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

The Oppenheimers continued to have friends who were Communists, and Oppenheimer contributed money until the end of 1941, through Communist channels, to Spanish Refugee Relief and to aid for migratory farm workers in California. As late as 1943 he had some kind of remote emotional relationship with a girl, daughter of a fellow professor, who was a Communist. All of this “derogatory” information was known to General Groves and to Army Intelligence, G-2, before Oppenheimer was made head of Los Alamos in 1942. The appointment was made because his talents were urgently needed, and there was no reason to feel that he was a Communist himself or that he had ever been, or would ever be, disloyal to the United States.

For the next four years Oppenheimer was kept under constant surveillance by M-2; his conversations secretly recorded, telephone calls and letters monitored, and all his movements shadowed. In 1954, under oath, General Groves testified to his belief in Oppenheimer’s discretion and loyalty, and he repeated this in his memoirs, published in 1962. The significance of all this is that this ancient evidence, plus Oppenheimer’s alleged opposition to efforts to make the H-bomb in 1946-1949, was used by the advocates of air power, the neo-isolationists, the exponents of massive retaliation, and the professional anti-Communists in 1953-1954 to destroy Oppenheimer’s public reputation, to end his opportunity for continued public service, and to discredit the preceding Democratic administration in Washington. It was an essential element in the massive-retaliation, neo-isolationist, McCarthyite, Dulles interregnum of 1953-1957, which ran almost exactly parallel to the post-Stalin interregnum in the Soviet Union during the same years.

The last significant factor in this postwar period of eighteen years was provided by the events in the Far East. In this factor also there are three subperiods, of which the most significant was the middle one from “the loss of China” to the Communists late in 1949 to the Geneva “Summit Conference” of July 1955. In this period the Far East was in confusion over the Chinese victory in mainland China; the outbreak of war in Korea in June 1950; the Korean armistice of July 1953; the Indo-Chinese war and armistice in 1953-1954; and the threatened Chinese Communist attack on Quemoy, if not on Formosa, in the winter of 1954-1955. The earlier period of Far Eastern history saw the slow decay of the Nationalist Chinese regime of Chiang Kai-shek and the revival of Japan, while the later, third, period centered upon the growing strength and dangerous pugnacity of “Red” China. This third period ended with the Chinese attack on India in October 1962 and the break between Communist China and the Soviet Union at the end of 1962.

The interweaving of these six factors makes up a major part of the history of the period 1945-1963. In each case we can discern three stages, of which the middle one is the most critical. The dates of these stages are not, of course, the same for all six factors, but they are close enough so that the whole eighteen years can be examined successfully as three consecutive subperiods organized around the central core of the nuclear rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union. Accordingly, we can examine this whole period in the three stages: (1) American atomic supremacy, 1945-1950; (2) the race for the H-bomb, 1950-1957; and (3) the race for the Intercontinental Ballistic Missile (IBM) from 1957 to early 1963.

The Origins of the Cold War,

1945-1949

The surrender of Japan left much of the world balanced between the mass armies of the Soviet Union and the American nuclear monopoly. It was an unequal balance, because the United States would not have used its atomic weapon against the Russians for anything Russia was likely to do. Stalin realized this, and largely ignored the atom bomb, although his designer, Andrei Tupolev, successfully copied four B-29’s captured by the Russians in the Far East in 1944 and brought these to production (as TU-4’s) in 1947. Otherwise, the Kremlin’s assessment of the situation was quite mistaken.

Stalin assumed that the United States would soon relapse into isolationism, as it had done after World War I, and would be fully occupied with a postwar economic collapse like that of 1921. Accordingly, he regarded Britain as the chief obstacle to his plans, and, seeing that it was both small and weak, with most unpromising economic prospects, he proceeded to carry out his designs with relatively little attention to the reactions of either English-speaking Power. These plans involved the creation of a Soviet-controlled buffer fringe of satellite states on the Soviet frontiers in all areas occupied by Soviet armies, and Communist coalition governments beyond these areas. In both cases the local Communists would be controlled by leaders of their own nationality who had been trained under Comintern auspices in the Soviet Union. In some cases, these Communist leaders had been exiles in Russia for more than twenty years.

The chief error in Stalin’s postwar strategy was his total misjudgment of President Truman and, on a wider stage, of the American people as a whole. Some of this error undoubtedly arose from Stalin’s ignorance of the world outside Russia and from the fact that his terrorist tactics in Russia in the 1930’s had made it difficult for him to get reliable foreign information from his diplomatic corps, which was shielded from contact with foreigners and was more concerned with sending Stalin the information he expected than with that derived from independent observations. In any case, the Kremlin misjudged both Truman and the American people.

Truman, in spite of a natural suspicion of the Russians, ended the war with every intention of trying to carry out Roosevelt’s original plans for postwar cooperation with the Soviet Union. In addition, having learned much from the 1920’s, he intended to make every effort to avoid either a postwar economic depression or a relapse into isolationism. His success in avoiding these events made it possible to reverse his inherited policy of cooperation with Russia when Stalin’s actions in 1946-1947 made it clear that cooperation was the last thing the Kremlin wanted. These actions appeared most clearly in regard to Germany.

We have already noted the Soviet subversion of Poland, Romania, and Bulgaria by native Communists returning from Russia under the protection of the Soviet armies. The same thing occurred, but more gradually, in eastern Germany. There the Communists at first pretended to cooperate with any “anti-Fascist” groups, but their unwillingness to cooperate with the Western Powers in the administration of Germany appeared almost at once. They gradually closed off their occupation zone and refused to carry out the earlier agreements to treat Germany as a single administrative and economic unit. This meant that the usual economic exchange within Germany of food from the agricultural eastern portion of the country for the industrial products of western Germany was broken. Instead, East German food was drained to the Soviet Union. To prevent starvation of the West Germans, the United States and Britain had to send in hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of food and other supplies. On May 3, 1946, General Lucius D. Clay, head of the American Military Government in Germany, informed the Russians that no future agreements would be made to ship West German industrial equipment as reparations to Russia until the Russians agreed to treat Germany as an economic unit and to give some accounting of their reparations plundering of East Germany. Both points referred to open violations of the Potsdam Agreement regarding the treatment of Germany.

The Soviet Union justified these and other violations of earlier agreements on the urgent need for their own economic rehabilitation. There can be no doubt that the Soviet Union had suffered great economic damage from the war, possibly the loss of a quarter of its prewar wealth, more than all the other victor countries combined, but the Kremlin could have obtained much more by continued cooperation with the United States than it did from its postwar policy of studied enmity. This enmity was based on a number of factors: In the first place, Stalin was misled by the false ideology of Marx and Lenin which spoke of the inevitable struggle of capitalism and Communism, of the inevitable economic breakdown of the capitalist system, and of the capitalist endeavor to avoid such a breakdown by militarist aggression. On this basis, Stalin could not believe that the United States was prepared to be generous and cooperative toward the Soviet Union.