The Making of the Atomic Bomb: 25th Anniversary Edition

by Richard Rhodes

As a result they had sent Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson a joint memorandum on September 19 that independently raised some of the issues Niels Bohr had raised with Franklin Roosevelt in August, in particular that “the progress of this art and science is bound to be so rapid in the next five years in some countries that it would be extremely dangerous for this government to assume that by holding secret its present knowledge we should be secure.”2114, 2115 They did not see the bomb’s complementarity, but did see that whatever control arrangement the United States and Great Britain devised—they favored a treaty—would somehow have to include the Soviet Union; if the Soviets were not informed, as Bush told Conant, the exclusion would lead “to a very undesirable relationship indeed on the subject with Russia.”