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

2. Too Stupid Even for the Funny Papers: The Myth of the American Atomic Monopoly, 1939–1945

2 Too​Stupid​Even​for​​ the​Funny​Papers The myTh of The AmericAn ATomic monopoly, 1939–1945 In September 1945, nuclear physicist James Franck warned President Harry S. Truman that “the idea that there exists a secret formula [for the atomic bomb] which can be guarded in its entirety” should be dismissed “as too stupid even for the movies and the funny papers.” The president ignored this warning and soon pledged publicly that the United States would hold its atomic monopoly as “a sacred trust” until “world cooperation for peace” achieved “a state of perfection.” Truman’s breezy confidence in U.S. atomic secrecy typified early American nuclear policy. He and other U.S. policymakers, including Truman’s predecessor, Franklin D. Roosevelt, disregarded warnings from well-informed atomic scientists that America’s nuclear secrets could not be kept forever. Political and military leaders dismissed such physicists as starry-eyed idealists, but events soon exposed policymakers as the deluded ones. Beneath their hubristic policy initiatives and public pronouncements lay a deeply engrained faith in U.S. technological prowess, a science fiction– inspired belief in superweapons, and a historical amnesia regarding how American fears of other states, especially Nazi Germany, acquiring atomic bombs had spurred the U.S. nuclear program. Faith in the U.S. atomic mo- 12 Too sTupid even for The funny pApers nopoly had led fdr and then Truman to waste opportunities to conclude a nonproliferation agreement at a time when enforcement would have been less complicated and before the growing Cold War rivalry betweenWashington and Moscow made such a treaty much more difficult to negotiate.1 ​ “The​Wrong​End​of​the​Telescope” Indulging in the stereotype of scientists as eccentrics, President Roosevelt once quipped that he “had little sympathy with Copernicus,” who had “looked through the right end of the telescope, thus greatly magnifying his problems. I use thewrong end of the telescope and it makes things much easier to bear.” In assessing the threat of nuclear proliferation, Roosevelt actually used both ends of the telescope. He initially used the magnifying lens when he inadvertently exaggerated the threat of a German atomic bomb. But he viewed the danger of postwar nuclear proliferation through the wrong end, minimizing and pushing it into the distance. Roosevelt’s successor, Truman, exacerbated these errors. Both men ignored ample data that wartime contingencies had led to the Anglo-American monopoly in 1945. Foreign and foreign-born scientists had made every major discovery leading to the development of the atomic bomb. In 1905, Albert Einstein, a German-born Swiss citizen, first put forth the theory that matter could be transformed into energy. Enrico Fermi, an Italian, discovered that uranium reacted to neutron bombardment in 1934, and in 1938 German chemists Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann discovered that rather than absorbing the neutron the uranium nuclei had actually become a lighter element. They announced their discovery of nuclear fission in January 1939.2 The discoveryof fission brought a flurryof scientific activity. In 1939 alone, scientists throughout the world published approximately 100 articles on the topic and initiated numerous research projects. In summer 1940, Soviet scientists Georgii Flerov and Konstantin Petrzhak confirmed experimentally that some uranium nuclei “split” naturally without neutron bombardment. French scientists under the direction of Frédéric Joliot-Curie quickly established the world’s leading nuclear program, albeit one focused on the development of nuclear power plants, not nuclear explosives. French scientists likely would have achieved the first uranium chain reaction but for the Nazi invasion of France in June 1940. The rapid diffusion of nuclear knowledge reflected the interwar flourishing of “scientific internationalism,” whose proponents advocated the open publication of experimental and theoretical findings in order to advance humanity’s understanding of the universe. Many hoped, espe- Too sTupid even for The funny pApers 13 cially after the atomic bomb became a reality, that contacts among scientists could bridge barriers to international peace and cooperation. Knowledge of fission’s possible military and civilian applications had already infused the scientific community years before the United States ever produced a functioning nuclear reactor or an atomic bomb.The proliferation of nuclear knowledgevia both publication and a mass exodus to Great Britain and the United States of scientists fleeing Nazi persecution inaugurated the Anglo-American nuclear effort.The émigrés employed throughout the Manhattan Project ironically helped germinate the myth of an American atomic monopoly.Yet, in the initial stages of the...