Los Alamos director even arrived, Conant nominated Oppenheimer for the chairmanship; when Oppenheimer made it through a snowstorm to join the group the next day, he discovered he had won unanimous election.
Truman at that time was transitioning from internationalist to cold-warrior. “Reds, phonies and… parlor pinks can see no wrong in Russia's four and one half million armed forces,” he complained to his diary petulantly in September 1946, “in Russia's loot of Poland, Austria, Hungary, Rumania, Manchuria… But when we help our friends in China who fought on our side it is terrible. When Russia loots the industrial plant of those same friends it is all right. When Russia occupies Persia for oil that is heavenly.” He wrote former Vice-President John Nance Garner that month that there was “too much loose talk about the Russian situation. We are not going to have any shooting trouble with them but they are tough bargainers and always ask for the whole earth, expecting maybe to get an acre.” He fired Secretary of Commerce Henry Wallace for publicly advocating conciliation with the Soviet Union at a time when Secretary of State Jimmy Byrnes was negotiating in Moscow. He reviewed a remarkable report that his young special counsel, Clark Clifford, and Clifford's assistant George Elsey had assembled in consultation with Byrnes, the Joint Chiefs, Dean Acheson, James Forrestal, the Attorney General, George Kennan, Central Intelligence Group director Sidney Souers and others that put teeth in the proposals Kennan had advanced in his long telegram.
The Clifford-Elsey report detailed the sorry record of Soviet intransigence in Eastern Europe and elsewhere in the world, documenting and extending Churchill's Iron Curtain indictment; it also, as Clifford wrote the President in a cover letter, brought together and focused opinion at the highest levels of the administration, “the simultaneous definition by so many government officials of the problem with which we are confronted… ” The hundred-page report argued that Soviet foreign policy was “a direct threat to American security” that was “designed to prepare the Soviet Union for war with the leading capitalistic nations of the world.” The Soviets, it asserted, were developing “atomic weapons, guided missiles, materials for biological warfare, a strategic air force [and] submarines of great cruising range… ” The Red Army was building up “large reserves” and mechanizing. Not diplomacy but military power should be the US's “main deterrent… It must be made apparent to the Soviet Government that our strength will be sufficient to repel any attack and sufficient to defeat the USSR decisively if a war should start. The prospect of defeat is the only sure means of deterring the Soviet Union.” To defeat its new enemy, “the United States must be prepared to wage atomic and biological warfare… A war with the USSR would be ‘total’ in a more horrible sense than any previous war… ” The US could not afford to lose its technological edge: “Any discussion on the limitation of armaments should be pursued slowly and carefully with the knowledge constantly in mind that proposals on outlawing atomic warfare and long-range offensive weapons would greatly limit United States strength, while only moderately affecting the Soviet Union.” Truman found the Clifford-Elsey report so incendiary that he confiscated the twenty extant copies Clifford had prepared but not yet distributed and locked them up permanently in the White House safe. “I read your report with care last night,” he told Clifford. “It is very valuable to me — but if it leaked it would blow the roof off the White House, it would blow the roof off the Kremlin.” Truman was ready to blow roofs, but he judged that the American people were not.
His military felt its vulnerable disarray. The US had fewer than two Army divisions and twelve air groups in Europe. From twelve million men at the end of the war, the armed forces had declined to 1.5 million; military spending had plunged from $90 billion to $11 billion per year as the Truman administration moved to reduce the deficit accumulated during the war. “The same thing happened here as everywhere else,” a disgusted Curtis LeMay would write a friend from Europe the following year. “Everyone dropped their tools and went home when the whistle blew. The property is in terrible shape and we do not have enough people left in the theater to properly take care of it.” USAAF General Lauris Norstad, briefing the President on the situation in Europe at the end of October 1946, told him, “Simple arithmetic dictates hasty withdrawal in the event of an emergency. It is our estimate that it would require good fortune as well as good management to retain as much as a small bridgehead on the continent of Europe if the Russians should decide to strike… At this time, [the USSR] appears not only the
Truman was sensible to the disparity, but apparently believed the atomic bomb evened it out — two bombs, after all, had ended a war. When Clark Clifford had presented the President with a new design for the presidential seal a few weeks after the Japanese surrender, Truman had suggested adding lightning emanating from the arrowheads in the eagle's left claw as a “symbolic reference to the tremendous importance of the atomic bomb.” (Clifford convinced Truman that the addition would ruin the design.) “This,” comments Clifford, “was the first time I heard the President talk about the atomic bomb, and I thought it told more than he publicly acknowledged about the impact the bomb had had on his thinking.” In October 1946, Truman's press secretary, Eben Ayers, told the President that radio commentator Drew Pearson had claimed the US had moved atomic bombs to Europe. “The President said what Pearson had said was a ‘lie.’ He said there were no bombs, either with or without detonators, in [Europe]. In fact, he said, none had gone out of the United States except those used in the Bikini tests and those dropped on Japan. He said he did not believe there were over a half dozen in the United States, although, he added, that was enough to win a war.”
Groves may have been the source of Truman's conviction. According to Bradbury, “Groves had a mystic number [of weapons he believed should be available in the stockpile], which when we got to it was all he gave a damn about. When we got there I think he was also leaving… and at that time I think he thought the [United States] was in control [of the world].” Groves left when the AEC took over; the official stockpile at that time stood at seven Mark III bombs.
The newly appointed AEC commissioners flew out to Los Alamos in January 1947 to lay hands on the weapons their organization had inherited from the Manhattan Engineer District. “I was very deeply shocked,” commissioner Robert Bacher told an interviewer in 1953. “… 1 actually went into the vaults … and selected at random cartons and various containers to be opened. These I then inspected myself… Judging by the consternation which appeared on some of the faces around there, I concluded that this must have been about the first detailed physical inventory that had been made… With weapons, the situation was very bad. We did not have anything like as many weapons as I thought we had.” Bradbury protests.-
I knew that number every hour on the hour!… Every time that number would quote-unquote change, and believe me for technical reasons that number would sometimes go down, I'd get a call from the good general [Groves] saying, “What the hell happened now?”
… There were technical reasons. I don't mean that we lost anything, but little details like corrosion or something like that would go wrong and the number of available devices would change…
We were up with the production of material at that time, but there were a lot of things that… we hadn't solved, particularly in respect to plutonium… I mean, sure, you could make a device that would stay pretty and beautiful for a week, two weeks, three weeks, a month. Then it began to look like it had the measles. That didn't really affect its performance, but it sure affected a lot of other things. We had to solve a lot of purely practical, and also very important, problems in corrosion metallurgy, materials stability, all kinds of nasty things which in wartime we never had to solve… [But] when you ask if I knew what the number was, I sure as hell did.
The scene at Los Alamos sickened David Lilienthal. “Probably one of the saddest days of my life,” he remembered, “was to walk down in that chicken-wire enclosure; they weren't even protected, what [bombs] there were… I was shocked when I found out… Actually we had one [bomb] that was probably operable when I first went off to Los Alamos; one that had a good chance of being operable.”
Dutifully, on April 3,1947, Lilienthal and the other commissioners carried the news to Truman. “We walked into the President's office at a few moments after 5:00 p.m.,” Lilienthal recorded in his journal within hours of the meeting. “I told him we came to report what we had found after three months, and that the quickest way would be to ask him to read a brief document.” Everyone at that time, says Lilienthal, “the President included, [assumed]
