The atomic bomb and the origins of the Cold War

The nuclear age began before the Cold War. During World War II, three countries decided to build the atomic bomb: Britain, the United States, and the Soviet Union. Britain put its own work aside and joined the Manhattan Project as a junior partner in 1943. The Soviet effort was small before August 1945. The British and American projects were driven by the fear of a German atomic bomb, but Germany decided in i942 not to make a serious effort to build the bomb. In an extraordinary display of scientific and industrial might, the United States made two bombs ready for use by August 1945. Germany was defeated by then, but President Harry S. Truman decided to use the bomb against Japan.

The decision to use the atomic bomb has been a matter of intense controversy. Did Truman decide to bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki in order, as he claimed, to end the war with Japan without further loss of American lives? Or did he drop the bombs in order to intimidate the Soviet Union, without really needing them to bring the war to an end? His primary purpose was surely to force Japan to surrender, but he also believed that the bomb would help him in his dealings with Iosif V. Stalin. That latter consideration was secondary, but it confirmed his decision.577 Whatever Truman’s motives, Stalin regarded the use

30. Mushroom cloud over Nagasaki, 1945.

Of the bomb as an anti-Soviet move, designed to deprive the Soviet Union of strategic gains in the Far East and more generally to give the United States the upper hand in defining the postwar settlement. On August 20,1945, two weeks to the day after Hiroshima, Stalin signed a decree setting up a Special Committee on the Atomic Bomb, under the chairmanship of Lavrentii P. Beriia.578 The Soviet project was now a crash program.

In 1946, the United States and the Soviet Union, along with several other countries, began negotiations under the auspices of the United Nations to bring atomic energy under international control. These negotiations failed. It was national governments rather than international organizations that were to determine the future of atomic energy. The United States built up its nuclear arsenal, slowly at first, but with increasing urgency as relations with the Soviet Union deteriorated. In September 1948, Truman endorsed a National Security Council paper (NSC 30), “Policy on Atomic Warfare," which concluded that the United States must be ready to “utilize promptly and effectively all appropriate means available, including atomic weapons, in the interest of national security and must therefore plan accordingly."579 The atomic air offensive became the central element in US strategy for a war against the Soviet Union. The Strategic Air Command (SAC), which had been established in March 1946, was the spearhead of American military power.

In 1948, the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) set up a committee to examine how effective an atomic air offensive would be, and it reported in May 1949 that an atomic attack on seventy Soviet cities would not defeat the Soviet Union.580 That assumption was written into the “Offtackle" Emergency War Plan, which was approved by the JCS in December 1949 and remained operative for two years. This envisaged a war in several stages. The Soviet Union would launch offensives in Western Europe, the Middle East, and the Far East; it would also bomb Britain, assail Allied lines of communications, and try to attack the United States by air. Strategic bombing would not stop the Soviet offensives. The Western Allies would be too weak to hold Western Europe; they would have to try to secure the United Kingdom and hold on to North Africa. The resulting situation would be like that of 1942-43. The Allies would carry out strategic bombing attacks, build up Britain as a major base, and begin to move outwards from North Africa with the aim ofreentering the European continent. World War III would be decided by campaigns like those of 1944-45.581

The Soviet atomic project was an enormous undertaking for a country that had been devastated by the war. The first Soviet test took place on August 29, 1949, twenty months later than the target date established by the Soviet

Government in 1946, but several years earlier than the Central Intelligence Agency thought probable.582 The Soviet Union strengthened its air defenses to deal with an American atomic air offensive and enhanced its capacity to conduct large-scale strategic operations by restructuring its ground and air forces. From the fragmentary evidence available, it appears that in 1950 the Soviet image of a future war was very much the same as the American: an atomic air offensive by the United States, which would not succeed in defeating the Soviet Union, and large-scale Soviet offensive operations to push the Western powers out of Europe and the Middle East.583 In the first five years after the war, neither American nor Soviet military planners saw the atomic bomb as a weapon that would by itself win a world war.

Relations between the Soviet Union and the Western powers grew steadily worse in the five years after World War II. The role ofnuclear weapons in this deterioration was subtle but important. Truman did not issue explicit nuclear threats against the Soviet Union, but the nuclear factor was present even when not specifically invoked. The most overt use of the bomb in support of foreign policy took place in July 1948, when Truman dispatched B-29 bombers to Europe during the Berlin crisis. Though not modified to carry atomic bombs, these bombers were intended to signal that the United States would defend Western Europe with nuclear weapons ifnecessary. For the United States, the bomb provided a counterweight, in psychological and political as well as military terms, to Soviet military power in Europe.

Stalin feared that the United States would use the bomb to put pressure on the Soviet Union, and he was determined not to let that happen. He adopted a policy of what he called "tenacity and steadfastness."584 This first became apparent in September 1945 at the London meeting of the Council of Foreign Ministers, where the Soviet Union took a tough stand on issues relating to the postwar settlement. Instead ofproving more pliable and willing to compromise, as the Americans had hoped, Stalin adopted a policy of stubbornness, for fear of seeming weak and inviting further pressure.

In spite of the growing international tension of the late 1940s, there was little expectation that a new world war would break out soon. All three Allies

Demobilized, though to varying degrees. The bomb nevertheless cast a shadow over relations. It gave the Americans confidence and enhanced their willingness to make security commitments, most notably the commitment to Western Europe embodied in the North Atlantic Treaty of April 1949. The bomb had a dual effect on Soviet policy. It inspired caution and restraint, but it also made the Soviet Union less willing to compromise for fear of appearing vulnerable to intimidation. The bomb made the postwar relationship even more tense and contentious than it would have been in any case.