Atomic Diplomacy Research Articles

Science of the Twilight Empire: British Atomic Diplomacy in the Era of Decolonization

This article discusses the British version of the Atoms for Peace campaign between the mid-1950s and the mid-1960s that aimed at maintaining, reorganizing, or strengthening its ties with countries in the traditional Briton sphere of influence as a scientific diplomacy tool for enhancing its soft power. The Conference of Commonwealth Atomic Scientists and the Harwell Reactor School were consistent with this objective. Notably, the United Kingdom prioritized its geopolitical interests in its Atoms for Peace overseas campaign. Desiring to maintain the British influence in the vast region from Ankara to Karachi, the United Kingdom also founded the regional nuclear center attached to the Baghdad Pact (or CENTO in later years). For creating an attractive magnetic force attached to Britain throughout the Middle East, the UK considered a regional nuclear center necessary to demonstrate the power of science and technology in practice.

The Atomic Bombing and Soviet Union’s Expansion in the Far East

Traditionally it is argued that the Atomic bombs were dropped to end WWII as the best solution to save both American and Japanese lives. However, using primary and secondary sources, this paper argues that the A-bombs were dropped as part of the Atomic diplomacy to limit Soviet expansion in East Asia, and the war could have ended with limited casualties without the use of the A-bombs.

The (Science Diplomacy) Origins of the Cold War

The US monopoly of information regarding nuclear weapons was one of the distinctive features of the early Cold War. It encouraged US officials to bolster their country’s hegemonic role in post-war affairs, something that scholars have previously referred to in terms of “atomic diplomacy.” This paper shows that Cold War atomic diplomacy originated in an ancestral form of what we call today “science diplomacy,” distinctive of wartime allied relations during WW2. It first explores how science became a distinctive feature of wartime diplomacy by looking at agreements regarding exchanges of information and collaboration that shaped the relations between wartime allies (US, UK, and the Soviet Union). It then shows that their signing (and, at times, their rejection) eventually paved the way to conflicting views within allied administrations on what to share, making their officials less inclined to pool more knowledge toward the end of WW2. In conclusion, US monopolistic stances and atomic diplomacy originated in these disagreements, also marking the demise of wartime science diplomacy. This essay is part of a special issue entitled Science Diplomacy, edited by Giulia Rispoli and Simone Turchetti.

The American Midwest and the Early Cold War

The American Midwest and the Early Cold War Bernard Lemelin Robert H. Ferrell, Harry S. Truman and the Cold War Revisionists. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2015. 142 pp. $19.95. Lawrence S. Kaplan, The Conversion of Senator Arthur H. Vandenberg: From Isolation to International Engagement. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2015. 294 pp. $45.00. Lawrence J. Haas, Harry and Arthur: Truman, Vandenberg, and the Partnership That Created the Free World. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2016. 313 pp. $29.95. Hendrik Meijer, Arthur Vandenberg: The Man in the Middle of the American Century. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017. 414 pp. $35.00. William Langer (North Dakota), Henrik Shipstead (Minnesota), Robert Taft (Ohio), Arthur Capper (Kansas), Charles Wayland Brooks (Illinois), Kenneth Wherry (Nebraska), Forrest Donnell (Missouri), William Jenner (Indiana), these were the names of a number of prominent isolationist members of the Congress from the Midwest during the early Cold War era. In the same period, however, this region was home to two significant internationalist politicians, Harry Truman (Missouri) and Arthur Vandenberg (Michigan), who have both been the focus of the recent monographs mentioned above. In his book entitled Harry S. Truman and the Cold War Revisionists, Robert Ferrell, one of the main biographers of Truman, castigates the group of historians known as the revisionists who have undertaken to disparage the foreign policy of the thirty-third American president since the 1960s. Among them were Gar Alperovitz, Barton Bernstein and Lloyd Gardner. For [End Page 142] the prolific scholar, who reminds that the conventional military strength of the United States in 1945–1950 was far from impressive, such an indictment is profoundly irrelevant to the basic idea of revision in history: "Th ere is nothing wrong … with the notion … of revisionism, taken by itself. My generation of historians, who began their studies in the years just after the war of 1941–1945 … appreciated the essays of the best-known historian of the time, Charles A. Beard, who declared that revision was the essence of scholarship. … We are all revisionists." Adds the eminent historian: "But the [C]old [W]ar revisionists who attacked … Truman did not understand the time in which he was president nor the man himself."1 Based on various primary sources (e.g., Truman papers, Department of State's Foreign Relations of the United States and memoirs of Dean Acheson), Ferrell's brief monograph particularly flays the three main theories advanced by the revisionists for the year 1945. The first one lies in the fact that President Franklin Roosevelt was "a subtle, sophisticated operator in foreign relations … and that President Truman was pretty much the opposite." The second theory consists in the conviction that the American nation, after the Yalta Conference, "sought to intervene in Russia's security zone in Eastern Europe, trying to gain influence, perhaps even dominance, over the cordon sanitaire of weak nations lying between Western Europe and the Soviet borders." The third hypothesis held by the revisionists, and notably Gar Alperovitz in its controversial Atomic Diplomacy (1965), was that the United States dropped two atomic bombs on Japan, "not so much to end the war … but to impress the Russians, who were giving trouble in Eastern Europe." Concerning this last assumption, Ferrell stresses that an invasion of Japan would have definitely cost far more casualties than some nuclear revisionists had believed, asserting that the invasion of Luzon and Okinawa had cost respectively 31,000 and 63,000 U.S. casualties.2 Although Ferrell's volume exhibits several strengths (cogency of the overall demonstration, accuracy of facts, etc.), readers familiar with Truman's foreign policy, and acquainted for instance with the works of scholars on the atomic bomb such as Robert Maddox and J. Samuel Walker, will hardly find novelty in this book. In his monograph The Conversion of Senator Arthur H. Vandenberg, Lawrence Kaplan, an expert on NATO, aims to follow "the odyssey of a major political figure from arch-isolationism in the 1930s to ardent internationalism after World War II." For the author, who consulted the rich Vandenberg papers located at the Bentley Library (University of Michigan), [End Page 143] the Midwest senator played a pivotal role in the conversion of...

Radium, biophysics, and radiobiology: tracing the history of radiobiology in twentieth-century China.

Radiobiology assesses the biological hazards of exposure to radioactive substances and nuclear radiation. This article explores the history of radiobiology in twentieth-century China by examining the overlapping of radium research and biophysics, from roughly the 1920s Nationalist period to the 1960s Communist period; from the foreign purchase of radium by the Rockefeller Foundation's China Medical Board during the Republican era, to the institutional establishment of radiobiology as a subset of biophysics in the People's Republic. Western historiography of radiobiology highlights the connection between the military development of nuclear weapons and the civilian use of radiation in biology, as well as the international export of radioisotopes and nuclear reactors. Considering the exclusion of China from Western atomic diplomacy, I argue that the study of the Chinese history of bomb-making and radiobiology is necessary not just to fill an existing knowledge gap, but more importantly to elucidate the influence of the Chinese nuclear weapons program and Cold War atomic politics on Chinese life-science enterprises. Through examining the formational history of the radiobiology program in China, I hope to shed light on the implications of the atomic age for Chinese biology in the twentieth century.

Иран и санкции: пределы саморазвития

The article considers the problem of external validity of sanctions as a tool to influence the state based on the principles of Shia Islam and self-reliance. The Obama administration significantly increased the political component of pressure in an attempt to find the “pain points” of the regime of the Islamic Republic. One of such points is a threat to be isolated in relation to such powers as Russian Federation and People’s Republic of China. In 2010, Tehran de facto started to use nuclear factor to log into the world politics. Therefore, the “atomic diplomacy” of Iran turned to be a rather unexpected result of the tightening of foreign sanctions. In this situation the West led by the USA embarked on a strategy of escalating sanctions as the most important instrument of pressure on Tehran. Finally, the system of sanctions was formed at the following levels: the restrictions imposed by the UN Security Council (resolutions of 2006–2010); the sanctions imposed by several groups of countries (EU and others); the unilateral sanctions of certain countries (USA). The evaluation of the effectiveness of sanctions is very difficult as far as Iran does not publish relevant information. So the only plausible assumptions can be made through the analysis of the bilateral trade and economic relations of Iran with other countries. Generally, the example the Islamic Republic of Iran which was under foreign sanctions since 1979 shows that only after the introduction of tiered sanctions, created the system of multivector effects on the Iranian economy, the sanctions’ impact has become a fairly significant factor that influenced the position of the Iranian leadership on the nuclear issue.

Obninsk, 1955: The World's First Nuclear Power Plant and "The Atomic Diplomacy" by Soviet Scientists

Obninsk, 1955: The World's First Nuclear Power Plant and "The Atomic Diplomacy" by Soviet Scientists

Reclaiming Realism for the Left: Gar Alperovitz and the Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb

Sixty-seven years after the decision to use the atomic bomb in World War II, controversy remains whether the United States was justified in using fission bombs in combat. Gar Alperovitz, the great revisionist historian, in his Atomic Diplomacy and The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb transformed our knowledge of the geopolitical motives behind the atomic attack against Japan at the end of World War II. These uranium and plutonium-core bombs were political, not primarily military in purpose and motive behind their deployment. His analysis will be compared to realists such as Hans Morgenthau, Kenneth Waltz, Henry Kissinger and George Kennan who for the most part questioned unrestrained violence and offered nuanced views on the wisdom of using such indiscriminate, savage weapons of war. The paper will explore Alperovitz’s classic argument that out of the ashes of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the A-bomb drove the incipient Cold War conflict. American national-security elites construed the bomb as a political-diplomatic lever to contain Soviet power as much as a military weapon to subdue Japan. The views of various political and military leaders, President Truman, Henry Stimson, James Byrnes, General George C. Marshall, Admiral William Leahy and General Dwight Eisenhower are assessed.

The Halban Affair and British Atomic Diplomacy at the End of the Second World War

In winter 1944, Sir John Anderson, senior minister in the government of Winston Churchill, and Wallace Akers, the chief executive officer of Imperial Chemical Industries, tried to initiate an independent and secretive atomic diplomacy that aimed to repair the Anglo–French atomic relationship. At the centre of this diplomatic debacle was a meeting in Paris between Hans Von Halban and Frédéric Joliot. Halban also travelled to Montreal at the behest of Anderson and Akers to ensure the continuation of Anglo–French atomic co-operation. Their actions not only failed to achieve their intended goal; they also brought about the unintended consequence of straining the Anglo–American atomic alliance and exacerbating France's bitterness at the Allies' refusal to invite France into their atomic alliance. This analysis is significant because it sheds light on the understudied area of British atomic diplomacy and increases the understanding of the Anglo–American “special relationship.”

The Embrace of Atomic Bomb Orthodoxy and Revisionism

Wilson Miscamble, an award-winning diplomatic historian at the University of Notre Dame, would like everyone to stop talking about atomic-bomb revisionism: the idea that the atomic bomb was not primarily used to end the war with Japan but to intimidate the Soviets and make Joseph Stalin more pliant in the emerging postwar order; thus the weapon’s use formed an important seed of the Cold War that blighted the world for the next four decades. This historiographical tradition stems from Gar Alperovitz’ Atomic Diplomacy: Hiroshima and Potsdam (1965), timed to coincide with the twentieth anniversary of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Alperovitz used the newly released diaries of Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson of the Truman administration to argue that the Americans engaged in a “strategy of delayed showdown” with the Soviet Union in the endgame of World War II. Miscamble will have none of this, and he structures this slim textbook as an all-out attack on every major thesis launched by Alperovitz. Miscamble’s central argument echoes what is known in atomic-bomb historiography as the “orthodox” position: the atomic bomb(s) ended the war, as intended, and had no connection to postwar (or wartime) efforts at “atomic diplomacy” with respect to the Soviet Union. Recent scholarship has confirmed most of this picture, especially the last point about the failure of the Americans to make any substantial geopolitical hay out of their atomic monopoly. Yet, by patterning his argument on Alperovitz’, Miscamble recapitulates a mirror-image of revisionism. Simply put, the best way to stop the error of linking the atomic bombs’ use in the war with postwar diplomatic history is to stop doing so. The historiography of nuclear weapons in the 1940s divides into three general subfields of history, each stressing progressively later years of that decade. The first concerns the actual building of the atomic bomb, and it has traditionally been a story of physicists (recent scholarship also includes chem-

The most controversial decision: Truman, the atomic bombs, and the defeat of Japan

This book explores the American use of atomic bombs and the role these weapons played in the defeat of the Japanese Empire in World War II. It focuses on President Harry S. Truman's decision-making regarding this most controversial of all his decisions. The book relies on notable archival research and the best and most recent scholarship on the subject to fashion an incisive overview that is fair and forceful in its judgments. This study addresses a subject that has been much debated among historians and it confronts head-on the highly disputed claim that the Truman administration practised 'atomic diplomacy'. The book goes beyond its central historical analysis to ask whether it was morally right for the United States to use these terrible weapons against Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It also provides a balanced evaluation of the relationship between atomic weapons and the origins of the Cold War.

Atomic Diplomacy

Atomic Diplomacy

Understanding Indignation: Gar Alperovitz, Robert Maddox, and the Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb

It must be conceded: Gar Alperovitz is consistent. For thirty years, from the publication of Atomic Diplomacy (1965) to the present monograph, Alperovitz has made it the defining task of his career as a historian to discredit the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The moral theme of his work has never changed: the bomb was an unrequited evil. Nor has the message: the Truman administration clearly understood before the atomic bomb was used that the war with Japan could be ended by other means without significant loss of life (p. xiii). In the face of this evil, Alperovitz believes the historian must adopt the mantle of the prophet Jeremiah, and protest.' There is no room for the counsel of Spinoza, who once pressed philosophers to take great care to understand human actions, and not to deride, deplore, or denounce them.112

Atomic Diplomacy: Hiroshima and Potsdam: The Use of the Atomic Bomb and the American Confrontation with Soviet Power.

Atomic Diplomacy: Hiroshima and Potsdam: The Use of the Atomic Bomb and the American Confrontation with Soviet Power.

Atomic Diplomacy during the Korean War

Atomic Diplomacy during the Korean War

Book Review: G. Alperovitz, Atomic Diplomacy: Hiroshima and Potsdam, the Use of the Atomic Bomb and the American Confrontation with Soviet Power, 2nd ed. (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1985, 427pp., £4.95 pbk.)

Book Review: G. Alperovitz, Atomic Diplomacy: Hiroshima and Potsdam, the Use of the Atomic Bomb and the American Confrontation with Soviet Power, 2nd ed. (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1985, 427pp., £4.95 pbk.)

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

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-

The Washington Declaration and the "Poor Relation": Anglo-American Atomic Diplomacy, 1945?46

The Washington Declaration and the "Poor Relation": Anglo-American Atomic Diplomacy, 1945?46

India's Nuclear Option: Atomic Diplomacy and Decision Making. By Ashok Kapur. (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1976. Pp. xiii + 295. $18.50.)

India's Nuclear Option: Atomic Diplomacy and Decision Making. By Ashok Kapur. (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1976. Pp. xiii + 295. $18.50.)

India's Nuclear Option. Atomic Diplomacy and Decision Making.

India's Nuclear Option. Atomic Diplomacy and Decision Making.