improve — Stimson imagined should be a precondition to any initial exchange.
Finally in mid-March Stimson talked to Roosevelt, their last meeting. That talk came to no useful end. In April, with a new President in the White House, he prepared to repeat the performance.
In the meantime the men who had advised Franklin Roosevelt were working to convince Harry Truman of the increasing perfidy of the Soviet Union. Averell Harriman, the shrewd multimillionaire Ambassador to Moscow, had rushed to Washington to brief the new President. Truman says Harriman told him the visit was based on “the fear that you did not understand, as I had seen Roosevelt understand, that Stalin is breaking his agreements.” To soften that condescension Harriman added that he feared Truman “could not have had time to catch up with all the recent cables.” The self-educated Missourian prided himself on how many pages of documents he could chew through per day — he was a champion reader — and undercut Harriman's condescension breezily by instructing the ambassador to “keep on sending me long messages.”
Harriman told Truman they were faced with a “barbarian invasion of Europe.” The Soviet Union, he said, meant to take over its neighbors and install the Soviet system of secret police and state control. “He added that he was not pessimistic,” the President writes, “for he felt that it was possible for us to arrive at a workable basis with the Russians. He believed that this would require a reconsideration of our policy and the abandonment of any illusion that the Soviet government was likely soon to act in accordance with the principles to which the rest of the world held in international affairs.”
Truman was concerned to convince Roosevelt's advisers that he meant to be decisive. “I ended the meeting by saying, ‘I intend to be firm in my dealings with the Soviet government.’” Delegates were arriving in San Francisco that April, for example, to formulate a charter for a new United Nations to replace the old and defunct League. Harriman asked Truman if he would “go ahead with the world organization plans even if Russia dropped out.” Truman remembers responding realistically that “without Russia there would not be a world organization.” Three days later, having heard from Stalin in the meantime and met the arriving Soviet Foreign Minister, Vyacheslav Molotov, he retreated from realism to bluster. “He felt that our agreements with the Soviet Union had so far been a one-way street,” an eyewitness recalls, “and that he could not continue; it was now or never. He intended to go on with the plans for San Francisco and if the Russians did not wish to join us they could go to Hell.”
Stimson argued for patience. “In the big military matters,” Truman reports him saying, “the Soviet government had kept its word and the military authorities of the United States had come to count on it. In fact… they had often done better than they had promised.” Although George Marshall seconded Stimson's argument and Truman could not have had two more reliable witnesses, it was not counsel the new and untried President wanted to hear. Marshall added a crucial justification that Truman took to heart:
He said from the military point of view the situation in Europe was secure but that we hoped for Soviet participation in the war against Japan at a time when it would be useful to us. The Russians had it within their power to delay their entry into the Far Eastern war until we had done all the dirty work. He was inclined to agree with Mr. Stimson that the possibility of a break with Russia was very serious.
Truman could hardly tell the Russians to go to hell if he needed them to finish the Pacific war. Marshall's justification for patience meant Stalin had the President over a barrel. It was not an arrangement Harry Truman intended to perpetuate.
He let Molotov know. They had sparred diplomatically at their first meeting; now the President attacked. The issue was the composition of the postwar government of Poland. Molotov discussed various formulas, all favoring Soviet dominance. Truman demanded the free elections that he understood had been agreed upon at Yalta: “I replied sharply that an agreement had been reached on Poland and that there was only one thing to do, and that was for Marshal Stalin to carry out that agreement in accordance with his word.” Molotov tried again. Truman replied sharply again, repeating his previous demand. Molotov hedged once more. Truman proceeded to lay him low: “I expressed once more the desire of the United States for friendship with Russia, but I wanted it clearly understood that this could be only on a basis of the mutual observation of agreements and not on the basis of a one-way street.” Those are hardly fighting words; Mo-lotov's reaction suggests that the President spoke more pungently at the time:
“I have never been talked to like that in my life,” Molotov said.
I told him, “Carry out your agreements and you won't get talked to like that.”
If Truman felt better for the exchange, it disturbed Stimson. The new President had acted without knowledge of the bomb and its potentially fateful consequences. It was time and past time for a full briefing.
Truman agreed to meet with Stimson at noon on Wednesday, April 25. The President was scheduled to address the opening session of the United Nations conference in San Francisco by radio that evening. One more conditioning incident intervened; on Tuesday he received a communication from Joseph Stalin, “one of the most revealing and disquieting messages to reach me during my first days in the White House.” Molotov had reported Truman's tough talk to the Soviet Premier. Stalin replied in kind. Poland bordered on the Soviet Union, he wrote, not on Great Britain or the United States. “The question [of] Poland had the same meaning for the security of the Soviet Union as the question [of] Belgium and Greece for the security of Great Britain” — but “the Soviet Union was not consulted when those governments were being established there” following the Allied liberation. The “blood of the Soviet people abundantly shed on the fields of Poland in the name of the liberation of Poland” demanded a Polish government friendly to Russia. And finally:
I am ready to fulfill your request and do everything possible to reach a harmonious solution. But you demand too much of me. In other words, you demand that I renounce the interests of security of the Soviet Union, but I cannot turn against my country.
With this blunt challenge on his mind Truman received his Secretary of War.
Stimson had brought Groves along for technical backup but left him waiting in an outer office while he discussed issues of general policy. He began dramatically, reading from a memorandum:
Within four months we shall in all probability have completed the most terrible weapon ever known in human history, one bomb of which could destroy a whole city.
We had shared the development with the British, Stimson continued, but we controlled the factories that made the explosive material “and no other nation could reach this position for some years.” It was certain that we would not enjoy a monopoly forever, and “probably the only nation which could enter into production within the next few years is Russia.” The world “in its present state of moral advancement compared with its technical development,” the Secretary of War continued quaintly, “would be eventually at the mercy of such a weapon. In other words, modern civilization might be completely destroyed.”
Stimson emphasized what John Anderson had emphasized to Churchill the year before: that founding a “world peace organization” while the bomb was still a secret “would seem to be unrealistic”:
No system of control heretofore considered would be adequate to control this menace. Both inside any particular country and between the nations of the world, the control of this weapon will undoubtedly be a matter of the greatest difficulty and would involve such thorough-going rights of inspection and internal controls as we have never heretofore contemplated.
That brought Stimson to the crucial point:
Furthermore, in the light of our present position with reference to this weapon, the question of sharing it with other nations and, if so shared, upon what terms, becomes a primary question of our foreign relations.
Bohr had proposed to inform other nations of the common dangers of a nuclear arms race. At the hands of Stimson and his advisers that sensible proposal had drifted to the notion that the issue was sharing the weapon
