postwar relations with the Soviet Union. Faced with what seemed to be the
growing intransigence of the Soviet Union toward virtually all postwar
questions, Truman and his advisors concluded that possession of the weapon
would give the United States unprecedented leverage to push Russia toward a
more accommodating position. Senator Edwin Johnson stated the equation
crassly, but clearly. "God Almighty in his infinite wisdom," the Senator
said, "[has] dropped the atomic bomb in our lap ... [now] with vision and
guts and plenty of atomic bombs, . . . [the U.S. can] compel mankind to adopt
a policy of lasting peace ... or be burned to a crisp." Stating the same
argument with more sophistication prior to Hiroshima, Stimson told Truman
that the bomb might well "force a favorable settlement of Eastern European
questions with the Russians." Truman agreed. If the weapon worked, he noted,
"I'll certainly have a hammer on those boys."
Use of the bomb as a diplomatic lever played a pivotal role in Truman's
preparation for his first meeting with Stalin at Potsdam. Not only would the
conference address such critical questions as Eastern Europe, Germany, and
Russia's involvement in the war against Japan;
It would also provide a crucial opportunity for America to drive home with
forcefulness its foreign policy beliefs about future relationships with
Russia. Stimson and other advisors urged the president to hold off on any
confrontation with Stalin until the bomb was ready. "Over any such tangled
wave of problems," Stimson noted, "the bomb's secret will be dominant. ... It
seems a terrible thing to gamble with such big stakes and diplomacy without
having your master card in your hand." Although Truman could not delay the
meeting because of a prior commitment to hold it in July, the president was
well aware of the bomb's significance. Already noted for his brusque and
assertive manner, Truman suddenly took on new confidence in the midst of the
Potsdam negotiations when word arrived that the bomb had successfully been
tested. "He was a changed man," Churchill noted. "He told the Russians just
where they got on and off and generally bossed the whole meeting." Now, the
agenda was changed. Russian involvement in the Japanese war no longer seemed
so important. Moreover, the United States had as a bargaining chip the most
powerful weapon ever unleashed. Three days later, Truman walked up to Stalin
and casually told him that the United States had "perfected a very powerful
explosive, which we're going to use against the Japanese." No mention was
made of sharing information about the bomb, or of future cooperation to avoid
an arms race.
Yet the very nature of the new weapon proved a mixed blessing, making it as
much a source of provocation as of diplomatic leverage. Strategic bombing
surveys throughout the war had shown that mass bombings, far from
demoralizing the enemy, often redoubled his commitment to resist. An American
monopoly on atomic weapons would, in all likelihood, have the same effect on
the Russians, a proud people. As Stalin told an American diplomat later, "the
nuclear weapon is something with which you frighten people [who have] weak
nerves." Yet if the war had proven anything, it was that Russian nerves were
remarkably strong. Rather than intimidate the Soviets, Dean Acheson pointed
out, it was more likely that evidence of Anglo-American cooperation in the
Manhattan Project would seem to them "unanswerable evidence of ... a
combination against them. ... It is impossible that a government as powerful
and power conscious as the Soviet government could fail to react vigorously
to the situation. It must and will exert every energy to restore the loss of
power which the situation has produced."
In fact, news of the bomb's development simply widened the gulf further
between the superpowers, highlighting the mistrust that existed between them,
with sources of antagonism increasing far faster than efforts at cooperation.
On May 11, two days after Germany surrendered—and two weeks after the
Truman-Molotov confrontation—America had abruptly terminated all lend-lease
shipments to the Soviet Union that were not directly related to the war
against Japan. Washington even ordered ships in the mid-Atlantic to turn
around. The action had been taken largely in rigid bureaucratic compliance
with a new law governing lend-lease just enacted by Congress, but Truman had
been warned of the need to handle the matter in a way that was sensitive to
Soviet pride. Instead, he signed the termination order without even reading
it. Although eventually some shipments were resumed, the damage had been
done. The action was "brutal," Stalin later told Harry Hopkins, implemented
in a "scornful and abrupt manner." Had the United States consulted Russia
about the issue "frankly" and on "a friendly basis," the Soviet dictator
said, "much could have been done"; but if the action "was designed as
pressure on the Russians in order to soften them up, then it was a
fundamental mistake."
Russian behavior through these months, on the other hand, offered little
encouragement for the belief that friendship and cooperation ranked high on
the Soviet agenda. In addition to violating the spirit of the Yalta accords
by jailing the sixteen members of the Polish underground and signing a
separate peace treaty with the Lublin Poles, Stalin seemed more intent on
reviving and validating his reputation as architect of the purges than as one
who wished to collaborate in spreading democracy. He jailed thousands of
Russian POWs returning from German prison camps, as if their very presence on
foreign soil had made them enemies of the Russian state. One veteran was
imprisoned because he had accepted a present from a British comrade in arms,
another for making a critical comment about Stalin in a letter. Even
Molotov's wife was sent to Siberia. In the meantime, hundreds of thousands of
minority nationalities in the Soviet Union were removed forcibly from their
homelands when they protested the attempted obliteration of their ancient
identities. Some Westerners speculated that Stalin was clinically psychotic,
so paranoid about the erosion of his control over the Russian people that he
would do anything to close Soviet borders and prevent the Russian people from
getting a taste of what life in a more open society would be like. Winston
Churchill, for example, wondered whether Stalin might not be more fearful of
Western friendship than of Western hostility, since greater cooperation with
the noncommunist world could well lead to a dismantling of the rigid
totalitarian control he previously had exerted. For those American diplomats
who were veterans of service in Moscow before the war, Soviet actions and
attitudes seemed all too reminiscent of the viselike terror they remembered
from the worst days of the 1930s.
When Truman, Stalin, and Churchill met in Potsdam in July 1945, these
suspicions were temporarily papered over, but no progress was made on untying
the Gordian knots that plagued the wartime alliance. Truman sought to improve
the Allies' postwar settlement with Italy, hoping to align that country more
closely with the West. Stalin agreed on the condition that changes favorable
to the Soviets be approved for Romania, Hungary, Bulgaria, and Finland. When
Truman replied that there had been no free elections in those countries,
Stalin retorted that there had been none in Italy either. On the issue of
general reparations the three powers agreed to treat each occupation zone
separately. As a result, one problem was solved, but in the process the
future division of Germany was almost assured. The tone of the discussions
was clearly not friendly. Truman raised the issue of the infamous Katyn
massacre, where Soviet troops killed thousands of Polish soldiers and
bulldozed them into a common grave. When Truman asked Stalin directly what
had happened to the Polish officers, the Soviet dictator responded: "they
went away." After Churchill insisted that an iron fence had come down around
British representatives in Romania, Stalin dismissed the charges as "all
fairy tales." No major conflicts were resolved, and the key problems of
reparation amounts, four-power control over Germany, the future of Eastern
Europe, and the structure of any permanent peace settlement were simply
referred to the Council of Foreign Ministers. There, not surprisingly, they
festered, while the pace toward confrontation accelerated.
The first six months of 1946 represented a staccato series of Cold War
events, accompanied by increasingly inflammatory rhetoric. In direct
violation of a wartime agreement that all allied forces would leave Iran
within six months of the war's end, Russia continued its military occupation
of the oil-rich region of Azerbaijan. Responding to the Iranian threat, the
United States demanded a U.N. condemnation of the Soviet presence in
Azerbaijan and, when Russian tanks were seen entering the area, prepared for
a direct confrontation. "Now we will give it to them with both barrels,"
James Byrnes declared. Unless the United States stood firm, one State
Department official warned, "Azerbaijan [will] prove to [be] the first shot
fired in the Third World War." Faced with such clear-cut determination, the
Soviets ultimately withdrew from Iran.
Yet the tensions between the two powers continued to mount. In early
February, Stalin issued what Supreme Court Justice William Douglas called the
"Declaration of World War III," insisting that war was inevitable as long as
capitalism survived and calling for massive sacrifice at home. A month later
Winston Churchill—with Truman at his side—responded at Fulton, Missouri,
declaring that "from Stetting in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an
iron curtain has descended across the [European] continent." Claiming that
"God has willed" the United States and Britain to hold a monopoly over atomic
weapons, Churchill called for a "fraternal association of the English
speaking people" against their common foes. Although Truman made no public
statement, privately he had told Byrnes in January: "I'm tired of babying the
Soviets. They [must be] faced with an iron fist and strong language. . . .
Only one language do they understand—how many divisions have you?" Stalin,
meanwhile, charged Britain and the United States with repressing democratic
insurgents in Greece, declaring that it was the western Allies, not the
Soviet Union, that endangered world peace. "When Mr. Churchill calls for a
new war," Molotov told a foreign ministers' meeting in May, "and makes
militant speeches on two continents, he represents the worst of twentieth-
century imperialism."
During the spring and summer, clashes occurred on virtually all the major
issues of the Cold War. After having told the Soviet Union that the State
Department had "lost" its $6 billion loan request made in January 1945, the
United States offered a $1 billion loan in the spring of 1946 as long as the
Soviet Union agreed to join the World Bank and accept the credit procedures
and controls of that body. Not surprisingly, the Russians refused, announcing
instead a new five-year plan that would promote economic self-sufficiency.
Almost paranoid about keeping Westerners out of Russia, Stalin had evidently
concluded that participation in a Western-run financial consortium was too
serious a threat to his own total authority. "Control of their border areas,"
the historian Walter LaFeber has noted, "was worth more to the Russians than
a billion, or even ten billion dollars." A year earlier the response might
have been different. But 1946 was a "year of cement," with little if any
willingness to accept flexibility. In Germany, meanwhile, the Russians
rejected a Western proposal for unifying the country and instead determined
to build up their own zone. The United States reciprocated by declaring it
would no longer cooperate with Russia by removing reparations from the west
to the east. The actions guaranteed a permanent split of Germany and
coincided with American plans to rebuild the West German economy.
The culminating breakdown of U.S.-Soviet relations came over the failure to
secure agreement on the international control of atomic energy. After
Potsdam, some American policymakers had urged the president to take a new
approach on sharing such control with the Soviet Union. The atom bomb, Henry
Stimson warned Truman in the fall of 1945, would dominate America's relations
with Russia. "If we fail to approach them now and continue to negotiate with
. . . this weapon rather ostentatiously on our hip, their suspicions and
their distrust of our purposes and motives will increase." Echoing the same
them, Dr. Harold Urey, a leading atomic scientist, told the Senate that by
making and storing atomic weapons, "we are guilty of beginning the arms
race." Furthermore, there was an inherent problem with the "gun on our hip"
approach. As the scientist Vannevar Bush noted, "there is no powder in the
gun, [nor] could [it] be drawn," unless the United States were willing to
deploy the A-bomb to settle diplomatic disputes. Recognizing this, Truman set
Dean Acheson and David Lilienthal to work in the winter of 1945—46 to prepare
a plan for international control.
But by the time the American proposal had been completed, much of the damage
in Soviet-American relations seemed irreparable. Although the Truman plan
envisioned ultimate sharing of international control, it left the United
States with an atomic monopoly—and in a dominant position—until the very last
stage. The Soviets would have no veto power over inspections or sanctions,
and even at the end of the process, the United States would control the
majority of votes within the body responsible for developing peaceful uses of
atomic energy inside the Soviet Union. When the Russians asked to negotiate
about the specifics of the plan, they were told they must either accept the
entire package or nothing at all. In the context of Soviet-American relations
in 1946, the result was predictable—the genie of the atomic arms race would
remain outside the bottle.
Not all influential Americans were "pleased by the growing polarization.
Averell Harriman, who a year earlier had been in the forefront of those
demanding a hard-line position from Truman, now pulled back somewhat. "We
must recognize that we occupy the same planet as the Russians," he said, "and
whether we like it or not, disagreeable as they may be, we have to find some
method of getting along." The columnist Walter Lippmann, deeply concerned
about the direction of events, wondered whether the inexperience and personal
predilections of some of America's negotiators might not be part of the
problem. Nor were all the signs negative. After his initial confrontation
with Molotov, Truman appeared to have second thoughts, sending Harry Hopkins
to Moscow to attempt to find some common ground with Stalin on Poland and
Eastern Europe. The Russians, in turn, had not been totally aggressive. They
withdrew from Hungary after free elections in that country had led to the
establishment of a noncommunist regime. Czechoslovakia was also governed by a
coalition government with a Western-style parliament. The British, at least,
announced themselves satisfied with the election process in Bulgaria. Even in
Romania, some concessions were made to include elements more favorably
disposed to the West. The Russians finally backed down in Iran—under
considerable pressure—and would do so again in a dispute over the Turkish
straits in the late summer of 1946.
Still, the events of 1946 had the cumulative effect of creating an aura of
inevitability about bipolar confrontation in the world. The preponderance of
energy in each country seemed committed to the side of suspicion and hostility
rather than mutual accommodation. If Stalin's February prediction of inevitable
war between capitalism and communism embodied in its purest form Russia's
jaundiced perception of relations between the two countries, an
eight-thousand-word telegram from George Kennan to the State Department
articulated the dominant frame of reference within which Soviet actions would
be perceived by U.S. officials. Perhaps the preeminent expert on the
Soviets, and a veteran of service in Moscow in the thirties as well as the
forties, Kennan had been asked to prepare an analysis of Stalin's speech.
Responding in words intended to command attention to Washington, Kennan
declared that the United States was confronted with a "political force
committed fanatically to the belief that [with the] United States there can be
no permanent modus vivendi, that it is desirable and necessary that the
internal harmony of our society be broken if Soviet power is to be secure."
According' to Kennan, the Russians truly believed the world to be divided
permanently into capitalist and socialist camps, with the Soviet Union
dedicated to "ever new heights of military power" even as it sought to subvert
its enemies through an "underground operating directorate of world communism."
The analysis was frightening, confirming the fears of those most disturbed by
the Soviet system's denial of human rights and hardline posture toward Western
demands for free elections and open borders in occupied Europe.
Almost immediately, the Kennan telegram became required reading for the
entire diplomatic and military establishment in Washington.
2.3 The Marshall Plan.
The chief virtue of the plan Marshall and his aides were Grafting was its
fusion of these political and economic concerns. As Truman told a Baylor
University audience in March 1947, "peace, freedom, and world trade are
indivisible. . . . We must not go through the '3os again." Since free
enterprise was seen as the foundation for democracy and prosperity, helping
European economies would both assure friendly governments abroad and
additional jobs at home. To accomplish that ^ goal, however, the United
States would need to give economic aid directly rather than through the
