The Atomic Bomb and the Origins of the Cold War

THE ATOMIC BOMB AND THE ORIGINS OF THE COLD WAR, Campbell Craig and Sergey Radchenko, Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 2008, 201 pages, $27.00. The nearly two decades since the collapse of the Soviet Union have yielded a spate of new works on the Cold War, most of which exploit the publication of additional documents on the Soviet side to add texture and nuance to well-established scholarly interpretations. That Campbell Craig and Sergey Radchenko's work falls within that category in no way disparages their careful argumentation or rethinking of familiar questions. What is distinctive about this history of Cold War origins is that it places the atomic bomb at the center of discussion about the widening rift among wartime allies that abruptly morphed into a Cold War after 1945. The authors' essential argument is that the existence of the atomic bomb itself so distorted foreign policy of both emerging superpowers as to make an amicable postwar accommodation substantially less likely. Moreover, they assert that atomic secrets and revelations of espionage further undermined trust and all but ensured there would be no modus vivendi leading to international controls of atomic weapons. The book has much to recommend it. Its introduction contains a useful review of major secondary works as well as newly published collections of relevant primary source documents. Chapter One offers a concise exposition of the authors' main points in the context of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's foreign policy and vision of the postwar world order. Chastened by the example of President Woodrow Wilson's failure to reshape the global environment in the aftermath of World War I, Roosevelt gave careful thought to the means and methods for implementing his own plans to forge a worldwide free market. However, like Wilson, Roosevelt faced the challenge of advancing a global agenda that was not fully compatible with those of fellow victorious allies. In Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin, in particular, he confronted men as determined and politically astute as himself. While working with Churchill, whose worldview more closely aligned with Roosevelt's own and whose country had steadily lost leverage during the exhausting world war, was one thing, dealing with Stalin was quite another. Churchill placed a premium on defeating Germany at the lowest possible cost to the British Empire and thus favored peripheral offensives in North Africa and southern Europe. Early in the war, when partnership with Britain was indispensable, Roosevelt deferred to British judgment on the matter of the Second Front over the objections of many of his own military strategists. By 1943, as U.S. military might reached gargantuan proportions, the voice of caution resonated less loudly and nothing deterred the U.S. from an invasion in northern France in 1944. The Soviet leader, by virtue of personality, ideology, and experience, operated from a sharply different frame of reference. Moreover, his political advantage was as great as Roosevelt's own--even greater in some respects. After all, the Red Army occupied most of Eastern and Central Europe by late 1944. Accordingly, Stalin would not budge from consolidating his sphere of influence into a series of East European buffer states molded in the Soviet image and under his direct control. In this context, the authors note, Roosevelt held one clear ace, an edge in the development of atomic weapons. Most interesting is the book's contention that Roosevelt sought to extract advantage from the bomb project to influence not merely Stalin, but Churchill as well. As events turned out, he had greater success with the latter than the former. Britain's stake was to preserve its position as the junior partner in the bomb project, a matter over which the Americans had considerable control. With regard to Stalin, Roosevelt hoped mistakenly that compelling evidence of American technological power would moderate Soviet positions concerning the postwar order. …