Dark Sun: The Making Of The Hydrogen Bomb

weakening the authority of the Secretary of Defense. So that the combative Forrestal would not subvert the work of the new office, Truman gave him the job.)

Hickenlooper pursued the problem as vigorously as he had promised. He bawled out Lilienthal for two hours in mid-October. “Got me so disgusted and mad during the first bitter scolding that I almost lost control and told him off,” Lilienthal reprised the argument in his journal, noting however that “there was some point in some of his complaint… ” Twice that month, Hickenlooper's office nudged the Joint Chiefs of Staff to make up their minds, two years after the war, about how many atomic bombs the military needed. The Joint Chiefs decided that the United States could use no more than 150 “Nagasaki type” bombs, basing that number on a Pentagon study that envisioned “attacks on approximately 100 different urban locations” in the USSR. “The efficient utilization of atomic bombs,” the JCS reasoned, “will dictate the use of one bomb only in any one attack on an objective area. Therefore, the maximum which would be dispatched in any one attack under present conditions is unlikely to exceed 100.” In October 1947, that is, the US military believed officially that 150 atomic bombs with a total yield of three million tons of TNT equivalent — 3 megatons — would be sufficient to defend the United States and defeat the USSR, its most likely enemy. In the years to come, one hydrogen bomb would develop four times that total yield and the number of such weapons in the US arsenal would multiply to four and then five figures, the extent of the threat always increasing in official estimates to match the rate of manufacture. For the time being, however, the US had the opposite problem.

As yet ignorant of the secret US debate, the British continued to push for more information on bomb and reactor technology. The three CPC nations convened a three-day conference in Washington in mid-November “to determine,” explains a British diplomat, “which wartime secrets could now be declassified.” The point was to declassify information by common agreement rather than piecemeal and inconsistently. Both Donald Maclean and Klaus Fuchs attended the declassification conference. Presumably neither man knew that the other was a spy. Among other subjects, the conferees discussed atomic weapons. One participant, Berkeley physicist Robert L. Thornton, told the FBI in 1950 “that Fuchs had on occasion exasperated some of the panel members because of his conservative attitude with regard to the advisability of declassifying certain atomic energy type information… Dr. Thornton concluded that if Fuchs was attempting to determine what the panel members considered as holding forth the greatest promise for future military development in the field of atomic energy, he could not have been more ‘damnably clever.’”

A congressional debate on the Marshall Plan was approaching. If the Departments of State and Defense had decoupled aid and ore, Vandenberg and Hickenlooper had not (nor, except cosmetically, had the AEC). In a meeting at the Pentagon on November 16, 1947, of Undersecretary Robert Lovett for the State Department, Forrestal for the Defense Department, Vandenberg and Hickenlooper, the two senators reaffirmed their insistence on a change in Anglo-American arrangements. Vandenberg called the wartime agreements “astounding” and “unthinkable.” “He said that failure to revamp the agreements,” his son paraphrases his contemporary diary, “would have a disastrous effect on Congressional consideration of the Marshall Plan… Both Senators… said that a satisfactory conclusion must be reached before final action on the Marshall Plan program.” A few days later, State Department staff members George Kennan and Edmund Gullion tried unsuccessfully to move the AEC commissioners toward a broader cooperation — “something that smacks of an alliance,” Lilienthal recorded distastefully, adding, “I shall do everything I can to discourage and prevent this; it is not the way to approach this matter.” (In the midst of these discussions, William Donovan, whose Office of Strategic Services was about to lose its authority over US intelligence to the new CIA, sent “a young fellow” to see Lilienthal bearing “a weird story, brought in from eastern Czechoslovakia (the Carpathians) by a Jewish rabbinical student… ” The story “purported] to concern Russian efforts in atomic energy.” Lilienthal was unimpressed that the Soviets might be mining ore in Czechoslovakia. “Turned him over to [an aide],” he noted in his journal.)

Vandenberg was restive. In late November, he said publicly (in Lilienthal's paraphrase) “that before the Marshall Plan was passed the United States would insist on Belgium's uranium,” a statement a Communist newspaper in Belgium immediately headlined. Lilienthal finally had a proposal for the British to show the JCAE, however — “it has been months and months in coming” — and on November 26 he and Lovett met with Vandenberg and Hickenlooper to preview it. “To my great surprise,” writes Lilienthal, “it was received almost without question, in every essential.” It ought to have been: it proposed abrogating the wartime agreements, diverting all Belgian Congo ore production to the United States and acquiring the entire British stockpile.

Lilienthal and Lovett presented the proposal to the full Joint Committee on December 5, 1947. The problem from State Department's point of view was to find some face-saving interest other than Marshall Plan aid to seem to exchange for British capitulation. The exchange that the AEC proposed was technical information on nuclear energy development. The JCAE “accepted the idea that [the proposal] should not be explicitly tied to economic relief to Britain — though, of course, the two cannot be wholly separated in reality,” Lilienthal records. Vandenberg told them bluntly, according to Lilienthal's notes, “I don't recognize that [British] veto [on the use of the bomb]… It can be a source of desperate embarrassment. Horrified and have been since I learned of it. Vitally essential that we wipe that off beyond any dispute.” Lovett would handle the negotiations; Vandenberg gave him a deadline of December 17, twelve days away.

Lovett cabled the American ambassador in London immediately after the meeting ended, and his cable explicitly linked aid and ore: “Vandenberg and some others strongly feel that further aid to Britain… should be conditioned on Britain's meeting our terms with respect to allocation of atomic raw materials.” The Marshall Plan could be at risk, he warned. The British were infuriated, but they had their backs to the wall.

Donald Maclean participated in the next two weeks of hard negotiations, conducted through the Combined Policy Committee. Information exchange as the negotiators agreed to define it boiled down to subjects peripheral to bomb development: health and safety, research radioisotopes, fundamental physics. The Americans agreed to share information on designing natural-uranium power reactors, which was the information Roger Makins had sought almost a year previously when he opened the can of worms. It was harder to agree on ore allocations. The Joint Chiefs weighed in on December 17 to bolster the US position with a convenient finding that for their 150 atomic bombs, “preemption of the world's supply of usable ores and stockpiling within the United States is an urgent and at this time paramount consideration for national security.” At the last minute, the British delegates had to return to London to report. Vandenberg and Hickenlooper waited impatiently. The delegates returned with reluctant agreement: the British veto on using the atomic bomb would be surrendered, Britain would ship two-thirds of its ore stockpile to the US and the US would get all Belgian Congo ore for at least the next two years. The negotiators named the agreement a modus vivendi. (Gordon Arneson explains: “A modus vivendi says, ‘Mr. A sits here and says I would propose to act in this way.’ B sits there, and he says, ‘Yes, I intend to work the same way.’ “)

Both sides initialed the modus vivendi at what Lilienthal calls an “undra-matic and unimpressive” ceremony on January 7, 1948. The AEC commissioners had met that very morning to review an agreement vital to their work that they had not yet seen; Lewis Strauss, always fractious, had resisted allowing even the marginal technical cooperation with the British that the modus vivendi described until limits were written into the AEC minutes. “I never felt more ashamed of the internal workings of an organization,” Lilienthal complained. At the ceremony, Maclean pulled Gullion aside to comment acidly, in Arneson's recollection, “‘You know, this is hardly an agreement among people who agree; it's an agreement among people who disagree.’ Ed replied, ‘Yes, that's about right.’” Gullion chose not to take offense. Since the United Nations charter required all international agreements to be registered (which would alert the Soviet Union), and the US Atomic Energy Act forbade sharing atomic-energy information with foreign governments (Strauss's objection), the hard-won modus vivendi was doubly illegal. A British diplomat says it “had to be kept under wraps.” In fact it was kept secret even from Congress outside the JCAE.

By acceding to the modus vivendi, the British effectively delayed their program to build an atomic bomb by several years. The negotiations, says Dean Acheson, “left the British with a sense of having been ungenerously, if not unfairly, treated.” The information Maclean gleaned on ore supplies and U235 and plutonium production rates might have been valuable to the Soviet Union, but the United States had not even tabled that information honestly during the negotiations. The AEC reported to the FBI several years later that “the estimates of raw materials supply that were used in [the] Combined Policy Committee calculations of 1947 were much under the actual supplies received in that period.” By 1947, with fewer than 1.5 million men under arms, the United States had made the atomic bomb its first line of defense (however thin the line) as it began to mount a broad, worldwide challenge to what it perceived to be Soviet expansionism; under such conditions, as it inevitably