Presidential Predicaments: Truman V (of VIII) -Who Gets to Know What?
As of August 10, 1945, President Truman had, in his constitutional capacity as “Commander in Chief” of our armed forces, reserved to himself the authority to order any further use of nuclear weapons “over Japan.” Chief of Staff General George Marshall had passed the word along to the Pentagon.
On August 15, in a radio broadcast, Japan’s emperor announced Japan’s surrender. All offensive operations against Japan ceased. The occupation of Japan now had to be planned and implemented. General Douglas MacArthur was put in charge.
In Washington, attention turned to the question of what to do about the discovery of atomic energy and the existence, now, of the nuclear weapon. (The great Danish physicist Niels Bohr had been trying to get US leaders to take up this question even before the bomb was successfully tested. A version of this story is told in Richard Rhodes’ excellent The Making of the Atomic Bomb (1986). A fuller version is offered in a book I’ve written called Roads Not Taken that has not as yet been published. )
A sub-question was whether the “secrets” of atomic energy should be shared in some way, or not. Atomic scientists like Bohr and J. Robert Oppenheimer argued that many of the “secrets” would be known already to any decent physicist and that the current monopoly the United States had on the bomb would not last long. Three or four years maybe.
They also argued that sharing with the Soviets some of the secrets that weren’t secrets might help develop trust between us and them.
But the voices that prevailed on this point were the ones that argued that it would take the Soviets much longer than that to get a bomb, twenty years, even. And that the United States should keep its monopoly on the bomb and treat as secret all that was now known about it.
A somewhat less complicated question was whether the physical atomic weapons themselves should now be held in the custody and control of the military or of civilian authorities.
Both questions were answered by the Atomic Energy Act passed by Congress in 1946. Under the Act, any information pertaining to atomic energy would be considered “born secret,” classified automatically as “restricted data,” and held in tight secrecy, even, oddly, from the British scientists who had had clearance to work with us in the Manhattan Project to develop the bomb.
The Act also said that the physical nuclear weapons would henceforth be held under the control of a civilian agency called the Atomic Energy Commission that would be answerable only to the President. All matters having to do with atomic energy, for weapons or anything else, would be controlled only by the AEC.1
It was still being asked whether atomic energy might somehow be brought under international control. A way of accomplishing this had been proposed in 1946 in a most interesting document called the Acheson-Lilienthal Report.
President Truman chose a financier named Bernard Baruch to advance the Acheson-Lilienthal plan to the United Nations. Bernard Baruch made some changes and it came to be called the Baruch Plan. The changes Baruch made undermined a fundamental premise of the plan.
The Soviets insisted the United States would have to give up its nuclear weapons before anything else could be done.
Soon, no one was holding out much hope for the plan. But in 1948, President Truman, in a speech on the campaign trail in Wisconsin, said he still hoped that atomic energy might be brought under international control. It was, of course, a speech on the campaign trail.
In 1949, any remaining hopes along these lines faded. In that year, the scientists won the argument about how long our monopoly on the atomic bomb would last, or rather, how long it wouldn’t last. In August of that year, the Soviet Union successfully tested its first atomic bomb. It was a copy, a very close copy, of the Nagasaki bomb. The U.S. monopoly had lasted, as the scientists had said it would, a little over four years.
The Soviets didn’t announce their successful test. Our leaders knew about it because for a couple of months we’d had airplanes “sniffing” around their eastern border for radiation. At the end of September, President Truman told the American public about the successful test, even though some of his advisors said he shouldn’t.
About this, he said, he had a duty to inform us.
For a fuller account of the creation of “restricted data” under the Atomic Energy Act and problems that have emerged concerning it, see Alex Wellerstein’s excellent new book, Restricted Data: The History of Nuclear Secrecy in the United States, 2021.