Singh
Banking on the Cold War
Nikhil Pal Singh
on september 21, 1945—five months after Franklin Roosevelt’s death—
President Harry Truman assembled his cabinet for a meeting that one
historian has called “a turning point in the American century.” The purpose
of the meeting was to discuss Secretary of War Henry Stimson’s proposal
to share atomic bomb information with the Soviets. Stimson, who had
directed the Manhattan Project, maintained that the only way to make
the Soviets trustworthy was to trust them. In his proposal to Truman, he
wrote that not sharing the bomb with the Soviets would “almost certainly
stimulate feverish activity on the part of the Soviets... in what will in
effect be a secret armament race of a rather desperate character.”
Henry Wallace, the secretary of commerce and former vice president,
agreed with Stimson, as did Undersecretary of State Dean Acheson (though
he later changed his position), but Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal
laid down the definitive opposition. “The Russians, like the Japanese,” he
argued, “are essentially Oriental in their thinking, and until we have a
longer record of experience with them... it seems doubtful that we should
endeavor to buy their understanding and sympathy. We tried that once