Fissionable Material

A WORLD DESTROYED: THE ATOMIC BOMB AND THE GRAND ALLIANCE by MARTIN J.SHERWIN 315 pages. Knopf. $10.

The age of backyard fallout shelters and grade-school air-raid drills is mercifully bygone. But nuclear warfare is by no means implausible. Despite the existence of various accords, the race to accumulate atomic firepower proceeds.

How did the precarious nuclear stalemate come about? For a generation, historians have been digging through the records of scientists and decision makers. Now, drawing on newly declassified documents, Princeton Historian Martin J. Sherwin has written a dispassionate, richly detailed account that promises, for the present at least, to be the definitive book on the formation of atomic-energy policy during World War II.

From the start of the Manhattan Project, says Sherwin, it was clear that an atomic bomb would be an awesome force in the postwar world. Franklin Roosevelt faced two basic options. He could reveal the project's existence (but not necessarily its details) to his ally Joseph Stalin. Or he could keep it a secret between the U.S. and Britain--which was in on the project all along--to ensure the two countries' diplomatic and military advantage.

F.D.R. received conflicting counsel from various advisers: Scientist-Administrators Vannevar Bush and James Conant, Danish Physicist Niels Bohr, War Secretary Henry Stimson. But the President, without telling any of his aides, concluded with Winston Churchill that the second option was the wiser. The two solemnized their agreement in a secret aide-memoire of a conversation at Hyde Park in September 1944: "The suggestion that the world should be informed regarding Tube Alloys [British code for the bomb], with a view to an international agreement regarding its control and use, is not accepted." Concludes Sherwin with characteristic understatement: "The Anglo-American leaders' publicly professed expectations for continued cooperation with the Soviet Union, it is now obvious, were somewhat less firm than has been heretofore recognized."

More than he knew, "Give-'em-hell" Harry Truman was quite faithful to his predecessor's set policy. During the Allied leaders' Potsdam Conference in July 1945, Truman learned that the first A-bomb test at Alamogordo, N. Mex., had been a success, enabling him to tell the Russians, as Churchill put it, "just where they got on and off." Indeed, some revisionist historians have insisted that U.S. officials used the bomb against Japan primarily--if not solely--to impress their military might upon Russia. But Sherwin disputes this interpretation, despite his conviction that both Roosevelt and Truman intended to wage atomic diplomacy against the Soviets. He argues that all policymakers connected with the Manhattan Project assumed from its inception that the Bomb would be used to win the war--and that the assumption was never seriously questioned. Sherwin does suggest (almost parenthetically) that neither Hiroshima nor Nagasaki had to be destroyed to bring the war to a swift conclusion.

Sherwin tells his story soberly, punctuating it with occasional historical curiosities. We learn, for example, that "to this day ... the U.S. government has never officially acknowledged that Americans [two captured Navy flyers] were killed at Hiroshima." Determined to avoid any tendentiousness, Sherwin is sometimes too cautious in presenting his insights, which are numerous but tucked away. The modesty is misplaced. Jona than Swift once observed, "the greatest inventions were produced in times of ignorance, as the use of the compass, gun powder, printing." To that list of dark times must be added the 1940s; to the list of new devices, atomic weapons. A World Destroyed does much to explain the invention -- and far more to dispel the ignorance.

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