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THE ATOMIC BOMB AND THE ORIGINS OF THE COLD WAR This page intentionally left blank the atomic bomb and the origins of the cold war Campbell Craig Sergey Radchenko Yale University Press New Haven & London Copyright © 2008 by Yale University. All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers. Set in Galliard Oldstyle by The Composing Room of Michigan, Inc. Printed in the United States of America. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Craig, Campbell, 1964– The atomic bomb and the origins of the Cold War / Campbell Craig and Sergey Radchenko. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-300-11028-9 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Cold War. 2. Atomic bomb—Political aspects. 3. United States—Foreign relations—Soviet Union. 4. Soviet Union—Foreign relations— United States. 5. United States—Foreign relations—1945– 1953. 6. Soviet Union—Foreign relations—1945– 1991. I. Radchenko, Sergey. II. Title. D843.C67 2008 909.82Ј5dc22 2007049148 A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources. 10987654321 CONTENTS Acknowledgments vii Introduction ix 1 Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Atomic Wartime Diplomacy 1 2 The Great Game 34 3 Truman, the Bomb, and the End of World War II 62 4 Responding to Hiroshima and Nagasaki 90 5 The Baruch Plan and the Onset of American Cold War 111 6 Stalin and the Burial of International Control 135 Conclusion 162 Notes 171 Index 197 v This page intentionally left blank ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Campbell Craig would like to thank Bob Jervis, Jeremi Suri, An- drew Preston, Lloyd Gardner, Paul Boyer, Katherine Sibley, and Fred Logevall for comments and advice. I’m grateful for the institutional sup- port of the University of Canterbury, Rutgers University, the University of Southampton—my new home—and especially Yale University. Inter- national Security Studies and the Center for International Affairs at Yale provided me with tremendous intellectual and financial backing during my stay in New Haven over the 2004– 5 academic year, when I did most of the work on this book. I’m indebted to John Gaddis for this and many other things. Friends and colleagues here at the Department of Politics and International Relations at the University of Southampton have kindly welcomed me and my historian’s ways. I spoke about various aspects of this book at Yale, Columbia, and Cam- bridge Universities, the Centre Américain at Sciences Po-Paris, and the University of Wisconsin, and am grateful for all of the comments and criticism received at these places. I would like to thank Brian Cuddy and Fiona McLachlan for their research assistance, Evgeny Pavlov for help- ing out with various translation issues, and archivists at the Roosevelt and Truman Libraries, the National Archives at College Park, Maryland, and Princeton’s Mudd Library. I should also like to salute the scholars re- sponsible for the National Security Archive’s Web site—it’s a great on- line resource. vii viii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Finally, I have tested, and even generated, several of the forthcoming arguments at the Rai d’Or public house of Salisbury, England. I would like to commend its proprietor, Simon Wheeler, for running such a civi- lized establishment, and to thank many friends there, including especially Peter Marshall, for listening to what I had to say, and then informing me that I was wrong. Sergey Radchenko is grateful to James Hershberg for his detailed and insightful comments and criticism. I also would like to thank Stephen Harmon for his friendly advice and help with the style, and Iurii Smirnov for sharing his published articles and manuscripts. In the course of working on this book I benefited from research at the Archive of Foreign Policy of the Russian Federation. I would like to thank the archive’s staff for accommodating my infrequent but sudden appearances and a long list of research requests. I am especially grateful to Elizaveta Guseva for her understanding of the meaning of scholarly re- search and invariable willingness to help in connection with this and my other book projects. Further credit goes to the archivists of the Russian State Archive of Political and Social History for helping me locate several important documents. Pittsburg State University, the Korea Foundation, and the Institute for Far Eastern Studies at Kyungnam University in Seoul, South Korea, pro- vided comfortable working conditions while I worked on this research project; I owe a debt of gratitude to all three institutions. We would both like to thank Juergen Moosleitner for his fine work in helping to prepare the final draft of our book, Professor Arne Westad of the London School of Economics, without whom there would be no book at all, Chris Rogers and Dan Heaton of Yale University Press, and above all our families, for putting up with the migratory call of the scholar. INTRODUCTION The bomb that scientists in remote New Mexico labored fever- ishly to build, that illuminated the desert skies at the Trinity test site, that massacred thousands in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in a matter of seconds, and that has since morphed into a thermonuclear weapon capable of killing off civilization, plays a starring role in the political, cultural, and social history of the contemporary era—a period coterminous with his- tory’s last great-power rivalry, the Cold War of 1945– 91. When we think of the diplomatic history of that era, the bomb features as a blunt, fear- some tool: a brutal means of ending the Second World War, and then of deterring war between the United States and the Soviet Union. It was an object of statecraft, a grim means of pursuing national ends. It was that, but we mean to suggest here that it also played a more ac- tive role. As the United States and the Soviet Union began to regard each other as potential rivals during the latter part of the Second World War and then the tense months afterward, the bomb—or, to put it more accurately, the implications of a war fought with it—had a kind of inde- pendent effect upon the attitudes of American and Russian leaders. It led American leaders such as Roosevelt and Truman to reconsider the notion that the United States would naturally lead the postwar world into an era of permanent peace. It led the Soviet leader Stalin to develop an acute fear for Russia’s postwar welfare, not so much because of what the Americans had done, or what they intended, but because of what they had. The miserable prospect of atomic war, made vivid by witnesses ix x INTRODUCTION to the destruction wrought at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, led many to de- mand that the nations of the world band together and form the interna- tional government necessary to prevent another world war that would surely doom civilization. Yet the shadow of the bomb pushed both the United States and the Soviet Union in the opposite direction. This irony underlies our story. The history of the atomic bomb and the origins of the Cold War has been explored by many authors, to whom we will refer presently. By tak- ing advantage of new documentation (especially on the Soviet side) and a willingness to explore new interpretations, we mean to provide a his- tory that places the atomic bomb at the center of the emerging rivalry be- tween the Soviet Union and the United States. As will become clear, we stress two factors that many recent histories eschew. First, we emphasize the parochial, inward nature of the two Cold War powers.1 This is to say, we are consciously seeking to avoid writing an “international” history of the origins of the Cold War in which the reader is provided with a top- down account of American and Russian decision making, gaining access now to what Truman was thinking and now to Stalin’s response. The leader of each side was unaware of the other’s intentions, largely igno- rant of the effects of his policies, operating as statesmen always do in conditions of darkness and misperception.2 Readers of our book may conclude that the leading policy makers of the two nations were acting as if they were on different planets. This is the conclusion we hope they will reach. Second, we discuss the one way that this blindness was overcome: the role of atomic espionage. Espionage, we argue, had two key effects upon the origins of the Cold War and the bomb’s central role in it. It provided a kind of communication between the two sides, telling Russia early on of the American project and informing the Americans that the Soviets knew. It served, in other words, as a kind of informal channel. Moreover, and more important, it exacerbated tensions between the two nations, not only because of its political explosiveness, though this was at times decisive, but also because it undermined the possibility of international atomic control, leaving the two sides with no plausible alternative to the old way of power politics. That is another irony that we wish to convey. INTRODUCTION xi The United States The role played by the atomic bomb in the foreign policy of the United States during the Second World War is the subject of a consider- able amount of writing by historians of American foreign relations.