THE AFTERMATH OF WAR
87
powers. Not for a moment did the existence of the United Nations
make any difference to the crucial issue of reconstructing a new
balance of power. At most it can be said to have confused the public
about the situation, especially since Roosevelt's insistence on the
inclusion of China among the Big Five had resulted in one of the
five permanent seats on the Security Council being occupied by a
Chinese government which was rapidly losing all authority at home.
Only with the signing of the North Atlantic Treaty in April 1949 was
there a partial return to reality, i.e., a partial admission that the
real aims of Western statesmanship could not be pursued by enlisting
the cumbersome machinery of the Charter. Although the reported
explosion of the Soviet Union's first atomic bomb in the fall of that
year was a coincidence, the conjunction of both events served to
emphasize the transition from the euphoria of the immediate post–
war period to the acceptance of a divided world which thereafter
became a commonplace.
On the Soviet side less time was lost in making their public un–
derstand that a new arms race was on. It has always been a cardinal
point of Leninist thinking that every peace is a preparation for the
next war-a Clausewitzian axiom whose ultimate sanction lies in
Hegel's
Logic,
along with a good deal of actual experience-and that
the closeness of war can be measured by the amount and intensity
of pacifist talk in currency among governments and populations.
Since atomic energy had now become the crucial factor, it followed
that both sides would try to maneuver, with a view to winning public
support for their proposals regarding international control, and that
neither would risk an open conflict until reasonably sure of having
gained the upper hand in the propaganda war. To say that the
Soviet government did not at any time intend to accept the American
proposals for atomic control first put forward in 1946, or even to
discuss them seriously, is an understatement. It never regarded them
as anything but a bid for public support in the general drive to
obtain control of the new sources of power, and as a maneuver
intended to place America's rival in an unfavorable light. Any other
as'5umption was excluded from the start, not merely by the habitual
cynicism of the political practitioner, but by the intellectual frame–
work within which the Soviet government has operated since its
inception.
It
was hardly to be expected that these assumptions would
