power reactors would need to be spread around anyway so that their benefits could be dispersed. Spreading such development around would be a way of transitioning from national to international control, and “a systematic plan” would probably have to be written into the authority's charter “governing the location of the operations and property of the Authority so that a strategic balance may be maintained among nations.” Whereupon the system would become self-policing:
This will… be quite a different situation from the one that now prevails. At present with Hanford, Oak Ridge, and Los Alamos situated in the United States, other nations can find no security against atomic warfare except the security that resides in our own peaceful purposes or the attempt at security that is seen in developing secret atomic enterprises of their own. Other nations which… may fear us, can develop a greater sense of security only if the Atomic Development Authority locates similar dangerous operations within their borders… [Then] a balance will have been established. It is not thought that the Atomic Development Authority could protect its plants by military force from the overwhelming power of the nation in which they are situated. Some… guard may be desirable. But at most, it could be little more than a token. The real protection will lie in the fact that if any nation seizes the plants or the stockpiles that are situated in its territory, other nations will have similar facilities and materials situated within their own borders so that the act of seizure need not place them at a disadvantage.
This remarkable idea — spreading the intrinsically dangerous mines and factories around — is indistinguishable from what has come to be called nuclear proliferation, except that the agent of proliferation in the board's design would have been an organ of the United Nations rather than individual states, and the technology that proliferated would have been infrastructure alone rather than infrastructure and stockpiled weapons. Though the report does not belabor the point, it notes more than once that true security is incompatible with secrecy. Its proposal for a radical system of self-policing makes starkly clear what Bohr's open world would be: a world where how to design atomic bombs would be public knowledge; a world, as it were, where the guns have all been laid out together in the open on a table but disassembled and arranged so as to be within everyone's equal reach. Bohr liked to ask of new ideas in physics whether they were cra2y enough to be truly original. Here was the logic of openness extended into a practical proposal, and it looked odd indeed. Would it have worked? In a much more unstable and dangerous form, as nuclear proliferation, it did. In the form in which the Acheson-Lilienthal Report proposed it in March 1946, it never had a chance.
Around this time — early 1946 — a remarkable conjunction of statements and events revealed and contributed to a darkening of relations between the US and the USSR. The first of these was a speech Stalin read before a crowd of four thousand Party members, government officials and Army officers at the Bolshoi Theater, across from the Kremlin in the center of Moscow, on the evening of February 9- The occasion for the speech was ostensibly an upcoming election; deputies to the Supreme Soviet were to be elected (on one-party ballots) for the first time since December 1937 and Stalin desired to express his appreciation for having been renominated. In fact the speech reclaimed the USSR for the Party. No “brothers and sisters” now, no “my friends,” as Stalin had embraced the Soviet people in the wake of the German invasion on July 3, 1941. The dictator addressed himself now to “comrades”; he informed them that their victory meant, “in the first place, that our Soviet system has won.” No gratitude for gallant allies; the war had been “an inevitable result… of modern monopoly capitalism.” The war had demonstrated that the Soviet system was a “perfectly viable and stable form of organization… a form of organization superior to all others.” The Red Army had proved itself first-class. The Communist Party had managed war production “with the utmost success.” But now the country needed to be restored. A new Five-Year Plan would squeeze into half a decade the development that had been planned for the decade truncated by the war.
Echoing at the Bolshoi what he had recently told Igor Kurchatov, Stalin expressed “no doubt that, if we give our scientists proper help, they will be able in the near future not only to overtake but to surpass the achievements of science beyond the boundaries of our country.” There would be “extensive construction of scientific research institutes.” He would soon remove rationing and the country would produce more consumer goods. But there would be no relief from the grinding toil and poverty of the war years, as millions dreamed:
Our Party intends to organize a powerful new upsurge of the national economy which would enable us, for instance, to raise the level of our industry threefold, as compared with the prewar level; only under such conditions can we regard our country as guaranteed against any eventualities. That will require perhaps three new Five Year Plans, perhaps more.
The country had lost 30 percent of its national wealth and 25 million people were still homeless, but “Stalin used the victory,” writes biographer Dmitri Volkogonov, “consciously and resolutely to preserve the system.”
In Washington a few days later, Navy Secretary James Forrestal asked Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas if he had read Stalin's speech and what he thought of it. “The Declaration of World War III,” Douglas said. Forrestal agreed.
The second defining statement during this period was a long telegram from George Kennan, the American charge d'affaires in Moscow, to the State Department on February 22, 1946, analyzing the Soviet mentality. Kennan was bedridden at the embassy “with cold, fever, sinus, tooth trouble and… the aftereffects of the sulpha drugs administered for the relief of these other miseries” when he dictated his acerbic dispatch. His illness followed the unsuccessful meeting of the Council of Foreign Ministers — Molotov, Ernest Bevin of Britain and Jimmy Byrnes — in Moscow in December, in which he had participated. There were few places on earth less pleasant in winter than the Soviet capital; Kennan calls the time “these unhappy days,” and associates his five-part telegram with “an eighteenth-century Protestant sermon.” For a year and a half, he wrote thirty years later, still exasperated, “I had done little else but pluck people's sleeves, trying to make them understand the nature of the phenomenon with which we in the Moscow embassy were daily confronted and which our government and people had to learn to understand if they were to have any chance of coping successfully with the problems of the postwar world. So far as official Washington was concerned, it had been to all intents and purposes like talking to a stone.” Kennan's mood of exasperation — with the Soviets and with Washington — colored his analysis. In his
“The USSR still lives in antagonistic ‘capitalist encirclement,’” Kennan began his analysis ominously, “with which there can be no permanent peaceful coexistence.” He ascribed to the Kremlin a “neurotic view of world affairs,” which “at bottom” was the “traditional and instinctive Russian sense of insecurity.” Russian rulers, he said, “have always feared foreign penetration, feared direct contact between [the] Western world and their own, feared what would happen if Russians learned [the] truth about [the] world without or if foreigners learned [the] truth about [the] world within.” Marxism simply supplied “justification for their instinctive fear of [the] outside world, for the dictatorship without which they did not know how to rule, for the cruelties they did not dare not to inflict… ” The Soviet rulers were not necessarily insincere; “who, if anyone, in this great land actually receives accurate and unbiased information about [the] outside world” was an “unsolved mystery.” An atmosphere of “Oriental secretiveness and conspiracy” pervaded the government, so that “possibilities for distorting or poisoning sources and currents of information are infinite.”
In consequence, “we have here a political force committed fanatically to the belief that with [the] US there can be no permanent modus vivendi, that it is desirable and necessary that the internal harmony of our society be disrupted, our traditional way of life be destroyed, the international authority of our state be broken, if Soviet power is to be secure.” How to cope with such a country “should be approached with [the] same thoroughness and care as [the] solution of [a] major strategic problem in war.”
Kennan believed the problem could be solved, however. The Soviets were militarily weaker and their system was not necessarily stable. War was not the solution. Rather, for the indefinite future, the Communists would have to be contained:
Soviet power, unlike that of Hitlerite Germany, is neither schematic nor adventuristic. It does not work by
