman administration maintained a studied silence about these facts. Perhaps the presence of the bombers in Europe made Stalin more cautious than he otherwise would have been; in any event, he ended the blockade in May 1949. It is plausible that the B-29s reminded him, if a reminder was needed, that the Americans had the bomb and at that point he did not.31
The Americans, too, were keenly aware of their monopoly of the bomb from 1945 to 1949. Rationally, it was not always clear that it provided them with a strategic advantage in the Cold War. Some derided the possibility of maintaining the ‘secret’ of the bomb for any length of time, in spite of Groves’s optimistic (and continually sliding) estimate that the Soviets would not have the bomb for decades. Stimson knew the ‘secret’ would not last and thus proposed, in his memo of 11 September 1945 to the President, that information about the bomb should be shared with the Russians. Henry Wallace, the Secretary of Commerce until Truman fired him in September 1946, noted that research on the nucleus had ‘originated in Europe ...It was impossible to bottle the thing up no matter how much we tried.’ Vannevar Bush, director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development and leading scientific adviser on the Manhattan Project, told Truman in September that the atomic