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The Atomic Bomb and the Special Relationship: Part 2
- By WARREN F KIMBALL
- | February 8, 2022
- Category: Churchill and America Churchill in the Nuclear Age Explore
Continued from Part 1
Roosevelt and the atomic question
Why keep the bomb project secret from Stalin? Through espionage, Roosevelt knew at least by September 1943 that the Russians knew. But he didn’t know how much they knew. (Perhaps comedians Abbott and Costello—or was it the Marx Brothers?—asked an equally important question: Did he know that they knew that he knew that they knew?)
The easy answer is that Roosevelt was waiting for the right moment to confront the USSR with a super weapon and gain effective leverage. Was the President the first practitioner of atomic diplomacy? Do we have here FDR, Cold Warrior? If so, how do we reconcile that with his consistently trusting the Soviets to believe the United States could be relied upon?
The more likely answer is that the atomic bomb had not yet been tested. With the USA jockeying with Russia for position, false bravado could weaken FDR’s bargaining strength. But his primary policy was to promote postwar cooperation, not confrontation, unrealistic as that later came to appear. Best to maintain the image of secrecy, lest Stalin demand access. Churchill had similar thoughts: “Nothing would have been easier than for [Stalin] to say, “Thank you so much for telling me about your new bomb. I of course have no technical knowledge. May I send my expert in these nuclear sciences to see your expert tomorrow morning?”13
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Franklin Roosevelt was firmly rooted in the practical present. He knew that Stalin had intelligence on the atomic bomb. But to inform the Soviets, and then refuse to share information, would raise Stalin’s suspicions and might lead to an argument. Why make a decision until it had to be made? And there were so many other decisions to be made about the postwar world.
On 15 February 1945, after the Yalta Conference, Churchill and Roosevelt met briefly at Alexandria, Egypt. Churchill read a proposal for Britain to develop its own atomic bomb after the war. FDR “made no objection of any kind.” He did comment that thoughts of using atomic energy for commercial purposes had “receded.” The President expected “the first important trials” of the weapon in September. It was their last discussion about the bomb.14
Just a “bigger bang”?
There is another explanation of Roosevelt’s silence. Like most non-scientists, he did not comprehend the revolutionary potential of nuclear weapons. His key atomic energy advisor, James B. Conant, believed FDR had “only fleeting interest in the atom… the program never got very far past the threshold of his consciousness.” He “really had no idea of the enormous importance of our [atomic] secrets.” A number of military “experts” tended to see the bomb as nothing more than just a bigger bang. Churchill also underestimated the weapon, at least at first. He allegedly told Niels Bohr to stop worrying: “After all this new bomb is just going to be bigger than our present bombs and it involves no difference in the principles of war.”15
During the 1953 Bermuda Conference, President Eisenhower made this same assertion. By then, however, the hydrogen bomb had arrived, and Churchill was shocked. Mankind, he said, was now “as far from the atomic age as the atomic bomb was from the bow and arrow.” His horror about the effects of H-bomb radiation lends credence to the argument that, in 1945, he also saw the atomic bomb as just a new weaponry development.16
As for Stalin, though he took a personal interest in Soviet atomic bomb research, his scientists assured him that development of such a weapon would take ten to twenty years.17 And there is a vast difference between knowledge of a research project and a working weapon. Whatever the varying weight of contributing factors, Churchill and Roosevelt agreed to an aide-mémoire that flatly rejected any “international agreement regarding control and use” of TUBE ALLOYS.
Informing Stalin
At the July 1945 Potsdam Conference, President Truman finally mentioned the bomb to Stalin. Observing from a distance, Churchill wrote:
He seemed to be delighted. A new bomb! Of extraordinary power! Probably decisive on the whole Japanese war! What a bit of luck! This was my impression at the moment, and I was sure that he had no idea of the significance of what he was being told. Evidently in his intense toils and stresses the atomic bomb had played no part. If he had had the slightest idea of the revolution in world affairs which was in progress his reactions would have been obvious…. As we were waiting for our cars I found myself near Truman. “How did it go? I asked. “He never asked a question,” he replied. I was certain therefore that at that date Stalin had no special knowledge of the vast process of research upon which the United States and Britain had been engaged for so long, and of the production for which the United States had spent over four hundred million pounds in an heroic gamble.18
The carefully chosen phrase, “special knowledge of the vast process of research,” does not deny what Roosevelt had known years earlier: Stalin certainly had some knowledge of the atomic project. Churchill’s words in his memoir may well have been chosen at the prompting of British Intelligence which, as David Reynolds has noted, “sanitized” the war memoirs to protect the ULTRA secret.19
Hiroshima and Nagasaki
Churchill and Roosevelt had agreed to use the atomic bomb on Japan, but only after “mature consideration.” Certainly both were capable of considering the ethical and moral questions, but those would arise once weapon was tested. At no time did top-level American leaders seek to avoid using the atomic bomb before Roosevelt’s death in April 1945. Shortly afterward, Churchill initialed, apparently without discussion, a minute telling British officials to go along with whatever the Americans decided.20 He certainly had no compunctions, writing in his memoirs:
…there never was a moment’s discussion as to whether the atomic bomb should be used or not. To avert a vast, indefinite butchery, to bring the war to an end, to give peace to the world, to lay healing hands upon its tortured peoples by a manifestation of overwhelming power at the cost of a few explosions, seemed, after all our toils and perils, a miracle of deliverance. British consent in principle to the use of the weapon had been given on July 4, before the test had taken place.21
The blackened bones of Hiroshima and Nagasaki strongly affected Churchill, who was quick to envision atomic proliferation. At Fulton in 1946 he declared:
In these present days we dwell strangely and precariously under the shield and protection of the atomic bomb. The atomic bomb is still only in the hands of a State and nation which we know will never use it except in the cause of right and freedom. But it may well be that in a few years this awful agency of destruction will be widespread, and the catastrophe following from its use by several warring nations will not only bring to an end all that we call civilization, but may possibly disintegrate the globe itself.22
“Forget the Baroosh and get on with the fissle”
The “Special Relationship,” after reaching its apogee during the Second World War, was by then at some risk. The U.S. Congress and President Truman were either ignorant or dismissive of the Roosevelt-Churchill sharing agreements. In June 1946 came the McMahon Act, an attempt to make the American atomic monopoly perpetual.
But American refusal to share atomic research was more a symptom than a cause. As Robin Edmonds observed, the common denominator in 1945-50 was “the absence of any recognition of the concept of a shared Anglo-American world leadership.”23 Britain’s parlous postwar economic situation, and its military withdrawal from Greece (stimulating the Truman Doctrine), generated American disinterest bordering on fond contempt for any notion of shared responsibilities. That would change under the pressures of the Cold War and of Britain’s own successful atomic bomb program. Whether for better or for worse is another question. The impossible dream of an Anglo-American and then American atomic monopoly was Churchill’s and Roosevelt’s most ambiguous, hubristic, geopolitical legacy.
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Also in June 1946, the American Baruch Plan proposed international control of atomic energy through a United Nations commission. It would make the U.S. the only nation capable of making an atomic bomb. One historian called it “emasculated internationalism.” It eliminated the Security Council veto on atomic matters, enabling U.S. control of atomic research elsewhere. The Russians opposed the plan. So had Churchill at Fulton:
Nevertheless it would be wrong and imprudent to entrust the secret knowledge or experience of the atomic bomb which the United States, Great Britain, and Canada now share, to the world organisation, while it is still in its infancy. It would be criminal madness to cast it adrift in this still agitated and un-united world. No one in any country has slept less well in their beds because this knowledge and the method and the raw materials to apply it, are at present largely retained in American hands. I do not believe we should all have slept so soundly had the positions been reversed and if some Communist or neo-Fascist State monopolised for the time being these dread agencies.24
Britain’s Labour government was also unenthusiastic. “Let’s forget the Baroosh and get on with the fissle” (Britain’s bomb project) was Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin’s alleged quip.25 The message was clear. Great power “equality” and status now seemed to depend on developing an atomic bomb. The Anglo-American Special Relationship wobbled on its axis, though Cold War fears kept it alive. More significant, an extensive U.S. nuclear development and testing program quickly followed. The nuclear arms race was on.
Retrospective
The reader may ask (as do many historians): what should they have done so that the world would remember them better in this matter? The reality that the atomic bomb would be an almost unusable weapon after Hiroshima and Nagasaki was not apparent before both Churchill and Roosevelt were gone from their leadership positions. Early on, both seemed to view the bomb as a “bigger bang,” not a technological revolution.
Yet Churchill, with his historical understanding, knew that “super-weapons,” like the Dreadnought or V-2 rocket, do not assure geopolitical security. However unlikely a Soviet military attack after the European war, he and Roosevelt did know full well that Stalin would make a major effort to develop a Soviet atomic bomb. Logic and their intelligence reports (however inadequate those were) made that clear.
So they were playing for the short term. But why? There was no short term threat. To this writer, hubris seems the only answer. Niels Bohr was not the only one who expressed fears that an attempt to create and hold an atomic monopoly was doomed to failure, and that nationalism would create a new and potentially more dangerous arms race. Henry Stimson later made similar warnings. Bohr suggested internationalization of atomic secrets; others apparently thought in terms of sharing. But Churchill and Roosevelt, and their successors, slammed the door shut on such thoughts, and did so in great secrecy.26
The growing “club”
The ineffectiveness of nuclear leverage in geopolitics appeared even before the atomic bombs were dropped on Japan. At Potsdam when Truman told Stalin about the bomb, Stalin seemed to shrug it off. Churchill was certain he knew little, but Stalin could equally have given a calculated response. In any case, the words of Henry Kissinger: “By the end of the conference, it was clear that the atomic bomb had not made the Soviets more cooperative.”27 Churchill and Roosevelt dismissed any thoughts of agreeing on internationalization or some sort of effective nuclear controls aimed at avoiding proliferation and the military use of atomic bombs. However unlikely, was it even in part a lost opportunity?
So here we are in 2022, still scrambling in vain to limit the atomic secret. Meanwhile, membership in the nuclear “club” (one of those “soft” words that seem to legitimize nuclear weapons) continues to grow. The Soviet Union joined in 1949. The British and French soon followed. China, India, Pakistan and Israel have all come on board. North Korea agreed to close down its bomb producing facilities after it developed the ability to make one, then backed off that commitment. Iran, which is knocking on the door, may well do the same. We have been told there are still are nuclear devices (bombs?) scattered around in the former Soviet empire. We are losing count of how many members of the club there are now. But what is certain is that trying to keep that genie in a bottle is fraught business.
Endnotes
13 Winston S. Churchill (hereinafter WSC), Triumph and Tragedy (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1953), 670.
14 Martin Gilbert, Road to Victory, 1941-1945 (Hillsdale, Mich.: Hillsdale College Press, 2007), 1223; Robin Edmonds, The Big Three (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1991), 419.
15 Recollection of British wartime science advisor R.V. Jones, “Churchill and Science,” in Robert Blake and William Roger Louis, eds., Churchill: A Major New Asssessment of his Life in Peace and War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 438. Some wartime scientists, often influenced by the belief that there were biological thresholds for radiation damage (i.e., “tolerance” levels), downplayed the dangers of radiation fallout, even labeling it a “minor problem.” See Barton C. Hacker, The Dragon’s Tail: Radiation Safety in the Manhattan Project, 1942-46 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), Introduction, Chapters 3-4, and 76-77, 89, 108. See also Michael Gordin, Five Days in August (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007). Cavalier dismissal of fallout dangers continued in the early postwar years. One horrible example was subjecting military personnel to live testing of the effects of fallout. See Hacker, Elements of Controversy: The Atomic Energy Commission and Radiation Safety in Nuclear Weapons Testing, 1947-1974 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 1-9.
16 David Reynolds, In Command of History: Churchill Fighting and Writing the Second World War (London: Allen Lane/Penguin, 2004), 492.
17 See David Holloway, Stalin and the Bomb (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1994).
18 Reynolds, In Command of History, 163.
19 WSC, Triumph and Tragedy, 670.
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20 WSC, Triumph and Tragedy, 639. See also David B. Woolner, The Last 100 Days (New York: Basic Books, 2017), 207-08.
21 WSC, Triumph and Tragedy, 639.
22 WSC, “The Tragedy of Europe,” Zurich University, 19 September 1946, in The Sinews of Peace (London: Cassell, 1948), 201.
23 Robin Edmonds, Setting the Mould (New York and London: Norton, 1986), 112. In 1952 Senator McMahon professed ignorance of the sharing agreement, telling Churchill: “If we had known this the [McMahon] Act would not have been passed. Attlee never said a word.” See Lord Moran, Churchill: Taken from the Diaries of Lord Moran. The Struggle for Survival 1940–1965 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1966), 392.
24 WSC, Westminster College, Fulton, Mo., 5 February 1946, in Sinews of Peace, 96
25 Edmonds, Setting the Mould, 83. Bevin alluded to “fissile” materials that are fissionable by neutrons with zero kinetic energy. Fissile materials are necessary in some cases to sustain a chain reaction.
26 Frank Costigliola, Roosevelt’s Lost Alliances (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012), 222-23, 365-78.
27 Henry Kissinger, Diplomacy (New York: Simon & Schuster/Touchstone, 1995), 437. Truman’s memoirs are quoted on page 435.
The author
Professor Kimball is editor of the three-volume Roosevelt-Churchill Correspondence and is the author of several works on the FDR-WSC relationship. The first draft of this paper was presentation at a symposium, “The Legacy of Two Statesmen,” at the Roosevelt Institute, Hyde Park, New York in June 2007.