Cam & Ray's Cold War Podcast

* Truman met often with Byrnes in the first few months of his Presidency.* But there are almost no records or notes of what they discussed.* And that was apparently Byrnes’ preference.* He was known as being paranoid about leaks.* a very devious politician* Truman referred to him as his “conniving” secretary of state* Historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., who liked Byrnes and found him personally charming, nevertheless had no illusions about him: “He was an operator. He was a kind of prior Lyndon Johnson.”* Throughout this period Byrnes spoke with the authority of—and personally represented—the president of the United States on all atomic bomb-related matters in the Interim Committee’s deliberations.* It is also quite clear that by early July 1945 when he was sworn in as secretary of state, Byrnes was firmly in control of U.S. foreign policy.* And as we’ve seen before – while Truman seems to have looked up to Byrnes as a mentor, Byrnes privately didn’t like Truman.* One of Truman’s close friends and advisers, his appointments secretary Matthew Connelly, later said that Byrnes thought Truman was “a nonentity, with no abilities to speak of, no knowledge of how to conduct foreign policy, or much else for that matter.”* Matthew Connelly later described Byrnes without reservation as “a very Machiavellian character,” adding that “I never trusted him.”* Similarly, Robert G. Nixon—who served as White House correspondent for the International News Service at the time—would later remark that “Byrnes looked down on Truman. He had a superior attitude.… He, in a sense, despised Truman … he looked upon Truman as an accident of history and not a very good accident at that.”* According to Clark Clifford, Admiral Leahy, who initially was favorably disposed towards Byrnes, came to regard him as a “horse’s ass.”* Bernard Baruch, the financier who presented Truman’s first nuclear arms control proposal at the United Nations in 1946, regarded his friend Byrnes as “power-crazy—that he wants to decide everything himself.…”* Averell Harriman recalled that after Potsdam, “I was through with Jimmy Byrnes … I didn’t want to have anything more to do with him.”* Almost immediately after taking office, Truman demonstrated his great trust in Byrnes by informing him of his intention to appoint him secretary of state sometime that summer—as, of course, he did. It should be kept in mind that the position of secretary of state carried far more weight in 1945 than it does today.* At the time, before the post of national security adviser was established, it was the premier Cabinet office.* Under then-existing law—with no vice president in office once Truman succeeded Roosevelt—the secretary of state was next in line of succession.* If anything happened to Truman, Byrnes would become president.* And of course, everyone knew that Byrnes *should* have been President.* He was going to be FDR’s Veep in the 1944 election – up until the very last moment, when Truman was picked instead.* Byrnes also appears to be a logical candidate for the adviser who convinced Truman to postpone meeting Stalin until the atomic bomb had been tested—one of the truly fundamental strategic decisions of the spring and summer.* Although our information is even more sketchy in this area, we have seen that his mandate—and his alone—included both atomic and diplomatic issues.* Moreover, all the other top advisers directly involved in diplomacy were pressing for an early meeting with Stalin, Thus, either Truman made the decision against their advice on his own or some other highly placed adviser concerned with the atomic bomb convinced him the new weapon would be critical in his approach to Stalin.* So everything points to Byrnes as the man who made the decision to bomb Japan.* Not to win the war – but as a message to Stalin.* Byrnes, we should remember, was at Yalta.* He helped draft the “Declaration on Liberated Europe” which vaguely promised consultation on how to achieve future free elections in Eastern Europe.* And FDR sent him back to the U.S. early to be his representative, selling America on their new relationship with Stalin and the Yalta agreements.* After attending an off-the-record briefing given by Byrnes, a reporter in the New York Sun’s Washington bureau had this to say about Byrnes’ view of Stalin: “Like everyone who has returned from Russia, [Byrnes] has been tremendously impressed by Joseph Stalin.”* Indeed, on the Polish issue [Byrnes] said that time after time Stalin proved his readiness to compromise; that throughout he proved to be tractable and to possess a malleable mind. He made concession after concession. He points out that Russia will come out of this war as the most powerful nation in the world. Stalin has definite plans in the Pacific, he reported, but apart from that wants only to rebuild Russia and to bring it to the standard of living that it ought to enjoy with its vast resources. He believes that once Stalin has settled w

* By June 18 events had progressed to the point where Admiral Leahy was able to note privately in his personal diary:* It is my opinion that at the present time a surrender of Japan can be arranged with terms that can be accepted by Japan and that will make fully satisfactory provision for America’s defense against any future trans-Pacific aggression.* This is two months before Hiroshima.* But also on June 18, when Grew spoke to Truman about brokering peace with the Japanese, The President shut him down.* He said he wanted to hold off until the Potsdam meeting.* Which, as we know, he was putting off to coincide with the Trinity test.* About 5000 American troops died between May and August. (page 22)* A total of 24,000 casualties during that period.* The Battle of Okinawa 1 April until 22 June, 1945.* If saving American lives was the objective, why not talk peace with the Japanese during this period?* Unfortunately we don’t know much about what Truman was thinking during these months.* Contemporaneous documents concerning Truman’s attitude at this time are scarce.* We have far fewer hard facts illuminating his calculations than we have concerning the thinking of Marshall, Stimson, and Grew.* Truman did give a public speech in June where he said his main priority was minimizing the loss of American lives.* And yet the invasion was set for November 1, 1945.* Which everyone knew was going to be a bloodbath.* Admiral Leahy said that he could not agree with those who said to him that unless we obtain the unconditional surrender of the Japanese that we will have lost the war.* Which suggests at least some people were worried about the optics.* McCloy, Assistant Secretary of War, claims that at the June 18 meeting, he strongly advocated to Truman that they should spell out terms of surrender to the Japanese, assuring them that they could keep the Emperor,* The President said that is just what I have been thinking about. “Why don’t you draft something and take it to Jimmy Byrnes.”* Byrnes, as we know, was acting as a special advisor to Truman and was soon to become the Sec of State.* He also thought HE should be the President.* And he disliked Truman.* When McCloy took his proposal to Byrnes, it was shot down because Byrnes thought it would be considered a weakness on America’s part to conclude the war without a total surrender.* So twice on June 18, Truman told people that he agreed with the idea of offering the Japs a deal.* But then Byrnes said no.* And it never happened.* Like the official Strategic Bombing Survey of 1946, the internal War Department report concluded the atomic bomb had not been needed to end the war.* Its assessment of the impact of the Soviet declaration of war paralleled that of American historian Ernest May: It was a “disastrous event which the Japanese leaders regarded as utter catastrophe and which they had energetically sought to prevent at any cost.…”* Had the atomic bomb not been available or not been used, the study concluded, it is “almost a certainty that the Japanese would have capitulated upon the entry of Russia into the war.…”* The Japanese leaders had decided to surrender and were merely looking for sufficient pretext to convince the die-hard Army Group that Japan had lost the war and must capitulate to the Allies.* The entry of Russia into the war would almost certainly have furnished this pretext, and would have been sufficient to convince all responsible leaders that surrender was unavoidable.* And, as we know, American leaders had been trying to get the Soviets to engage with the Japanese since a few days after Pearl Harbour.* General George C. Marshall, June 18, 1945: “An important point about Russian participation in the war is that the impact of Russian entry on the already hopeless Japanese may well be the decisive action levering them into capitulation at that time or shortly thereafter if we land in Japan.”* There’s plenty of evidence to suggest that the Japs also knew Russia’s entry into the war meant the end.* On April 29, Colonel Tanemura — Chief of the Planning Bureau of the General Staff — stated: “Needless to say, moves of Soviets could be fatal in continuing the Great Asian War, and this has been the matter of greatest concern in planning of the war since before the beginning of the war.…”* Even though Japan may have to give up Manchuria, South Sakhalin, Korea, Taiwan, Okinawa, [w]hich means reverting to the borders before the Sino-Japanese War, Japan has to avoid the Soviet entry into the war no matter what, and has to accomplish fighting with the U.S. and U.K.* The Supreme Council for the Direction of the War held on May 11, 12, and 14, Umezu, Chief of the Imperial Japanese Army General Staff, urged the central importance of preventing a Russian attack.* A formal Council decision taken at this time stated:* While Japan is fighting with the U.S. and U.K., once the Soviets enter the war Japan will face inevitable defeat; therefore, whatever hap

* On 15 August 1945, about a week after the bombing of Nagasaki, Truman tasked the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey to conduct a study on the effectiveness of the aerial attacks on Japan, both conventional and atomic.* Did they have an effect on the Japanese surrender?* The Survey team included hundreds of American officers, civilians and enlisted men, based in Japan.* They interviewed 700 Jap military, government and industrial officials.* And had access to hundreds of Japanese wartime documents.* Less than a year later they published their conclusion – that Japan would likely have surrendered in 1945 without it, without a Soviet declaration of war, and without an American invasion.* “It cannot be said that the atomic bomb convinced the leaders who effected the peace of the necessity of surrender. The decision to surrender, influenced in part by knowledge of the low state of popular morale, had been taken at least as early as 26 June at a meeting of the Supreme War Guidance Council in the presence of the Emperor.”* It goes on to say that there wasn’t a unanimous agreement amongst the military, especially the War Minister, and the Army and Naval Chiefs of Staff.* They wanted to fight on.* But that’s why the Emperor was brought into the discussions to accept the Potsdam terms.* According to the report:* “So long as the Emperor openly supported such a policy and could be presented to the country as doing so, the military, which had fostered and lived on the idea of complete obedience to the Emperor, could not effectively rebel.”* The report says the only thing the atomic bombings achieved was that they sped up the process.* The War Minister and the two Chiefs of Staff were looking for a way to surrender without losing face.* And the nuclear attacks gave them that.* Because the military were able to conclude that there was no way of defending the home islands against further atomic attacks.* So they could surrender without losing face.* But the report strongly suggests the Japanese would have surrendered anyway and probably pretty quickly after the Emperor got involved.* They had been trying to get the Soviets to intercede with the United States.* The Soviets, as we know, kept stalling until the Potsdam Declaration on 25 July.* Then they declared war on 9 August.* The made the decision to surrender on August 10 and they publicly accepted the Potsdam terms on August 15.* But in the 73 years that have passed since Hiroshima, poll after poll has shown that most Americans think that the bombings were totally justified—and, moreover, that they had saved a very significant number of lives which might otherwise have been lost in an invasion.* 56% of Americans according to a poll in 2015.* Which is down from 85% in 1945.* But it’s a lot considering that the Strategic Bombing Survey concluded as early as 1946 that it wasn’t necessary to get Japan to surrender.* And considering senior American military leaders from Admiral Leahy to MacArthur, Eisenhower and Woodrow Wilson all said they didn’t think the bombing was necessary.* So if it wasn’t necessary, why did it happen?* WHAT’S UP WITH THAT?* In 1990, J. Samuel Walker, chief historian of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission wrote:* The consensus among scholars is that the bomb was not needed to avoid an invasion of Japan and to end the war within a relatively short time. It is clear that alternatives to the bomb existed and that Truman and his advisers knew it.* But does this mean dropping the bombs was wrong?* Not necessarily.* We obviously can’t put ourselves in the shoes of American leaders in 1945.* But I think there are two questions we CAN ask.* 1. Did American military and government leaders in 1945 think they had to use, or should use, the bomb to bring about Japan’s surrender?* 2. why do the majority of Americans still think all these years later that it was necessary, if the historians say it wasn’t?* I think the answer to the last question is partly to do with the media.* Over the past fifty years most journalists have reported what government officials said about the decision as if it were fact—evidence to the contrary notwithstanding.* And partly I think it has to do with Americans wanting to believe in the Great American Myth – that America can do no wrong.* And when it *does* do wrong, well it was either an accident, the result of bad intel – or it was necessary.* So how was the decision made?* And why?* As we have discussed in the past, the Potsdam Declaration was demanding “unconditional surrender”.* Truman inherited this from Roosevelt.* But what this meant was unclear.* Did it mean, for example, that Japan, like Hawaii before it, would become an American colony?* Did it mean the execution of the Emperor?* We know, of course, that in the end, Truman did not hesitate to modify the “unconditional surrender” policy after the atomic bomb was used.* The Emperor stayed.* BTW, did you know – Currently, the Emperor of Japan

Our guest today is Alex Wellerstein, a self-described “historian of science, secrecy, and nuclear weapons”. He’s a Professor of Science and Technology Studies at the Stevens Institute of Technology. He blogs here and is on Twitter here. He is also the creator of the NUKEMAP. Alex joined us to talk about the decision to drop atomic bombs on Japan. Did Truman know Hiroshima contained civilians? Did he know the military were going to bomb Nagasaki a few days later? How much deliberation went into the question of whether or not the bomb should be used? And was it necessary to end the war with Japan? These questions and more on this episode.

Kistiakowsky and his team armed the device shortly after 5am and retreated to the control bunker. Their final task was to switch on a string of lights on the ground that would serve as an ‘aiming point’. The air force wanted to know what the effect of the blast would be on a B-29 30,000 feet up and some miles away. In case of an accident, Groves left Oppenheimer in the control bunkers and joined Bush and Conant at base camp another 5 miles to the south. There they picked up the countdown by FM radio. Those in shelters heard it over the PA system. Some of the scientists were with a party of onlookers 20 miles away on Compania Hill. Teller said, ‘We were told to lie down on the sand, turn our faces away from the blast and bury our heads in our arms. No one complied. We were determined to look the beast in the eye.’ However, though it was not yet dawn, they smothered their faces with suntan lotion. Teller himself wore a pair of dark glasses and heavy gloves and pressed a welder’s glass to his face. At precisely 5:30am on Monday, 16 July 1945, the atomic age began. As the firing circuit closed, 32 detonators fired around the outside of the high-explosive shell. The shockwave produced hit the tamper, squeezing and liquefying it. The plutonium sphere inside shrank to the size of an eyeball. In the centre, polonium alphas kicked neutrons from the beryllium – one, two, maybe as many as nine of them. This was enough to start a chain reaction in the plutonium. It went through 80 generations in millionths of a second, generating millions of degrees of heat and millions of pounds of pressure. The X-rays given off super-heated the air, generating another shock wave. The explosion vaporized the tower and turned the asphalt around the base into green sand. The bomb released approximately 18.6 kilotons of power, and the New Mexico sky was suddenly brighter than many suns. Some observers suffered temporary blindness even though they looked at the brilliant light through smoked glass. Here’s an eyewitness account: Trinity Test, July 16, 1945 Eyewitness Report by Victor Weisskopf, an Austrian-born American theoretical physicist, one of the giants of 20th century physics. He died in 2002, aged 93. You have asked me to submit to you an eye witness account of the explosion. I was located at base camp and watched the phenomenon from a little ridge about 100 yds. east of the water tower. Groups of observers had arranged small wooden sticks at a distance of 10 yds. from our observation place in order to estimate the size of the explosion. They were arranged so that their distance corresponded to 1000 ft. at zero point. I looked at the explosion through the dark glass, but I have provided for an indirect view of the landscape in order to see the deflected light. When the explosion went off, I was first dazzled by this indirect light which was much stronger than I anticipated, and I was not able to concentrate upon the view through the dark glass and missed, therefore, the first stages of the explosion. When I was able to look through the dark glass I saw flames and smoke of an estimated diameter of 1000 yds. which was slowly decreasing in brightness seemingly due to more smoke development. At the same time it rose slightly above the surface. After about three seconds its intensity was so low I could remove the dark glass and look at it directly. Then I saw a reddish glowing smoke ball rising with a thick stem of dark brown color. This smoke ball was surrounded by a blue glow which clearly indicated a strong radioactivity and was certainly due to the gamma rays emitted by the cloud into the surrounding air. At that moment the cloud had about 1000 billions of curies of radioactivity whose radiation must have produced the blue glow. The first two or three seconds, I felt very strongly the heat radiation all over the exposed parts of my body. The part of my retina which was exposed to the indirect light from the surrounding mountains was completely blinded and I could feel traces of the after image 30 minutes after the shock. The reddish cloud darkened after about 10 or 20 seconds and rose rather rapidly leaving behind a thick stem of dark brown smoke. After this, I remember having seen a white hemisphere rising above the clouds in continuation of the breakthrough of the explosion cloud through the ordinary cloud level. The path of the shock wave through the clouds was plainly visible as an expanding circle all over the sky where it was covered by clouds. After about 45 seconds the sound wave arrived and it struck me as being much weaker than anticipated. V. Weisskopf I watched a great interview from 1988 with Weisskopf where he said something I agree with. He said a sunset is made ever more beautiful if you understand something about the science that causes it. Science doesn’t deprive us of beauty – it enhances it. A steel container weighing more than 200 tons, standing half a mile from Ground Zero, was knocked over. As the orang

Back to Alamogordo. The army leased a ranch in the middle of the Jornada del Muerto site and converted it into a military police station and field laboratory. They thoroughly vacuumed it to make a makeshift clean room and sealed its windows with black electrical tape. Just like Ray’s infamous kill room. Nearly 2 miles to the northwest, they marked out the spot for Ground Zero. Three concrete-roofed observation bunkers with bullet-proof glass portholes were dug 10,000 yards north, west and south of Ground Zero. From there, the test would be controlled and the explosion would be filmed and measured. Scientists wanted to determine the symmetry of the implosion and the amount of energy released. They also wanted to get estimates of the damage that the bomb would cause and study the behaviour of the resulting fireball. The biggest concern was the radioactivity the test device would release. It was hoped that favourable meteorological conditions would carry the radioactivity into the upper atmosphere. As they were proposing to do the test in the middle of the thunderstorm season, the army stood ready to evacuate the people in surrounding areas. Two towers were built. One was 800 yards south of Ground Zero. Made of heavy wooden beams, it was 20 feet high, topped with a broad platform like an outdoor dance floor. One day, the contractors returned to find that it had disappeared. Harvard physics professor Kenneth T. Bainbridge, recruited from MIT’s radar project, the man in charge of Project Trinity, had loaded the platform with canisters of radioactive waste from Hanford and surrounded it with 100 tons of high explosives. Before dawn on 7 May, he detonated the largest chemical explosion ever set off to test the instruments and procedures in a practice firing. The tower at Ground Zero had been prefabricated in steel and was shipped in sections to the Trinity site, where concrete footings had been sunk 20 feet into the rocky desert floor. The four feet were 35 feet apart and the tower rose 100 feet above the ground. Near the top was a platform with a removable centre section and corrugated iron sheets on three sides. The open side faced the camera bunker to the west. Above the platform was a $20,000 electrically driven heavy-duty winch. On 12 July, the plutonium core was taken to the test area in an army sedan. The non-nuclear components of the bomb left for the test site at 12:01 am on Friday the 13th. The idea was to put a ‘reverse English’ on the ill-luck of that day. ‘reverse English’ – Billiards. a spinning motion imparted to a cue ball in such a manner as to prevent it from moving in a certain direction. As they rode through Santa Fe in the small hours, the convoy sounded a siren. At midnight because the army did not want to risk some late-night drunken driver speeding out of a side street into a truck full of high explosives. Final assembly of “the gadget” – which was its nickname – took place in the ranch house. Before it began, one of the physcists, Robert Bacher, asked for a receipt from the army. As Los Alamos was technically part of the University of California, he didn’t want the university to be liable for the several million dollars-worth of plutonium they were about to vaporize. Imagine that conversation – so…. Where’s our plutonium? Ummm we blew it up. You WHAT? That’ll be $2 billion, bucko. Then the team installed the neutron initiator that would trigger the explosion between the two hemispheres of plutonium. These were hot to the touch due to the alpha particles they were already giving off. HOT JAMES BROWN (Bowie FAME riff, Carlos Alomar) The plutonium ball was then placed inside a cylinder of U-238 tamper. The core was then driven out to Ground Zero, where it arrived at 3.18pm. The five-foot sphere of high explosives had arrived that morning. Remember the way a plutonium implosion bomb works is that want to compress is using convention explosives wrapped around the outside of the shell – the beer can experiment. This was wrapped around a hollow globe of U-238. At 1pm, the winch was used to hoist the 2 ton ball of high explosives from the back of the truck and lower it onto a skid. Norris Bradbury, the navy physicist in charge of the assembly, said ‘We were scared to death that we would drop it,’ ‘because we did not trust the hoist and it was the only bomb immediately available. It wasn’t that we were afraid of setting it off, but we might damage it in some way.’ A white tent was erected over the assembly, ready for the cylindrical plug containing the plutonium spheres and the initiator to be slid into place in the centre of the ball of tamper inside the explosives. Boyce McDaniel, one of the assembly team, said ‘Imagine our consternation when, as we started to assemble the plug in the hole, deep down in the centre of the high-explosive shell, it would not enter,’ ‘Dismayed, we halted our efforts in order not to damage the pieces, and stopped to thin

Today we have a special guest – Jeff Hogue from the “History of the Cold War” podcast. We invited Jeff on to chat about his thoughts on the bombing of Japan.

On 6 June, Stimson again briefed Truman on S-1. * The briefing summarized the consensus of the Interim Committee, set up as an advisory group on atomic research.* It’s job was the advise on the proper use of atomic weapons in wartime and to develop a position for the United States on post-war atomic policy.* The committee comprised of Bush, Conant, Compton, the Under Secretary of the Navy, The Assistant Secretary of State and the director of the Office of War Mobilization, soon to be Secretary of State, James F. Byrnes.* Oppenheimer, Fermi, Compton and Lawrence served as a scientific panel, while General Marshall represented the military.* They had met on 31 May and concluded that the United States should not share its nuclear secrets and should try to retain superiority in nuclear weapons in case international relations deteriorated.* Most present thought that the US should protect its monopoly for the present, though they realized that the secrets could not be held for long.* It was only a matter of time before other potentially hostile countries, particularly Russia, would be capable of producing atomic weapons.* Some thought the Soviets would catch up in 3 or 4 years.* Groves countered with a twenty-year estimate.* He was convinced the U.S. Had a stranglehold on the world’ supply of uranium.* There was also some discussion of free exchange of nuclear research for peaceful purposes and the international inspection system that such an exchange would require.* Lawrence’s suggestion that a demonstration of the atomic bomb might possibly convince the Japanese to surrender was discussed over lunch and rejected.* No one knew whether the bomb would go off.* If it did not, it would do much to improve Japanese morale.* If they were warned, the Japanese might put American prisoners of war in populated areas or make an all-out effort to shoot down the plane.* Besides, the shock value of the new weapon would be lost.* These reasons and others convinced the group that the bomb should be dropped without warning on a dual target – a munitions factory surrounded by workers’ homes.* Still no one realized quite how devastating the bomb would be.* The weirdest thing about the committee meeting?* There seems to have been no discussion about whether or not they SHOULD use the bomb – only where and when they should use it.* On 1 June, the committee met with representatives from DuPont, Tennessee Eastman, Westinghouse and Union Carbide to get input from the contractors.* This further convinced the Interim Committee that the US had a lead of three to ten years on the Soviet Union in making the bomb.* As a result, in his meeting with the president on 6 June, Stimson told Truman that the Interim Committee recommended keeping S-1 a secret until Japan had been bombed.* The attack should take place as soon as possible and without warning.* The president was of course due to meet Churchill and Stalin in Potsdam on 17 July.* While the British were already on board with the Manhattan Project, Truman and Stimson agreed that the president would stall if asked about atomic weapons by Stalin as it might be possible to gain concessions from Russia later in return for technical information.* Stimson told Truman that members of the Interim Committee generally held the position that international agreements should be made in which all nuclear research would be made public and a system of inspections would be devised.* They were even considering domestic legislation to that effect.* However, if international agreements didn’t get worked out, the US should continue to produce as much fissionable material as possible to maintain its current position of superiority.* Although the bomb had not yet been tested, a target selection group was set up in late April.* It was headed by Groves and General Thomas Farrell, who had been appointed his military aide in February 1945.* In late May, the committee, which comprised scientists as well as air force officers, listed Kokura Arsenal, Hiroshima, Niigata and Kyoto as the four best targets.* These cities were as yet undamaged, though General Curtis LeMay’s Twentieth Air Force planned to eliminate all major Japanese cities by 1 January 1946.* Using a single bomb to wipe out a pristine city, it was thought, would have a profound psychological impression on the Japanese and weaken military resistance.* It was also thought that by dropping the bomb on a city that had not already been damaged, it would be easier to judge just how much destruction this new weapon wrought.* However, Stimson vetoed Kyoto.* Japan’s most cherished cultural centre was full of priceless art treasures.* The Allied governments had already noted the revulsion among their populations at the bombing of Dresden, so Nagasaki replaced the ancient capital in the directive issued to the Army Air Force on 25 July.* While decisions about the use of the atomic bomb were being made by politicians and the military, the scientists who had made i

* Which brings us to April 1945.* Only weeks before Germany surrendered on May 7, FDR dies.* And Truman takes over as POTUS.* He knew nothing of the Manhattan Project or the atomic bomb.* He was briefed on it immediately by Sec of War Stimson.* By the time Truman took office, Japan was near defeat.* Keep in mind that the bomb was developed primarily to fight the Nazis.* But now that they are out of the picture, nobody wants a $2 billion white elephant.* At this stage, American aircraft were attacking Japanese cities at will.* As we mentioned recently, the B-29 was the world’s first pressurized bomber.* So it could fly at high altitudes that the few remaining Japanese fighters couldn’t reach.* Although kamikaze pilots did take down quite a few.* BTW, do you know what the B stands for in B-29?* Lots of people think it stands for “bomber”.* But it really secretly stands for the name of the guy who came up with the name of the planes – Barry.* It’s the Barry-29.* A single fire-bomb raid on Tokyo in March 1945 killed nearly 100,000 people and injured over a million.* On 13 April, the Imperial Army Air Force’s laboratory where early Japanese research on the atomic bomb had been done was hit.* And that’s something we haven’t talked about – the Japanese attempts to build a bomb.* In 1934, Tohoku University professor Hikosaka Tadayoshi released his “atomic physics theory”.* Hikosaka pointed out the huge energy contained by nuclei and the possibility that both nuclear power generation and weapons could be created.* Keep in mind that the West didn’t understand that concept until 1938 when the Germans worked it out.* Leading Japanese physicist Nishina Yoshio was keen on utilizing nuclear fission as a military weapon, but was also justifiably concerned that other countries like the U.S., were also trying to create a nuclear weapon.* Before the war, he was apparently friendly with Einstein and Neils Bohr* Nishina had previously established his own Nuclear Research Laboratory to study high-energy physics in 1931 at RIKEN Institute (the Institute for Physical and Chemical Research), which had been established in 1917 in Tokyo to promote basic research.* BTW, Ricoh, the Japanese camera company, also came out of Riken.* In 1936 Nishina constructed a 26-inch (660 mm) cyclotron, and a 60-inch (1,500 mm), 220-ton cyclotron in 1937.* In 1938 he also purchased a cyclotron from the University of California, Berkeley.* After meeting Japanese director of Japan’s Army Aeronautical Department’s Technical Research Institute, lieutenant-general Yasuda Takeo (surname first), Nishina told him about the possibility of Japan building its own nuclear weapon’s arsenal.* In April of 1941, Army Minister and later Prime Mininster Tojo Hideki (yeah, that Tojo) ordered Yasuda to look further into the possibility of Japan being able to create nuclear weapons.* Yasuda then passed the order down to viscount Ōkōchi Masatoshi director of the RIKEN Institute, who then passed the order down to Nishina.* By this time, Nishina had over 100 nuclear researchers.* Japan’s Army and Navy were always in competition with one another, so perhaps it would come as no surprise that the Imperial Japanese Navy’s Technology Research Institute had been looking in to the possibility of creating nuclear weapons, too.* They had been in talks with scientists from the Imperial University in Tokyo, for advice on constructing and possible use of nuclear weapons.* This resulted in the formation of the Committee on Research in the Application of Nuclear Physics, chaired by Nishina, that met 10 times between July 1942 and March 1943.* It concluded in a report that while an atomic bomb was, in principle, feasible, “it would probably be difficult even for the United States to realize the application of atomic power during the war.”* Well… if the U.S. couldn’t do it, why should the Japanese Navy bother?* Rather than worry about nuclear weapons, the Navy focused its attention on radar.* But the Army still thought the awesome might of a split atom would be just dandy to use, that same Committee on Research in the Application of Nuclear Physics worked with the Army and set up the Ni-Go Project at the RIKEN complex.* Via the Ni-Go Project, scientists were TRYING to separate uranium-235 by thermal diffusion.* It took until February 1945, but at the RIKEN complex, scientists separated a small amount of some radioactive material… but it was not uranium-235.* The attempt to separate the U-235 ended two months later after U.S. bombing fire-damaged the facility.* Japan’s biggest problem in attempting to create nuclear fission was its inability to procure enough uranium for experiments.* The Japanese Navy and Army did conduct searches for uranium ore, looking in Fukushima, of all places, as well as in conquered territories in Burma, Korea and China.* They also tried to get some from Germany, with some 1,230 pounds (560 kilograms) of unprocessed ur

Of course, while the bomb was being designed, they had to figure out how they were going to deliver it. And WHO was going to deliver it. Way back in March 1944, the US Army Air Force, with William Sterling “Deak” Parsons and his team at Los Alamos, developed two bomb models and began testing them with B-29 bombers. Thin Man, named for President Roosevelt, was the design carrying the plutonium gun, while Fat Man, named for Winston Churchill, was an implosion prototype. Emilio Segrè, Italian-American physicist, had designed a lighter, smaller uranium bomb was later dubbed Little Boy, Thin Man’s brother. Thin Man, the one named for FDR, was eliminated four months later because of the predetonation problem. Which is ironic, because FDR himself also was eliminated a few months after that. The problems with figuring out how to create a reliable chain reaction meant the estimates of when a bomb could be delivered that Bush had given the President in 1943 would have to be revised. The new timetable was presented to Roosevelt’s Army Chief of Staff General Marshall by Groves on 7 August 1944, two months after the Allied landings on Normandy on 6 June. It said that small implosion weapons using uranium or plutonium would be ready in the second quarter of 1945, if experiments proved satisfactory. Groves was more confident that a uranium gun bomb could be delivered by 1 August 1945, and another one or two more by the end of that year. Marshall and Groves acknowledged that German surrender might take place by summer 1945, making it likely that Japan would be the atomic bomb’s first target. Expenditures on the Manhattan Project had reached $100 million a month by mid-1944. No one was sure that Groves’ deadline of 1 August 1945 could really be reached. The Germans were by then in retreat on all fronts and the Japanese were being pushed back in the Pacific it wasn’t certain that a weapon would be ready for use in the war at all. Meanwhile, just in case a bomb was ready in time, they needed to start working out how they would deliver it. The US Army Air Force started training in September 1944 at Wendover Field Air Force Base in western Utah Where Chrissy won at craps when she was 21. On the border of Nevada and Utah. Near the Bonneville Salt Flats Raceway, about 100 miles west of Salt Lake City. BTW, Wendover Air Base is still there today. It’s a civil air base. But it’s one of the most intact World War II training airfields. Numerous films and television shows have been filmed using Wendover Field, including The Philadelphia Experiment (1984), Con Air (1995), Mulholland Falls (1996), Independence Day (1996), Hulk (2003) and The Core (2003). Lieutenant Colonel Paul W. Tibbets began drilling the 393rd Bombardment Squadron of the 509th Composite Wing in test drops with 5500-pound orange dummy bombs, nicknamed pumpkin bombs, on the Great Salt Lake. Not to be confused with the pumpkin bombs thrown by the Green Goblin. These had the same ballistic characteristics as Fat Man. Tibbets was recognized as the best bomber pilot in the Air Force. He had led the first B-17 bombing mission from England over occupied Europe. Then he had flown Eisenhower to his command post in Gibraltar before the Allied landings in northwest Africa and conducted the first bombing raids there afterwards. More recently, he had been a test pilot for Boeing’s new B-29 Superfortress and worked with the physics department of the University of New Mexico to determine how well the B-29 could defend itself against fighter attack. BTW – the Superfortress was the single most expensive weapons project undertaken by the United States in World War II, exceeding the cost of the Manhattan Project by between $1 and 1.7 billion. It was the first plane to include a pressurized cabin, and dual-wheeled, tricycle landing gear. Those of course ended up in commerical aircraft. It also had an analog computer-controlled fire-control system that directed four remote machine gun turrets that could be operated by a single gunner and a fire-control officer. That of course ended up in James Bond’s cars. In September 1944, Deke Parsons and Norman Ramsey, a Columbia physicist in charge of the delivery group, briefed Tibbets. He was then told by his commanding officer, Major General Uzal Girard Ent, ‘You have to put together an outfit and deliver this weapon. We don’t know anything about it yet. We don’t know what it can do. You’ve got to mate it to the airplane and determine the tactics, the training and the ballistics – everything. These are all parts of your problem. This thing is going to be very big. I believe it has the potential and possibility of ending the war.’ Given Tibbets and two other names as choices for the mission, General Ent replied without hesitation, “Paul Tibbets is the man to do it.” A month later, Ent was seriously injured in the crash of a B-25 on takeoff at the Fort Worth Army Airfield, Texas. Paralyzed from the waist down he learned

* President Roosevelt authorized the Manhattan Project to go full steam 26 days after Fermi’s success, on 28 December 1942* The U.S. would end up spending $2 billion on it. (about $22 billion in 2018 dollars)* Do you know why it cost so much?* 130,000 people* When I thought of the Manhattan Project, I used to imagine it was a handful of guys sitting around a blackboard scribbling equations in chalk.* Over 90% of the cost was for building factories to produce fissile material, with less than 10% for development and production of the weapons.* Remember that you couldn’t just go to Amazon and buy pure uranium-235 or plutonium.* It had to be made. A LOT of it had to be made.* And they still didn’t even know how to make it.* So they ran up parallel factories trying various methods.* Out of that 130,000 people, do you know how many knew they were working on developing an atomic bomb?* Probably not many.* It was one of the best kept secrets in military history.* Imagine – 130,000 people working on a project that didn’t know what it was for!* And I’m not just talking about the worker bees – the management didn’t know either.* And of course in December 1942, nobody knew how long the war would last or how long it would take to build a bomb.* So it was highly likely they the war would be over before they figure it out.* But they did it anyway.* While Bush was seeking approval from the president, Oppenheimer had suggested that a bomb laboratory be set up in an isolated area.* It would operate secretly but allow a free exchange of ideas between theoreticians and experimentalists who would work side by side.* The site chosen was the Los Alamos Boys Ranch School in New Mexico.* Which, BTW, used to be called just Mexico.* The owners of the boys’ school occupying the site was eager to sell, and Groves was equally eager to buy.* it was easy enough to get to Santa Fe by train, Los Alamos itself was virtually inaccessible, located on a mesa, or flat-topped hill, about 30 miles northwest.* a private ranch school for boys, modeled after the Boy Scouts* Famous graduates of the school include William S. Burroughs and Gore Vidal* The official name for the site during the war was Project Y.* It was only after the war, when it’s existence became public, that it was referred to as Los Alamos.* Oppenheimer was put in charge, despite him being a leftie and the fact he didn’t have a Noble Prize when many of the people working in the team did.* But he was apparently a great leader.* According to some of the other scientists who worked there, nobody else in that laboratory even came close to him in his knowledge.* There was human warmth as well.* Everybody certainly had the impression that Oppenheimer cared what each particular person was doing.* In talking to someone he made it clear that that person’s work was important for the success of the whole project.* He seems to have the ability to walk into a room where a major scientific debate was going on, listen, sum up everyone’s points, and then when he left, everyone knew what the right answer was.* He insisted that everyone at Los Alamos could know everything about the project – they weren’t relegated to their particular piece of the puzzle.* He created a spirit where everyone felt important and involved.* Meanwhile, on the production side of things, they still had challenges.* Huge amounts of material had to be obtained.* But that’s just the start of their problems.* More than three million board cubic feet of timber were required, for instance, and the magnets needed so much copper for windings that the Army had to substitute silver, borrowing almost 15,000 tons of silver bullion from the US Treasury.* They couldn’t get enough vacuum tubes, generators, regulators and other equipment* Keep in mind that nobody had ever done this before, so they didn’t know what they needed.* A lot of it was in flux.* Last-minute design changes continued to frustrate equipment manufacturers – who of course were still kept in the dark about what was going on.* And there were major performance issues with other parts of the project.* Oppenheimer discovered that he needed three times more fissionable material would be required for a bomb than earlier estimates had indicated.* Even if things had been going well with the teams trying to create U235, at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, it was possible that they might not produce enough purified U-235 in time.* But things weren’t going well.* The two teams trying to create Uranium 235, one using electromagnetic separation and the other using gaseous diffusion, at Oak Ridge, had equipment malfunctions and breakdowns or just couldn’t get it working.* Things on that front were behind schedule.* Even going into 1944, neither method was producing results.* So Oppenheimer turned to the Navy.* Even though the bomb project was in the hands of the Army, the Navy were pursuing their own atomic project – to provide a source of fuel for submarines.* And t

Benn Steil is an American economist, author of a great new book on “The Marshall Plan”, and senior fellow and director of international economics at the Council on Foreign Relations.

* Fission involved breaking apart the nuclei of heavy elements like uranium or plutonium.* Fusion involves forcing the nuclei of lighter elements, like hydrogen or deuterium, together.* And deuterium, which is basically heavy hydrogen, is far easier to get your hands on than uranium.* But there’s still not a ton of it.* There is one D atom in 6420 of H.* D accounts for approximately 0.0156% of all the naturally occurring hydrogen in the oceans, while protium, the other isotope of hydrogen, accounts for more than 99.98%.* But a fusion bomb is also a lot more powerful than a fission bomb.* That’s why all of the nuclear weapons today operate by fusion instead of fission.* BTW, a fusion bomb is also known as a hydrogen bomb or thermonuclear bomb, becaue a fusion bomb actually contains a fission bomb which creates the heat, thermo, required to initiate the fusion reaction, the nuclear part.* In late November, there was a scare.* Neither Groves nor the S-1 Executive had been told that Compton was building the experimental pile at Stagg Field.* They were faced with the vision of a chain reaction possibly running wild in heavily populated Chicago.* However, Fermi’s calculations provided reasonable assurance that this was not going to happen.* But for a few days there, everyone was panicking.* So let’s talk about k.* And I’m not talking about Tommy Lee Jones from Men In Black.* Here’s the situation.* Remember that to get a fission reaction to happen, you had to get just the right number of neutrons to hit the right number of uranium nuclei, causing them to fission, which would give off more neutrons, which would hit more nuclei, etc.* Some of the neutrons would be lost, they might bounce in a direction where there wasn’t a uranium nuclei.* So you have to put up a kind of shielding that would make the neutrons bounce back into the chamber.* To quantify this, the physicists came up with a number – k.* If the number of neutrons in the chamber was less than k, there was no chain reaction, the process would just fizzle out.* If it was exactly k, when k = 1, you had a sustainable reaction.* But if it was larger than k, it could go supercritical, and you might have a bomb go off in the middle of Chicago.* But of course at this stage nobody knew if achieving k was even possible.* To try and achieve k, they put the uranium in the middle of the pile and surrounded it with cubes of graphite, which would act as a moderator, slowing down the neutrons.* The first pile that Fermi built on the campus at Columbia in September 1941 comprised cans of uranium oxide surrounded by graphite bricks.* Its k was 0.87.* Which he said sucked but at least it was a starting point.* By July 1942, at Stagg Field, they had edged k up to 0.918, then 0.94.* To get closer to k they realised they were going to need purer graphite and uranium metal, instead of uranium oxide, which had too many impurities.* The problem was – uranium metal of that purity didn’t exist.* It wasn’t until November that they could get enough manufactured, from a range of companies who were all working without knowing exactly why, to their specifications.* So in November, Fermi started to build the main pile in Chicago.* interestingly, some of the physicists working on the project were pacifists.* They believed that the existence of atom bombs would prevent future wars.* But Fermi still didn’t know if the pile would go critical.* So they had the idea to cover the entire thing in a huge rubber balloon so they could pump all of the air out of it.* Gases absorb neutrons and they wanted to negate that factor.* The balloon was made by Goodyear, who of course weren’t allow to know WHY they were building this huge rubber balloon.* Maybe they thought it was a huge condom. For a giant.* The pile had graphite bricks in the center.* Surrounded by a wooden frame.* Then uranium was placed on the next layer.* More wooden frames.* Then alternating graphite and uranium for each layer.* Into a roughly spherical shape.* And these guys needed to carve the graphite into the shapes they needed.* One of them said: ‘We found out how coal miners feel. After eight hours of machining graphite, we looked as if we were made up for a minstrel. One shower would remove only the surface graphite dust. About a half-hour after the first shower the dust in the pores of your skin would start oozing. Walking around the room where we cut the graphite was like walking on a dance floor. Graphite is a dry lubricant, you know, and the cement floor covered with graphite dust was slippery.’* Imagine you’re one of the world’s leading physicists, and you’re spending your days carving graphite, covered in dust, trying to build the world’s biggest bomb.* That’s a hard day’s work.* Fermi was described by his associates as ‘completely self-confident but wholly without conceit’.* He’d made his calculations and he was certain of them.* In Chicago in the early afternoon of 1 December, tests indicated that the pile was

* President Roosevelt responded to Einstein’s letter by setting up the Advisory Committee on Uranium under Lyman J. Briggs, director of the National Bureau of Standards.* Side note: his daughter Isabel would eventually marry Clarence Myers and go on to generate the Myers–Briggs Type Indicator with her mother.* Which is complete bullshit BTW.* The committee met for the first time on 21 October 1939.* It’s function was to look into the current state of research on uranium to recommend an appropriate role for the federal government.* On 1 November 1939, the Uranium Committee recommended that the government should immediately obtain 4 tons of graphite, which was used to slow down the neutrons coming from the fission reaction, and 50 tons of uranium oxide.* But there was still no proof that the whole thing would work.* Even if you could create a chain reaction, how would you fit everything you needed into something of a size that could be used as a bomb?* Fermi himself thought that there was ‘little likelihood of an atomic bomb, little proof that we were not pursuing a chimera’.* Keep in mind that this was before Pearl Harbour, before the U.S. was officially even at war.* One guy who believed that America was going to end up at war was Vannevar Bush, president of the Carnegie Foundation.* Bush was a legendary engineer and inventor.* Among other things, he founded the company now known as Raytheon, which developed better vacuum tubes, he developed the work that lead to the digital circuits, came up with the idea of hypertext, and was vice president of MIT and dean of the MIT School of Engineering.* in June 1940 Roosevelt established the National Defense Research Committee with Bush at its head.* Its priorities were the development of radar, proximity fuses and anti-submarine devices.* The Uranium Committee fell under its remit.* It was reconstituted as a scientific body and purged of its military membership.* In the interest of security, foreign-born scientists were barred from the committee and further publication of articles on uranium research was banned.** In 1941, Plutonium was discovered.* They found that plutonium-239 was 1.7 times as likely as U-235 to fission.* And they could produce large amounts of fissionable plutonium from the plentiful U-238.* So now there were two options – U-235 and plutonium.* Meanwhile, Bush had been appointed director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development.* This had been established by an executive order on 28 June 1941 – six days after German troops invaded the Soviet Union – giving Bush direct access to the White House.* The National Defense Research Committee, now headed by James Conant, president of Harvard University, was downgraded to an advisory body while the Uranium Committee became a section of the OSRD, codenamed S-1 – Section One of the Office of Scientific Research and Development.* It was S-1 that Truman discovered was sucking up a ton of money in 1943 and they told him he wasn’t allowed to know anything about it.* Meanwhile, over in England, the Military Application of Uranium Detonation Committee, or MAUD, which was set up in 1940 to research atomic weapons, issued a report that said fission of U-235 could happen even with fast neutrons.* They estimated that a critical mass of 22 pounds would be large enough to produce an enormous explosion.* A bomb that size could be loaded on existing aircraft and be ready in around two years.* The Americans read the report.* It reminded them that fission had been discovered in Nazi Germany nearly three years earlier, and since spring 1940 a large part of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin had been set aside for uranium research.* Meanwhile* In September 1941, Werner Heisenberg, one of the key pioneers of quantum mechanics, who had become head of the German nuclear energy project, visited Neils Bohr in Copenhagen.* During this meeting the two men took a private moment outside, the content of which has caused much speculation, as both gave differing accounts.* According to Heisenberg, he began to address nuclear energy, morality and the war.* Bohr seems to have reacted by terminating the conversation abruptly.* Denmark was currently under Nazi occupation and his situation was kind of dicey.* As it turned out, a couple of years later Bohr got word that he was seen as a Jew and they were coming to get him.* He defected to the UK.* He ended up meeting Churchill and tried to convince him that they should share the work that was being done on the bomb with the Soviets.* Churchill wanted him arrested.* Oppenheimer agreed with Bohr and they tried to convince FDR.* FDR sent Bohr back to have another discussion with Churchill and get his agreement.* Of course, as we know, that never happened.* Anyway….* Bush went to see Roosevelt on 9 October.* He summarized the British findings and discussed the cost of building a bomb and how long it might take, though he was still by no means convinced it could be done.* Roos

* In 1913, H. G. Wells wrote a book called The World Set Free* The novel begins: “The history of mankind is the history of the attainment of external power. Man is the tool-using, fire-making animal. . . . Always down a lengthening record, save for a set-back ever and again, he is doing more.”* In the book, the human race develops an atomic bomb.* This was written in 1913.* A few years earlier, Frederick Soddy had published a book about the properties of radium which Wells had read.* Soddy and others, including Rutherford, had the slow natural radioactive decay of elements like radium continues for thousands of years, and that while the rate of energy release is negligible, the total amount released is huge.* Wells wondered what would happen if you could get all of that energy to release at once?* He got a lot of the details wrong – but plutonium, the fissile material used in the first atomic explosions, wasn’t actually discovered until 1941.* Wells’s “atomic bombs” have no more force than ordinary high explosive and are rather primitive devices detonated by a “bomb-thrower” biting off “a little celluloid stud.”* He also said that ‘A man could carry about in a handbag an amount of latent energy sufficient to wreck half a city’.* I don’t know about a handbag, but suitcase bombs certainly are a thing.* In the 1960s the U.S. built a mini nuclear device– the Special Atomic Demolition Munition (SADM).* It weighed 80-100 pounds, was small enough to fit in a duffel bag or large case and was designed for sabotage missions– airfields, bridges, dams.* It had an explosive charge of roughly one thousand tons of TNT (one kiloton).* The Russians also developed a suitcase bomb.* The highest ranking GRU defector, Stanislav Lunev, has said that suitcase nukes might be already deployed by the GRU operatives on US soil to assassinate US leaders in the event of war.* He claimed that arms caches were hidden by the KGB in many countries.* They were booby-trapped with “Lightning” explosive devices or Molniya as its known in Russian.* Just like Mad Max’s Interceptor, a sequence of specific actions had to be taken in the correct order to render the device safe prior to moving or opening the container, or the device would automatically detonate.* This detonation was designed to be lethal to anyone in its immediate proximity, as well as being sufficient to destroy all materials in the cache.* In 1992, KGB archivist Vasili Mitrokhin defected to the UK, and brought with him 30 years of handwritten archives.* He indentified the location of one hidden suitcase radio transmitter, not a bomb, which exploded when Swiss authorities sprayed it with a high pressure water cannon in a wooded area near Bern.* Several others caches were removed successfully.* The lightest nuclear warhead ever acknowledged to have been manufactured by the U.S. is the W54, which fit into 11 in by 16 in (28 cm by 41 cm, small enough to fit in a footlocker-sized container) cylinder that weighed 51 lbs (23 kg).* Anyway, back to Wells’ book.* His bombs ‘made a mighty thunder in the air, and fell like Lucifer’.* They produced ‘tremendous pillars of fire . . . Hard upon the sound of them came a roaring wind, and the sky was filled with flickering lightnings and rushing clouds.’* They destroyed buildings like a scythe cutting down grass, while mountainous clouds billowed up into the air.* The book was published in 1914, just as World War I was starting.* In 1932, the Hungarian physicist Leo Szilard, a Wells fan, read the book.* The following year, he realized that you could indeed make an atomic bomb.** In the first memorandum passed to President Roosevelt, outlining the possibility of making a bomb, Szilard’s first citation is to The World Set Free.** For the next few episodes, we want to tell the story about how that happened.* In the book, Wells’s atomic bombs were used in a war that pits an alliance of Britain, France and America against Germany and Austria.* The war takes place in 1956.* As a result, all the major cities of the world are destroyed.* A conference is then called in Switzerland where the Britain’s ‘King Egbert’ abdicates in favour of a world state.* Limitless atomic energy then solves the world’s problems, leaving the majority of the world’s population to pursue a career as artists.* Wells died in August 1946, a year after the atomic bomb had been used for the first time and ten months after the United Nations had been established, so he may have felt justified in his optimism.* Of course, it didn’t play out exactly as he prophesized.* Out story begins early 20th century.* With New Zealand chemist Ernest Rutherford.* Who said nothing good ever came out of that bunch of sheep fuckers?* Rutho was Interested in radiation being given off by certain materials.* It came in three types: alpha, beta and gamma.* It was alpha radiation that particularly interested him because it co

* The Potsdam declaration on Japan was tricky.* It was drafted while Churchill was still PM.* In fact it was probably one of the last things he did as PM.* But it was signed by Attlee.* Stalin had to be involved, but he couldn’t sign it because the U.S.S.R. was still technically under a non-agression treaty with Japan.* Truman also wanted Chiang KaiShek to sign it.* Which meant it needed they needed to get it translated and sent to him at his remote headquarters nears ChongKing in central China.* The final text gave Japan “an opportunity to end this war” before the “prodigious land, sea and air forces of the United States, the British Empire and of China, many times reinforced by their armies and air fleets from the west, are poised to strike the final blows upon Japan . . . until she ceases to resist.”* It also advised the Japanese of what befell the Germans when they fought to the end.* It warned that “the might that now converges on Japan is immeasurably greater than that which, when applied to the resisting Nazis, necessarily laid waste to the lands, the industry and the method of life of the whole German people.”* But of course it’s worth keeping in mind that many in the Japanese military prided themselves on their particular militaristic interpretation of the Bushido code.* The classic book, Bushido, the Soul of Japan by Inazo Nitobe, written in 1899, portrays Bushido – which he says translates as Military-Knight-Ways – as being very similar to the code of chivalry supposedly adopted by the European knights in the Middle Ages.* He portrays it as relatively pacifistic.* It’s about courage and honour, sincerity, frugality, loyalty, mastery of martial arts, and honour to the death, but stresses morality as well.* It was the code of the samurai.* Here’s some crazy numbers.* By the end of the 19th century, somewhere between 5% and 10% of the Japanese population were samurai.* The census at the end of the 19th century counted 1,282,000 members of the “high samurai”, allowed to ride a horse, and 492,000 members of the “low samurai”, allowed to wear two swords but not to ride a horse, in a country of about 25 million.* Under the bushidō ideal, if a samurai failed to uphold his honor he could only regain it by performing seppuku (ritual suicide).* In an excerpt from his book Samurai: The World of the Warrior, historian Stephen Turnbull describes the role of seppuku in feudal Japan:* In the world of the warrior, seppuku was a deed of bravery that was admirable in a samurai who knew he was defeated, disgraced, or mortally wounded.* It meant that he could end his days with his transgressions wiped away and with his reputation not merely intact but actually enhanced.* The cutting of the abdomen released the samurai’s spirit in the most dramatic fashion, but it was an extremely painful and unpleasant way to die, and sometimes the samurai who was performing the act asked a loyal comrade to cut off his head at the moment of agony.* Unfortunately bushido was hijacked and adapted by militarists and the government from the early 1900s onward as nationalism increased around the time of the Russo-Japanese War.* And by WWII, it had reached epic proportions.* I don’t know how much western strategists understood bushido in 1945, but they were certainly aware of kamikaze pilots.* Kamikaze translates as “divine wind” or “spirit wind”* The Kamikaze were a part of the Japanese Special Attack Units of military aviators who initiated suicide attacks for the Empire of Japan against Allied naval vessels in the closing stages of the Pacific campaign of World War II, designed to destroy warships more effectively than was possible with conventional air attacks.* About 3,862 kamikaze pilots died during the war, and somewhere between 5,000 and 7,000 naval personnel were killed by kamikaze attacks.* The idea for kamikaze came very late in the war.* It’s not something you do when things are going well.* Has a tendency to deplete your airforce pretty fucking quickly.* But by late 1944, the Japanese airforce was already running out of experienced pilots and their planes were outclassed by the new American planes.* Captain Motoharu Okamura, in charge of the Tateyama Base in Tokyo, as well as the 341st Air Group Home, was, according to some sources, the first officer to officially propose kamikaze attack tactics.* The first successful attacks happened on 14 October or 15 Oct 1944.* Rear Admiral Masafumi Arima, the commander of the 26th Air Flotilla (part of the 11th Air Fleet), is sometimes credited with inventing the kamikaze tactic.* Arima personally led an attack by about 100 Yokosuka D4Y Suisei (“Judy”) dive bombers against a large Essex-class aircraft carrier, USS Franklin, near Leyte Gulf, on (or about, accounts vary) 15 October 1944.* Arima was killed and part of a plane hit Franklin.* The Japanese high command and propagandists seized on Arima’s example: He was pro

* Episode 69.* Ray’s favourite number.* Have you actually had one yet, Ray?* Sister in law?* Truman had given his final approval to the plan to invade Kyushu, the southern most island of Japan, just two weeks before leaving for Potsdam.* A Russian invasion of Manchuria and Korea figured prominently in the grand strategy that underlay that plan.* Second, even an invasion of the home islands did little to solve the problem of the estimated 1.8 million Japanese soldiers in mainland China.* But the Soviets could handle that problem as well.* In return, of course, for the new territories they wanted as a result.* Which were mostly old Russian territories lost during the Russo-Japanese war as we discussed in earlier episodes.* Getting Stalin into the Pacific War was Truman’s number one goal in Potsdam.* The Japanese knew of course that this was coming and had been trying to negotiate a way to keep their Neutrality pact in place with the Soviets.* They had offered the Soviets pretty much everything they wanted – southern Sakhalin Island, Port Arthur, and half of Manchuria in exchange for help in keeping the rest of Japan’s conquests in Asia.* The Russians had informed the Allies about these offers and their rebuttals of them.* But still the Americans didn’t trust the Soviets and thought they might cut a deal.* Of course, Truman need not have worried about Russian desires to join the war against Japan.* Stalin wanted Russia involved in the war as much as Truman did.* On June 28, 1945, even before he set out for Potsdam, Stalin told his commanders to begin preparations for a war with Japan “in the greatest secrecy.”* As later reported, “army commanders [were] to be given their orders in person and orally and without any written directives.”* Almost without debate, Stalin told Truman early on at Potsdam that Russian forces would invade Manchuria no later than mid-August.* Truman was as happy as a capitalist pig in shit.* How to end the war with Japan remained a question of intense debate.* The Allies had insisted on unconditional surrender for Germany, but several strategists argued that the same insistence for Japan might well prove counterproductive.* The geography of Japan complicated any attempts at invasion and military dominance.* Culturally, the Japanese people had an attachment to the emperor that argued against an insistence on his removal.* If the Americans, whose forces would have to bear the brunt of an invasion of the home islands, insisted on dethroning the quasi-divine emperor, it might force the Japanese to fight on for an abstract goal that had little real strategic or political importance.* The Americans should, Secretary of War Henry Stimson and others argued, allow Japan to keep its emperor in exchange for ending the war.* Most senior US military officials agreed, noting that only the emperor could sign or endorse a capitulation that the Japanese people would respect.* Removing him by force might create anarchy and an untenable situation for occupying forces.* British Foreign Minister Ernest Bevin drew a direct lesson from World War I, arguing that “it might have been better for all of us not to have destroyed the institution of the Kaiser after the last war; we might not have had this one if we hadn’t done so.”* Thus, he argued, the Allies should remain flexible about the emperor’s future.* Other officials recalled with bitterness Pearl Harbor and insisted that Japan must surrender unconditionally.* The still-influential former secretary of state Cordell Hull publicly blasted any concessions to the Japanese as “appeasement.”* His word choice mattered deeply, as it carried the historical implication of both American weakness and the beginning of another round of conflict.* He, Byrnes, and most State Department officials opposed allowing the emperor to remain under any circumstances.* They were willing to risk further casualties in order to destroy the Japanese political system and open the way for a full American occupation of Japan after the war.* By the time of Potsdam, Truman’s senior advisers had begun to back off the idea of unconditional surrender.* A New York Times editorial on May 11 called unconditional surrender “a senseless policy” that would cause the Japanese people to fight harder and cost lives unnecessarily.* Truman’s own briefing book argued for stripping the emperor of his powers, but not for abolishing the institution, removing the emperor from Japan, or placing him on trial for war crimes.* The Japanese people, the briefers argued, would never accept abolition of the institution of the emperor by a foreign power.* Better, it argued, to try to use the emperor in helping Japan make the transition from war to peace.* Stalin, too, favored unconditional surrender with some room for flexibility, as he told Hopkins in Moscow in May.* An unconditional surrender offered the way to “destroy Japanese military might and [the] forces of Japan once and for all.”* Stalin recognized, how

Well the election result shocked everyone. And the rest of the contingent at Potsdam weren’t very happy about it either. We might think that the Soviets would be please to be dealing with a British government made up of socialists. But that wasn’t the case. Stalin didn’t like Attlee or the British Labour Party. Despite Churchill’s attempts during the election to paint Labour as pro-Soviet, neither Attlee nor Stalin saw themselves as fellow travellers. To the Labour Party, Soviet-style economic models were horrible. To the Soviets, the Labour Party seemed no less capitalist or imperialist than the Tories. Far better, in Stalin’s mind, to deal with the Churchill devil he knew rather than the Attlee devil he most certainly did not. Attlee wrote: “I knew from experience,” he wrote, “that the communists had always fought us more vigorously than the Tories because they thought we offered a viable alternative to communism. They regarded the Tories as advocates of a dying cause while they thought we were a rival” The British of course were horrified. Cadogan called Churchill’s defeat “a display of base ingratitude” on the part of the British people and “rather humiliating for our country.” Field Marshal Alan Brooke saw the timing of the election itself as another in a long line of Churchill’s mistakes in domestic politics, and one with potentially catastrophic repercussions. “What a ghastly mistake to start elections at this point of the world’s history!” he wrote in his diary that night, “May God forgive England for it.” Brooke blamed Churchill personally, saying, “If only Winston had followed any advice, he would have been in at any rate till the end of the year!” Instead, Brooke noted, Churchill had counted on his personality to carry the election, just as he had counted on his personality to win over Truman and Stalin. Tragically, he had failed at both. Some tried to tell Churchill that the British people had not rejected him personally, but the Conservative Party in general. The data, however, tell a different story. The Tories actually performed worse in districts where Churchill himself had campaigned. Clearly, he had lost the faith of the British people even if he could not quite figure out why. “It may well be a blessing in disguise,” Clementine told him. “At the moment,” he replied, “it seems quite effectively disguised.” Attlee himself thought the result had more to do with the economic policies of the Tories in the 30s and the appeasement of Hitler – nothing Churchill could personally be blamed for. Churchill returned to No. 10 Downing Street for one last meeting as prime minister. He told Eden that he expected his own political career to be at an end, but that Eden would himself one day return to Downing Street as prime minister. Churchill appeared to Eden as “pretty wretched, poor old boy.” Losing the election, Churchill told Eden, was “like a wound which becomes more painful after the first shock.” The British government had even taken away his bodyguards, The American delegate Walter Brown observed that “the Empire he had saved did not think enough of him to keep a guard for a single night after he had been defeated.” Churchill drove down to Chequers for a final weekend at the country home of the prime minister, writing his name and “FINIS” in the guest book as his tenure as Britain’s wartime leader came to an end. The end was pretty harsh: no one even asked Churchill to deliver an address to the nation when the Japanese surrendered in August. Churchill told Lord Moran that “it would have been better to have been killed in an aeroplane or to have died like Roosevelt.” When the king announced he was awarding the Order of the Garter to Eden, Eden replied that he could not accept it, given that the British people had just given him the Order of the Boot. Churchill and Eden may also have worried about the strategic situation they had bequeathed to their successors. When Ernest Bevin told Eden that he would seek to become the Chancellor of the Exchequer in the new government, Eden shot back, “Whatever for? There will be nothing to do there except account for the money we have not got.” He then advised Bevin to seek the Foreign Office as, in Eden’s judgment, Bevin was the only Labour politician qualified for the job. Which he did. Now Labour had only 48 hours to govern before the new PM and FM had to return to Potsdam. Attlee had time to make just six political appointments. Several members of the outgoing government shared Churchill’s derisive view of the new prime minister. Cadogan remarked that with Attlee representing Britain, the Big Three would become the Big Two and a Half. He had also described Attlee’s villa in Babelsberg as a “drab and dreary little building. . . . very suitable—it’s just like Attlee himself.” But To help him along and help him deal with the transition, every member of the British delegation except Churchill and Eden returned to Potsdam with Attlee, underscoring the contin

Attlee was Churchill’s lame duck deputy PM. In fact he was the first Deputy PM the UK ever had. I didn’t realise this, but in the UK the role of the Deputy PM isn’t like you’d expect, like it is in Australia or like the Vice-President in the USA. The Deputy PM doesn’t take over if the PM is incapacitated or resigns. If the PM is sick or dies, the Deputy does NOT take over. In the UK, only the sovereign can appoint a PM. So having a Deputy who is PM-in-waiting is seen as a no no. One argument made to justify the non-existence of a permanent deputy premiership is that such an office-holder would be seen as possessing a presumption of succession to the premiership, thereby effectively limiting the sovereign’s right to choose a prime minister. But of course you might think “well surely the Monarch can just say “okay I make you PM and I make you Deputy PM and therefore you’ll take over if something happens”, but apparently that would be too much work. Attlee was the Deputy PM because the Churchill war ministry was a coalition government of men from both major political parties, handpicked by Churchill. The idea went back to the first World War, when both Asquith and David Lloyd George had a coalition government in which Churchill was a minister, and back then he was with the Liberal Party, because he’d quit the Tories for a while. And Attlee was the leader of the Labor Party. In fact he was the leader for 20 years, from 1935 – 1955. Not a bad run. Now remember that Churchill himself HATED socialists more than he hated wasting a cigar, so it was a pretty remarkable thing that he found a way to work with these guys, and it’s something I can respect him for. Anyway, the UK election had happened before Potsdam, despite Attlee suggesting they should wait until after the defeat of Japan, but the results were still being tallied. On July 25, the conference took a two-day break so that the most senior British officials could return to London for the tabulation of the votes. There was a three week delay between the vote on July 5 and the results to give the 3 million troops still overseas time to cast their votes. Everyone, including Attlee and the British communists, expected Churchill to win, all that seemed in doubt was the size of the majority.. But Churchill later claimed that before he left Potsdam he had had a nightmare. “I dreamed that my life was over,” he later recalled. “I saw it—it was very vivid—my dead body under a white sheet on a table in an empty room. I recognized my bare feet projecting from under the sheet. It was very life like. . . . Perhaps this is the end.” I wonder if his corpse was smoking a cigar? The elections produced a historic surprise, of course – it was a landslide victory for Labour and Clement Attlee. The Conservative majority in the House of Commons disappeared as the number of Tory seats plummeted from 585 to 213. Labour emerged as the dominant party, meaning that Clement Attlee would return to Potsdam as Britain’s prime minister, and that Churchill would at least temporarily leave government. Churchill briefly thought about returning to Potsdam and forcing the new Parliament to vote him out, but he soon bowed to the inevitable and resigned. Attlee offered Churchill and Eden the chance to return to Potsdam with him as advisers, to show the world the continuity of the British system, but both declined. Attlee himself could hardly believe that he and his party had won, and by such an enormous margin. When he went to Buckingham Palace to meet the king, George VI told Attlee that he looked quite surprised to have won. “Indeed I certainly was,” Attlee replied. Needless to say – everyone back at Potsdam was in shock. No one quite knew what to make of the change; Winston Churchill now had no role in British policy. In his diary, Admiral Leahy recorded his concern that, Churchill’s flaws notwithstanding, Britain simply could not go on without him. The change in government, Leahy wrote, “is in my opinion a world tragedy. I do not know how the Allies can succeed without the spark of genius in his qualities of leadership.” Now, instead of Roosevelt and Churchill at Potsdam, the Allies had Truman and Attlee, both of whom seemed to Leahy to be grossly inadequate substitutes for their illustrious predecessors. ATTLEE BIO Clement Attlee’s background was about as far removed from Chuchill’s as you could imagine. Attlee was born into a middle class family, the seventh of eight children. His father was Henry Attlee (1841–1908), a solicitor, and his mother was Ellen Bravery Watson (1847–1920), daughter of the secretary for the Art Union of London. But young Clement went to Oxford, where in 1904 he graduated BA with second-class honours in Modern History. He trained as barrister and went to work for his father’s firm, but didn’t like it. In 1906, he became a volunteer at Haileybury House, a charitable club for working-class boys in the East End of London run by his old school, and

Stalin arrived in Potsdam a day late. Claimed he had a small heart attack. Might have been a ruse. It gave the others a day to take a tour of Berlin on July 16 and see the destruction first hand. During the first week of the conference, everyone was jubilant, having won the war – but Truman quickly learned the Russians weren’t going to give in to his demands, and the Allies and Stalin both had secrets. The Allies had a successful test of Trinity, the first atomic bomb. Stalin had Hitler’s body. Of course, the A Bomb wasn’t really a secret. Meanwhile Clement Attlee is there but being ignored by everyone.

Prof Michael Neiberg is Chair of War Studies and Professor of History, Department of National Security and Strategy, US Army War College. He has also written a number of excellent books on the First World War – as well as the book we are talking about today – Potsdam: The End of World War II and the Remaking of Europe.

After a string of fuckups, Truman starts listening to other people, like Joseph Davies, the US Ambassador to the Soviet Union in 1937-38, one of the guys he had ignored before his first meeting with Molotov. They decide a new meeting of the Big Three is needed – and start to plan the Potsdam Conference. Truman announced James Byrnes, the man who should be President, would be his new Secretary of State. And he finally learns the details of the S-1 project he had uncovered as a senator two years earlier – AKA the Manhattan Project.

Truman listens to certain people who tell him he should get tough with the Russians. At his first meeting with Molotov, the Soviet Foreign Minister said “I have never been talked to like that in my life.”“Carry out your agreements and you won’t get talked to like that,” Truman replied.Then Truman decides to look tough by ending the Lend Lease shipments to the Soviets. Unfortunately nobody seems to have told him that the USA was still counting on Soviet support to end the Pacific War.

Harry S. Truman. Farmer. Soldier. Failed businessman. Given his political career by a mobbed-up bootlegger. Became President through fate. Adopted John Wayne persona to try to look tough.

Then, on April 12, 1945, FDR died, aged only 63. https://traffic.megaphone.fm/WCATR4967146762.mp3?updated=1660203086

FDR sends one of his inner circle, Edward Flynn, a staunch Catholic, to meet the Pope to try to keep the peace between him and Stalin. Stalin meanwhile revived caesaropapism, the old tradition dating back to Constantine, making himself head of the Russian Orthodox Church. Not a bad promotion for someone who once studied to become an Orthodox priest.

Stalin crushes the Ukrainian Catholic Church, partly because socialists believe religion is the opium of the masses, and partly because the Pope, Pius XII, had done a deal with Hitler and was a virulent anti-Communist.

March 8, 1945. Allen Dulles, the Bern station chief of the U.S. Office of Strategic Services (a forerunner of the CIA), met in secret with Obergruppenführer Karl Wolff, the former head of Heinrich Himmler’s secretariat, who in the last years of the war became the commander of SS forces in northern Italy, to discuss Germany’s surrender. The Anglo-Americans neglected to tell the Soviets about the meeting – a breach of their agreements. The Americans called it “Operation Sunrise”. Some historians call Operation Sunrise the first episode of Cold War.

On February 13, 1945, U.S. Secretary of State Stettinius and his staff were invited to a reception hosted by Vyshinsky in the commissariat’s guesthouse in Moscow. Little did the Americans know that one member of their staff was a Soviet spy.

What does Dracula have to do with the Cold War? The next issue to drive a wedge between the Big Three was the government of Romania.

Our first post-Yalta episode! Churchill and Roosevelt go home and give big speeches about how well Yalta went and how the Big Three really get each other. And then it all fell apart.

The last day of Yalta! We’re out, baby! Churchill fell asleep in the middle of an important debate and then woke up ranting about the wrong things. Iran wants everyone to leave their oil alone but no-one cares. Stalin wanted access to the Black Sea Straits. And Frank does the last big deal of his life – getting Joe’s agreement in writing to join the fight against Japan.

Just when I thought I was out… they pulled me back in! To Yalta! Before the Big Three left Yalta, they signed a document that promised to allow the people of Europe “to create democratic institutions of their own choice”. Of course, at the time, the British were waging a war in Greece to prevent the people creating a government of their own choice… but let’s not worry about inconvenient details like that.

As the Yalta conference comes to a close, the question of German reparations is settled on, but it’s obvious that Stalin still doesn’t trust the other two. And the feeling is mutual.

Stalin goes hard on the issue of German reparations but meets with pushback from Churchill, while Roosevelt can’t seem to make up his mind.

So after they agreed on Poland, the rest of the February 9 plenary session is spent talking about Germany. Specifically – what to do with the Nazi big dogs. Previously secret British War Cabinet papers released on 1 January 2006 have shown that Churchill had been advocating since 1942 for a policy of summary execution for the top Nazis. But Stalin suggested, you know, maybe they should be put on trial before being shot like animals? Everyone was shocked. But Joe still wanted $10 billion in reparations – and to keep France off of the Control Commission.

We have a very special guest. Professor Serhii Plokhii is the Mykhailo Hrushevsky professor of Ukrainian history at Harvard University, where he also serves as the director of the Ukrainian Research Institute. He’s the author of quite a few award-winning books including “The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine”, which in 2015 won the world’s most important award for non-fiction, the Lionel Gelber Prize – and a book that’s been invaluable to us while we discuss the Yalta conference, “Yalta: The Price of Peace”. Serhii was kind enough to join us to talk about the importance of the Yalta conference and his analysis of the key players, the Big Three, FDR, Churchill and Stalin.

Day 9 at Yalta! The official, famous photographs are taken, and someone worries that he’s going to be sent to the Gulag as a result. And the Polish question is finally settled to everyone’s relief. They can almost go home. Oh and there was no raping.

At the end of a long day full of hard bargaining, The Big Three could still relax in one another’s company. In this episode we discuss the most important dinner of the conference.

A deal was struck between FDR and Stalin: the Soviets will join the war with Japan in exchange for territorial acquisitions at Japan’s expense and the creation of a Soviet sphere of influence in northeastern China.

The city of Dresden was the primary victim of the “zone of limitation” agreement reached at Yalta—one of the few direct outcomes of the military consultations held there. In early 1945 Dresden was one of the few major German centers to have escaped systematic Allied bombing. On the night of February 13 – only two days after the end of the Yalta conference – the Royal Air Force Bomber Command executed the first night air raid on the city. “Florence on the Elbe”, as it was known, was reduced to rubble by Allied bombers in three major raids between February 13 and 15 – known by the Allies as Operation Thunderclap.Altogether 1,300 British and American bombers dropped more than 3,000 tons of bombs including 1,100 tons of incendiaries on a city with one million civilians.

On Feb 7, the British Chiefs of Staff decided to take the day off to visit the site of the Battle of Balaclava, infamous for the “Charge of the Light Brigade” in 1854. Meanwhile, the Americans and the Soviet military commanders took the opportunity to talk about Russia’s entry into the Pacific War against Japan.

Conversation at Yalta turns to Poland’s borders. Stalin had a new proposal that would mean moving the southern part of the Polish-German border 200 kilometers west – into Germany, right up to the Oder & Neisse rivers. Which was actually giving Poland more of Germany than the U.S. and UK were happy with. They believed it would create 8 or 9 million German refugees.

On Feb 8, when Stalin arrived for his lunch date with Roosevelt, FDR told him that the Foreign Ministers had met that morning and agreed to accept the two extra countries for the Soviet’s in the UN General Assembly. It was good timing for FDR, because that day they were going to be talking about getting Russia involved in the war with Japan, and he wanted him on side. THE ONLY SMALL PROBLEM – the Foreign Ministers had NOT actually agreed to the two extra votes! Roosevelt made it up! Why? How? To what end? Listen and find out!

At Yalta, Feb 7 and 8 – days 4 and 5 – are going to be about trying to get agreement on the Polish issues and the issue of the Soviets entering the war with Japan. Winnie The Pooh is getting played by Uncle Joe, who senses that the US/UK love fest is struggling.

Back to the question of Poland. Roosevelt suggests changing the Polish-Russian border – in the favour of the Poles. Why? It’d really help him out in the upcoming U.S. election. Churchill agreed with him. Why? It would really help him out in the upcoming British election. Stalin, as you can imagine, was not impressed with their logic.

Despite their attempts to get the U.K. and U.S.S.R. to give up on the concept of spheres of influence, the Monroe Doctrine remained the dominant way that America built its economic empire after WWII. Russia has always longed for more warm water ports and we explain why that’s important. We do a mini bio on Maxim Litvinov, the Soviet deputy people’s commissar for foreign affairs. And we talk about why George Kennan wanted to kill off the idea of the United Nations.

We are back talking about Poland and why it was such an important issue to the Big Three at Yalta. As Churchill himself said, Poland was so important, it was discussed at seven out of the eight plenary sessions and the official British record contained 18,000 words on Poland spoken by Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin. We also talk a little about Operation Paperclip, where America grabbed 1600 Nazi scientists and engineers and took them back to work on for the U.S. government.   ← #36 - That Little Rat Leo Pasvolsky #38 - Warm Water Ports →

So after Sumner Welles resigned, the majority of the work on the UN charter was done by an interesting guy no-one remembers – Leo Pasvolsky. When he died in 1953, his New York Times obituary was subtitled “Wrote Charter of World Organization.” In a 1967 letter, Dean Acheson criticized American moralism in international affairs, which he saw as culminating in “that little rat Leo Pasvolsky’s United Nations.”