Hiroshima_ The World's Bomb - Andrew J. Rotter [159]
But as time went on and no more came from the West, disappointment turned to irritation and, when the bomb seemed to them to become an instrument of policy, into spleen. It was clear that the West did not trust them. This seemed to justify and it quickened all their old suspicions. It was a humiliation also and the thought of this stirred up memories of the past.
‘We may assume’, Kerr concluded, ‘that all these emotions were fully shared by the Kremlin.’ It was a safe assumption. David Holloway has written: ‘As the most powerful symbol ofAmerican economic and technological might, the atomic bomb was ipso facto something the Soviet Union had to have too.’ Thus, even if the United States had made a good-faith effort to share the bomb with the Soviets—and the Acheson-Lilienthal plan, whatever its inadequacies and notwithstanding its hijacking by Baruch, was such an effort—the Soviet project to develop the bomb would have continued apace. ‘Stalin’, concludes Holloway, ‘would still have wanted a bomb of his own.’38
The Soviets did not immediately publicize the successful test of ‘Stalin’s Rocket Engine’. An American B-29 airborne just east of Soviet Kamchatka on 3 September registered a sharp spike in atmospheric radioactivity on its test filter paper. For several days American and British pilots and scientists chased the cloud as it spread in both directions from Kazakhstan. Officials in Washington were informed on the 9th. Louis Johnson, the Secretary of Defense, refused to believe the Russians had detonated an atomic bomb, first dismissing the intelligence that indicated it, then deciding that a Russian reactor must have exploded. Truman also refused to believe it, or rather to accept that it had happened. Like Johnson, he doubted the intelligence; when persuaded of its accuracy, he told Lilienthal that ‘German scientists in Russia did it’. When Lilienthal pressed, the President agreed to authorize the appointment of a committee of experts to sift the evidence. Bush was made the chair, but he relied heavily on Oppenheimer’s expertise. A year earlier, Oppenheimer had told Time magazine that the US ‘atomic monopoly is like a cake of ice melting in the sun’. Now, after meeting for five hours on 19 September, the committee concluded that the ice had become water. Lilienthal carried this finding to Truman. Still disbelieving, the President wanted Lilienthal and the other committee members to sign a statement ‘to the effect [that] they really believed the Russians had done it’. Four days later, Truman announced that ‘an atomic explosion’— he still hoped it might have been a reactor—had ‘occurred in the USSR’.39
6. Call/response: Developing the ‘super’
In December 1945 a group of physical and social scientists at the University of Chicago published the first edition of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists of Chicago, though the city name was soon dropped from the title. The readership of the Bulletin remained small, but the journal gained public attention in June 1947, when editors placed on its cover the Doomsday Clock, whose minute hand indicated the level of crisis then facing the world. Hands at midnight meant nuclear war; in mid-1947 the editors showed the time as seven minutes to midnight. Following Truman’s announcement of the Soviet atomic-bomb test, the large hand moved forward four minutes. The changed situation was reflected as well in the reaction in the scientific community. I. I. Rabi thought the Russian shot ‘brought the prospect of war much closer’. William Golden,