Carroll Quigley - Tragedy and Hope - A History of the World in Our Time

The making of the first atomic bombs is surely the most amazing story of World War II. It is a long, complex, and technical study which most historians would like to omit, but it is not possible to understand the history of the mid-twentieth century without some understanding of how this almost unbelievable weapon was achieved and especially why the Western Powers were able to achieve it and the Fascist Powers were not. The gist of this story will be told in the next chapter. Here we need only record that the United States obtained its first three atom bombs over a three-week period from July 15 to August 10, 1945.

The theory on which the nuclear explosions were based was known to the scientists of all countries before April 1939, and the direction in which practical efforts to achieve a bomb must go were established and equally known before worldwide secrecy descended a year later, in April 1940, just before the fall of France. Scientific ignorance, however, was so universal among political and military leaders throughout the world that the use of the existing scientific knowledge would not have been achieved anywhere but for two factors: (1) many of the world’s greatest nuclear scientists had fled as refugees from Fascism to England and the United States, and (2) Franklin Roosevelt was quite willing to listen to unconventional suggestions if his attention could be obtained.

In the years 1939-1941 the refugee scientists in the United States were so fearful that Hitler would obtain the atomic bomb that they were able to prevail upon the best known among them, Einstein, to allow his name to be used to catch Roosevelt’s attention. Once this had been done, the urging of these same scientists and the growing urgency of the war itself made it possible for the administrative talents of American scientists to utilize the enormous resources made available to them to reach the goal they sought. After September 1942, Brigadier General Leslie R. Groves, U.S.A., was in charge of the whole project and, in an atmosphere of fanatical secrecy, brought it to a successful conclusion with an expenditure of about $2 billion and the work of about 150,000 persons.

In this, as in other matters, the sudden death of President Roosevelt on April 12, 1945 had a great and incalculable effect. Vice-President Truman knew nothing of the atomic-research program until he was told of it by Secretary of War Henry Stimson, briefly on April 12th and at greater length two weeks later. In fact, Truman had been kept so far outside the whole war effort that his first few months as President required an almost superhuman effort of absorbed attention to get the major lines of policy into his hands. To avoid a repetition of this situation in case of his own death, he decided to place James F. Byrnes, perhaps the most widely experienced man in American government, into the office of secretary of state, since at that time the incumbent of this first Cabinet post was designated as second in line of succession, after the Vice-President, to the Presidency. The new secretary of state, however, had been serving as “Assistant President” largely concerned with domestic questions, and he was almost as unfamiliar with the main problems of foreign policy as Truman himself.

The problems which Truman, Byrnes, and their advisers faced in reestablishing the peace of the world were greatly intensified by the obstructionism of the Soviet government and by the fact that Winston Churchill had set an election in England, the first in ten years, for July 5, 1945, to renew his government’s mandate. The result was not clear until July 27, 1945, because of the need to count absentee ballots from soldiers overseas, but these eventually showed a smashing two-to-one victory of the Labour Party over Churchill’s Conservatives.

Thus Byrnes became secretary of state only on June 30th. He went with President Truman to the Potsdam Conference, which opened on July 17th and lasted until August 2nd, but on July 28, 1945, Clement Attlee and Ernest Bevin, the new prime minister and foreign secretary of Britain, replaced Churchill and Eden as delegates at Potsdam. The transition was made somewhere easier by the fact that Attlee had been deputy prime minister since 1942 and had been on the British delegation to Potsdam from the opening of the conference. Nevertheless, the fact that Stalin was the sole survivor of the Big Three heads of government who had conferred so often during the war undoubtedly weakened the West in this last, “Terminal,” conference.

In general, the American delegation seemed to regard as its chief aims to seek to continue the Big Three cooperation into the postwar world within the structure of the United Nations whose charter had been adopted at San Francisco on June 25th. The American delegation felt that Europe was falling very rapidly into two antithetical parts in which Britain would seek to balance a Soviet-dominated eastern Europe by a British-dominated western Europe. The Americans wished to avoid this and particularly to prevent two possible consequences of this: a revival of Germany by Britain to help serve as a shield against Soviet power in the east and the jeopardizing of western Europe’s and the world’s economic revival by the splitting of Europe into opposed blocs. As one evidence of this American attitude, we might mention President Truman’s refusal to confer separately with Churchill before the main conference at Potsdam and his refusal to allow the State Department and the Foreign Office to make any advance agreement on joint policies.

On July 16th, while Truman was surveying the devastation of Berlin, the atomic scientists were gathered on the desolate open plain of Alamogordo, New Mexico, 125 miles southeast of Albuquerque. There an implosion-type plutonium bomb at the top of a steel tower one hundred feet high was detonated at 5:30 a.m. The result was an explosion beyondall expectations: a burst of blinding light far brighter than the sun expanded into a ball of fire two miles high, which lasted, second after second, as a great mushrooming pillar of radioactive smoke and dust surging upward to a height of almost eight miles. Almost a minute later, as if the door of a hot oven had been opened, the blast reached “base camp,” ten miles from the bomb point, with sufficient force to push some people backward. The light was seen 180 miles away by early risers, and the sound, by some freak, split windows at that distance. At the scene, General Thomas F. Farrell said to General Groves, “The war is over,” but the scientists, stricken with horror at their success in releasing a force equivalent to 17,500 tons of TNT from about 12 pounds of plutonium, had had a glimpse of hell. In that instant, many of them became politicians, convinced of the social responsibilities of science, especially to avoid war and to direct the unlimited power of science to human welfare. It was soon established that the steel bomb tower had been volatilized, as was a 4-inch iron pipe, 16 feet high, deeply set in concrete 1,500 feet away. Another forty-ton steel tower, 70 feet high and a half-mile away, had been torn to pieces.

The first message of the great event in New Mexico reached Secretary of War Stimson at Potsdam on July 17th. It had only three words: “Babies satisfactorily born.” More details followed, and General Groves’s detailed account arrived by courier on July 21st. All this information was given to Churchill as it arrived. It was agreed to give the Russians no information, but merely to mention the success of the new bomb as casually as possible to prevent any later accusations of withholding information when the story became public. The prime minister at once saw the significance of the event, but his chief of staff, Field Marshal Lord Alanbrooke, belittled Churchill’s excitement, and wrote in his diary:

“He had absorbed all the minor American exaggerations and, as a result, was completely carried away. It was now no longer necessary for the Russians to come into the Japanese war; the new explosive alone was sufficient to settle the matter. Furthermore, we now had something in our hands which would redress the balance with the Russians.”