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

Assistance similar to these was available to the Soviet Union but was generally rebuffed. Even in 1945, efforts to establish international emergency committees for coal, transportation, and economic recovery in Europe were boycotted by the Soviet Union, with the exception of the one on transportation, which was necessary to supply the Russian troops. Little cooperation could be obtained from Soviet authorities for handling or aiding refugees, except for their demands for the return, to concentration camps or slave labor, of those who had fled from eastern Europe. On October 15, 1945, Moscow signed an agreement similar to Britain’s by which they agreed to pay, after July 1954, for the quarter-billion dollars’ worth of goods on their final Lend-Lease demands yet unfilled when Lend-Lease ended; but they refused to discuss any general Lend-Lease settlement and they refused to negotiate for a general loan, similar to that made to Britain, although Stalin had asked for one of $6 billion as early as January 1945. An American offer to discuss such a credit was rejected by Russia as “financial aggression” in March 1946. The offer was renewed in April and again in September 1946, but the American aims of multilateral trade free of artificial restraints except tariffs, like the American insistence on free elections, were regarded in Moscow as clear evidence of America’s aggressive aims.

One significant, but perhaps not essential, factor in the deterioration of the relations of the Big Three in 1945 and 1946 lies in the provincial ignorance of the three foreign ministers, Byrnes, Bevan, and Molotov, who conducted the negotiations. All three were men of limited background and narrow outlook who saw the world from a narrow nationalistic point of view and were incapable of appreciating the outlook of different cultures or the different values and verbal meanings to be found in alien minds. Nevertheless, it does seem clear that the postwar breakdown of cooperation was inevitable in view of the conceptions of public authority, state power, and political security to be found in all three countries.

On the whole, if blame must be allotted, it may well be placed at the door of Stalin’s office in the Kremlin. American willingness to cooperate continued until 1947, as is evident from the fact that the Marshall Plan offer of American aid for a cooperative European recovery effort was opened to the Soviet Union, but it now seems clear that Stalin had decided to close the door on cooperation and adopted a unilateral policy of limited aggression about February or March of 1946. The beginning of the Cold War may be placed at the date of this inferred decision or may be placed at the later and more obvious date of the Soviet refusal to accept Marshall Plan aid in July 1947. The significance of the latter date is revealed by the fact that Czechoslovakia, which accepted on July 7th, was forced by Stalin’s direct order to Prime Minister Gottwald to reverse this decision on July 10th.

One significant encouragement to Soviet aggression came from the almost total demobilization of the American war effort. Pressure from special-interest groups such as business, labor unions, and cattlemen, aroused public opinion for the ending of price controls and rationing and obtained cooperation from an anti-New Deal coalition in Congress to end most of the nation’s economic controls in 1946. At the same time came almost total military demobilization. In spite of Ambassador Harriman’s explicit warnings from Moscow in April 1945, and Stalin’s declaration of cold warfare in February 1946, the American government carried out the demobilization plan of September 1943, which was based on individual rather than on unit discharges. This destroyed the combat effectiveness of all units by the end of 1945, when almost half the men had been demobilized, and every unit, as a result, was at 50 percent. The army’s 8 million men in August 1945 was at 4 1/4 million by the end of the year and reached 1.9 million by July 1946. The air force fell from 218 combat groups to 109 groups in the last four months of 1945. The navy fell from 3.4 million men in August 1945 to 1.6 million in March 1946.

The most critical example of the Soviet refusal to cooperate and of its insistence on relapsing into isolation, secrecy, and terrorism is to be found in its refusal to join in American efforts to harness the dangerous powers of nuclear fission. Long before the test at Alamogordo, some of the nuclear scientists, spurred on once again by Szilard, were trying to warn American political leaders of the unique character of the dangers from this source. Centered in the Chicago Argonne Laboratories, this group wished to prevent the use of the bomb on Japan, slow up bomb (but not general nuclear) research, establish some kind of international control of the bomb, and reduce secrecy to a minimum. Early in April 1945, Szilard wrote to President Roosevelt to this effect, and, on the latter’s death, sought out Byrnes and repeated his views verbally. The future secretary of state found difficulty in grasping Szilard’s arguments, especially as they were delivered in a Hungarian accent, but the new President Truman soon set up an “Interim” Committee to give advice on nuclear problems. This committee, led by Secretary of War Stimson, was dependent on its scientific members, Bush, Conant, and Karl T. Compton, for relevant facts or could call on its “scientific panel” of Oppenheimer, Fermi, Arthur H. Compton, and E. O. Lawrence for advice. All these scientists except Fermi were “official” scientists, deeply involved in governmental administrative problems involving large budgets and possible grants to their pet projects and universities, and were regarded with some suspicion by the agitated, largely refugee, scientists in the Manhattan District laboratories. These suspicions deepened as the “official” scientists recommended use of the bomb on Japan “near workers’ houses.”

At Chicago seven of the agitated scientists, led by James Franck of Gottingen (Nobel Prize, 1925) and including Szilard and Eugene Rabinowitch, sent another warning letter to Washington. They forecast the terror of a nuclear arms race which would follow use of the bomb against Japan. Later, in July 1945, they presented a petition seeking an international demonstration and international control of the new weapon. Szilard obtained sixty-seven signatures to this petition before it was blocked by General Groves and Arthur Compton, using military secrecy as an excuse. After Hiroshima this group formed the Association of Atomic Scientists, later reorganized as the Federation of Atomic Scientists, whose Bulletin (BAS) has been the greatest influence and source of information on all matters concerned with the political and social impact of nuclear weapons. The editor of this amazing new periodical was Eugene Rabinowitch.

The energetic lobbying of this group of atomic scientists had a considerable influence on subsequent atomic history. When the “official scientists,” late in 1945, supported the administration’s May-Johnson bill, which would have shared domestic control of atomic matters with the armed services, the BAS group mobilized public opinion behind the junior senator from Connecticut, Brian McMahon, and pushed through the McMahon bill to presidential signature in August 1946. The McMahon bill set up an Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) of five full-time civilian commissioners, named by the President, with David Lilienthal, former TVA czar, as chairman. This commission, from August 1946, had ownership and control of all fissionable materials (uranium and thorium) from the mine to the final disposal of atomic wastes, including control of all plants and process patents, with the right to license private nuclear enterprises free of danger to society.

The AEC as it functioned was a disappointment to the BAS scientists. They had sought freedom from military influence and reduced emphasis on the military uses of nuclear fission, free dissemination of theoretical research, and a diminution of the influence of the official scientists. They failed on all these points, as the AEC operated largely in terms of weapons research and production, remained extravagantly secretive even on purely theoretical matters, and was, because of the scientific ignorance of most of the commissioners, inevitably dominated by its scientific advisory committee of “official” scientists led by Oppenheimer.