Hiroshima_ The World's Bomb - Andrew J. Rotter [169]
EIGHT - The World’s Bomb
From mutual suspicion between the United States and the Soviet Union came tension, rivalry, and finally Cold War. An arms race, conventional and nuclear, precipitated out of that. Both of the powers demanded loyalty of the nations on their side of the Cold War barrier, and these nations in turn, having chosen a side or having been compelled, by force or persuasion, to join one, required from their citizens dedication to the Cold War cause. The alliance system that had emerged by the mid-1950s—the North Atlantic Treaty for the United States and its allies, the Warsaw Pact for the Soviet-dominated world—triggered a psychological turning inward by people seeking to maintain their autonomy in an international system that threatened to dissolve the bonds of nationhood. (Renewed affection for one’s country was in any case widespread following the liberation of nations from German and Japanese occupation and the growing antipathy for colonialism.) And, in the shadow of the powers’ arms race, men and women around the world feared for their safety, now apparently in the hands of officials residing in Washington and Moscow. There was, thus, a natural temptation on the part of smaller or less powerful nations to explore the possibility of building nuclear weapons. Scientific curiosity promoted the pursuit; national pride predicted it; the desire for control of one’s own security gave it logic and urgency. As neither the Americans, as the Baruch Plan indicated, nor the Soviets, despite a bit of rhetorical generosity toward fellow Communist states, seemed interested in sharing control of nuclear-weapons development, governments elsewhere began to consider nuclear programs of their own.
Scientists were recruited for this purpose, or in some cases recruited themselves and pressured their governments to act. In the United States, many came to see the Cold War as a continuation of the Second World War, with the Soviets replacing the Nazis. There remained dissenters, as we will see, physicists and chemists who clung to the hope of international control of atomic energy or even the creation of a world government. Still, what Robert Gilpin has called the ‘containment school’ of scientists assumed greater prominence in the nuclear field. The Americans plucked from defeated Germany scientists they felt might stimulate their nuclear progress, and whose capture by the Russians might dangerously tip the nuclear balance east. This recruitment effort, codenamed by its military sponsors ‘Operation Paperclip’, made it clear to the Germans, many of whom had worked on ‘reprisal weapons’ before May 1945, that bygones were bygones and no hard questions would be asked about their previous political affiliations—though the US government did hope it would not be necessary to recruit ‘ardent Nazis’. The Soviets, for their part, snatched whatever German scientists they could. Elsewhere, scientists who had before and during the war been involved in studying the nucleus resumed their work, often determined to do for their countries what American scientists had done and Soviet scientists would do for theirs. Beginning in 1946, scientists in the employ of their governments once more immersed themselves in the growing literature of the bomb. The British, the French, the Israelis, South Africans, Chinese, and Indians all moved thereafter, with various degrees of speed, to hunt nearby sources of uranium, to buy or manufacture moderators for nuclear reactors or the reactors themselves, to solve problems of initiators and implosion lenses and the derivation of plutonium, and finally to imagine themselves in possession of a nuclear weapon, with all the strategic and moral dilemmas such a condition would present.
Along with this nationalist involution, there was at the same time a countertendency among the world’s scientists to restore the borderless ‘scientific republic’ of the interwar