Nuclear Apartheid: The Quest for American Atomic Supremacy from World War II to the Present

3. Winning Weapons: A-Bombs, H-Bombs, and International Control, 1946–1953

3 Winning​Weapons A-BomBs, h-BomBs, � inTernATionAl conTrol, 1946–1953 In 1946, Harry Truman swore that the United States would not “throw away our gun until we are sure the rest of the world can’t arm against us.” By late 1945, many government officials had embraced Truman’s belief that weapons rather than treaties ensured U.S. security. They made no pretense of sharing American know-how with the rest of the world. Others, including Secretary of State Byrnes, also wished to preserve the atomic monopoly but feared that the growing chorus of voices urging international control of atomic energy might work to Soviet advantage. With most national security managers fearing communist ideas more than Soviet arms,Washington needed to appear more reasonable and peace loving than Moscow. By going through the motions in the un, Byrnes and like-minded officials hoped to convince the American and Western European publics that an effective nuclear nonproliferation agreement could not be negotiated with the Soviets. They worked to make the American proposal appear generous and conciliatory while including conditions unacceptable to Moscow. U.S. efforts did succeed in mollifying public opinion, but the president never shared Byrnes’s point of view. He would rather that the United States act as the lone sheriff with nuclear six-guns at the ready than as one of fdr’s four international policemen. If Washington had allies, they would be subordinates, not equals, and he felt no need to join any charade of nuclear multilateralism. Truman’s treatment of 48 WinninG WeApons the Anglo-American nuclear alliance from 1945 to 1953 made this quite clear. He ultimately decided that “since we can’t obtain international control we must be strongest in atomic weapons.” Truman then worked to solidify U.S. nuclear superiority with little concern for nonproliferation.1 Crafting​the​Ruse After returning from the Moscow Conference, Byrnes had little time to set his international control policy in motion. He knew that neither Truman nor such important congressional leaders as Connallyand Vandenberg supported his variant of atomic diplomacy.To deflect congressional opposition, in early 1946 Byrnes created a committee on atomic energy to formulate an internationalcontrolproposalfortheunAec meetingsthatsummer.Hisundersecretary , Dean Acheson, chaired the panel, which also included Vannevar Bush, James Conant, Leslie Groves, and former War Department aide John McCloy . Acheson seemed an odd choice as the point man for Byrnes’s strategy. In his last experience with atomic energy policy, he had supported Henry Stimson’s 1945 proposal to negotiate bilaterally with the Soviets, and he disdained the un as too idealistic and unwieldy to serve U.S. national interests. But what Acheson and Byrnes shared was the notion that the Soviets might be made more pliable through positive inducements than through threats. Acheson hoped that the State Department committee could pull together what he saw as an inchoate U.S. atomic energy policy. Technical knowledge would be key because the success of Byrnes’s strategy hinged on the plan at least appearing to be reasonable and practical. Although Acheson respected the committee’s members, he feared that only Bush had the expertise to formulate a strong international control proposal. At the committee’s first meeting , he proposed creating an advisory board to study several possible plans, ignoring Groves, who protested that he, Conant, and Bush knew more about atomic weapons than any outside consultants. Acheson selected David E. Lilienthal, head of the Tennessee Valley Authority , to chair the panel because of his experience in government and his familiarity with technical issues. The undersecretary confessed to Lilienthal that the government desperately needed a thorough study of international control to assess how best to deal with Truman’s and Byrnes’s public and private commitments, which he said had been issued without “the facts nor an understanding of what was involved in the atomic energy issue.”2 To what degree Lilienthal might have been “in” on the Acheson/Byrnes strategy as he met with the rest of the board is unclear. In any case, the panel, WinninG WeApons 49 which included Robert Oppenheimer and several industrialists who had worked with the government during the war—Chester Barnard, Harry A. Winne, and Charles Thomas—loomed large in the subsequent debate, for it went beyond its advisory role and contributed most of the ideas that appeared in the committee’s final proposal. Oppenheimer became the primary scientific expert for both the Lilienthal board and the...