SECRETARY OF STATE JAMES BYRNES GOES TO
LONDON IN MID-SEPTEMBER OF 1945 TO CONFER
WITH FOREIGN MINISTERS [ BYRNES WAS A LOSER]
In mid-September of 1945, Secretary of State James Byrnes traveled to London to confer with Vyacheslav Molotov and other foreign ministers. Before leaving, he made clear his intention to use the U.S. atomic monopoly to force Soviet compliance with U.S. demands. { Although appointed Sec. of State by F.D.R., Byrnes acted like a frigging neocon Republican.] But whenever Byrnes insisted the Soviets open up Eastern Europe, Molotov pointed to exclusionary U.S. policies in Italy, Greece, and Japan. Tired of Byrnes's belligerence, Molotov finally asked if he was hiding an atomic bomb in his coat pocket, to which Byrnes replied, "You don't know southerners. We carry our artillery in our pants pocket. If you don't cut out all this stalling . . . . I'm going to pull an atomic bomb out of my hip pocket and let you have it."
U.S. atomic diplomacy, in its first iteration, had clearly failed to produce the desired results. Secretary of War Henry Stimson objected to such crude intimidation. In a September memo, Stimson had advised Truman that bullying the Soviets with atomic weapons would backfire and only speed the Soviet Union's efforts to attain its own atomic arsenal :
our satisfactory relations with Russia are not merely connected with but . . . virtually dominated by the problem of the atomic bomb. . . if we have this weapon rather ostensibly on our hip, their suspicions and their distrust of our purposes and motives will increase. The chief lesson that I have learned in a long life is that the only way you can make a man trustworthy is to trust him ; and the surest way to make him untrustworthy is to distrust him and show your distrust.
Stimson boldly called for halting U.S development of atomic bombs if Great Britain and the Soviet Union did likewise and impounding those the United States had already built. Truman dedicated the September 21 cabinet meeting to Stimson's urgent appeal to strengthen the U.S friendship with the Soviet Union before it developed its own atomic bombs. The meeting, occurring on Stimson's seventy-eighth birthday, would be the last for the retiring statesman. The cabinet split sharply over Stimson's proposals, with Secretary of Commerce Henry Wallace rallying supporters, and Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal leading the opposition. Forrestal would play an important role in the hardening of U.S. policy toward the Soviet Union. He had earned a fortune on Wall Street and married a former Ziegfeld Follies girl before joining the White House staff in 1939. LIKE MOST OTHER WALL STREETERS, HE DEEPLY DISTRUSTED THE SOVIET UNION. He leaked a PHONY ACCOUNT of the cabinet discussion to the press. The next day, the New York Times that Wallace had proposed sharing "the secret of the atomic bomb" with the USSR. Though Truman immediately repudiated this flagrant falsehood and set the record straight, Wallace could see the writing on the wall.
Having just returned from a conference on atomic energy at the University of Chicago, Wallace understood the real stakes better than Truman and other administration officials. The experts agreed that whatever secret there might have been to the atomic bomb had vanished when the Unite States dropped the first one on Hiroshima. They also knew, as the Franck Committee had warned in June, that the Soviet Union would soon develop its own atomic arsenal. The scientists in attendance drove home the fact that the current generation of atomic weapons paled by comparison to what would soon be available. Therefore, they concluded, steps to curb an arms race wa essential and urgent. Wallace had told the gathering that "any nation that violates the international moral law, sooner or later gets into trouble --- the British have done that in relation to colonial peoples and the United States is in danger of doing it with the atomic bomb." He conveyed that same message to his fellow cabinet members.
A few days later, Wallace received a letter from physicist Arthur Holly Compton. Compton alerted Wallace to ominous developments at the weapons laboratories. "There is a reasonable chance," he reported, "that a concentrated scientific and technical effort, comparable to that spent on the development of the present atom bomb, could develop a super bomb" of staggering destructive capability. He expressed the deeply held view among the members of the Scientific Panel of the Interim Committee. "We feel that this . . . should not be undertaken because we prefer defeat in war to a victory obtained at the expense of the enormous human disaster that would be caused by its use." Compton presented some rough figures to show just how powerful a bomb he was talking about : The "area completely destroyed by 1 atomic bomb, 4 square miles. Area completely destroyable by 1000 atomic bombs, as in a future war, 4000 square miles. Area completely destroyable by 1000 super bombs, about 1,000,000 square miles. Area of continental United States, about 3,000,000 square miles." What worried Compton was that "the theoretical basis of the super bomb has arisen spontaneously with at least four persons working on a project who have independently brought the idea to me. This means that it will occur likewise to those in other nations engaged in similar developments. If developed here, other great powers must follow suit." Wallace and Compton both felt that only some form of world government could meet such a challenge.
Wallace fought a rearguard action against the powerful forces propelling the country toward war with the Soviet Union. Truman's ouster of the few remaining New Dealers from his cabinet, left Wallace increasingly isolated. Now Stimson too was gone. As Soviet intelligence noted, the RIGHTWARD SHIFT in Truman's economic and foreign policy advisors was unmistakable.
Wallace, undeterred, met with Truman on October 15 to press him on softening his tone toward the Soviet Union, and gave him a report he had written titled "The Significance of the Atomic Age." Truman read it sentence by sentence in his presence. It warned , "When many nations have atomic bombs it will require only the smallest spark to set off a worldwide humanity-destroying explosion. Steps should be taken at once to call into being a vital international organization based on the elimination of all weapons of offensive warfare, the pooling of the constructive aspects of atomic energy, and the adoption of the principle of international trusteeship for certain areas of the world." Truman agreed completely, telling Wallace that "this was what he had been trying to say right along." He also remarked, somewhat overgenerously, that "Stalin was a fine man who wanted to do the right thing." Truman even agreed with Wallace's statement that "the purpose of Britain was to promote an unbreachable break between us and Russia." Wallace's efforts bore fruit. In the fall of 1945, Truman told a press conference, "Russia's interests and ours do not clash and never have. We have always been friends, and I hope we always will be."
TO BE CONTINUED
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