After The War

The film “Oppenheimer” skips from 1945 to 1954 with only one stop in between: a 1949 discussion of the results of airborne isotope collection that showed that the Soviets had tested a fission device. But a lot of other things happened in those nine years.

At the end of the war, the Manhattan Project was disbanded as a military project. J. Robert Oppenheimer and others left Los Alamos to return to their universities. The industrial base for building atom bomb remained, but it was not clear that Los Alamos would continue. Norris Bradbury became director. Having been a naval officer, Bradbury used his connections to arrange a series of tests, Operation Crossroads, at Bikini Atoll in 1946, to help justify a future for Los Alamos.

Two bills were introduced in Congress – the May-Johnson bill proposed a heavy military presence in the nuclear venture, and the McMahon bill proposed civilian control. The May-Johnson bill was vehemently opposed by and lobbied against by scientists. The McMahon bill was eventually passed, and the Atomic Energy Commission, the forerunner of today’s Department of Energy, was formed.

Scientists, Oppenheimer among them, were concerned about the potential for an arms race and were very politically active. The Federation of American Scientists was formed to lobby and otherwise make their concerns known.  The big issue was control of atomic energy. which Oppenheimer wrote about and later, whether the hydrogen bomb should be built.

The United Nations was formed on October 24, 1945. The hope was that the organization could prevent wars like the two that had just ended. And we have had no wars between major powers since then. If that sentence sounds both familiar and strange to you, you have probably heard the more frequently said “We have had no wars between major powers since nuclear weapons came into the picture.” Perhaps both causes need to be considered.

The United Nations was one venue through which scientists hoped that nuclear weapons could be controlled. The Baruch Plan was not accepted, but the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty came about in 1970 through efforts in the United Nations, so part of that hope was realized. The International Atomic Energy Agency was formed in 1957 and has played an increasing part in monitoring nuclear activities, including in Iran and the war zone in Ukraine.

It’s hard to express how hopeful we were about the United Nations. The Federation of American Scientists was related to the United World Federalists, who wanted world government. I knew two scientists at Los Alamos who were Federalists until their deaths a few years ago. In the same way, I will always see the United Nations as a source of hope, although, like all human institutions, imperfect. This song, written in 1950 by Ed McCurdy, captures it well:

At the same time, the Soviet Union developed nuclear weapons, the Chinese Communists won their civil war, and the war in Korea. The arms race had started, but it was not yet in its most fearsome bloom. Given that the Second World War started a couple of decades after the first ended, it was easy to think that another all-enveloping war was possible.

It was during this period that people started to think about how a nuclear war might play out. That’s the next post.

Previous posts

Giving Up A Myth

Truman Establishes Sole Presidential Authority

Cross-posted to Nuclear Diner