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By Root 1096 0

found valuable for keeping their physicists on the right track. Physicists to some extent resumed their travels after the war, and while their governments’ sensitivities made them watch their words, they could not and did not totally abjure old habits of candor and collaboration. Truman’s successor, Dwight Eisenhower, shared some of Truman’s secretiveness about nuclear matters—he would not, for instance, endorse a ban on testing more powerful and innovative hydrogen bombs in 1952 because, he said of the Soviets, ‘they could make tremendous advances where we would be standing still’. But Eisenhower also conceived the ‘Atoms for Peace’ initiative that resulted in the creation, in 1957, of the United Nations’ International Atomic Energy Agency, and thereafter the distribution of US nuclear equipment to nations seeking the benefits of peaceful nuclear power. Eisenhower seemed to recognize, as had an editorialist for the New York Times just two days after the bombing of Nagasaki, that ‘the very nature of science makes secrecy impossible’ and that eventually ‘all military powers will recruit enough scientists to develop their own atomic bombs’.3

That, of course, is precisely what happened during the half century following the end of the Second World War. Nations fashioned nuclear programs for different reasons: fear of annihilation was prominent among them, but also present were scientific curiosity and ego, bureaucratic momentum (like the kind that took the Americans seamlessly from research to testing to use of the bomb against the Japanese), a desire to prove masculine toughness, an interest in creating substantial diplomatic bargaining chips, and, perhaps above all if difficult to substantiate, a growing sense across the globe that atomic weapons conferred status. The British and French empires were shrinking. Smaller states, including Israel and South Africa, were more and more criticized for their treatment of nonwhite majorities or minorities, and risked becoming pariahs. China felt threatened by the United States and, increasingly, the Soviet Union, and its supreme leader, Mao Zedong, concluded that his revolutionary regime would not gain international stature until it developed a bomb of its own. India felt threatened by China and Pakistan, and Indian scientists and political leaders thought they were not being taken seriously by their counterparts in the West; they decided that possession of a nuclear device might win them respect.

1. Great Britain

Let us begin with Britain. In 1933 Harold Nicolson had imagined that Britain was first to fashion an atomic bomb, monopolizing its fuel, Deposit A, and testing the weapon in the North Atlantic, inadvertently wiping out much of South Carolina into the bargain. The British were among the world’s leaders in nuclear physics before the war, and with the Frisch-Peierls memorandum and the formation of the MAUD Committee in 1941 they became the first to contemplate seriously building an atomic weapon. Marcus Oliphant carried to the United States his message of urgency late that summer. Following a period of coolness in late 1941 and early 1942, resulting from a British belief that they were ahead of the Americans in caring about a bomb and planning for it, the British government had resumed attempts to collaborate with the Americans and hoped for a full sharing of information concerning nuclear matters. Prime Minister Churchill thought he had achieved a partnership with agreements with President Roosevelt at Hyde Park in June 1942 and Quebec in August 1943. The admission of a British scientific team at Los Alamos late that year was useful and promising.

Yet uncertainty remained—or Churchill’s doubts did, and Roosevelt’s vagueness, and his advisers’ (especially Groves’s) skepticism concerning the desirability of collaboration. Churchill went to Hyde Park again in September 1944 seeking greater clarity. There he and FDR produced a brief aide-memoire. It contained three points. First, it rejected the pleas of Niels Bohr that the ‘secret’ of the bomb be shared with the Russians