Command and Control

The selection of Bernard Baruch to help formulate the American plan had been controversial within the Truman administration. Many liberals criticized Baruch for being too old, too ignorant about atomic weaponry, and too suspicious of the Soviet Union. The Baruch plan was attacked by Oppenheimer, among others, for not being bold enough — for emphasizing inspections and punishments instead of cooperation with the Soviets. Oppenheimer favored a scheme that would share technical information about atomic energy and promote goodwill. On June 19 the Soviet Union offered its own plan. Andrei Gromyko, the Soviet foreign minister, proposed that first the United States should destroy all of its nuclear weapons, and then an agreement should be reached on how to prevent other nations from obtaining them. The Soviet response confirmed liberal doubts about the Baruch plan — and conservative doubts about the Soviet Union.

During the summer of 1946, some form of international agreement to outlaw the atomic bomb still seemed within reach. Although the Soviets complained that the United States was trying to prolong its nuclear monopoly, America’s defense policies were hardly those of an imperialist power seeking world domination. In fact, the United States was quickly dismantling its armed forces. The number of soldiers in the U.S. Army soon dropped from about 8 million to fewer than 1 million; the number of airplanes in the Army Air Forces fell from almost 80,000 to fewer than 25,000 and only one fifth of those planes were thought ready for action. Ships and tanks were permanently scrapped, and the defense budget was cut by almost 90 percent.

American servicemen were eager to come home after the war and resume their normal lives. When the pace of demobilization seemed too slow, they staged protest marches in occupied Germany. The American people expressed little desire to build an empire or maintain a strong military presence overseas. Although the War Department sought to acquire a wide range of foreign bases, the likelihood of any military challenge to the United States seemed remote. “No major strategic threat or requirement now exists, in the opinion of our country’s best strategists,” Major General St. Clair Street, the deputy commander of SAC, said in July 1946, “nor will such a requirement exist for the next three to five years.”

At the very moment when hopes for world government, world peace, and international control of the atomic bomb reached their peak, the Cold War began. Without the common enemy of Nazi Germany, the alliance between the Soviet Union and the United States started to unravel. The Soviet Union’s looting of Manchuria, its delay in removing troops from Iran, and its demand for Turkish territory along the Mediterranean coast unsettled the Truman administration. But the roots of the Cold War lay in Germany and Eastern Europe, where the Soviets hoped to create a buffer zone against future invasion. Ignoring promises of free elections and self-determination, the Soviet Union imposed a Communist puppet government in Poland. George Kennan told the State Department that the Soviets were “fanatically” committed to destroying “our traditional way of life,” and Winston Churchill warned that an “iron curtain” had descended across Europe, along with the expansion of Communist, totalitarian rule.

By March 1947, American relations with the Soviet Union had grown chilly. In a speech before Congress, President Truman offered economic aid to countries threatened by a system relying on “terror and oppression, a controlled press and radio, fixed elections, and the suppression of personal freedoms.” Although the speech never mentioned the Soviet Union by name, the target of the Truman Doctrine was obvious. The United States now vowed to contain Soviet power throughout the world. The divide between east and west in Europe widened a few months later, when the Soviets prevented their allies from accepting U.S. aid through the Marshall Plan. In February 1948 the Communist overthrow of Czechoslovakia’s freely elected government shocked the American public. The Soviet-backed coup revived memories of the Nazi assault on the Czechs in 1938, the timidity of the European response, and the world war that soon followed.