CONSEQUENCES OF THE FIRST ATOMIC BOMB TEST, JULY 16, 1945

 

Harry Targ

 

 

The last wartime conference was held at Potsdam in July, 1945. While minor agreements were reached on the administration of Germany, the meeting -attended by Churchill (and his replacement, Clement Attlee, who had just defeated Churchill in British elections), Stalin, and Truman was filled with acrimony. By the outset of the conference, Truman had heard of the successful test of the atomic bomb. He realized that economic pressure on the Soviets could then be coupled with the implied threat of using the most destructive weapon the world had ever seen.

 

Truman, Attlee, and Chiang Kai-shek issued a proclamation during the conference calling for the unconditional surrender of the Japanese. This public statement was made without the prior knowledge of the Soviets. During the weeks preceding Potsdam, the Japanese had been negotiating with the Soviets over surrender. They only wished to preserve the Emperor as their spiritual leader. It was clear, however, that the United States no longer needed or wanted the Soviet Union to intervene in the Asian war or aid in securing Japan's surrender now that the atomic bomb was operational.

 

On the German question the allies agreed at Potsdam to take reparations from their own zones. The Western zones would give the Soviets ten percent of their reparations because the Western zones included the industrial sectors of Germany. Also, fifteen percent of Western reparations taken were to be exchanged for agricultural products from the Soviet sector. These agreements were soon to be dishonored.

 

Despite the communiqués between the Japanese and the Soviets about possible surrender, the United States dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, killing 80,000 people. The Soviet Union sent their armies into Manchuria on August 8, 1945 and on August 9 a second atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki, leveling the city. The United States had become the first power in world history to use nuclear weapons.

The Cold War Heats Up

 

 

In October, 1944, Stalin and Churchill had reached an agreement whereby the Soviet Union would have dominant influence in Romania and Bulgaria after the war, and the British would have dominant influence in Greece. Both nations were to have equal influence in Yugoslavia and Hungary. While this arrangement was made without formal approval of President Roosevelt, many analysts argue that Stalin assiduously honored the arrangement after World War Il, until the Western nations began to pressure Stalin to reduce Soviet influence in Eastern Europe.

 

This pressure began almost immediately after the United States dropped the atomic bomb in the summer of 1945. The U.S. secretary of state, James Byrnes, publicly attacked the Soviets for a lack of democracy in the Bulgarian election, which was subsequently postponed until 1946. While the Soviets did influence Bulgarian politics, in what had been a country allied with Germany, at the same time they did not engage in political pressure in support of the left in Greece, Hungary, or Yugoslavia. Consequently, the public attack on the Soviets was probably seen by them as a repudiation of the Churchill-Stalin agreement of 1944. Further, as Horowitz suggests:

The deeper significance of Byrnes' statement was that it indicated to the Russians that the West was no longer interested in working with them, and indeed was ready to use its preponderant power to prevent the Soviet Union from organizing a sphere of influence (in accord with previous agreements) in the vital East and Central European area. Thus, on the very day the second atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki, and while Washington was staking out its own sphere of influence in the Pacific, President Truman declared that the East European countries were "not to be spheres of influence of any one power." This was the effective end of the coalition (David Horowitz, The Free World Colossus, 1971, 57).