• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1275 0

translator’s job. He now refused all scientific counsel on the bomb, because, as he told Bush, ‘I know all I want[ ] to know. It went boom and it killed millions of people.’ Appalled at what he considered Acheson-Lilienthal’s generosity toward the non-nuclear world and especially the Soviets, Baruch translated the report by transforming it. He emphasized, in his amendments, the need for inspections, sanctions levied against wrongdoers, and maintenance, during an indeterminate process of divulging atomic ‘secrets’ to something called the International Atomic Energy Authority (IAEA), of a virtual veto on decisionmaking by the United States. Under his plan (for it soon gained independent status as the ‘Baruch Plan’), presented to the United Nations in June 1946, ‘the Americans would still retain their arsenal of atomic weapons long after the Russians had surrendered the crucial information about their raw materials sources and the state of their research and development’, as Daniel Yergin has written. In the midst of the UN debate on the American plan on 1 July, the United States tested an air-dropped atomic bomb at Bikini atoll in the South Pacific. Missing its target, the worn out battleship Nevada, by 2 miles, the bomb nevertheless impressively went boom. The test seemed to punctuate Baruch’s intention to retain an atomic monopoly for as long as possible. The Soviets counterproposed with the destruction of existing nuclear weapons, the retention of national control over nuclear weapons’ programs, and the endurance of individual vetoes on the IAEA. By September Baruch, who refused to bend on his proposal, admitted to Truman that talks had reached an impasse, and by the year’s end, as Gregg Herken has put it, ‘the atomic curtain had been firmly rung down’. The Russians applied the coup de grace with a veto in the Security Council.34

So the Americans would go it alone, testing weapons openly at Bikini in the summer of 1946 and again, at Eniewetok atoll in the Marshall Islands, in the spring of 1948. The latter series of tests in particular signaled to the Soviets that the United States had enough atomic bombs to afford the luxury of detonating three of them just to see how well they worked—and indeed one of them yielded 49 kilotons, easily the most powerful bomb yet. The Russians, and for that matter the British and others, could glean what clues they wanted from the tests, but there would be no decision to release atomic information. ‘It was [Baruch’s] ball, and he balled it up,’ wrote a disgusted Acheson. The United States hid behind Groves’s misplaced faith that the Soviets were years away from developing a bomb, hoping, somehow, that its nuclear monopoly would preserve its security and that of Western Europe, hoping, somehow, that its scientists had caught lightning in a bottle, a feat of genius, technology, and good luck that would be impossible for others to duplicate.35

This was wishful folly. But so too, in all likelihood, was the hope of Stimson, Lilienthal, and Acheson that an international agreement that envisioned, even in the short run, an American nuclear monopoly might dissuade Josef Stalin from building his own bomb. In the way that the American decision to drop the bomb on an enemy’s city was largely determined by Franklin Roosevelt’s decision to develop the bomb in the first place, so also was the Soviets’ resolve to make a bomb of their own established with unbreakable momentum by Stalin in August 1945, and perhaps even with Stalin’s authorization of a small nuclear project in spring 1943. The bomb was central to the Cold War; the Soviet leadership felt it as acutely as did the American. Stalin was not certain that the atomic bomb would prove, in itself, a militarily decisive weapon in a future war. Officials from the Soviet embassy in Tokyo who visited Hiroshima in September 1945 reported that, although destruction was great and death plentiful from the bomb, the effects of the bomb generally had been exaggerated by the Japanese press. Of course, as long as the Russians lacked the bomb they tried to reassure