The Atomic Bomb and the Origins of the Cold War

230 Pages·2008·0.74 MB·English

by  Prof. Campbell Craig

THE ATOMIC BOMB AND
THE ORIGINS OF THE COLD WAR
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the atomic
bomb
and the origins of
the cold
war
Campbell Craig
Sergey Radchenko
Yale University Press
New Haven & London
Copyright © 2008 by Yale University. All rights reserved.
This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including
illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by
Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by
reviewers for the public press), without written permission from
the publishers.
Set in Galliard Oldstyle by The Composing Room of Michigan, Inc.
Printed in the United States of America.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Craig, Campbell, 1964–
The atomic bomb and the origins of the Cold War / Campbell
Craig and Sergey Radchenko.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-300-11028-9 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Cold War.
2. Atomic bomb—Political aspects. 3. United States—Foreign
relations—Soviet Union. 4. Soviet Union—Foreign relations—
United States. 5. United States—Foreign relations—1945– 1953.
6. Soviet Union—Foreign relations—1945– 1991. I. Radchenko,
Sergey. II. Title.
D843.C67 2008
909.82(cid:2)5dc22 2007049148
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British
Library.
The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and
durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book
Longevity of the Council on Library Resources.
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments vii
Introduction ix
1 Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Atomic Wartime Diplomacy 1
2 The Great Game 34
3 Truman, the Bomb, and the End of World War II 62
4 Responding to Hiroshima and Nagasaki 90
5 The Baruch Plan and the Onset of American Cold War 111
6 Stalin and the Burial of International Control 135
Conclusion 162
Notes 171
Index 197
v
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Campbell Craig would like to thank Bob Jervis, Jeremi Suri, An-
drew Preston, Lloyd Gardner, Paul Boyer, Katherine Sibley, and Fred
Logevall for comments and advice. I’m grateful for the institutional sup-
port of the University of Canterbury, Rutgers University, the University
of Southampton—my new home—and especially Yale University. Inter-
national Security Studies and the Center for International Affairs at Yale
provided me with tremendous intellectual and financial backing during
my stay in New Haven over the 2004– 5 academic year, when I did most
of the work on this book. I’m indebted to John Gaddis for this and many
other things. Friends and colleagues here at the Department of Politics
and International Relations at the University of Southampton have kindly
welcomed me and my historian’s ways.
I spoke about various aspects of this book at Yale, Columbia, and Cam-
bridge Universities, the Centre Américain at Sciences Po-Paris, and the
University of Wisconsin, and am grateful for all of the comments and
criticism received at these places. I would like to thank Brian Cuddy and
Fiona McLachlan for their research assistance, Evgeny Pavlov for help-
ing out with various translation issues, and archivists at the Roosevelt
and Truman Libraries, the National Archives at College Park, Maryland,
and Princeton’s Mudd Library. I should also like to salute the scholars re-
sponsible for the National Security Archive’s Web site—it’s a great on-
line resource.
vii
viii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Finally, I have tested, and even generated, several of the forthcoming
arguments at the Rai d’Or public house of Salisbury, England. I would
like to commend its proprietor, Simon Wheeler, for running such a civi-
lized establishment, and to thank many friends there, including especially
Peter Marshall, for listening to what I had to say, and then informing me
that I was wrong.
Sergey Radchenko is grateful to James Hershberg for his detailed and
insightful comments and criticism. I also would like to thank Stephen
Harmon for his friendly advice and help with the style, and Iurii Smirnov
for sharing his published articles and manuscripts.
In the course of working on this book I benefited from research at the
Archive of Foreign Policy of the Russian Federation. I would like to
thank the archive’s staff for accommodating my infrequent but sudden
appearances and a long list of research requests. I am especially grateful
to Elizaveta Guseva for her understanding of the meaning of scholarly re-
search and invariable willingness to help in connection with this and my
other book projects. Further credit goes to the archivists of the Russian
State Archive of Political and Social History for helping me locate several
important documents.
Pittsburg State University, the Korea Foundation, and the Institute for
Far Eastern Studies at Kyungnam University in Seoul, South Korea, pro-
vided comfortable working conditions while I worked on this research
project; I owe a debt of gratitude to all three institutions.
We would both like to thank Juergen Moosleitner for his fine work in
helping to prepare the final draft of our book, Professor Arne Westad of
the London School of Economics, without whom there would be no
book at all, Chris Rogers and Dan Heaton of Yale University Press, and
above all our families, for putting up with the migratory call of the
scholar.
INTRODUCTION
The bomb that scientists in remote New Mexico labored fever-
ishly to build, that illuminated the desert skies at the Trinity test site, that
massacred thousands in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in a matter of seconds,
and that has since morphed into a thermonuclear weapon capable of
killing off civilization, plays a starring role in the political, cultural, and
social history of the contemporary era—a period coterminous with his-
tory’s last great-power rivalry, the Cold War of 1945– 91. When we think
of the diplomatic history of that era, the bomb features as a blunt, fear-
some tool: a brutal means of ending the Second World War, and then of
deterring war between the United States and the Soviet Union. It was an
object of statecraft, a grim means of pursuing national ends.
It was that, but we mean to suggest here that it also played a more ac-
tive role. As the United States and the Soviet Union began to regard
each other as potential rivals during the latter part of the Second World
War and then the tense months afterward, the bomb—or, to put it more
accurately, the implications of a war fought with it—had a kind of inde-
pendent effect upon the attitudes of American and Russian leaders. It
led American leaders such as Roosevelt and Truman to reconsider the
notion that the United States would naturally lead the postwar world
into an era of permanent peace. It led the Soviet leader Stalin to develop
an acute fear for Russia’s postwar welfare, not so much because of what
the Americans had done, or what they intended, but because of what
they had. The miserable prospect of atomic war, made vivid by witnesses
ix