The 1946 Atomic Bomb Tests: Atomic Diplomacy or Bureaucratic Infighting?

Abstract

The term gained currency in the 1960s. It was identified with revisionist historians of the New Left, particularly with Gar Alperovitz, who in 1965 argued that the United States had employed nuclear weapons in 1945, not so much to bring a speedy conclusion to World War II, but to achieve political objectives: to end the conflict before the Red Army had had a chance to make major advances in Manchuria and, quite possibly, to gain diplomatic leverage over the Soviet Union. Although it was Alperovitz who acquired notoriety for that thesis, its essence had been stated as early as 1948, when the British physicist P. M. S. Blackett wrote: So we may conclude that the dropping of the atomic bombs was not so much the last military act of the second World War, as the first major operation of the cold diplomatic war with Russia now in progress. ' Numerous historians have criticized Alperovitz's thesis. Yet the concept of atomic diplomacy has not been dropped from historical literature. In a more sophisticated and more scrupulously documented fashion, it was central to Martin J. Sherwin's A World Destroyed and forms a major theme in Gregg Herken's The Winning Weapon. 2 Aided by declassification of materials from the postwar years, Herken is but one of several scholars who have made outstanding contributions to our under-