Man of the Hour

by Jennet Conant

  Conant’s prescription for action got the White House’s attention. On January 7, 1946, hours before leaving for London and the first meeting of the United Nations General Assembly, Secretary of State Byrnes telephoned to tell him he was appointing a committee to formulate American policy on international control of atomic energy and asked him to serve as one of the five members. Byrnes overrode any possible objections he might have by assuring him it was only a part-time commitment and would not interfere with his duties at Harvard. Conant had only just returned to the business of running the university, and by all rights it should have been his priority, but the question of what could be done about this terrifying new weapon could not wait.

  Among the factors impelling him to take the job was that he would be in good company: Undersecretary of State Dean Acheson was named chairman of the committee, and the other members were Bush, Groves, and John J. McCloy, who had been one of Stimson’s closest advisors in the War Department. Except for Acheson, an atomic neophyte, these were extremely competent men and capable of solving the problem of international control. All agreed on the necessity of a hardheaded, realistic, enforceable world agreement. At the suggestion of Acheson’s assistant, a smart young lawyer named Herbert S. Marks, who observed that the all-star committee was perhaps “too grand” to have the time to work through all the material itself, a board of consultants was created to investigate and report on all the pertinent issues. David E. Lilienthal, an articulate and personable Chicago lawyer who had distinguished himself as head of the Tennessee Valley Authority, was made chairman, and he in turn recruited a group of seasoned hands: Chester Barnard, a leading figure in the business world, and three veterans of the Manhattan Project, Charles Thomas of Monsanto Chemical, Harry A. Winne of General Electric, and the man who knew more about the bomb than anyone, Robert Oppenheimer.

  The consultants devoted six weeks of intensive labor to drafting their report, beginning with a crash course in nuclear physics guided by Oppenheimer. They presented their report to the Acheson committee on March 7. Their conclusion was that the only workable system of safeguards required an Atomic Development Authority with a worldwide monopoly on raw materials; control over all the dangerous activities in the field of atomic energy, from mining through manufacturing; as well as a commitment to continue nuclear research and development. They rejected most of the proposals that had been suggested immediately after Hiroshima, arguing that it was impossible to outlaw the weapons or effectively police atomic activities, because developments for peaceful purposes and for war were interchangeable. No inspection system would be seen as reliable, and rivalries and suspicions would inevitably result.

  It was Oppenheimer, in a stroke of brilliance, who recognized that if a single international authority was the only authorized participant in the “dangerous activities”—such as operating separation plants for U-235 or large reactors for generating power—the problem became much easier to solve. If the dangerous activities were the sole province of the Atomic Development Authority, then all the “nondangerous power-producing piles” could be operated by individual nations under relatively moderate controls. The idea had immediate appeal, particularly by downplaying the agency’s “cops” role and promoting a positive, dynamic future for atomic energy, and in so doing, enhancing the incentives for Russian cooperation. The board of consultants did not pretend it was a final plan—further study and negotiation were required—but it was “a place to begin; a foundation on which to build.”

  During two days of marathon discussions at Dumbarton Oaks, the Acheson committee members picked apart the report and requested revisions. Conant worried that the consultants had made the inspection process too easy, and insisted again on guaranteed freedom of access—the right to see any lab or plant anywhere, at any time. Bush wanted to specify the exact timing for turning over information to the international authority. They both understood the transition would have to be gradual and urged the panel to retain the idea of progressing toward disarmament in clearly defined “stages.” They needed a plan, Conant stressed, that protected American interests but still convinced Russia and the other nations that the United States had no intention of using its nuclear monopoly to advance its global economic and political agenda. Despite their many differences, they managed to reach a consensus. On a damp, chill Sunday morning in mid-March, after copious cups of coffee, the Acheson group approved the report and sent it to Byrnes, calling it in a cover letter “the most constructive analysis of the question of international control we have seen and a definitely hopeful approach to a solution of the entire problem.”

  The so-called Acheson-Lilienthal Report, which was made public on March 28, 1946, was largely well received. The Washington Post praised the statesmanlike document for lifting the “Great Fear” that had descended over the world on August 6, 1945. As usual, the right-wing newspapers denounced it as a transparent scheme to give the bomb secret to the Russians. The columnist Dorothy Thompson dismissed it as an “Elysian daydream.”

  The report far exceeded the expectations of the scientists, who had been less than thrilled with the selection of Conant, Bush, and Groves, by then lumped together as part of oppressive officialdom. Like all the manifestos of the scientists’ movement, the Acheson-Lilienthal Report was inspired by Bohr’s original commitment to internationalize the atom and reflected the basic ideas in which they deeply and somewhat naïvely believed: confidence in the beneficent powers of science and that its practitioners could contribute significantly to a novel experiment in cooperation. The first sign of real progress since the setbacks on Brien McMahon’s bill in December 1945, it was greeted with much relief and excitement. “We clasped the new bible in our hands and went out to ring doorbells,” recalled William A. Higinbotham, the head of the Federation of Atomic Scientists.

  Their hopes were dashed almost immediately when it was revealed that on the same day that the Acheson committee members and consultants reached a compromise, President Truman, without bothering to consult any of them, had asked Bernard Baruch to be the American representative at the United Nations Atomic Energy Commission (UNAEC). Conant, whose own name had been bandied about as a possible candidate for the job, was dismayed by the choice. Over the years, he had had many dealings with the crusty septuagenarian financier and would have preferred that such a difficult diplomatic task go to someone more nimble and less conservative. Baruch had been past his prime when they had been “park bench” colleagues—deaf in one ear and requiring a daily nap, and a team of “youngsters” to do the legwork—and that had been at the start of the war. Conant assumed that Byrnes and Truman felt that the “suspicions of many senators about scientists had to be allayed,” and that they were counting on the elder statesman’s “high prestige” to buy them credibility on Capitol Hill.

  A furious Bush confronted Byrnes—who had reportedly suggested his fellow South Carolinian—and told him to his face that Baruch was completely unequal to the complexities of the task. The Old Man, as they called him, boasted of being almost entirely ignorant of the bomb, maintaining that all he needed to know was that it “went boom and it killed millions of people.” When Oppenheimer heard that the formulation of international atomic policy had been entrusted to the vain, grandstanding Wall Street operator, he was crushed, saying later, “That was the day I gave up hope.”

  Truman was no fan of Baruch’s. On the day he offered him the job, he noted caustically on his appointment sheet, “He wants to run the world, the Moon, and maybe Jupiter.” But by then, any illusion of international magnanimity had evaporated, and on the key issues—especially the hard line toward the Russians—the two men were in agreement. As Truman put it, he was “tired of babying the Russians.” His mistrust of the former ally had recently been reinforced by revelations of a Soviet espionage ring in Canada, resulting in the arrest of twenty-two suspects and inciting, over successive weeks of headlines, a near hysteria over Communist “atom spies” in America. Relations were further strained by St
alin’s refusal to withdraw Russian troops from Iran, which they occupied jointly with the British, and his angry declaration that the uneven economic development in the West would split the capitalist world into “two hostile camps and war between them.”

  The Soviets’ belligerence drew fire from America’s favorite Englishman. Barely a month later, in March, Winston Churchill descended on Fulton, Missouri, and the defeated statesman delivered a ringing speech about the growing threat posed by the Russians. “From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent,” he proclaimed, echoing his celebrated wartime orations by calling on the “fraternal association of English-speaking peoples” to hold Soviet military expansion in check. He warned the Americans not “to entrust the secret knowledge of experience of the atomic bomb . . . to the world organization, while still in its infancy. It would be criminal madness to cast it adrift in this still agitated and un-united world.”

  The speech created such a furor that Truman was forced to claim that he had not had time to read an advance copy, even though he had stood by Churchill’s side throughout, beaming from the rostrum. Acheson and Byrnes, still agitated by an eight-thousand-word telegram sent by George Kennan in the Moscow embassy characterizing the Russians as “fanatically” committed to the idea that there could be no “permanent peaceful coexistence” with the United States, took the Englishman’s speech as a warning that it was high time to stand up to Stalin.

  Conant, who largely accepted the image of an aggressive Russia that was fast becoming the new orthodoxy, deplored Churchill’s “iron curtain” speech—the death rattle of Britain’s shrinking empire—and worried it would be seen as a repudiation of the United States’ attempt to work out a deal with the Soviets. It seemed like “rocking the boat,” and might discourage the peacemakers’ efforts to reach a nuclear settlement through diplomatic initiatives and conciliatory gestures.

  While Baruch did not blanketly accept Churchill’s views, he took exception to being saddled with the liberal-leaning Acheson-Lilienthal Report, which amounted to a statement of policy, and immediately began making alterations to the parts of the plan he viewed as too weak. Even more discouraging, he assembled a team of conservative cronies that included three banking associates, a former New York State racing commissioner, and Groves. The latter had already made it clear he thought the plan was a pipe dream, and persisted in the belief that the United States could corner the world’s supply of high-grade uranium ore and thereby prevent any other nation from becoming a nuclear power. Such was the general skepticism about Baruch’s commitment to international control that when he asked the scientists on the board of consultants to stay on, they refused to a man.

  Conant also begged off politely, but he tried to use his influence to persuade Baruch of the Acheson-Lilienthal proposal’s merits. His parting contribution was to recommend bringing in Richard Tolman as chief scientific advisor after Oppenheimer, who was the “logical” choice, objected to joining the Wall Street gang. (He eventually agreed to help.) Conant’s only knowledge of the acrimonious behind-the-scenes struggle that developed between the president’s advocate and the creators of the report—at one point Baruch accused Acheson of secretly recording their telephone calls, which the latter denied heatedly—came from reading the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists and listening to the complaints of colleagues fed up with “yes-yessing” the preening counselor. Apart from a few informal letters to Baruch urging flexibility, and warning him not to allow the talks to break down, Conant had no contact with the US delegation.

  In the end, the American plan that Baruch presented at the opening session of the UNAEC on June 16 reflected the essentials of the Acheson-Lilienthal proposal, the one major change being on the question of enforcement: he demanded “immediate and certain punishment” for violators of the international agreement. Large-scale violations by a great power, as in the case of illegal work on atomic bombs, would be punished by war. Truman agreed with his stand on penalties and abolishing the veto power of the UN Security Council over such action, and assured his chief negotiator that he had his full backing. Addressing his fellow commission members, gathered in the elaborately decorated Hunter College gymnasium in the Bronx, the snowy-haired Baruch began with a dramatic warning even more dire than that of the scientists, his overblown, hortatory rhetoric intended for the history books:

  We are here to make a choice between the quick and the dead. That is our business.

  Behind the black portent of the new atomic age lies a hope which, seized upon with faith, can work our salvation. If we fail, then we have damned every man to be the slave of Fear. Let us not deceive ourselves: We must elect World Peace or World Destruction.

  Back in Cambridge, Conant watched helplessly as Baruch played to the gallery, squandering any chance for the plan in endless posturing and propaganda harangues. After dispensing with the lofty goals, Baruch got straight to the point, insisting on the abolition of the veto. “If I read the signs aright,” he said, “the peoples want a program not of pious thoughts but of enforceable sanctions—an international law with teeth in it.” The Soviet response on June 19, delivered by Andrei Gromyko, who was all of thirty-six, did not explicitly reject the American approach but offered a counterproposal: a pledge by the participating nations never to use atomic weapons under any circumstances, and a moratorium on their possession and production.

  Though the talks dragged on all summer, they had reached an impasse. Baruch was so preoccupied with punishments and the veto issue that he had gotten sidetracked, and Conant had the sickening feeling a precious opportunity was slipping away. The New York Times argued there was still a way to bridge the gap between the two positions. The editors of Business Week pleaded with the delegates to remain at the bargaining table for as long as it took: “Literally the fate of the world hangs on this attempt,” they wrote. “Unless the United Nations Commission can arrest the drift of events, we are moving toward a horrible war. The commission must succeed . . . There is no alternative but atomic chaos.”

  A month later, Gromyko repeated his proposal, this time bluntly rejecting Baruch’s position and, for that matter, the fundamental ideas of the Acheson-Lilienthal board. The president instructed the Old Man to “stand pat.” Baruch, determined to emerge the recognized victor and portray the Soviets as obstructionists, never budged. Neither side ever altered its position. Truman believed the United States had what Baruch called the “winning weapon.” America was ahead and would stay ahead by keeping the atomic “secret.” They were never convinced by Conant’s argument that they needed to share American know-how—they really did not believe another country could catch up anytime soon—nor did they believe that the informed diplomatic discussion he wanted was necessary to get down to brass tacks with the Russians. “The bitter truth,” observed McGeorge Bundy, was that there was not at any time a serious effort to reach an accord: “In the forum to which, by agreement, they had referred the question—the largest threat to the human future ever known—the representatives of the two greatest powers in the world never undertook any direct negotiation.”

  * * *

  Meanwhile, in mid-July 1946, Conant got a call from Acheson that the president would like to see him. A few weeks earlier, the Senate had finally passed and signed the McMahon Act authorizing the creation of the US Atomic Energy Commission, and he suspected Truman might offer him the chairmanship. His instincts proved correct, and, in a meeting at the White House, Truman expressed the hope that he would head the newly created agency. He had helped direct the wartime atomic project with brilliant success, and this responsibility would be as great as any shouldered in peacetime. Conant was sorely tempted. As the advisor to the president on all atomic energy affairs, he noted with anticipation, he would “be in a position of great influence on the future of the world.”

  Never one to act on impulse, Conant asked Truman for time to think it over. What was really keeping him from accepting was his “
appraisal of the relative strength of the friends and enemies” he could expect to encounter if he took the job. He could be certain of the support of Bush, Oppenheimer, and the two Comptons, as well as Groves, but how many others who had been part of the Manhattan Project would rally around him? A few, at least, would be openly hostile. Byrnes had let him know that Leo Szilard would be at the front of the line. A considerable number of the younger men in Chicago would be right behind him.

  The administration’s attempt to railroad the May-Johnson bill through Congress had exacerbated the “accumulated dissatisfactions” among many of those who had toiled under the Bush-Conant management during the war years. The fact that they had both contributed to the scheme embodied in the May-Johnson bill, and both testified in its favor alongside Groves—whose attempts to perpetuate military control helped precipitate the scientists’ revolt—had made them figures of suspicion. Contributing to Groves’s declining reputation was the scandal over the army’s senseless destruction of five Japanese cyclotrons in the final months of 1945, which had newspaper cartoonists conjuring up the spectacle of crude military “hatchet men” who could not distinguish between atomic weapons and important experimental research tools. The episode placed a permanent demerit by the general’s name and hastened the end of his career. All in all, it was a pretty dismal picture. “For all I knew,” the Harvard president recalled, “the entire scientific and technical manpower of the atomic energy establishments might have been just waiting until the war ended to become vocal in their condemnation of Conant, Bush, and Groves.”

  He felt unfairly tarred and feathered by his scientific fraternity. In his view, it was just plain wrong to claim the May-Johnson bill opened the way for the Atomic Energy Commission to be run by a military man—the scientists were convinced the army intended to install Groves, a possibility they could contemplate only with “extreme horror”—yet it was just this prejudice that had finally led Truman to have the bill killed. Realizing he was tainted by his association with Groves and no longer able to be effective, Conant had stood aside and let the storm over the legislation run its course. Now, confronted once again with this painful reality, he decided it would be the better part of valor to turn down the AEC job.