Abstract
The months that witnessed American efforts to control atomic energy also saw the simultaneous erosion of US-Soviet relations, a process that would eventually give rise to a more militant American policy involving greater reliance on nuclear weapons. Growing suspicions about Soviet intentions in Eastern Europe and Manchuria, alarm over the Soviet failure to leave Iran, new fears about Russian ambitions in the Turkish Straits, and the Soviet Union’s obstructionist behavior in the United Nations all contributed to reinforcing the harder, more “realistic” assessments being offered around Washington of long-range Soviet ambitions. So too did Stalin’s provocative speech of February 9, 1946, announcing three or more new five-year industrial development plans to guarantee the Soviet Union against “all contingencies,” a statement that Justice William O. Douglas at the time called “The Declaration of World War III.”1 Meanwhile, in Western Europe, the Italian and French communist parties grew increasingly strident. In these months of transition, roughly from September 1946 through December 1947, the public rupture of Soviet-American relations slowly evolved. During this period, new initiatives, including the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan, and new institutions created by passage of the 1947 National Security Act would also appear, adding in their own ways, sometimes directly, sometimes indirectly, to the rapidly changing face of relations between Washington and Moscow and, eventually, to American perceptions of the role nuclear weapons should play in that relationship.
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Notes
Diary entry, Sep. 24, 1945, in Robert H. Ferrell (ed.), Truman in the White House: The Diary of Eban A. Ayers (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1991), 84.
Quoted in M. Truman, Harry S. Truman (New York: Morrow, 1973), 312.
Kennan to Byrnes, Feb. 22, 1946, FRUS 1946, VI, 696–709; excerpts in George F. Kennan, Memoirs, 1925–1950 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1967), 547–559.
Ibid., 294–295; Millis and Duffield, Forrestal Diaries, 135–140; Lloyd C. Gardner, Architects of Illusion (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1970), 277.
The Clifford-Elsey report appears in full in Arthur Krock, Memoirs: Sixty Years on the Firing Line (New York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1968), 417–482.
See Henry W. Berger, “Bipartisanship, Senator Taft, and the Truman Administration,” Political Science Quarterly 90 (Summer 1975): 221–237;
and James T. Patterson, Mr. Republican: A Biography of Robert A. Taft (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1972), chs. 20–23.
U.S. Bureau of the Census, Historical Statistics of the United States: Colonial Times to 1957 (Washington, D.C.: G.P.O., 1960), 99.
Clark Clifford with Richard Holbrooke, Counsel to the President: A Memoir (New York: Random House, 1991), 110.
Millis and Duffield, Forrestal Diaries, 141, 171, 211. Also see David Alan Rosenberg, “The U.S. Navy and the Problem of Oil in a Future War: The Outline of a Strategic Dilemma,” Naval War College Review 29 (Summer 1976): 53–64.
Samuel P. Huntington, The Common Defense (New York: Columbia University Press, 1961), 42–43.
For Truman’s endorsement of UMT, see “Address Before a Joint Session of the Congress on Universal Military Training,” Oct. 23, 1945, Truman Public Papers, 1945, 404–413. Also see Truman, Year of Decisions, 510–512; Harry S. Truman, Years of Trial and Hope (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1956), 53–55; and U.S. Congress, House, Committee on Military Affairs, Hearings: Universal Military Training, 79:1, Nov. 8, 1945—Feb. 21, 1946 (Washington, D.C.: G.P.O., 1946).
According to a Gallup Poll conducted in July 1947, fully 75 percent of those surveyed favored some form of military training for young men. Six months later, however, the figure had dropped to 65 percent, indicating that UMT was gradually losing popular support. See George H. Gallup, The Gallup Poll: Public Opinion, 1935–1971 (New York: Random House, 1972), 661, 700.
Steven L. Rearden, History of the Office of the Secretary of Defense: The Formative Years, 1947–1950 (Washington, D.C.: Historical Office, Office of the Secretary of Defense, 1984), 16–20.
The most vivid account of the unification controversy is to be found in Townsend Hoopes and Douglas Brinkley, Driven Patriot: The Life and Times of James Forrestal (New York: Knopf, 1992).
Also see Demetrious Caraley, The Politics of Military Unification (New York: Columbia University Press, 1966), which looks mainly at the legislative side of the struggle; Lawrence Legere, Jr., “Unification of the Armed Forces” (Ph.D. Thesis, Harvard University, 1950),
for the Army’s viewpoint; and John C. Reis, The Management of Defense (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1964), for the Navy’s perspective.
“Special Message to the Congress Recommending Establishment of a Department of National Defense,” Dec. 19, 1945, Truman Public Papers, 1945, 546–560. For congressional views, see Steven L. Rearden, “Congress and National Defense, 1945–1950,” in Richard H. Kohn (ed.), The United States Military under the Constitution of the United States, 1789–1989 (New York: New York University Press, 1991), 271–289.
Ltr, Truman to Patterson and Forrestal, June 15, 1946, in Alice C. Cole, et al. (eds.), The Department of Defense: Documents on Establishment and Organization, 1944–1978 (Washington, D.C.: Historical Office, Office of the Secretary of Defense, 1978), 26–28.
For an interesting analysis from the Navy’s perspective of the impact the roles and missions controversy had, see Dean C. Allard, “Interservice Differences in the United States, 1945–1950: A Naval Perspective,” Airpower Journal 3 (Winter 1989): 71–85.
Alfred D. Sander, “Truman and the National Security Council, 1945–1947,” Journal of American History 59 (Sep. 1972): 369–388. One who especially disliked the NSC approach was George C. Marshall. See his memo to Truman, Feb. 7, 1947, FRUS 1947, I, 712–715.
John Lewis Gaddis, The United States and the Origins of the Cold War, 1941–1947 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1972), 351.
Quoted in Victor Rothwell, Britain and the Cold War, 1941–1947 (London: J. Cape, 1982), 434.
The most thorough treatment of Marshall’s tenure as secretary of state is Forrest C. Pogue, George C. Marshall: Statesman, 1945–1959 (New York: Viking Press, 1987). Also see Robert H. Ferrell, George C. Marshall, vol. XV in Robert H. Ferrell and Samuel Flagg Bemis (eds.), The American Secretaries of State and Their Diplomacy (New York: Cooper Square, 1966);
and Alexander DeConde, “George Catlett Marshall,” in Norman A. Graebner (ed.), An Uncertain Tradition: American Secretaries of State in the Twentieth Century (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1961), 245–266.
Diary entry, Feb. 27, 1947, William D. Leahy Papers, L.C. Also see Arthur H. Vandenberg, Jr., with Joe Alex Morris (eds.), The Private Papers of Senator Vandenberg (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1952), 338–344;
and Joseph Marion Jones, The Fifteen Weeks (New York: Viking, 1955).
The best analysis of the changes in Truman’s thinking is Deborah Welch Larson, Origins of Containment: A Psychological Explanation (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1985), chs. 6–7.
Kennan, Memoirs, 1925–1950, 325–326; Wilson D. Miscamble, “George F. Kennan, the Policy Planning Staff and the Origins of the Marshall Plan,” Mid-America 62 (April–July 1980): 75–89.
Charles E. Bohlen, Witness to History, 1929–1969 (New York: Norton, 1973), 261.
Robert J. Donovan, Conflict and Crisis: The Presidency of Harry S. Truman, 1945–1948 (New York: Norton, 1977), 260–261, 352. Defense expenditures from U.S. Dept. of Defense, Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense (Comptroller), “National Defense Budget Estimates for FY 1985” (Mar. 1984), 116.
Memo, JCS for SWNCC, Apr. 11, 1946, FRUS 1946, I, 1171–1174; Schnabel, JCS and National Policy, 1945–47, 310–321; Melvyn P. Leffler, “The American Conception of National Security and the Beginnings of the Cold War, 1945–1948,” American Historical Review 89 (Apr. 1984): 349–353.
For a fuller discussion, see Alan S. Milward, The Reconstruction of Western Europe, 1945–1951 (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1984), 113–125.
Draft memo, JCS to CAEC through CMLC, Dec. 17, 1947, enclosure to JCS 1745/5, Dec. 8, 1947, RG 218, CCS 471.6 (8–15–45) sec. 8. Also see David Alan Rosenberg, “American Atomic Strategy and the Hydrogen Bomb Decision,” Journal of American History 66 (June 1979): 67–68.
Arthur B. Darling, The Central Intelligence Agency: An Instrument of Government, to 1950 (2 vols.; Washington, D.C.: Historical Staff, Central Intelligence Agency, 1953, released 1989), I, ch. IV, pp. 64–65.
For a detailed analysis of Forrestars views, see Cecilia Stiles Cornell, “James V. Forrestal and American National Security, 1940–1949” (Ph.D. diss., Vanderbilt University, 1987).
Paul Y. Hammond, Organizing for Defense: The American Military Establishment in the Twentieth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961) examines the development of the national security concept.
P.L. 80–253, The National Security Act of 1947, in Cole, et al., Department of Defense, 35–50. For a general history, see John Prados, Keepers of the Keys: A History of the National Security Council from Truman to Bush (New York: William Morrow, 1991).
On the maneuvering over the NSC’s functions, see Rearden, Formative Years, 118–123; and Anna Kasten Nelson, “President Truman and the Evolution of the National Security Council,” Journal of American History 72 (Sept. 1985): 360–378.
Also see Henry M. Jackson (ed.), The National Security Council (New York: Praeger, 1965);
and the comments by James S. Lay, Jr., in Francis H. Heller (ed.), The Truman White House (Lawrence: Regents Press of Kansas, 1980).
See U.S. President’s Air Policy Commission, Survival in the Air Age (Washington, D.C.: The Commission, Jan. 1, 1948).
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© 1993 Samuel R. Williamson, Jr. and Steven L. Rearden
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Williamson, S.R., Rearden, S.L. (1993). Policy in Transition. In: The Origins of U.S. Nuclear Strategy, 1945–1953. Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Institute Series on Diplomatic and Economic History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-05882-9_3
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