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as much to impress the Soviet government as to hasten the Japanese
surrender. However that may be, the expectations placed upon con–
tinued Western-or rather American-monopoly of the new weapon
are now known to have been unrealistic even at a time when they
seemed in accordance with the known facts. Thus if a belief that
the Soviet Union was unable to produce atomic arms, or at least
would take a decade over it, formed part of the mental background
of Western policy-making, that misjudgment must be listed among
the other notable intellectual errors of the period. In actual fact it
is doubtful whether those in authority were quite so naive as they
appeared to be some years later, when they allowed it to be inferred
that but for Soviet espionage the secret of the bomb might have been
preserved indefinitely. Like much else that came to be said and
written, this suggestion belongs to the folklore of the cold war.
Already in June
1945,
a "Committee on Social and Political Impli–
cations," appointed by the Metallurgical Laboratory in Chicago and
presided by Professor James Franck, had presented a Report to the
U.S. Secretary of War which stressed the impossibility of the United
States retaining the monopoly.1 (The signatories incidentally opposed
the use of the atomic bomb against an already defeated Japan, a
recommendation which was promptly ignored.) When in March
1946
the U.S. State Department issued the so-called Acheson-Lilien–
thal Report advising on methods of atomic control, the warning was
repeated, this time with all the authority of a Committee including
such figures as Dr. Vannevar Bush, Professor James B. Conant, and
Major General Leslie R. Groves, to say nothing of Dr. J. Robert
Oppenheimer, who was partly responsible for writing the Report.
Thus there was plenty of advance notice from those best qualified
that within a few years an atomic arms race would be on, unless
international ownership and/ or control of atomic energy could be
arranged. The problem consequently-except for those who seriously
believed that the Soviet government would submit to outside control
of atomic installations-was how to assemble the elements of a new
world-wide political system before Russia had caught up in the race.
This of course could not be stated, but it was implicit in Churchill's
Fulton address (March
1946)
and in the actions of the Western
1
Bulletin of Atomic Scientists,
Chicago, May 1946.
