Dark Sun: The Making Of The Hydrogen Bomb

April 3. The British for their part had no immediate use for the ore. They were stockpiling it against the time when their own secret bomb program could put it to use. Congress had passed the Atomic Energy Act in ignorance of these secret agreements; one provision of the act forbade sharing information on the design and manufacture of nuclear weapons with foreign governments. Agreements were therefore in conflict with US law and would have to be reconciled. And Donald Maclean was positioned to observe and to participate in these revealing negotiations.

The sorry state of the US atomic arsenal was one secret at least that Donald Maclean evidently did not learn. Halfway through 1947, feeling the pressure of US Cold War initiatives, the Soviet Union began rebuilding its military forces. From three million men at arms at the beginning of the year, Soviet forces began a gradual increase to more than five million. “Immense Russian superiority in conventional arms,” Alexander Werth interprets the expansion, “was the only effective antidote [the Soviet Union] had against an atomic attack on Soviet territory.” It would not have been much of an attack.[29] Lilienthal had briefed Truman on the stockpile disarray just weeks after the President had proposed (on March 12, 1947) the Truman Doctrine that offered “to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures.” The doctrine, which amounted to a declaration of Cold War, had evolved into a major US policy position from a British appeal to the US to take over assisting Greece and Turkey, something the British, victorious but nearly bankrupt, could no longer afford to do. Secretary of State George Marshall had been meeting with the Council of Foreign Ministers in Moscow at the time of Truman's declaration. What to do about Germany — divided into Soviet, US, British and French zones of occupation and still nearly moribund — had been once again the central issue on the agenda. Charles Bohlen served at Marshall's translator:

During our visit… Stalin took a relaxed attitude toward the failure of the conference to achieve any results. Doodling the inevitable wolfs heads with a red pencil, he asked what difference it made if there was no agreement. “We may agree the next time, or if not then, the time after that.” To him, there was no urgency about settling the German question. We should be detached and even relaxed about the subject…

Stalin's seeming indifference to what was happening in Germany made a deep impression on Marshall. He came to the conclusion that Stalin, looking over Europe, saw that the best way to advance Soviet interests was to let matters drift. Economic conditions were bad. Europe was recovering slowly from the war. Little had been done to rebuild damaged highways, railroads, and canals. Business alliances severed by years of hostilities were still shattered. Unemployment was widespread. Millions of people were on short rations. There was a danger of epidemics. This was the kind of crisis that Communism thrived on. All the way back to Washington, Marshall talked of the importance of finding some initiative to prevent the complete breakdown of Western Europe.

In the midst of these transitions, with terrible timing, the British unwisely chose to make an issue of the wartime agreements. At the end of January 1947, Roger Makins, deputy chairman of the CPC, raised the question with Dean Acheson of exchanging information about reactor design. Acheson suggested in turn dropping British consent to use the atomic bomb. Makins returned to England to report. Acheson briefed Lilienthal and Marshall on the exchange, emphasizing that “some action is urgently needed.”

Congress had to be informed. “The somewhat incredible truth,” Acheson would note in his memoirs, “was that very few knew about [the Quebec Agreement]… and those who did thought of it as a temporary wartime agreement… ” Lilienthal and the other AEC commissioners met with the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy for the first time on May 5 and taught the committee members the facts of life:

There was some alarm expressed that England is getting half of the Belgian [Congo] uranium output and some surprise at learning that Great Britain and Canada actually had had men participating… in the development of the bomb itself, during the war. Senator [Tom] Connally [of Texas] said that then you mean that England knows how to make the bomb. The answer is certainly “Yes.” I explained that we had been concerned that the Joint Committee… had not previously been informed of our agreements with England and recommended that they learn of these basic agreements directly from the Secretary of State and the Under Secretary. This apparently they will do.

A little later in his journal Lilienthal adds: “This was in accordance with a prior understanding with Acheson. They were considerably shocked to learn that we have so little in this country in the way of raw materials.”

Acheson briefed the JCAE on May 12. “When he read the terms of the agreement,” recalls State Department atomic energy specialist Gordon Arne-son, “the hearing room erupted in indignation and anger. Several members walked out at the very thought that we'd have to ask anybody's permission to use these weapons.” Two Republican senators in particular — Arthur Van-denberg and Bourke Hickenlooper — were outraged at the British veto as well as the ore arrangements. Vandenberg, a former newspaper editor, had swung from isolationism to vital support of bipartisan foreign policy during the Second World War and had been crucial to enlarging US alliances in the early years of the Cold War. He believed, as he had written a friend in February, “that I am best serving my country when I provide the tightest possible ‘public control’ of atomic energy in the United States.” Hickenlooper, in contrast, was a Red-baiting ultraconservative. In the months to come, both men pushed to improve the US position.

England's financial situation gave them leverage. Back from the Moscow conference, Marshall quietly raised the issue of European aid in a commencement speech at Harvard University on June 5,1947 (Robert Oppenhei-mer sat behind him, a fellow candidate for an honorary degree). “The United States should do whatever it is able to do,” the Secretary of State proposed, “to assist in the return of normal economic health in the world, without which there can be no political stability and no assured peace. Our policy is directed not against any country or doctrine but against hunger, poverty, desperation and chaos… The initiative, I think, must come from Europe. The role of this country should consist of friendly aid in the drafting of a European program and of later support of such a program so far as it may be practical for us to do so.” Prodded by British Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin, the Europeans quickly responded. The program that resulted would be called the Marshall Plan.

Marshall's offer came none too soon for the British. “It is very secret indeed,” Acheson told Lilienthal privately on June 28, “but the British are almost out of dollars. The way things are going, unless something can be done… in a few months they will have exhausted about all but $500 million of the British loan of 7V2 billion.” Lilienthal immediately took the point. “I asked if this situation might make it worth their… while to consider changing the allocation of [uranium] ore so we would be buying and paying for the ore? I pointed out that we could use it because we had the plants, but they can't, perhaps for some time.” Acheson was skeptical. “No, he didn't think there was a chance of that. We had offered sometime back… to have us buy it all and hold it in this country subject to later allocation, but they would have nothing of it.”

Lilienthal never says he talked to Vandenberg and Hickenlooper about forcing a quid pro quo. The AEC chairman and the two senators may have arrived at the same conclusion independently, but by Lilienthal's own report, the approaching British bankruptcy was “very secret indeed.” In any case, by August 1947, Hickenlooper was writing to Marshall bluntly that “the present agreement [with the British], in view of all the circumstances, is intolerable.” He wanted it revised. If the British refused, the Iowa senator threatened the Secretary of State, “I shall oppose, as vigorously as I can, and publicly if necessary, any further aid or assistance to Britain.” When Lilienthal had breakfast early in September with Bernard Baruch, the two men talked about “some important matters concerning raw materials — this was at [Baruch's] insistence — and its relation to the Marshall Plan.” Lilienthal goes on to endorse explicitly the idea of a quid pro quo: “This made sense to me and fits into plans we have under way.” And when Lilienthal and his fellow commissioners discussed ore supply estimates at AEC meetings later in September, they agreed that the US needed the entire free world supply and reviewed a policy proposal that would require both the British and the Canadians to give up not only future allocations but also their existing stocks of ore. Since only the United States was in a position to process the ore into atomic bombs, the proposal reasoned, such a change of policy would benefit mutual security.

It would look bad to blackmail a friendly sovereign state, Marshall argued in a meeting at the Pentagon in mid-September with the new Secretary of Defense, James Forrestal. Fearing a damaging outcry, the State Department wanted to decouple aid and ore. Forrestal agreed. (The National Security Act, which Truman signed on July 26,1947, after months of brutal infighting between the Army and the Navy, replaced the War Department with a Department of Defense and created a separate Air Force, a Central Intelligence Agency and a National Security Council. As Navy secretary, Forrestal had stubbornly opposed the new arrangement and had succeeded in