History of the Americas II Notes
Cold War Series :: Nuclear Weapons and the Early Cold War
Atomic bombs are meant to frighten those with weak nerves.
-- Joseph Stalin,17 September 1946
I. The Great Nuclear Deterrent
1. On August 6, 1945 the world learned simultaneously of the existence and power of nuclear weapons.
a. Prior to that moment, improvements in weaponry had, with few exceptions, increased the cost of fighting without reducing the probability of doing so.
b. From the invention of axes and spears through bows and arrows, gunpowder and guns, warships, tanks, submarines, high explosives, and aerial bombardment, each advance in technology increased the devastation wrought by war.
2. By the beginning of the 20th century, weapons themselves were contributing to the outbreak of war.
a. Without the naval arms race of the pre-1914 Era (see Kagan’s On the Origins and War and the Preservation of Peace for more details) and particularly without the development of the Dreadnought, the Great War might never have taken place.
b. Without U-boats and German unrestricted submarine warfare, the United States probably would not have entered World War II beyond our limited assistance to the Allies.
c. And of course without a carrier based air force, Japan could hardly have attached Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941.
3. It is therefore an historical anomaly that for over 60 years the most striking innovation in military history has served the cause of peace rather than provoking war.
a. In the wake of President Truman’s order to drop the second atomic bomb on Nagasaki on August 9, 1945, tens of thousands or nuclear weapons have been produced by the U.S. and Russia, most of which were aimed at one another.
b. And yet not a single nuclear weapon was used during the Cold War, despite its many tensions and actual battles.
II. What Caused such a Radical Change?
1. The cause of the paradigm shift was the level of violence wrought by nuclear weapons.
a. To use a football metaphor, the distance from conventional to nuclear weapons was the difference between getting a new kind of shoe that allowed for better traction in tackling the other team’s players – and developing a device capable of instantly destroying not only the other team but also one’s own, not to mention the playing field, the spectators, the stadium, the parking lot, and the television studio airing the game.
b. So from the very beginning (that mankind fully understood their colossal impact, nuclear weapons caused rational people to reflect before choosing to wage war.
c. The most striking thing about nuclear weapons is that they forced the emergence of the realization that modern weapons had become so devastating that they were rendered obsolete for actual usage.
III. How Did Nuclear Weapons become the ultimate inducement to peace?
1. The U.S. had typically imitated others rather than originate new weapons.
2. But when F.D.R. perceived that Hitler’s Germany threatened the U.S. in the most fundamental way, he prepared to counter that danger by authorizing the development of an atomic bomb, made possible by the following:
a. By the 1930s, public and private funding had made several American Universities competitive with their European counterparts in the field of nuclear physics.
b. The rise of anti-Semitism in Nazi Germany drove many of Europe’s best physicists to the United States.
3. Having acquired the atomic bomb, the U.S. used it against Japan to achieve victory as rapidly, as decisively, as economically, and with as little loss of life as possible.
4. Contrary to some revisionist opinion, Germany would have been a target had the bomb been ready in time. Truman stated “Let there be no mistake about it, I regarded the bomb as a military weapon and never had any doubt that it should be used.”
5. The Administration also exploded the bombs to intimidate the Soviet Union; and some of the scientists who developed the bomb hoped it would frighten the U.S. government, the Russians, and the rest of the world into a collective abhorrence of war.
IV. The United States Very Unorthodox Behavior
1. Why didn’t the United States resort to preventive war to keep the Soviet Union from developing a nuclear weapon?
a. Americans had a particular image of itself as a nation that did not start wars; as late as 1948 President Truman doubted the utility of nuclear weapons for offensive operations “because the people of the United States might not at the time permit their use for aggressive purposes.” (Gaddis, 89).
2. The production of atomic weapons had proceeded at a very relaxed pace.
a. There were only fourteen nuclear weapons available when the Truman Doctrine was announced in 1947.
b. There were only 50 unassembled weapons when the Berlin blockade began in 1948.
c. There were only 30 B-29s capable of delivering those weapons. As such the Soviet ability to march into Western Europe, the Middle East, and the Far East would not have been seriously impaired by an American nuclear strike.
3. Rather than keeping secret the means of producing nuclear weapons, Truman’s administration sought to place all atomic weapons under the authority of the U.N. (Baruch Plan).
a. We had a great deal of faith in the U.N. and the international legal procedures it would rely upon.
b. The scientists who built the bomb strongly supported this plan.
c. We had a lingering hope of avoiding a hostile relationship with Moscow.
d. American felt a deep sense of guilt over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and so they sought to reform the methods in which nuclear weapons would be used in the future – they sought to redeem themselves for bombing the Japanese.
e. Stalin rejected the Baruch Plan (Spring 1946); his scientists had long been developing a nuclear weapon of their own.
V. The Soviets and Nuclear Weapons.
1. The Soviets first learned of the possibility of nuclear weapons from a NY Times article on May 5, 1940.
2. The Soviets extensive spy network informed them that the Americans and the British were developing nuclear capabilities, but Stalin was skeptical, “I do not believe this. And I advise you not to believe that it is possible to win a war using some kind of chemical element that no one has seen. Doesn’t this seem like pure propaganda to you? Done deliberately to distract our scientists from work on new kinds of weapons for the army?” (Gaddis, 93).
3. Soviet agents continued to discover proof of the development of nukes from contacts with nuclear physicists, include J. Robert Oppenheimer, the Director of the Manhattan Project, Klaus Fuchs (a German émigré scientists who joined the British project and went to Los Alamos.
4. Ultimately, it was Georgii Flerov, a young Soviet physicist looking for citations to his own work in British and American journals, who noticed that references to nuclear physics were no longer appearing in scientific journals. Stalin was now convinced that the Americans and British were developing a nuclear weapon.
5. Roosevelt had considered telling the Soviet Union about its little secret in 1944 and he was well aware that the Soviets had been spying on us for over a year (Gaddis,94). But espionage didn’t seriously help the Soviets because:
a. Kremlin leaders were slow to understand what atomic weapons could actually do.
b. Molotov, who was initially assigned the responsibility for Nuclear research, had little since of its capabilities.
c. Beria, who replaced Molotov in 1945, understood the capabilities more, but he never trusted the intelligence reports he received from his spies on the Manhattan Project, “If this is disinformation, I’ll put you all in the cellar.”
VI. Stalin finally “gets it.”
1. When Truman informed Stalin about our nuclear capabilities at the Potsdam Conference on July 24, 1945 (after the test in Los Alamos), Stalin was not surprised.
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