Such was the clamorous valley of the shadow into which the members of the Acheson-Lilienthal board of consultants descended from their mountaintop.
Just as the board was finishing its seven weeks of intense deliberation, Truman moved to appoint a conservative to head the delegation that would present the US proposal to the United Nations. International control of atomic energy would mean a significant concession of national sovereignty; Truman concluded that only a certified conservative could carry such a measure through Congress. On Jimmy Byrnes's recommendation, he chose the multi-millionaire financier Bernard Baruch, whose legendary advice to Presidents and statesmen from a humble park bench and careful but expansive allotment of campaign funds had won him political authority. (Acheson, for his part, thought Baruch's “reputation was without foundation in fact and entirely self-propagated” and that Byrnes had “fallen victim to Mr. Baruch's spell.”)
When Baruch, freshly appointed, read about the Acheson-Lilienthal Report in the newspapers — it had been leaked from Brien McMahon's new Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, in consequence of which the State Department released it officially on March 28 — he was enraged. When he learned, a day or two later, that Acheson had said the report would be the basis for discussion at the United Nations, he was furious. “I [could not] see the purpose of my appointment,” he writes, “if the United States plans on atomic control had already been decided upon… I told [Acheson] plainly that he would then have to find another messenger boy, because Western Union didn't take anybody my age. I had never served as a messenger or mouthpiece before, and did not intend to start now.” From the startled Acheson, Baruch swerved to Truman. Truman claims he dressed down “the only man to my knowledge who has built a reputation on a self-assumed unofficial status as ‘adviser’”.- “I had asked him to help his government in a capacity of my choosing. I had no intention of having him tell me what his job should be. I made that clear to him, in a very polite way.” Baruch claims to the contrary that Truman “was most affable, and plainly anxious for me not to withdraw from the task. When the question arose about who was to draft the atomic proposals, he made this exact and characteristic reply: ‘Hell, you are!’”
Baruch did so, and his first concern, predictably, was that the Acheson-Lilienthal Report “did not deal with the problem of enforcement — a problem which I considered crucial.” For Baruch, who was then seventy-six years old and who had served as a technical adviser on the American delegation to the 1919 peace conference following the First World War, “swift and sure punishment” would determine whether an agreement on atomic energy was effective or only “another in the long line of history's empty declarations and gestures… If I had learned anything out of my experiences in international affairs, it was that world peace is impossible without the force to sustain it.” He was in charge and he would insist on “sanctions against those who violated the rules.” And since the veto power that the permanent members of the United Nations Security Council enjoyed could block enforcement of such sanctions, he would further insist that the veto be suspended in matters of atomic control.
Acheson was appalled:
The ‘swift and sure punishment’ provision could be interpreted in Moscow only as an attempt to turn the United Nations into an alliance to support the United States threat of war against the USSR unless it ceased its efforts, for only the United States could conceivably administer ‘swift and sure’ punishment to the Soviet Union… ‘Swift and sure punishment’ for violation of the treaty, if realistically considered, seemed uncomfortably close to war, or certainly to sanctions that under the United Nations treaty were subject to the veto of permanent members of the Security Council. Did it seem likely that they would forgo it here? The only practicable safeguard in case of violations would be clear notice and warning that they were occurring.
Baruch did not agree. His view prevailed. His Baruch Plan also proposed that the United States would give up its stock of atomic bombs only as the other nations of the world fell into line. The Soviet Union countered the Baruch Plan with a proposal for immediate and universal nuclear disarmament without inspection. The United Nations Atomic Energy Commission to which Baruch was the American delegate discussed the proposals until December, when it voted a plan largely modeled on the American plan, the Soviet Union and Poland abstaining. “There,” writes Acheson, “the matter died.” Nothing came of the effort except bad will.
Oppenheimer told an interviewer long afterward that the day Jimmy Byrnes appointed Bernard Baruch “was the day I gave up hope.” Rather than speaking out publicly, as he might have done, he agreed to serve Baruch as a scientific adviser: “That was not the day for me to say so publicly. Baruch asked me to be the scientific member of the delegation, but I said I couldn't. Then Truman and Acheson told me it might not look right if I got out now, so I said I would be present at meetings.” Baruch assesses Oppenheimer's contribution more fulsomely: “Once I got to work… I found scientists who were willing to help.” Oppenheimer, writes Baruch, “rendered invaluable aid to me by serving on the Scientific Panel… His is one of the most brilliant minds I have ever encountered.”
Rabi, who was no man's fool, assessed Oppenheimer's conflicts realistically:
I found him excellent. We got along very well… I enjoyed the things about him that some people disliked. It's true that you carried on a charade with him. He lived a charade, and you went along with it. It was fine — matching wits and so on. Oppenheimer was great fun, and I took him for what he was. I understood his problem… [His problem was] identity… He reminded me very much of a boyhood friend about whom someone said that he couldn't make up his mind whether to be president of the B'nai B'rith or the Knights of Columbus. Perhaps he really wanted to be both, simultaneously. Oppenheimer wanted every experience. In that sense, he never focussed. My own feeling is that if he had studied the Talmud and Hebrew, rather than Sanskrit, he would have been a much greater physicist. I never ran into anyone who was brighter than he was. But to be more original and profound I think you have to be more focussed.
“I think [my brother] felt that he wanted to make a big difference,” Frank Oppenheimer commented of this period in Robert Oppenheimer's life. “I argued with him quite a lot after the war. I felt that the kind of big difference would happen if one really taught people a lot about the dangers of the bomb, about the possibilities of cooperation. He said there wasn't time for this. He'd been in the Washington scene. He saw that everything was moving. He felt that he had to change things from within.”
Both Rabi and Oppenheimer came to question whether the US proposal had been offered entirely in good faith. “Whether we really wanted to turn the bomb over [to the UN],” Rabi wondered late in life, “I don't know. Baruch didn't believe in it.” Oppenheimer in a 1948 postmortem noted that even before the US took a position, “doubts [about Soviet and Anglo-American policy] pointed rather strongly to the need for discussion between the heads of state and their immediate advisors, in an attempt to re-open the issue of far-reaching cooperation. The later relegation of problems of atomic energy to discussions within the United Nations, where matters of the highest policy could only be touched upon with difficulty and clumsily, would appear to have prejudiced the chances of any genuine meeting of minds.” Had there been “more reality to the plans,” Oppenheimer concluded, “… we ourselves, and the governments of other countries as well, would have found many difficulties in reconciling particular national security, custom and advantage with an over-all international plan for insuring the security of the world's peoples.” The physicist vividly remembered a conversation he had with Truman during this period; in biographer Nuel Pharr Davis's transcription, it went like this:
“When will the Russians be able to build the bomb?” asked Truman.
“I don't know,” said Oppenheimer.
“I know.”
“When?”
“Never.”
At some level, for Harry Truman, US monopoly mooted the issue of international control.
Yuli Khariton visited Veniamin Zukerman's radiography laboratory in late December 1945. Zukerman recalled the occasion vividly-.
Khariton arrived at the laboratory and asked us without preamble, “Have you read Smyth's book?”
“Of course we have.”
“Then you understand what an enormous amount of work will have to be done before our country, too, has
