Eric Schlosser - Command and Control

The United States had good reason to distrust the Soviet Union. In 1939 the Soviet nonaggression pact with Germany was followed by the Nazi invasions of Poland, Belgium, and France. Two years later the Soviet neutrality pact with Japan was followed by the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. During the war, the Soviet Union launched its own surprise attacks on Finland, the Baltic states, and Poland — and then executed tens of thousands of their citizens. After encouraging Japanese diplomats to believe it would mediate a peace agreement with the United States, the Soviet Union attacked and occupied Manchuria in the closing days of the war, causing the deaths of perhaps three hundred thousand Japanese soldiers and civilians. The ideology of the Soviet Union sought the overthrow of capitalist governments like that of the United States. And the Soviet leader, Joseph Stalin, was not only paranoid and megalomaniacal, but had already killed almost as many Russians as the Nazis had.

The Soviets had reason to distrust the United States, too. It had intervened militarily in the Russian civil war, using American troops to fight the Red Army until 1920. It had withheld diplomatic recognition of the Soviet Union until 1933. It had suffered vastly fewer casualties fighting the Nazis during the Second World War and yet claimed an equal role in the administration of occupied Germany. The United States government had a long history of opposing almost every form of socialism and communism. Armed with nuclear weapons, it was now the greatest impediment to Soviet influence in Europe, Asia, and the Middle East.

President Truman decided that a domestic policy on atomic energy had to be adopted before the issue of international control could be addressed. The War Department favored the May-Johnson bill, which would give the military a prominent role in atomic matters. The bill was also backed by J. Robert Oppenheimer, who’d become a celebrity since the end of the war, renowned as “the father of the atomic bomb.” But the legislation was vehemently opposed by most of the young scientists who’d worked on the Manhattan Project. For years they had resented the strict, compartmentalized secrecy imposed by General Groves. Few of the Manhattan Project scientists had been allowed to know how the atomic bomb would be used. Many now regretted that both Hiroshima and Nagasaki had been destroyed. They considered themselves far more qualified than anyone in the Army to make decisions about atomic energy — and warned that passage of the May-Johnson bill could turn the United States into a secretive, totalitarian state. Some still had an idealized vision of the Soviet Union and thought that the War Department’s bill would endanger world peace. At the heart of the debate were fundamentally different views of who should control the atomic bomb: civilians or the military.

Physicists representing groups like the Federation of American Scientists and the Association of Los Alamos Scientists traveled to Washington, D.C., testified before Congress, wrote editorials, gave impassioned speeches, and publicly attacked General Groves. An ambitious first-term senator from Connecticut, Brien McMahon, soon embraced their cause, asserting that the atomic bomb was too important to be left in the hands of “a militaristic oligarchy.” He was particularly upset that General Groves would not tell anyone in Congress how many atomic bombs the United States possessed or where they were kept — and that Groves refused to share that information with Cabinet members, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, or even the secretary of war. President Truman backed the Army’s insistence that details of the atomic stockpile should remain top secret, for the sake of national security. But he sided with the young scientists on the issue of civilian control and threw his support to legislation sponsored by Senator McMahon.

McMahon’s bill, the Atomic Energy Act of 1946, was passed by Congress in a somewhat amended form and signed into law by the president. It created an Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) run by civilians and a Joint Committee on Atomic Energy that provided congressional oversight. Members of the military could serve on a liaison committee that advised the AEC, but they could not determine the agency’s policies.

The president was given the sole authority to decide how many atomic bombs the United States should have, when they should be handed over to the military, and whether they should be used against an enemy. One person now had the power to end the lives of millions, with a single command. All of the laboratories, reactors, processing plants, fissile material, and atomic bomb parts belonging to the Manhattan Project were transferred to the AEC. Civilian control of the atomic bomb was now an American principle firmly established by law — but that did not prevent the military, almost immediately, from seeking to undermine it.

“WE ARE HERE TO MAKE a choice between the quick and the dead,” Bernard Baruch told a gathering of United Nations delegates on June 14, 1946, at the Hunter College gymnasium in the Bronx. “We must elect World Peace or World Destruction.” Baruch was an elegant, silver-haired financier in his midseventies who’d been asked by President Truman to offer a proposal for international control of the atomic bomb. The “Baruch plan” called for the creation of a new agency, affiliated with the U.N., that would own or control “all atomic-energy activities potentially dangerous to world security.” The agency would have the power to inspect nuclear facilities throughout the world, so that any attempt to make nuclear weapons could be discovered and severely punished. The new system of international control would be imposed in stages — and would eventually outlaw the manufacture, possession, or use of atomic bombs. The United States was willing to hand over its “winning weapons,” Baruch said, but would require “a guarantee of safety” stronger than mere words.

The selection of Bernard Baruch to help formulate the American plan had been controversial within the Truman administration. Many liberals criticized Baruch for being too old, too ignorant about atomic weaponry, and too suspicious of the Soviet Union. The Baruch plan was attacked by Oppenheimer, among others, for not being bold enough — for emphasizing inspections and punishments instead of cooperation with the Soviets. Oppenheimer favored a scheme that would share technical information about atomic energy and promote goodwill. On June 19 the Soviet Union offered its own plan. Andrei Gromyko, the Soviet foreign minister, proposed that first the United States should destroy all of its nuclear weapons, and then an agreement should be reached on how to prevent other nations from obtaining them. The Soviet response confirmed liberal doubts about the Baruch plan — and conservative doubts about the Soviet Union.

During the summer of 1946, some form of international agreement to outlaw the atomic bomb still seemed within reach. Although the Soviets complained that the United States was trying to prolong its nuclear monopoly, America’s defense policies were hardly those of an imperialist power seeking world domination. In fact, the United States was quickly dismantling its armed forces. The number of soldiers in the U.S. Army soon dropped from about 8 million to fewer than 1 million; the number of airplanes in the Army Air Forces fell from almost 80,000 to fewer than 25,000 and only one fifth of those planes were thought ready for action. Ships and tanks were permanently scrapped, and the defense budget was cut by almost 90 percent.

American servicemen were eager to come home after the war and resume their normal lives. When the pace of demobilization seemed too slow, they staged protest marches in occupied Germany. The American people expressed little desire to build an empire or maintain a strong military presence overseas. Although the War Department sought to acquire a wide range of foreign bases, the likelihood of any military challenge to the United States seemed remote. “No major strategic threat or requirement now exists, in the opinion of our country’s best strategists,” Major General St. Clair Street, the deputy commander of SAC, said in July 1946, “nor will such a requirement exist for the next three to five years.”