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

An early and fairly typical example of these efforts was a semidocumentary film called the House on 92nd Street , which was made by Louis de Rochemont, in collaboration with the FBI, and was widely and favorably viewed by the American people in 1946. It showed that the FBI, before the war, had infiltrated the Nazi espionage network in this country and successfully frustrated its large-scale efforts to communicate to Germany atomic secrets which it had obtained from an employee in an atomic plant under military control. At the end of the picture the commentator’s voice announced that the efforts of the FBI had successfully frustrated all efforts by foreign agents to penetrate our atomic secrets during the war, and would continue to do so.

The falsehoods in this motion picture, as in most of the subsequent publicity on atomic spying, are too numerous to be refuted completely; but it might be pointed out that atomic security was guarded by military Intelligence exclusively, and the FBI knew nothing of the project until April 1943, when Army Intelligence, G-2, asked the FBI to stop its surveillance of a Manhattan District employee whom the FBI had been watching because he was a suspected Communist (not because he was in the atomic project, of which the FBI knew nothing official until April 5, 1943). G-2 continued as the sole agency in Manhattan District security until after the war, although it used the resources of FBI (such as fingerprint files), as of other government agencies on a cooperative basis.

As for the tale of FBI exploits in the House on 92nd Street, as late as 1962 General Groves knew of no German efforts at atomic espionage. As to the final boast of that movie that no atomic secrets had been stolen during the war owing to FBI efforts, we now know that the information which was “stolen” went to the crowd that the FBI was watching, the Communists.

Most of the stories of atomic espionage which are now accepted as gospel by most Americans are similar to the House on 92nd Street. These stories were spread by partisan groups to discredit the Democratic administrations which had been in office in Washington from 1933 to 1953, by fanatical neo-isolationist conservatives who wished to discredit foreigners (including our Allies, such as England), scientists, the United Nations, and all persons whose political sympathies were anywhere to the left of Warren G. Harding, and by various government agencies, such as the FBI and the air force, who could use such stories to obtain increased appropriations from the Congress. Some of the details of these struggles will be mentioned later.

When we speak of atomic secrets and spying, we must distinguish three quite different types of information: (1) scientific principles, (2) questions of general production tactics (such as, which methods are workable or unworkable), and (3) detailed information of engineering construction. No secrets of Group 1 existed; and secrets of Group 3 would usually have required elaborate blueprints and formulas which could not be passed by spying methods of communication. There remains information of Group 2, which could be extremely helpful in saving wasted time and effort. In most cases information of this type would have little meaning to anyone without a minimum of scientific training. This kind of information, so far as present information allows a judgment, would seem to have been passed to the Russians from two English scientists, Alan Nunn May and Klaus Fuchs, and an American Army enlisted man, David Greenglass, in the period to September 1945. Nunn May had little directly to do with the A-bomb, but he had worked on the heavy-water nuclear pile in Canada and had visited the graphite pile in Chicago several times. He gave Soviet agents Lieutenant Angelov and Colonel Zabotin, in Canada, considerable information about atomic piles, as well as the daily output of U-235 and plutonium at Oak Ridge (400 and 800 grams, respectively), and handed over a trace of the uranium isotope U-233.

The information from Fuchs, which was much more valuable, culminated about the same period (June 1945) and gave information on gaseous diffusion, the two trigger devices, and the fact that work had been done without much success toward a fusion H-bomb. Greenglass, at the same time, gave the same Russian contact, Harry Gold, a rough sketch of part of the “implosion trigger” for the A-bomb. There may have been other spying episodes of which we are not now aware, but the information passed to the Russians of which we are now aware probably did not contribute much significant aid to their achievement of the A-bomb. The H-bomb will be considered later. Statements frequently made that the Russians could not have made the A-bomb without information obtained from espionage, or statements that such information speeded up their acquisition of the bomb by years (or even by eighteen months) are most unlikely, although here again we cannot be sure. They must have been saved from trying some unremunerative lines of endeavor, but the real problems in making the bomb were engineering and fiscal problems, which Russia could overcome, on a crash basis, once it was known that we had such a bomb. This knowledge was given to the world by the destruction of Hiroshima.

The Twentieth-Century Pattern

The decision to use the bomb against Japan marks one of the critical turning points in the history of our times. We cannot now say that the world would have been better, but we can surely say that it would have been different. We can also say, with complete assurance, that no one involved in the decision had a complete or adequate picture of the situation. The scientists who were consulted had no information on the status of the war itself, had no idea how close to the end Japan already was, and had no experience to make judgments on this matter. The politicians and military men had no real conception of the nature of the new weapon or of the drastic revolution it offered to human life. To them it was simply a “bigger bomb,” even a “much bigger bomb,” and, by that fact alone, they welcomed it.

Some people, like General Groves, wanted it to be used to justify the $2 billion they had spent. A large group sided with him because the Democratic leaders in the Congress had authorized these expenditures outside proper congressional procedures and had cooperated in keeping them from almost all members of both houses by concealing them under misleading appropriation headings. Majority Leader John W. McCormack (later Speaker) once told me, half joking, that if the bomb had not worked he expected to face penal charges. Some Republicans, notably Congressman Albert J. Engel of Michigan, had already shown signs of a desire to use congressional investigations and newspaper publicity to raise questions about misuse of public funds. During one War Department discussion of this problem, a skilled engineer, Jack Madigan, said: “If the project succeeds, there won’t be any investigation. If it doesn’t, they won’t investigate anything else.” Moreover, some air-force officers were eager to protect the relative position of their service in the postwar demobilization and drastic reduction of financial appropriations by using a successful A-bomb drop as an argument that Japan had been defeated by air power rather than by naval or ground forces.

After it was all over, Director of Military Intelligence for the Pacific Theater of War Alfred McCormack, who was probably in as good position as anyone for judging the situation, felt that the Japanese surrender could have been obtained in a few weeks by blockade alone: “The Japanese had no longer enough food in stock, and their fuel reserves were practically exhausted. We had begun a secret process of mining all their harbors, which was steadily isolating them from the rest of the world.