CHAPTER 3

FACE-TO-FACE

During World War II, U.S. and Soviet forces never fought side by side; Hitler—the common enemy—had been squeezed between two distinct fronts. On April 25, 1945, the U.S. and Soviet armies converged in southeast Germany at the River Elbe, about eighty miles south of Berlin. The Red Army troops arriving in Torgau had fought across Poland and what is now the Czech Republic. The American soldiers had crossed the Rhine, captured Frankfurt, and claimed the industrial Ruhr Valley.

As soldiers from both nations began pouring into Torgau, the two armies united like brothers in arms. There were hugs. There were kisses. American veteran Ben Casmere recalled, “I never kissed so many men in my life.” The First Ukrainian Front broke out their accordions and balalaikas. The Russians hosted a feast, serving macaroni, salami, small raw fish, raw fat, meat covered with dough, black bread, hard-boiled eggs, hot chocolate, and cookies. Dancing commenced. Thousands of toasts were punctuated by swigs of beer and shots of vodka.

“Every time I took a drink from my glass, the fellow behind me would refill it,” said H. W. (Bill) Shank, who was a first lieutenant in the 104th Mechanized Cavalry Reconnaissance Troop. “Wishing to appear equal to my Russian hosts, I kept pouring the stuff into my boot.”

Added Lieutenant Shank, “Of all the experiences in my life, finding and meeting the Russians was the most memorable. The war made people love each other so much when it was finally over. If everyone intermingled—like we did when we linked up with the Russians—there could be no war.”

Two weeks later, on May 9, 1945, less than four years after Hitler’s forces had loomed within miles of the walls of the Kremlin, Soviet radio reported Germany’s surrender at 1:10 a.m. Despite the hour, people flocked into the streets of Moscow by the millions. Searchlights panned the sky. Fireworks and cannon shells exploded above Red Square. A Soviet captain was overheard saying, “Pora jit” (“It’s time to live”). Within twenty-four hours, there would not be a drop of vodka left in the Soviet capital.

With Soviet ambassador Averell Harriman out of the country, George Kennan was the ranking American diplomat in the city. To his amazement, a massive crowd gathered in the enormous square in front of the U.S. embassy. “They crowd up against our wall in thousands, waving and cheering—they cannot be induced to go anywhere else,” Kennan later wrote. “After some hours of this, I, being in charge of the embassy at that moment, feel it necessary to acknowledge in some way this great demonstration of goodwill; and I go out onto one of the pedestals of the high pilasters on the front of the building and say a few simple words to the crowd in Russian, congratulating them on the common day of victory. They love it and roar their approval.”

Later that same month, Dwight Eisenhower expressed confidence about maintaining a peaceful relationship with the Soviet Union. He noted how, in 1941, American and British forces had to work through an often heated culture clash. “As we dealt with each other, we learned the British ways and they learned ours,” he wrote. “Now the Russians, who have had relatively little contact with the Americans and British, do not understand us, nor do we them. The more contact we have with the Russians, the more they will understand us and the greater will be the cooperation.” Speaking a few months later before Congress, Eisenhower reasserted the opinion: “Russia has not the slightest thing to gain by a struggle with the United States.”

It bears noting that the majority of Americans at the time shared Ike’s view. A poll taken in the summer of 1945 indicated that 60 percent expressed confidence about cooperation between Russia and the Western Allies. But even before the war against Japan had ended, prominent voices returned to framing the world as capitalism versus communism, the God-fearing versus the atheists, the forces of light battling the forces of darkness.

“The Soviet Union,” Life cautioned, “is the number one problem for Americans because it is the only country in the world with the dynamic power to challenge our own conceptions of truth, justice, and the good life.” The Catholic Mind warned its readers about “wishful thinking” regarding the possible transformation of the Soviet system. “The reality… remains unchanged,” the publication maintained, “and the war has given the dictatorship a stronger, more penetrating grip on the country than it ever had before.”

America’s top spy was also alerting Harry Truman in a secret memo that was written just a week after Hitler’s suicide. “The United States will be confronted with a situation potentially more dangerous than any preceding one,” advised General “Wild Bill” Donovan, head of the OSS. “[Russia will] become a menace more formidable to the United States than any ever known.”

On October 21, 1939, immigrant physicist Leo Szilard was in Washington, D.C., attending the first meeting of the Advisory Committee on Uranium. It didn’t go well. An Army representative berated Szilard as naïve to think he could create an atomic bomb, advised him that it usually took two wars to find out whether a new weapon was any good, and, further, told him that “in the end it is not weapons which win wars but the morale of the troops.”

You could say, or at least hypothesize, that we had a Cold War of lasting duration because powerful people in the U.S. government kept doubting Leo Szilard’s wisdom. It happened again on Monday, May 28, 1945. It was one of the worst days of Szilard’s life, because when he failed to effectively educate a president’s top advisor about a prospective doomsday, an immediate peace with the Soviet Union was all but junked and humanity edged significantly closer to extinction.

The day before, Szilard had taken an overnight train from Washington to Spartanburg, South Carolina, to meet with Jimmy Byrnes, who was about to conclude a microscopic retirement. Byrnes had just left a job as head of the Office of War Mobilization under the recently deceased Franklin Roosevelt and would soon formally accept a new role as Harry Truman’s secretary of state.

Secretly, Byrnes was already in the midst of another assignment from Truman, as the head of the new Interim Committee, a body of senior military and civilian experts charged with advising the president on the use of the atomic bomb. The sixty-three-year-old Byrnes was about to become, effectively, the second most powerful man in the country, if not the world.

When the native South Carolinian opened the door on the evening of May 28, the visiting scientist in front of him was short and stout, five foot six inches, with thick, curly dark hair, starting to recede. A round face was highlighted by warm brown eyes advertising intensity and intellect. Byrnes was about the same height, but decidedly thinner, to the point of being wiry, with eyes small and deeply set, his nose narrow and elongated, hair gray, sparse, closely trimmed.

The origins and mentalities of Jimmy Byrnes and Leo Szilard were studies in opposition. Szilard, age forty-seven at the time, was a Jewish, Hungarian-born peripatetic refugee who had recently made it his habit to keep a packed suitcase on standby anywhere he landed. In 1933, during a morning walk on the streets of London, he had understood how neutrons could elude the electric barrier guarding the nucleus and produce exponential mayhem, creating a chain reaction. It was Szilard who in 1939 compelled Albert Einstein to send a letter to FDR warning that Germany had the capacity to build the kind of super weapon that might provide Hitler with a rather swift route to world dominion. As chief physicist of the Manhattan Project’s Metallurgical Laboratory, Szilard, along with colleague Enrico Fermi, demonstrated the world’s first self-sustaining atomic chain reaction. As the Manhattan Project spread across the country—becoming a $20 billion experiment encompassing thirty-seven laboratories, with newly built production cities at Oak Ridge, Tennessee; Los Alamos, New Mexico; and Hanford, Washington—Szilard toured the facilities as a troubleshooter. “He is a man with an astounding amount of ideas,” said Fermi.

Byrnes, in his fourth decade of continuous public service, was a classic American success story. Born in Charleston to a working single mother, he had left school at age fourteen to take a job as a runner in a law office, where he cleaned and performed errands. He would go on to serve in every branch of the federal government: Congress, the Supreme Court, and the White House. In 1942, becoming head of the Office of War Mobilization, Byrnes more or less ran the U.S. economy since the entire U.S. economy had mobilized for war. The press began calling him “assistant president.”

Szilard had an innate distrust of the political and military class and had classified General Leslie Groves, the administrative head of the Manhattan Project, as pompous, rigid, imperialistic, and a very “big fool.” Groves, who was openly anti-Semitic, thought of Szilard as a Jewish busybody and judged him the project’s “biggest villain.” The one-star brigadier general preferred “quiet, shy and modest” non-Jews, such as Fermi. Szilard’s sparkling idea-a-minute intelligence unnerved him. So did Szilard’s radical independence. Groves had determined that the fundamental problem with the Hungarian physicist was that he hadn’t played baseball, and therefore had failed to learn the concept of teamwork. Eventually, Groves even suspected Szilard was a spy, and proposed having him locked up in an internment camp. The secretary of war judged otherwise.

Unable to imprison Szilard, Groves began keeping him under constant surveillance. The general knew exactly where Szilard was on May 28, 1945, because on May 27 an undercover agent had boarded the overnight train Szilard took to Spartanburg. Before the physicist arrived, Groves had also conveyed his decidedly negative view of Szilard to Byrnes.

After all but dreaming the atomic bomb into existence—acting as the prime mover, supplying the force of his genius and his bottomless persistence to shake an oblivious and at times obnoxious Pentagon hierarchy into action—Szilard believed the pretext for using the weapon had vanished. “Until recently,” he wrote in a memo he gave to Byrnes, “we have had to fear that the United States might be attacked by atomic bombs during this war and that her only defense might lie in a counterattack by the same means.… With the defeat of Germany, this danger is averted.”

Szilard had no issue with the bomb as a defensive weapon. However, he judged preemptive use immoral. In the third paragraph of the memo, Byrnes read: “Perhaps the greatest immediate danger which faces us is the probability that our ‘demonstration’ of atomic bombs will precipitate a race in the production of these devices between the United States and Russia and that if we continue to pursue the present course, our initial advantage may be lost very quickly in such a race.”

On Monday, May 28, 1945, Leo Szilard was hoping to educate Jimmy Byrnes about the prospect of a different kind of chain reaction, one that could erupt on the timeline of history, leading to humanity’s end. What he was asking Byrnes to envision was a future in which the United States, after detonating the first atomic bomb, would obtain only a short-lived monopoly on nuclear weapons. He made it clear to Byrnes that the Soviet Union had the wherewithal to rather quickly join the nuclear club, following which—in the absence of any controls, any agreements, any restraints—an arms race propelled by a natural paranoia would place all existence in the shadow of a prospective Armageddon.

But Byrnes had already decided to play atomic poker, counting up all the needs the bomb could serve: (a) to secure the unconditional surrender of Japan; (b) to limit Soviet territorial conquests in the Pacific; and (c) to intimidate Stalin into granting self-determination for Eastern Europe. Byrnes had his own reputation prejudicing the last of those objectives. He had been one of Roosevelt’s chief advisors at Yalta, where an all-too-vague agreement on Poland’s autonomy was being predictably abused by Stalin. With Roosevelt dead, Byrnes was suddenly receiving a greater share of the blame for Soviet suppression in Eastern Europe.

“I’m concerned about Russia’s postwar behavior,” Byrnes told Szilard. “Russian troops have moved into Hungary and Romania. I believe it will be very difficult to persuade Russia to withdraw her troops from these countries, and Russia might be more manageable if impressed by American military might.”

Szilard responded, “I share your concern about Russia throwing her weight around in the postwar period, but I disagree that rattling the bomb might make Russia more manageable. I fail to see how sitting on a stockpile of bombs, which we could not possibly use, will have this effect. I think it’s conceivable that doing so will even have the opposite effect.”

“Well,” said Byrnes, “you come from Hungary—you would not want Russia to stay in Hungary indefinitely.”

Said Szilard, “I’m more concerned at this point that by demonstrating the bomb and using it in the war against Japan, we might start an atomic arms race between America and Russia, which might end with the destruction of both countries. I’m not disposed at this point to worry about what would happen to Hungary.”

Groves, who was not a scientist, had badly misinformed Byrnes about the Soviet Union’s potential to join the atomic age. The general had told him that the USSR did not have access to uranium (wrong), claimed that Stalin’s regime didn’t have the necessary technology (wrong), and predicted it would be decades before the country produced a nuclear weapon (wrong again). In 1948, a year before the Soviets detonated their first atomic bomb, Groves wrote a profoundly chauvinistic and inaccurate assessment in the Saturday Evening Post: “The Soviet Union simply does not have enough precision industry, technical skill, or scientific numerical strength to come even close to duplicating the magnificent achievement of American industries.”

At the end of his visit with Byrnes, Szilard was fully aware that he had completely failed to slow the march toward a future piled high with nuclear weapons. Indeed, a political chain reaction on history’s timeline was about to be set in motion, a Doomsday Clock about to be born and placed minutes to midnight, a new kind of dread unleashed, entrenched and universal. Szilard would later say he was rarely as depressed as when he left the house in Spartanburg and walked toward the train station: “I thought to myself how much better off the world might be had I been born in America and become influential in American politics, and had Byrnes been born in Hungary and studied physics. In all probability, there would have been no atom bomb, and no danger of an arms race between America and Russia.”

On July 18, 1945, the first day of the eighth and final Allied summit, in the Berlin suburb of Potsdam, a cat-and-mouse game began. Who was the cat and who was the mouse became interchangeable.

This tragicomedy began with Joseph Stalin, general secretary of the Communist Party of the USSR, telling U.S. president Harry Truman about Japan’s recent peace overtures.

But Stalin, from his spies, knew that Truman, from his spies, had already learned about the overtures.

Truman responded by telling Stalin to delay any talks with Japan—although Truman knew that Stalin had already decided to do that.

Stalin was making the fraternal gesture of sharing “confidential information” about the Japanese because he wanted to be part of a joint declaration at the end of the conference in which the Soviets would officially sever their neutrality with Japan. Stalin was anxious to grab a chunk of Asia. But Truman had no intention of fulfilling Joe’s wish.

On July 24, during a recess at the Potsdam Conference, Truman nonchalantly approached Stalin and told him that “we have a new weapon of unusual destructive force.”

Stalin replied that he was glad to hear it and hoped the United States would make good use of it against the Japanese. Speaking of the exchange, Manhattan Project science director Robert Oppenheimer said, “That was carrying casualness rather far.”

Afterward, Truman suspected Stalin did not understand the significance of what he’d been told. But Stalin had.

Completely.

Here’s what Truman didn’t know:

Number one: Stalin’s intelligence operatives had stolen virtually all the relevant classified documents related to the bombs about to be dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The amount of stolen data was, in total, a how-to manual enabling the Soviets to make duplicates of the American bombs.

Number two: The USSR possessed the necessary scientific elite to comprehend the cutting-edge physics contained in the pilfered documents.

Number three: Stalin was in command of an almost limitless supply of slave labor, which was incarcerated in a continent-wide network of prison camps. Stalin’s U.S.-based spies had also made the dictator aware of the prodigious amount of men, money, and materials that would be required to match the Manhattan Project.

Number four: Logic dictated that Stalin assign the job of making an atomic bomb to the principal administrator of the gulags, Lavrentiy Beria, the head of internal security and a criminal genius. Beria was a serial rapist, an expert in the commission of mass murder, and a masterful organizer. As the new atomic czar, he had immediate access to tens of thousands of people who could be worked to death, if necessary, with tens of thousands more available as ready replacements. On their backs, new atomic cities would rise.

Most of Stalin’s superstar atomic spies came by way of Britain, which had partnered with the United States on nuclear research. In all, some ten thousand pages of stolen technical data about the U.S. atom bomb would be forwarded to Soviet physicists, including experiments and designs related to every aspect of development: the physiology of uranium, isotope separation, gaseous diffusion, centrifuges, the construction of reactors, and drawings of the custom-made machinery used to detonate the bomb.

One of Stalin’s British moles was Alan Nunn May, who joined the British Communist Party in the 1930s. During the war, May was attached to the Manhattan Project as a physicist based in Canada, where the world’s most powerful research reactor was built at Chalk River. He provided the Soviets with a clear overview of the functions of the key atomic sites: the University of Chicago (where Szilard, Fermi, and many of the Nobel Prize winners were clustered); Oak Ridge (the site of isotope separation units to enrich uranium); Hanford (plutonium processing); and Los Alamos (the bomb factory). May forwarded expert analysis of the July 16 Trinity test in New Mexico shortly after it took place. He even shared a sample of enriched uranium, shipped to the Soviet Union in a small glass tube.

Bruno Pontecorvo was an Italian theoretical physicist who had worked closely with Enrico Fermi. Unlike Fermi, Pontecorvo was a devoted communist. During World War II, he worked with May at Chalk River, and in that position, he also had full access to the entire scope of the Manhattan Project. He would defect to the Soviet Union in 1950 and continue his work on high-level nuclear research until his death, in 1993.

German-born Klaus Fuchs may have been the most valuable player of all the moles. He was the most accomplished physicist and had the greatest access to the most sensitive and valuable information. In 1943, Dr. Fuchs was the prime culprit in a gigantic security breach, informing the Soviets about plutonium, the new synthetically created substance that was more powerful than uranium. By 1944, Fuchs was on site at the Los Alamos Lab in New Mexico, where he had access to every document in the laboratory’s archives, in particular the latest work being done by Edward Teller on the vastly more destructive hydrogen bomb.

On July 26, 1945, China, Great Britain, and the United States issued the Potsdam Declaration demanding unconditional surrender of all Japanese forces. The declaration warned that the alternative was prompt and utter destruction. Stalin was not invited to be a co-signer. Truman wrote in his diary, “I was not willing to let Russia reap the fruits of a long and bitter and gallant effort in which she had no part.”

On August 6, in the first billionth of a second after the detonation of the Little Boy atomic bomb, the temperature at the burst point in Hiroshima was several million degrees, hotter than the surface of the sun. Spontaneous combustion occurred at a distance of over two thousand yards. Passengers in a tram near ground zero were reduced to a pile of black cinder. At a military base, the shadows of soldiers, literally evaporated, were etched on the training ground.

Hundreds who sought shelter in water basins were boiled alive. In a city of 260,000, a quarter were killed immediately: 66,000. Another 70,000 were injured, and 68,000 buildings were damaged or destroyed. Only three of the fifty-five hospitals and first aid stations remained operational. Out of 200 physicians in the city, 180 were either dead or injured.

The nuclear explosion triggered an enormous amount of gamma and neutron radiation. Less than two hours after the bomb exploded, a “black rain,” dark in color and sticky, fell on the city for three hours. The precipitation was the product of the bomb’s dust cloud, and was highly radioactive. There were reports that some survivors, desperately parched by the city’s heat and fires, opened their mouths to the sky to drink this toxic rain.

An Associated Press bulletin introduced Americans to the reality of atomic warfare at 11:03 a.m. Eastern Time on August 6. That night, the bar at the Washington Press Club was offering a gin and Pernod mix called the “Atomic Cocktail.” In a matter of days, a Los Angeles burlesque establishment was promoting “Atom Bomb Dancers.” A New York jewelry company began selling “atomic inspired pin and earring sets as daring to wear as it was to drop the first atom bomb.” Kix cereal soon advertised an Atomic Bomb Ring for the price of 15 cents and a cereal box top.

While U.S. citizens were reading headlines of the Hiroshima attack, Stalin was certain that in displaying this new wonder weapon, the “noisy shopkeeper” who’d replaced FDR was not sending a message to Japan. Rather, the destruction of Hiroshima was directed at him. “Of course, the Soviet Union was moving troops to the Far East in order to enter the war with Japan,” said David Holloway, author of Stalin and the Bomb. “So yes, it was seen very much as directed against the Soviet Union, not only in order to deprive the Soviet Union of gains in the Far East, but generally to intimidate the Soviet Union.”

Stalin called a meeting with Boris Vannikov, people’s commissar of munitions, and Igor Kurchatov, the director of the Soviet atomic bomb project. “A single demand of you comrades,” he said. “Provide us with atomic weapons in the shortest possible time. You know that Hiroshima has shaken the whole world. The equilibrium has been destroyed. Provide the bomb—it will remove a great danger from us.”

During the Cold War, leaders of both the Soviet Union and the United States could accurately be accused of failing to stop the insanity of stockpiling nuclear weapons capable of ending life on the planet. The era demanded more imaginative and sustained diplomacy from both sides. An often cowardly political class—demonizing the other side ignorantly and willfully, regularly claiming foul and fictional conspiracies—chose to enflame the threats posed by the rivalry. And, yes, any war, even a so-called cold war, requires at least two belligerents. But it’s also important to understand who fired the first shot. And in the Cold War, that was Harry Truman and the United States of America.

In the view of the Soviet Union, the balance of power had been destabilized when the United States became the sole nuclear power. Ergo, there were only two ways for that to be corrected: Either (1) the United States disarmed, or (2) the Soviets caught up. But from the U.S. perspective, having an atomic monopoly provided significant leverage over the Kremlin, and unilateral disarmament could be disastrous if the Soviets, a genuinely untrustworthy bunch, introduced their own bomb after American denuclearization and therefore gained a destabilizing monopoly of their own.

Ultimately, the worst-case scenario took place. The United States would begin military testing of nuclear weapons soon after World War II, and, in the meantime, Stalin wasn’t waiting for America to unilaterally disarm. When the Soviets shocked an all-too-complacent U.S. leadership by becoming a nuclear power much sooner than anticipated, the shaken Americans responded by fast-tracking development of an even bigger bomb.

The vicious circle that ensued had previously been identified as the “security dilemma” by Sir Edward Grey, the British foreign secretary at the start of World War I. “Fear,” Grey wrote, “begets suspicion and distrust—and evil imaginings of all sorts—until each government feels it would be criminal and a betrayal of its own country not to take every precaution… while every other government regards every precaution by every other government as evidence of hostile intent.”

On August 10, 1945, General Groves had informed Truman that a third atomic bomb could be dropped on Japan within a week. By that point, however, the previously gung-ho president had been sobered by the savagery and attendant moral implications of using the most indiscriminate weapon ever devised, which, like an irrepressible biblical plague, spared virtually no one, nor any structure, in the wake of its considerable blast radius. After the advisory from Groves, Truman told a cabinet meeting that he had ordered the atomic bombing stopped. The thought of wiping out another 100,000 people was “too horrible,” he said, especially the idea of killing “all those kids.”

But it seems he didn’t ever ask himself: What happens when the next country gets the bomb? And then another? It was necessary for Truman, with a degree of urgency, to have sought more counsel about the implications of a frightening new dawn in science, to consider what it would mean if physicists were able to produce even more powerful bombs, already in development. He should have more fully considered how all of America’s major metropolitan areas would be in the crosshairs of any adversary that could assemble as few as two or three dozen nuclear devices. Ultimately, the only equalizer the Soviets would ever have was their own nuclear arsenal.

Critically, the first person in charge of America’s nuclear weaponry was a narrow-minded soldier, and that man, Leslie Groves, did his nation and the world a great disservice by sidelining such dissidents as Leo Szilard and he then magnified his lack of foresight by successfully suppressing the truth about the lingering and deadly effects of radioactive fallout at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The world needed to immediately see and understand all the gruesome effects of a single bomb that was capable of not only vaporizing its victims, but also inexorably and fatally poisoning survivors at a cellular level. Humanity’s scientists had gone too far. Instead, the full scope of that sin became the first big secret of a soon to be booming U.S. security establishment, thus further stifling accountability and debate.

Truman had a tool to reimagine the international world order, the new United Nations. Roosevelt had envisioned the UN carrying the flag for a grass-roots “Century of the Common Man,” with an ethos encapsulated by the pursuit of “four freedoms”: freedom of speech and worship, freedom from want and fear. In Roosevelt’s robust conception, the UN had the chance to be a dynamic moral and humanitarian force that, with the backing of the entire world family, could, for the first time, vigorously challenge colonial masters, promote self-determination, and stifle the whims of solipsistic rulers, like Stalin. But, as Roger Morris observed, that version of the UN “was all over in April 1945 with [Roosevelt’s] death. Into the Oval Office moved the more typical American certainty of Harry Truman, a feisty, remorselessly compromised machine politician who would be led in the White House by bellicose, half-informed aides.”

Stalin was presented the same blank slate. The existential threats to his society had also been defeated, and none were on the horizon. He too had the authority and freedom to reimagine the dynamic of global relations. But, predictably, he would choose the safety of isolation over the demands and risks of cooperation, spending his final years largely hidden from public view, sequestered in one of several custom-built sanctuaries across the Soviet empire, a pampered communist czar expecting people to show up and kiss his ring.

“The dynamic circularity of U.S.-Soviet relations gained in velocity,” wrote Harold Evans. “Even statesmen of goodwill and imagination may attribute evil motives to an opponent while at the same time finding it hard, if not impossible, to recognize that their own actions might be seen as menacing. Truman had the goodwill, but not the imagination; and the odious Stalin had neither. He was truculent, ruthless, suspicious, mendacious, and xenophobic.”

In the decade following the war, no face-to-face dialogue took place between the leaders of the superpowers. Truman would invite Stalin to come to the United States, and he received a no in reply. This pretty much ended any chance for summitry, since Truman had decided, after being repelled by Berlin’s devastation during the Potsdam meeting, that he had no desire to ever go back to Europe. In fact, Truman would make only four other extended foreign junkets during the nearly eight years of his presidency, three of which were to neighboring Canada, Mexico, and Bermuda.

In short, world affairs in the first chapters of the Cold War would be shaped by very provincial men.

Although most Americans only participated in World War II vicariously, the nation had been attacked, and even if those attacks were in no way commensurate with withering clashes oceans away, a new vulnerability had been introduced. The shock of Pearl Harbor had cut to the bone and settled deep in the mind.

As the war progressed, readers of West Coast newspapers were repeatedly alerted to other chinks in the aura of invincibility, such as lurking Japanese submarines close enough for their shells to strike targets along the Pacific Coast Highway; a seaplane bombing an Oregon forest; and the arrival of menacing Japanese fire balloons, propelled across the Pacific by the jet stream, each packing fifty pounds of explosives. One balloon had killed six civilians, the only combat deaths on the U.S. mainland during the war.

On the East Coast, Nazi submarines had deposited saboteurs on beaches in both New York and Florida in the dead of night. The FBI claimed to have foiled the plot but in reality it was a saboteur who immediately had second thoughts and, intrepidly, showed up at FBI headquarters in Washington to rat out the operation. J. Edgar Hoover shamelessly took full credit for capturing the Germans who fell into his lap and spiked national anxiety with a chest-thumping press conference.

Finally, a new meme had been imprinted on the American psyche: a massive explosion reaching up into the sky to form a spreading cloud shaped like a mushroom, the signature of a super weapon out of science fiction negating every last trace of life.

In the wake of Japan’s capitulation, Norman Cousins wrote a widely discussed editorial in the Saturday Review addressing the atomic attacks: “Whatever elation there is in the world today because of final victory in the war is severely tempered by fear. It is a primitive fear, the fear of the unknown, the fear of forces man can neither channel nor comprehend. The fear is not new; in its classical form, it is the fear of irrational death. But overnight it has become intensified, magnified. It has burst out of the subconscious and into the conscious, filling the mind with primordial apprehensions.”

CBS broadcast titan Edward R. Murrow offered a similar view: “Seldom, if ever, has a war ended leaving the victors with such a sense of uncertainty and fear, with such a realization that the future is obscure and that survival is not assured.”

On August 30, 1945, the U.S. military issued a top-secret document titled A Strategic Chart of Certain Russian and Manchurian Urban Areas. The chart established a priority target list for nuclear attacks on the USSR. For example, the chart indicated six atomic bombs would be necessary to destroy Moscow, and the same number to destroy Leningrad. When the memo was issued, the Red Army was still fighting Hirohito’s Far East Command and the planned formal surrender of Japanese forces on USS Missouri was still days away.

Such future war gaming was daft. Wrote Morris: “As it happened, though few American experts seemed to realize it, the target had already been demolished as the Cold War began, a condition from which it never really recovered.… Revolution, terror, civil war, purges, collectivization, famine, the horrors of the Gulag, World War II’s carnage, still more postwar starvation” had left the people of the USSR, Morris continued, with “an inconceivable demography of national desolation.”

In mid-October 1945, Robert Oppenheimer retired as director of the Los Alamos lab, saying: “If atomic bombs are to be added to the arsenals of the warring world then the time will come when mankind will curse the name of Los Alamos and Hiroshima.”

A few days later, he was in Washington, D.C., and met with Truman in the Oval Office. “I feel we have blood on our hands,” he told the president.

According to Oppenheimer, Truman replied, “Never mind, it’ll come out in the wash.”

Afterward, Truman told aides he hoped never to see the great physicist again and later wrote derisively about how the “crybaby scientist” came to his office “and spent most of the time wringing his hands.”

Oppenheimer also met with Henry Wallace, who, after being supplanted as vice president by Truman in 1945, had accepted Roosevelt’s offer to stay on as commerce secretary. In his diary Wallace wrote of the meeting:

I never saw a man in such an extremely nervous state as Oppenheimer. He seemed to feel that the destruction of the entire human race was imminent… He had been in charge of the scientists in New Mexico and says that the heart has completely gone out of them there; that all they think about now are the social and economic implications of the bomb and that they are no longer doing anything worthwhile on the scientific level… He says that Secretary Byrnes’s attitude on the bomb has been very bad… He thinks the mishandling of the situation at Potsdam has prepared the way for the eventual slaughter of tens of millions or perhaps hundreds of millions of innocent people.

By the end of the year, a grumpy Truman was losing patience with Byrnes, finding him to be an egotistical, high-handed, and secretive figure scripting U.S. foreign policy all by himself. During a Moscow conference in December, the secretary of state had agreed to grant diplomatic recognition to Soviet-occupied Romania and Bulgaria in return for “democratic participation,” and he also proposed that the UN control all atomic weapons. In reaction, a print report wondered if America’s top diplomat was “communistically inclined,” a criticism happily seconded by congressional Republicans.

On January 5, 1946, Truman would write Byrnes a scolding letter, which ended: “I’m tired of babying the Soviets.… Unless Russia is faced with an iron fist and strong language, another war is in the making,”