Bomb Scare: The History and Future of Nuclear Weapons

Soon after using the bomb, President Harry Truman began wrestling with how to control it. “The hope of civilization,” he said in his message to Congress in October 1945, “lies in international arrangements looking, if possible, to the renunciation of the use and development of the atomic bomb.” In November 1945, Truman advanced the first government nonproliferation plan when he joined with British Prime Minister Clement Attlee and Canadian Prime Minister Mackenzie King to propose to the new United Nations that all atomic weapons be eliminated and that nuclear technology for peaceful purposes be shared under strict international controls, implemented by a UN Atomic Energy Commission. By 1946, he had a detailed plan that included many of the nuclear nonproliferation proposals still debated today, including a ban on the production of any new weapons or the fissile material for weapons, international control of nuclear fuel, a strict inspection regime, and complete nuclear disarmament. Truman was not alone in considering new policies that might be able to stop the spread of this terrible new weapon. In fact, the origins of this first U.S. plan can be found in the troubled conversations some atomic scientists held in the closing days of the war.

A-bomb research was conducted primarily in Los Alamos, while scientists at the Manhattan Project’s Metallurgical Laboratory in Chicago focused on the production of fissile materials that would form the core of the explosive device. In December 1942, the first test nuclear reactor went critical in the squash courts under the stadium at the University of Chicago. While Los Alamos raced to finish the bomb, by the spring of 1945 work at Chicago had slowed and scientists were drawn to thoughts of the future. That June, when the defeat of Nazi Germany eliminated the major reason why many of the scientists had rallied to the atomic project, Chicago physicist and Nobel laureate James Franck formed a committee to consider the implications of the bomb. It included Eugene Rabinowitch, the ultimate drafter of the report (and later that year a founder of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists) and Leo Szilard, who agonized about its use on Japan after Hitler’s defeat. They were increasingly concerned about the uncontrolled spread of atomic energy and the moral implications of using the atomic bomb.

The scientists warned that the United States could not rely on its current advantage in atomic weaponry. Nuclear research would not be an American monopoly for long, and secrecy would not mean protection. Staying ahead in production was also a false source of security, since a “quantitative advantage in reserves of bottled destructive power will not make us safe from sudden attack.” If no international agreement were developed after the first detonation of the bomb, they concluded, then there would be a “flying start of an unlimited armaments race.”¹

The report identified nuclear materials as the critical choke point. The scientists believed that the rationing of uranium ores could be the simplest way to control nuclear technology. Under an international agreement, uranium could be accounted for, and there would be a check on the conversion of natural uranium into fissile material. Any international agreement must, they said, be backed by controls: “No paper agreement can be sufficient since neither this or any other nation can stake its whole existence on trust in other nations’ signatures.”

The Franck report also argued that the use of the bomb on Japan without warning would have both moral and political repercussions:

It will be very difficult to persuade the world that a nation which was capable of secretly preparing and suddenly releasing a weapon, as indiscriminate as the rocket bomb and a thousand times more destructive, is to be trusted in its proclaimed desire of having such weapons abolished by international agreement.

After a discussion of the Franck report in mid-June, the interim committee decided that the technical demonstration pushed by the scientists would not convince Japan to surrender. It did not seriously consider the recommendations on international control of atomic energy.

But the Chicago scientists had hit upon a core truth: preventing proliferation had to be a universally accepted political solution; the science of nuclear technology could not be otherwise contained. They could not have been more clear:

We urge that the use of nuclear bombs in this war be considered as a problem of long-range national policy rather than military expediency, and that this policy be directed primarily to the achievement of an agreement permitting an effective international control of the means of nuclear warfare.

This impulse found new life after the war. The Truman-Attlee-King proposal to form a commission was adopted by the United Nations in December 1945. On June 14, 1946, the United States representative to the commission, conservative financier Bernard Baruch, presented the nation’s detailed recommendations. At the United Nations, Baruch was nothing if not dramatic. “We are here to make a choice between the quick and the dead,” he said. “That is our business. . . . If we fail, then we have damned every man to be the slave of fear.”

Baruch based his plan on the Acheson-Lilienthal report, which had been submitted to President Truman by Undersecretary of State Dean Acheson and U.S. Atomic Energy Commission Chairman David Lilienthal in March 1946. The plan sought to establish an International Atomic Development Authority that would own and control all “dangerous” elements of the nuclear fuel cycle, including all uranium mining, processing, conversion, and enrichment facilities. Only “non-dangerous” activities would be allowed on a national level, and even then only with a license granted by the proposed International Authority. Baruch reasoned that this structure would make verification relatively simple since the mere possession of a uranium conversion or enrichment plant by a national authority would be a clear violation. Baruch’s version of the plan also included automatic punishment for violations, which went a step further than the recommendations of Acheson and Lilienthal.²

Since the objective of the Baruch Plan was not only to restrain the spread of nuclear weapons, but also to prevent an arms race and eliminate the bomb altogether, it proposed that once the International Authority could ensure that no other state was able to construct the bomb, the United States would guarantee the elimination of its entire nuclear stockpile.

Approved by the UN Atomic Energy Commission on December 31, 1946, the plan was opposed by the Soviet Union in the UN Security Council. Stalin saw the bomb as more than a weapon. It was also a symbol of industrial might, scientific accomplishment, and national prestige. Stalin told his scientists, “Hiroshima has shaken the whole world. The balance has been broken. Build the Bomb—it will remove the great danger from us.”³

Stalin was not about to accept any plan that limited Soviet national sovereignty and that might have locked in, even if only for a short time, America’s nuclear advantage. Knowing that the Americans would refuse, the Soviets proposed that any agreement require Washington to disarm prior to the establishment of some form of international authority.

Stalin was right. Truman and Baruch would not compromise. There was a growing sense among prominent American officials that the United States should retain a nuclear monopoly. Leslie Groves argued that the Soviets would not be able to build the bomb for one to two more decades. Secretary of State James Byrnes saw the bomb as a trump card in meetings with Stalin and Soviet Foreign Minister V. M. Molotov. Even Baruch came to believe that the plan could only be accepted on its own terms since “America can get what it wants if she insists on it. After all, we’ve got it and they haven’t.”⁴

The combination of Soviet opposition and growing faith in the sustainability of American superiority proved too much for the Baruch Plan. For a brief time in 1946, this revolutionary vision to abolish the ultimate weapon seemed within reach. In a matter of months, it was defunct.

Historian David Holloway and others argue persuasively that even if Truman had followed physicist and Nobel laureate Niels Bohr’s advice to tell the Soviets about the bomb before it was built, Stalin would still have pursued a Russian bomb. “As the most powerful symbol of American economic and technological might, the atomic bomb was ipso facto something the Soviet Union had to have too,” Holloway writes. ⁵ In fact, by the time of the Baruch Plan, Russia was seriously committed to her atomic bomb project.

The Soviet effort commenced with little fanfare in 1943. Stalin did not expect the bomb to be ready in time to influence the war with Germany, and the nuclear program was instead started as “a rather small hedge against future uncertainties.”⁶ The head of the Soviet project, physicist Igor Kurchatov, struggled to attain both the fissile materials and the political support necessary to speed up development of the bomb. Even in the spring and summer of 1945, Stalin remained skeptical. When Truman cryptically mentioned a “new weapon of unusual destructive force” at the Potsdam Conference in July 1945, Stalin most likely understood the atomic bomb reference.⁷ But the reality of the weapon as a tool of both destruction and diplomacy was not apparent to Stalin until the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.⁸

Moscow’s effort was greatly accelerated following the end of World War II. Stalin was determined, and he spared no expense, telling his nuclear scientists, “Ask for whatever you like. You won’t be refused.”⁹ Thrown full force into a greatly expanded nuclear program, Soviet scientists knew they were several years behind the Americans. But they also had a significant advantage: the U.S. had shown it could be done. The American design, while not the most efficient, was successful, and the Soviet Union did not have time to take chances. Soviet intelligence provided scientists with the key elements of the American bomb design.¹⁰ But as the source of the bomb design was kept secret, experimental results had to be reconstructed and steps retraced. Apart from Kurchatov and a few other select members of the project, Soviet physicists did not know they were working on copied designs.

It took the U.S.S.R. four years to catch up, achieving the bomb in almost the exact same time it took the U.S.¹¹ The first Soviet nuclear test took place on August 29, 1949. The test was set up in remote Kazakhstan, at a site known as Semipalatinsk-21. The area around the settlement, later renamed after Kurchatov, was to be the site of over 450 nuclear tests through the course of the Cold War.

The American monopoly was over. For Stalin, the bomb wasn’t a threat to all of humanity, but rather a source of security and power. Truman saw it more than ever as a tool to contain Stalin and preserve American security. He ordered a rapid increase in the then small U.S. atomic arsenal.

Atomic weapons were becoming the currency of power. Policy was increasingly influenced by the strong belief in the diplomatic utility of these new weapons. As we will see later, this view retains a powerful hold on policy makers in many countries today. It began early on, as some within the U.S. government argued that dropping the bomb on Japan would also have a deterrent effect on the Soviet Union. The Soviets understood this, but did not respond as predicted. Molotov said years later that the Soviets rejected the Baruch Plan because they believed that the bombs dropped on Japan “were, of course, not against Japan but against the Soviet Union: ‘See, remember what we have. You don’t have the atomic bomb, but we do—and these are what the consequences will be if you stir.’ Well, we had to adopt our tone, to give some kind of answer, so that our people would feel more or less confident.”¹²

The idea that political power comes from the barrel of a gun-assembly fission bomb took hold in both American and Soviet policy. Even James Conant, the president of Harvard who had overseen the Manhattan Project and was a voice for nuclear restraint, wrote Henry L. Stimson in 1947, “I am firmly convinced that the Russians will eventually agree to the American proposals for the establishment of an atomic energy authority of world-wide scope, provided they are convinced that we would have the bomb in quantity and would use it without hesitation in another war” (emphasis in original).¹³ But Conant was wrong. The American shift to more and bigger bombs did not convince the Soviets to forgo their own arsenal. Instead, it encouraged Moscow to respond in kind.