American Prometheus

by Kai Bird

The atomic bombs that Oppenheimer had organized into existence were going to be used. But he told himself that they were going to be used in a manner that would not spark a postwar arms race with the Soviets. Shortly after the Trinity test, he had been relieved to hear from Vannevar Bush that the Interim Committee had unanimously accepted his recommendation that the Russians be clearly informed of the bomb and its impending use against Japan. He assumed that such forthright discussions were taking place at that very moment in Potsdam, where President Truman was meeting with Churchill and Stalin. He was later appalled to learn what actually happened at that final Big Three conference. Instead of an open and frank discussion of the nature of the weapon, Truman coyly confined himself to a cryptic reference: “On July 24,” Truman wrote in his memoirs, “I casually mentioned to Stalin that we had a new weapon of unusual destructive force. The Russian premier showed no special interest. All he said was that he was glad to hear it and hoped we would make ‘good use of it against the Japanese.’ ” This fell far short of what Oppenheimer had expected. As the historian Alice Kimball Smith later wrote, “what actually occurred at Potsdam was a sheer travesty. . . .”