The morning of August 6, 1945, was calm in Hiroshima. “The hour was early; the morning still, warm, and beautiful. Shimmering leaves, reflecting sunlight from a cloudless sky, made a pleasant contrast with shadows in my garden,” recalled Michihiko Hachiya, the director of the Hiroshima Communications Hospital.
It was the doctor’s last thought in an era of a certain kind of innocence. Forty years earlier, Einstein had shown on paper that matter was equivalent to energy. At 8:15 A.M. the Enola Gay passed overhead, opened its bomb bay doors, and demonstrated that equation in a horrible way.
“Suddenly, a strong flash of light startled me—and then another,” Hachiya remembered. “The view where a moment before had been so bright and sunny was now dark and hazy. Through swirling dust I could barely discern a wooden column that had supported one corner of my house. It was leaning crazily and the roof sagged dangerously. . . . To my surprise I discovered that I was completely naked. How odd! Where were my drawers and undershirt? What had happened?”
Hachiya was one of the lucky ones. America had stolen fire from the gods and kept the news secret until that clear Monday morning. A few people in Washington had briefly discussed warning the Japanese of the power of this new weapon, or perhaps inviting their leaders to watch a demonstration. But to Harry Truman, the decision to drop the bomb on Hachiya and his neighbors was an easy one. Truman felt he had to act fast. America was winning the war against Japan, slowly gaining territory and closing in on the home islands. But Japan was holding on, and victory might require a massive invasion. The bomb might end the war quickly and save huge numbers of American lives.
On August 8, two days after the Hiroshima explosion and one before Nagasaki met its terrible fate, Stalin called to the Kremlin George Kennan and Ambassador Averell Harriman. The Soviets were in, he told them. Red Army troops were now surging toward the eastern enemy.
Harriman began the conversation by explaining how pleased he was to learn of the rekindled alliance. This was an exaggeration. The Soviets were entering the battle far later than America had hoped, and the United States wanted to limit the credit Moscow could claim for defeating Japan.
Stalin knew the American was being insincere. But he also knew what the war had required of his country. The streets of Leningrad had filled with the frozen and the starved before the United States even entered the fight. What did it matter if his country was attacking Japan a little late? So he responded to Harriman with his own string of platitudes.
Harriman then moved to the big topic: how did Stalin think the Japanese would respond to the new weapon? Stalin knew far more about the atomic bomb than his interlocutors suspected he did. In 1942, a Soviet physicist notified him of the suspicious fact that articles on nuclear physics had stopped appearing in British and American scientific journals. More directly, at least two spies had been passing top-secret information to Moscow: George Koval, an electrical engineer whose treachery did not become public until sixty years after the war, and Klaus Fuchs, the nuclear scientist originally recruited by Ruth Brewer.
Stalin predicted Japan’s reaction fairly well. Many leaders there wanted to change governments and put into place a regime more likely to end the war, he said. The atomic bomb might give them that excuse.
Hinting at his frustration that his country had not developed the weapon first, he called the bomb “a very difficult problem to work out.” The Soviets had tried to make one but had failed, and they had found a factory showing that the Germans had worked on it too. Had they succeeded, Stalin said, Hitler would never have surrendered.
Harriman declared that the bomb could have peaceful uses. Yes, said Stalin—it could mean “the end of war and aggressors”—but “the secret would have to be well kept.” Harriman agreed and, making an argument that would reappear throughout the Cold War, repeated that the bomb could help keep the peace. “Unquestionably,” replied Stalin.
With that, Harriman and Kennan returned to the American embassy, where Harriman fired off a cable to tell Truman that Russia had entered the war.
Stalin already had a team trying to split the atom. But until Hiroshima, he had not realized the monumental strategic power the weapon would confer. Soon after the Americans left the Kremlin, the generalissimo told his men that equilibrium had been broken. Within two weeks, he had ordered a crash atomic development program and put his most ruthless lieutenant, Lavrenti Beria, in charge. The arms race had begun.
PAUL NITZE HAD a Wall Street instinct for sniffing out information that had been kept from him. He had helped organize mineral procurement for the war effort—tracking down substances no one had heard of from countries no one had visited for purposes no one could talk about—and he had noted that the U.S. government needed a lot of unusual materials, such as mercury flasks and beryllium. He had even heard about an inquiry by the vice president to identify all the world’s sources of uranium. By the summer of 1945 he knew something was going on. A friend who worked as a mining engineer told Nitze he knew that America was building a massive new bomb with all these materials—but he did not think it would work.
It did work, of course, and the day after Hiroshima the leaders of the Strategic Bombing Survey began to discuss their urgent new task: measuring the weapon’s effect. One week later Japan surrendered; a couple of weeks after that, Nitze was flying across the Pacific.
Moved by the land’s beauty, he felt a deep animus toward its people. Their nation had dropped five-hundred-pound bombs on the sleeping sailors at Pearl Harbor, deified kamikaze pilots, and refused to surrender until well after the war was lost. “This was the most beautiful country I’d ever seen . . . populated by the most hateful of all people on earth,” he would write later.
After paying his respects to Douglas MacArthur, the American supreme commander overseeing the occupation, Nitze began planning a trip to Hiroshima. He sent his top assistant to try to find a building that the survey could acquire for a base. The aide returned and told him, “There is nothing there to requisition.” For the first time, Nitze had a real sense of the damage done. The team was eventually stationed on ships lying off Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
To many, the weapon seemed almost supernatural. Rumors flew among survivors that the bomb would give off deadly poisons for the next seven years. Robert Oppenheimer would later remember himself quoting from the Bhagavad-Gita when he learned that the first test had succeeded: “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” Even President Truman had invoked God when announcing the strike on Hiroshima. “It is an awful responsibility which has come to us. We thank God that it has come to us, instead of to our enemies; and we pray that He may guide us to use it in His ways and for His purposes.”
But Nitze saw the atom bomb as just another weapon, something he and his colleagues could analyze acutely but calmly. Yes, it was epically powerful. But we could think about it, discuss it, include it in plans. “With weapons of that size,” Nitze wrote, “the effects were not infinite: they were finite.” His report for the survey, published in the summer of 1946, declared that people should strip their “minds of any lingering prejudice that the atomic bomb is supernatural or incomprehensible in its operation.” The report then went on to explain, clearly and concisely, that the bomb worked by loosing three forces—pressure, heat, and radiation—the first two of which were also produced by other bombs.
Nitze’s goal, he said, was to put calipers on the destruction and on the recovery. He was struck by how fast the railroads in Nagasaki had recovered, and how buildings made of reinforced concrete survived the bombing and “rose impressively from the ashes.” Years later, he would remember a story of a train passing through Hiroshima when the bomb fell. People sitting near open windows were not cut by flying glass, but they died of radiation exposure. People sitting by closed windows were bloodied by the glass, but protected from the radiation.
Nitze’s report came out in the summer of 1946, two months before John Hersey’s famous essay about the bomb. The USSBS paper appeared in thick government binders. Hersey’s “Hiroshima” appeared in an issue of the New Yorker devoted entirely to his reporting. The goals of the two documents differed as much as their presentation.
Here, for example, is how the USSBS described the defense offered by clothing:
Flash burns were largely confined to exposed areas of the body, but on occasion would occur through varying thicknesses of clothing. . . . One woman was burned over the shoulder except for a T-shaped area about one-fourth inch in breadth; the T-shaped area corresponded to an increased thickness of the clothing from the seam of the garment. Other people were burned through a single thickness of kimono but were unscathed or only lightly affected underneath the lapel.
Here is Hersey:
The eyebrows of some were burned off and skin hung from their faces and hands. Others, because of pain, held their arms up as if carrying something in both hands. Some were vomiting as they walked. Many were naked or in shreds of clothing. On some undressed bodies, the burns had made patterns—of undershirt straps and suspenders and, on the skin of some women (since white repelled the heat from the bomb and dark clothes absorbed it and conducted it to the skin), the shapes of flowers they had had on their kimonos.
Despite the cool tone of the report, the images of Hiroshima stuck with Nitze. He would almost never talk about the terrible things he had seen, except on a few occasions when challenged by people who said he did not understand what nuclear war was like. Then, he could get tense and emotional, replying, in effect: Why, yes, actually I’m one of the few people who really does understand. And toward the end of his life, his memories of the horrors began to bubble out. He would talk about what he’d seen back then, even as his conscious awareness of the present faded.
HARRY TRUMAN WAS CONFLICTED in his thinking about Joseph Stalin in the fall of 1945. Before his improbable arrival in the White House, the Missourian had shown a streak of knee-jerk pro-American fire, famously proclaiming on the Senate floor in 1941, “If we see that Germany is winning we ought to help Russia and if Russia is winning we ought to help Germany, and that way let them kill as many as possible.” But with responsibility came ambivalence. “I like Stalin,” he wrote home to his wife, soon after becoming president. “He is straightforward. Knows what he wants and will compromise when he can’t get it.”
It was a measured reaction to an enigmatic man. Most Americans now think of Stalin as the merciless tyrant he was. But he was also curious, highly intelligent, and sensitive. As a young man, he was a poet, a singer, and a voracious reader. He memorized works by Gogol and Chekhov, while amusing himself with Thackeray, Balzac, and Plato. At seminary, he would sneak in worldly texts and read by candlelight, sometimes hiding books in stacks of firewood. He studied Esperanto intensively when he thought it the likely language of the future. “He didn’t just read books,” said a friend. “He ate them.”
He had a lovely voice and often sang at weddings. Much of his poetry described the beauties of nature. It was so accomplished that Prince Ilia Chavchavadze, a prominent Georgian poet, published five poems by the impressive “young man with the burning eyes.” One early poem ended with a declaration that in becoming learned he could help others:
While the joyful nightingale
With a gentle voice was saying—
“Be full of blossom, oh lovely land
Rejoice Iverians’ country
And you oh Georgian, by studying
Bring joy to your motherland.”
Poet or not, Stalin was always tough. He had grown up in Gori, a Georgian city that took pride in its tradition of no-holds-barred, full-on street fighting. His alcoholic father once thrashed him so hard that there was blood in his urine for days. But his mother pampered him and stood up for him. She ensured that one day he would be able to get out of Gori and leave his mark on the world.
Stalin started with crime, turned to politics, and eventually merged the two. Gradually, his soul turned entirely black. According to his daughter, Svetlana, everything changed in 1932 when her mother killed herself. To Svetlana, this act was a historic hinge, connecting the relatively peaceful late 1920s with the terrible purges of the 1930s. “She took what was good of him to the grave,” Svetlana says. When Svetlana’s older brother tried to commit suicide but misfired the gun, his father told him that he was good for nothing—not even a good shot.
By the time of the German invasion, Stalin had become the monster we now recall, even if he could still charm. He did not have a philosophical mind, but he had a sharp and quick one. Although he looked decrepit—five foot four, with discolored teeth, a withered arm, and a pockmarked face; Kennan called him “an old battle-scarred tiger”—he still seemed heroic and wise.
Even Dwight Eisenhower came somewhat under the tyrant’s spell. Several days after the atomic bomb exploded in Hiroshima, the general joined Stalin in Red Square to watch a parade in the dictator’s honor. The New York Times reported, without irony or skepticism, that Eisenhower watched as “hundreds of portraits of Premier Stalin in many native styles from the various republics moved with the procession. One great statue of him was placed in the square before him and became a heroic background for a dance avowal of devotion.”
But Kennan was not charmed at all. He clearly perceived Stalin’s demonic side. “His words were few. They generally sounded reasonable and sensible; indeed, often they were. An unforewarned visitor would never have guessed what depths of calculation, ambition, love of power, jealousy, cruelty, and sly vindictiveness lurked behind this unpretentious façade.”
Kennan had seen the Soviets double-cross the United States repeatedly over the war’s final months. He was frustrated by Washington’s desire to maintain an illusory friendship with the Soviets, and pained by his masters’ indifference to his missives on the need to treat Stalin severely. In late August 1945, he wrote to his friend and colleague Freeman “Doc” Matthews, declaring that he planned to resign from the Foreign Service. “I do hope that it will be possible for you to send a successor for me by the end of October at the latest. As a matter of fact, I would strongly recommend that you send two successors.”
WHILE KENNAN FOUGHT over policy, Nitze embarked on a new investigation. His task had expanded beyond the bombing survey; he was also in charge of interviewing Japan’s former leaders and establishing why the war had started and what they had thought as it progressed.
The most senior man he talked to was Prince Fumimaro Konoye, who had been prime minister in three different governments. His tenure in the first started just before Japan initiated full-scale aggression against China; his tenure in the last ended just before Japan struck the United States.
A man of contrasts, Konoye was both intimidating and weak. According to Japanese lore, he came from a family of divine descent, brought to earth by a deity sent down by the Sun Goddess. He was brilliant, learned, worldly. He translated and published Oscar Wilde’s The Soul of Man Under Socialism. He sent his son to the Lawrenceville School and then Princeton. At the same time, though, he was nervous and vulnerable. He seemed to come down with a grave illness whenever a crisis hit.
Nitze began their interview with a straightforward question. When the war with America started, how long did Konoye think it would last, and how did the Japanese army think it would end? Konoye answered vaguely that he had not thought it would last long, and that he could not remember any exit strategy. Asked about army plans, Konoye claimed ignorance. Nitze grew frustrated and his questions became tense. “The impression we have gained so far is that you agreed to a declaration of war against the United States with no information at all as to how victory was to be achieved or as to how the war was to be brought to an end.”
Neither tough nor friendly questioning elicited the information Nitze sought. Finally, he moved on to his other big question: how much had the nuclear bomb mattered? As before, Nitze spoke in a manner fit for an American courtroom.
Konoye struggled in response, sounding more like a broken man than a dishonest one. Speer had seen the interrogation by Nitze as an opportunity to match wits, to build his legacy, and possibly to save his life. Konoye had almost nothing precise to say.
“How much longer do you think the war might have continued had the atomic bomb not been dropped?”
“It is a little hard for me to figure that out.”
“What would your best estimate be?”
“Probably it would have lasted all of this year . . . it is just a sort of general feeling, without much actual basis.”
Both men left the interview frustrated. A few days afterward, Konoye’s secretary showed up at Nitze’s office with word that his boss wanted to make up for a poor performance. He handed Nitze the prince’s private diary, including notes on events leading up to the start of the war.
Nitze was elated, believing that the diary capped an extremely thorough investigation. “If there are any unanswered questions about the war in the Pacific when we get through, it won’t be for want of trying,” he wrote his mother in December. “The boys know what happened to each ship, plane, shell, ton of coal, rodent, fly, open latrine, and house of prostitution during the course of the war.”
Konoye’s cooperation with Nitze did the prince no good, however. An American court indicted him for war crimes. The day before his arraignment, he invited a group of friends over for dinner and a talk. After they left, he asked for a copy of Oscar Wilde’s prison letter, De Profundis, and retired to bed at around one A.M. He read the writer who had been so dear for so many years, underlining in red pencil several passages that had particular meaning to him. Among these was one that can be read as a final confession of his failure to alter the attitudes of other Japanese leaders about the war: “My ruin came not from too great individualism of life but from too little.”
He dropped the book on the couch and then swallowed a lethal dose of poison.
ALTHOUGH KENNAN HAD declared his intention to resign, Matthews, along with another dear friend, Chip Bohlen, soon persuaded him that it was his patriotic duty to keep his post. He then quickly turned to the one thing he seemed always to love about embassy work: the opportunity to travel.
Early that September, he set out for Leningrad, a city he barely knew but to which he had a deep and emotional connection. He wandered the streets, observing people carefully. He noted the city’s rhythms, its problems, and its passions. He walked past the Winter Palace and watched children bicycling. He sat on a bench near the Kazan Cathedral to see people boarding streetcars. He recalled that Leningrad was the city where Pushkin had written his masterworks and where nobles from the court of the czar had thrust Rasputin’s body, already shot and poisoned, through the Neva River ice.
He wrote in his diary that he found it
a great, sad city, where the spark of human genius has always had to penetrate the darkness, the dampness, and the cold in order to make its light felt, and has acquired, for that very reason, a strange warmth, a strange intensity, a strange beauty. I know that in this city, where I have never lived, there had nevertheless been deposited by some strange quirk of fate—a previous life, perhaps?—a portion of my own capacity to feel and to love, a portion—in other words—of my own life; and that this is something no American will ever understand and no Russian ever believe.
But Kennan was soon called back to Moscow. He still had a job to do in the embassy—including tasks he found wholly tiresome, such as serving as a factotum for men who knew vastly less about Russia than he did.
On September 14, 1945, he was told to arrange for a group of visiting congressmen to see Stalin and then to translate the exchange. He never liked this sort of setup—congressmen traveling abroad can display an unfortunate combination of ignorance and entitlement—and things started going haywire early. According to Kennan’s recollections, the delegation showed up at their rendezvous point both late and drunk. As they raced to the Kremlin in a pair of limousines, one member hooted, “What if I biff the old codger one in the nose?” Kennan later wrote: “My heart froze. I cannot recall what I said, but I am sure that never in my life did I speak with greater earnestness.”
Fortunately, the congressmen all kept their hands in their pockets and the interview went smoothly: no one bloodied Stalin’s nose, and no representative made his return in a flag-draped coffin. But another tedious political chore awaited: translating for the exceedingly deferential Florida senator Claude Pepper. A member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Pepper asked Stalin about Soviet economic growth, the state of the Red Army, and how long the USSR planned to continue using German prisoners of war as laborers. Stalin gave wise, reasoned answers to all these questions. The Floridian then asked whether he knew that Americans still referred to him as Uncle Joe. Stalin said that he did not know what he had done to deserve the compliment.
Afterward, Pepper described the meeting in a New York Times piece filled with the sort of soft, fuzzy praise that later helped earn him the nickname Red Pepper. “The generalissimo is a realist, notwithstanding the fact that he is engaged in the mightiest effort ever made in a single nation to raise the standard of living of some 200,000,000 people.” At the end of the meeting, Pepper had asked Stalin whether he would like to pass on any message to the United States. Why, yes, Stalin said. He would indeed. “Just judge the Soviet Union objectively. Do not either praise us or scold us. Just know us and judge us as we are.”
Having offered those words of wisdom, Stalin walked over to Kennan and thanked him kindly for doing such a fine job of translating.
PAUL NITZE WALKED through the ruins of Hiroshima as the representative of a conqueror. The United States had won unequivocally, profoundly, and devastatingly. Only one nation had the ultimate weapon, and he was one of its emissaries.
But Nitze was not triumphant. The weapon was not a product of Yankee magic that no one else could replicate. And if others could make it, then they could use it. This led him to a question as dark as it was nerve-racking: what if the bomb was dropped on the United States, not by the United States?
Nitze’s answer: if nothing changed, America would be devastated. A nuclear bomb would obliterate the center of Chicago, or San Francisco, or Washington, or New York, just as it had Hiroshima.
For Nitze, this was not a cause for paralysis, but a stimulus to try to change the odds. Nuclear weapons were just weapons. Man had created them, and man could limit their impact. Nitze had noticed that Nagasaki residents who reached bomb shelters had survived. What if the United States built a network of shelters? What if we designed more parks and rivers into our cities, places that could serve as firebreaks and escape routes? What if we made our buildings out of reinforced concrete? When he returned to the United States, Nitze tried to convince the city planner Robert Moses to require bomb shelters in all the big new buildings going up in New York City. The trip to Japan had opened Nitze’s eyes, and he was beginning to sort through his responses to questions on which he would spend the next fifty years.
Kennan, too, was beginning to think through the implications of this new epoch. “It would be highly dangerous to our security if the Russians were to develop the use of atomic energy, or any other radical and far-reaching means of destruction,” he declared in late September 1945. “There is nothing—I repeat nothing—in the history of the Soviet regime which could justify us in assuming that the men who are now in power in Russia, or even those who have chances of assuming power within the foreseeable future, would hesitate for a moment to apply this power against us if by doing so they thought that they might materially improve their own power position in the world.” Kennan would later, forcefully, argue a different position. But he was resolute for now.
As that fall progressed, his mood darkened. Each diary entry showed a little more frustration than the last. He lashed out at Moscow’s refusal to let American officials even talk to Russian citizens; he bemoaned a night spent listening to new Soviet records, declaring that “one of the fundamental facts about Soviet life [is] the excellence of that small part which is good and the extreme inferiority of that large part which is bad”; he squirmed through a talk by an American labor leader still in thrall to the Kremlin—“a sickening bit of bootlicking.”
A week before Christmas, two old friends visited him: Bohlen and the British philosopher Isaiah Berlin. The three talked late into the night about the Russian threat and the tensions between socialism and capitalism. Kennan wrote that “Berlin, who is undoubtedly the best informed and most intelligent foreigner in Moscow . . . was firmly convinced that the Russians view a conflict with the western world as quite inevitable and that their whole policy is predicated on this prospect.” Politics even infected Kennan’s efforts at relaxation. A group of American military men stationed in Moscow formed a band called the Kremlin Crows, and Kennan, a good guitar player, would sometimes grab his instrument and sit in with them. But Moscow objected to the word “Kremlin” appearing in the name of an American band. The Crows had to paint over their drum kit and become the Purged Pigeons.
Kennan remained cheerful enough to organize the embassy Christmas carols as the season approached, inviting the staff up to his office, where he would pull out his guitar and play. But as the year turned, he feared that another war was coming to a weary world.
BUILT IN 1825, during the reign of Alexander I, Moscow’s Bolshoi Theater premiered the works of Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninoff. Wagner conducted there. Bolshoi means “grand,” and so the place is. A statue of four bronze horses drawing Apollo’s chariot tops the theater. It was and is the center of Moscow’s artistic life. And, on February 9, 1946, it became the center of much of the rest of the world’s political life too.
That evening, Joseph Stalin entered the Bolshoi to the hysterical cheers of thousands of screaming Muscovites. When the squat, mustachioed leader strode on stage to give a much anticipated speech, everyone rose to chant: “Cheers for great Stalin!” “Long live great Stalin, hurrah!” “Cheers for our beloved Stalin!”
Stalin had written and edited the speech himself. He had even inserted the prescribed crowd prompts, such as “standing ovation,” where he thought it appropriate. The evening was a preelection event, preparing the Soviet people to vote for members of the Supreme Soviet. Stalin, of course, did not need to ask his subjects for their votes.
Instead, he began in his thick Georgian accent by blaming the West for World War II, throwing out a classic canard of Marxist theory: the inevitability of capitalist warfare. Under capitalism, some countries get richer faster, which leads the poorer countries, and the ones with fewer natural resources, to take up arms. “The development of world capitalism in our times does not proceed smoothly and evenly, but through crises and catastrophic wars.” Throughout the war, he had played up nationalist sentiments and addressed the people as “countrymen.” Tonight they were just “comrades.”
He then moved to praising the Soviet system and the people’s courage through the long fight. After he declared that “the Red Army heroically withstood all the hardships of the war, utterly routed the armies of our enemies, and emerged from the war the victor,” a voice in the crowd hollered, “Under Comrade Stalin’s leadership!” Soon everyone in the audience was standing again and cheering.
Stalin then brought forth an array of statistics and plans, all meant to show that now was no time to relax. Toward the end of the speech, he uttered one of his most important, but also subtlest, lines: “I have no doubt that if we give our scientists proper assistance they will be able in the very near future not only to overtake but even outstrip the achievements of science beyond the borders of our country.” It is likely that Stalin had just one scientific project in mind: the atomic bomb.
Stalin ended with some predictable propaganda about the election. But the message was clear: war was the locomotive of history. As his foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov would later say, Stalin believed that “the First World War pulled one country out of capitalist slavery. The Second World War created a socialist system, the third will put an end to imperialism once and for all.”
Waves of applause greeted the conclusion of the speech. “Cheers for the great leader of the peoples!” “Glory to great Stalin!” “Long live Comrade Stalin, the candidate of the entire people!” “Glory to the creator of all our victories, Comrade Stalin!” The speech was broadcast by radio across the Soviet Union, and tens of millions of copies were printed.
Stalin’s words stirred the American embassy as well. Kennan wrote a memo summarizing the speech. Within a week, he got another request from Washington: “We should welcome receiving from you an interpretive analysis of what we may expect in the way of future implementation of [Stalin’s] announced policies.” It was an innocuous-sounding request, but an infuriating one too, coming after he had written so many memos on that very topic. Soon Kennan would begin the project that an embassy colleague later said would “both make and destroy him.”
