The atomic bomb, the cold war, and the Soviet threat

Monthly Review, Dec, 1989 by Alan G. Nasser

Since shortly after the end of the Second World War, the media, the schools, our political leaders, and most of the churches have been presenting a version of postwar events intended to illustrated the Soviet "threat" Americans are supposed to fear. In February, 1945, at the Yalta Conference, the story goes, the Soviets had promised to promote free elections and parliamentary democracies in Eastern Europe. But Stalin broke his word and foisted ruthless dictatorships on Poland, Hungary, Bulgaria, Rumania, Czechoslovakia, and the Eastern regions of Germany, and Austria, aiming to bring Europe, and ultimately the world, under Soviet hegemony. The U.S. has been forced to respond to this global Soviet offensive by sustaining and enlarging a worldwide military "defense" on behalf not only of itself, but of the entire "free world."

The official story is thoroughly disingenuous, as Gar Alperovitz shows in the updated edition of Atomic Diplomacy, originally published in 1965. The new edition draws on a number of crucial, recently released sources, which Alperovitz marshals along with other sources to present an account of the perceived interests and motives that induced Truman to use the atomic bomb twice against the Japanese in August, 1945.

Atomic Diplomacy reconstructs the development of U.S. policy during the six months from March to August, 1945, the period in which an uncompromising and aggressive U.S. posture emerged toward its Soviet ally's security requirements for a postwar peace settlement in Eastern Europe. Since Napoleon's invasion in 1812, Russia had been a target of Western European aggression, and Germany had attacked twice in two world wars. Immediately after the First World War, the Western powers succeeded in reconstituting the Eastern European region as a cordon sanitaire in order to quarantine and intimidate the Bolshevik revolution. Most of these countries were right-wing dictatorships, several of which were to side with the Nazis and in fact join their invading armies in the next war, in which twenty million Soviets died.

The historical experience of the Soviets thus inclines them to see the countries of Eastern Europe, through which they had been invaded twice in little more than a generation, as a potential corridor of terror. By the end of 1944 it was obvious that the Red Army would both liberate and occupy this region. These sorts of considerations led President Roosevelt, in the fall of 1944 and in January of 1945, to lend his support to armistice agreements with Britain and the Soviet Union that gave the Red Army almost complete control of internal politics in each of the Eastern European ex-Nazi satellites. These agreements signalled U.S. endorsement of the earlier Churchill-Stalin "spheres of influence" agreement, which gave the Soviets a predominant influence in Rumania, Bulgaria, and Hungary, in exchange for predominant British influence in Greece and an even split of influence in Yugoslavia. (A previous agreement had also included Soviet acquiescence to dominant U.S.-British influence in Italy.)

Churchill was making no new concessions to Stalin in the "spheres of influence" agreements, since the Red Army was already in Eastern Europe. He was, however, offering Stalin the assurance that the leading capitalist powers would not raise a fuss about Soviet activities there. Stalin in turn accepted capitalist hegemony in Western Europe, discouraging revolutionary politics in the Communist Parties there. Churchill knew that this was crucial to capitalist "stability" in countries like France, Italy and Greece, where the Communist Parties had acquired substantial popular support by virtue of their leadership in the wartime resistance to the Nazis. It is essential to an understanding of this formative period to note that Stalin kept these agreements.

Thus, up to this point there is no evidence whatever of Soviet duplicity or expansionism. Stalin scrupulously lived up to the agreements and behaved precisely as he was expected to behave, in exchange for Yalta's ratification of a Soviet sphere of influence in the Balkans. Indeed, between February and late summer of 1945, all the great powers adhered to the Yalta agreements.

Suddenly, in August and September, the United States did an abrupt and pronounce about-face. On August 18, Secretary of State James Byrnes publicly charged the elections in Bulgaria were not being conducted democratically. Four days later Byrnes held a press conference in support of the right-wing King Michael of Rumania, who was demanding that the pro-Soviet government of Petru Groza step down. This was a cause of great alarm to the Soviets, to whom Churchill and Roosevelt had given "90 percent" influence in Rumania, and not without good reason: Rumania had added twenty-six divisions to Hitler's armies to conquer Stalingrad. This U.S. reversal was the beginning of what mainstream sources describe as Stalin's "paranoia." But paranoia is irrational fear, and there was nothing irrational about Soviet suspicions of U.S. intentions. The Yalta-Moscow agreements were indeed broken, but not by the Soviets.