STALIN MERELY SMILED

By CHARLES CURRAN AT 8.15 a.m. on Monday, August 6, 1945, there was a dazzling flash of white light in the sky above the Japanese city of Hiroshima. The flash lasted for less than a second. Then the atom bomb exploded. Hiroshima disappeared at once, as though a genie had rubbed his ring. In its place, a tower of smoke rose into the air to a height of eight miles. Beneath the smoke lay an area inhabited by 245,000 people which had become a radio-active crematorium. Three days later, an atom bomb was dropped on the city of Nagasaki and turned it into 'a graveyard with not a tomb- stone standing.' Eight days later, Japan sur- rendered to Britain, the United States, China and the Soviet Union.

That tower of smoke at Hiroshima—a monster mushroom topped by a white cap—was the most affrighting sight ever seen by human eyes. It has imprinted itself on the minds of all mankind. The passage of fourteen years has served only to mul- tiply its terror. We can see now, far more plainly than in 1945, that the decision to drop the atom bomb was the most solemn event in the history of the world. How, when, by whom and in what circumstances did that decision come to be taken?

It was made during a conference between Britain, the United States and the Soviet Union. The place was the Cecilienhof Palace at Potsdam —once the home of Crown Prince Wilhelm, the Kaiser's son whom Englishmen in 1914 nick- named Little Willie. The conference began on Tuesday, July 17, 1945, between delegations from the three countries led by Churchill, then the Prime Minister, President Truman and Stalin. It was Truman who proposed that the bomb be used against Japan unless she surrendered; he did this on July 18, in a talk with Churchill, and Churchill agreed. On July 24, Truman told Stalin of the decision;' and Stalin concurred in it at once— according to Churchill, with a smile on his face.

But behind those two conversations there lies a very curious story.

Some parts of the story are familiar. They have been coming to light ever since Potsdam—in war histories, memoirs, diaries and other published records (including the records of the Old Bailey). The latest account is by Michael Amrine. an American writer, in The Great Decision, re- cently serialised in John Bull before publication here by Heinemann. Reviewing it in the Observer on September 6 Lord Attlee—himself a key par- ticipant in the Potsdam decision—wrote, 'It does not add much to our knowledge.' Having said this. Attlee went on to supply one of the missing pieces of the puzzle.

When we assemble the pieces that are so far available (including this new one), we can discern the outlines of a pattern. We can also clear up the - mystery of Stalin's smile. Let us see how much we know now about the Hiroshima decision.

`Use It Without Warning'

Death came to President Roosevelt on April 12, 1945, while he was having his portrait painted. That evening, Truman, the Vice-President, was sworn in as Roosevelt's successor at the White House in Washington. As soon as he had taken the oath, he held a Cabinet meeting. When it broke up, the Secretary of War, Colonel Henry Stimson, stayed behind. With no third person in the room, Stimson told Truman that he must speak privately about 'a most urgent matter.'

This was 'the first bit of information that had come to me about the atomic bomb,' says Truman in Volume 1 of his Year of Decisions, 1945. The bomb project, he goes on, had been first suggested to Roosevelt by Einstein in 1942, when 'we learned that the Germans were at work on a method to harness atomic energy for use as a weapon of war.' Churchill had known of it from the begin- ning, since it involved pooling British and Ameri- can technical skill, and had agreed with Roosevelt that the work should be concentrated in the United States—where it was masked under the code-name of 'Manhattan District.' More than 100,000 men had been employed on it, and £500 MOST of us must have wondered whether the atom bomb need have been dropped on Japan. The answer has always been that Iwojima and Okinawa had demonstrated that the Japanese must be shocked into surrender; but is this true ? Might they not, given the opportunity, have been prepared to surrender, anyway ?

Charles Curran's interest in the subject was first aroused by a passage in the Churchill war memoirs: when Truman told Stalin of the decision to drop the bomb on Japan, Stalin happily accepted the great news. Why? Mr. Curran began investi- gating the problem; and, hearing of his researches, we suggested he should make an article out of them. It is, we sub- mit, the first serious effort to tell the whole story in a way that will enable the reader to make up his own mind whether the atom bomb need have been dropped; and to understand why Stalin merely smiled.

—Editor, 'Spectator'

million spent. Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer, of the Unk;ersity of California, had set up the key estab- lishment at Los Alamos, in the US State of New Mexico.

Stimson knew all about it. He now told Truman that the project was nearing completion, and that an atom bomb could be expected within four months. At his suggestion Truman set up a com- mittee to examine the implications of the new weapon. It consisted of seven men, with Stimson as chairman. Four were laymen—George L. Har- rison, special assistant to Stimson; James F. Byrnes, a lawyer-politician whom Truman was to make his Secretary of State; William A. Clayton, Assistant Secretary of State; Ralph A. Bard, Navy Under-Secretary. Three were eggheads—Dr. Vannevar Bush, Dr. Karl L. Compton and Dr. James B. Conant, the President of Harvard. The committee was helped by a panel of four nuclear scientists—Arthur H. Compton, E. 0. Lawrence, Enrico Fermi and Robert Oppenheimer. (Wore than any other man,' says Truman, 'Oppen- heimer is to be credited with the achievement of the completed bomb.') On June 1, 1945, after discussions with the panel, the committee unanimously adopted three recommendations to be made to Truman. Stim- son reveals what they were in a remarkable article by him called 'The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb' in Harper's Magazine for February, 1947 —an indispensable section of Hiroshima's death certificate. Let me quote Stimson verbatim : 1. The bomb should be used against Japan as soon as possible. 2. It should be used on a dual

target—that is, a military installation or war plant surrounded by or adjacent to houses and other buildings most susceptible to damage, and

3. It should be used without prior warning (of the nature of the weapon). One member of the committee. Mr. Bard, later changed his view and dissented from recommendation 3.

Stimson adds that the committee carefully con sidered whether advance warning should be given, and also whether there should be a demonstration on some uninhabited island. It discarded both suggestions as impracticable : They were not regarded as likely to be effec- tive in compelling a surrender of Japan, and

both of them involved serious risks. Even the New Mexico test would not give final proof that any given bomb was certain to explode when dropped from an airplane. • . . Nothing would have been more damaging to our effort to obtain surrender than a warning or a demonstration followed by a dud—and this was a real pos- sibility.

On June 16, 1945, Oppenheimer and his three nuclear colleagues made a report about the bomb.

In this they said (as quoted by Stimson), . . We Can propose no technical demonstration likely to bring an end to the war; we see no acceptable alternative to direct military use.' And there was a further reason why the committee rejected a prior warning about the target—disclosed by Byrnes in his book Speaking Frankly: 'We feared that, if the Japanese were told that the bomb would be used on a given locality, they might bring our boys who were prisoners of war to the area.'

Stimson endorsed the committee's recom- mendations, passed them on to Truman, and advised him to accept them. '1 felt,' says Stimson, 'that to extract a genuine surrender from the Emperor and his military advisers, there must be administered a tremendous shock which would carry convincing proof of our power to destroy his Empire. Such an effective shock would save many times the number of lives, both American and Japanese, that it would cost.'

Truman accepted the recommendations.

The Butchers' Bill

In June, 1945, when the committee reported, Truman got another report. This one came from General George Marshall, the US Chief of Staff. It set out Marshall's detailed plans for the defeat of Japan—plans drawn up without reference to the use of the bomb (which had yet to be tested). Marshall's time-table was : 1. intensified sea and air attacks, throughout the summer and autumn of 1945, on Japan's home islands;

2. on November 1, 1945, a landing on Kyushu, the southernmost island, by the US Sixth Army; 3. in February, 1946, a landing on Honshu, the main island, by the US Eighth and Tenth Armies; 4. in midsummer, 1946, a landing on the Kanto plains, near Tokyo, by the US First Army, which would be brought from Europe;

5. defeat of Japan by November 15, 1946.

`Marshall told me,' writes Truman, 'that it might cost half a million American lives to force the enemy's surrender on his home grounds.'

That was one estimate that Truman got about the size of the butchers' bill if Japan had to be beaten without using the bomb. It was not the only one. Stimson says that his advisers predicted 'over a million American casualties.' Churchill put it higher still. In Triumph and Tragedy, Churchill writes : 'To quell the Japanese resistance man by man, and conquer the country yard by yard, might well require the loss of a million American lives, and half that number of British—or more if we could get them there; for we were resolved to share the agony.'

These forebodings were based on two blood- stained facts. They dominated the mind of the American people during the months that led up to Hiroshima. Any assessment of the bomb decision must give full weight to them. One was lwojima. The other was Okinawa.

Iwojima is a volcanic rock in mid-Pacific, 775 miles from Japan. On February 18, 1945, the United States Marines—backed by an armada of warships, carriers, and warplanes—made a land- ing there, in order to wrest it from its Japanese garrison. It held out for exactly four weeks. The Marines took no prisoners; but they captured 22,000 corpses. The Japanese went on fighting until every one of them was dead. Those four weeks of competitive massacre made an indelible impression on the United States. The Marines who won the battle occupy, in the minds of Americans, the kind of place that Victorian England gave to the soldiers who stood in parade order as the troopship Birkenhead sank in the shark-filled sea, and the thin red line that Sir William 'Russell described from the hill-top at Balaclava; and rightly so. For Iwojima was a triumph of discipline over torment. But it does not detract from the Marines' achievement to say that the Japanese at lwojima displayed a courage for which adjec- tives are inadequate.

From Iwojima, the armada moved on across the Pacific to the island of Okinawa, 300 miles nearer Japan. It took eighty-two days and nights of killing to capture Okinawa. More than 1,900 Japanese airmen died in suicide attacks on the American warships, and on the British carriers that reinforced them. The garrison numbered 115,000, and hardly one man survived.

The process called 'dying to the last man' enjoys much popularity in the utterances of military spokesmen, and with the writers of wartime lead- ing articles; it is less popular on battlefields. Armies rarely die to the last man, no matter how brave they are; when resistance is plainly hopeless, they surrender. But Iwojima and Okinawa made the words come true. They also made Truman and his advisers ponder those estimates about the size of the butchers' bill. If the Japanese would fight like this for barren rocks far from home, their final stand around the palace in Tokyo looked like being Glitterdlimmerung—a blend of Thermopylae and the Chicago slaughter-houses.

Okinawa fell on June 21, 1945. Sixteen days later Truman embarked for Potsdam, accom- panied by Admiral William D. Leahy, his personal Chief of Staff. With them went Byrnes, the newly appointed Secretary of State, and Ben Cohen and Charles E. Bohlen, both of the State Department. Each of the three was to have a speaking part in the Hiroshima melodrama.

Before he went on board the cruiser that took him across the Atlantic, Truman knew that the bomb was about to be tested at Los Alamos. Throughout the voyage he was 'anxiously await- ing word on the results.' For, so far as he could see, there were two, and only two, ways in which the United States could avoid a Tokyo Goner- dammerung. One was to use the bomb—if the scientists could produce it. The other was to call in the Red Army as an ally against Japan. As his memoirs show, both these matters were in his mind at the time. He says that his 'most urgent' reason for going to Potsdam was to bring Stalin into the war—'a matter which our military advisers were most anxious to clinch: But what did Stalin think about that?

The Two Faces of Russia

Stalin had been thinking about it for years. In consequence, he had succeeded in manoeuvring himself into a position that was a masterpiece of ingenious ambiguity. On April 13, 1941, he had signed a non-aggression pact with Japan. Mat- suoka, then the Tokyo Foreign Minister, had come to the Kremlin to sign it. According to the Chatham House War History, in the volume America, Britain and Russia, 1941-46, The Pact was to last for five years, and unless denounced by one of the parties a year in advance of its expiry, automatically renewed itself for an additional five years. Thus, theoreti- cally, the USSR was not legally free to attack Japan until April, 1946.

By making this deal, Stalin set Japan free to attack in the east; and attack she did : In April, 1941, Stalin was still no friend of `capitalist war-mongers' like Britain or the United States, and he was well aware of the alternatives before Japanese imperialists—Siberia or the South Pacific. He cannot have doubted that, by signing the Neutrality Pact, he was encouraging Japanese expansion southwards, preparing the way for a further extension of the war, just as the Non- Aggression Pact of 1939 had prepared the way for the beginning of war in Europe. In each case, Stalin was probably primarily concerned with deflecting danger from the USSR, but he may also have been influenced by Leninist principles which saw in international war the best oppor- tunity for the spread of revolution and class war.

Stalin's bargain with Japan produced Pearl Harbour and Singapore, as his bargain with Hitler had led to Dunkirk and the London blitz. But, in June, 1941, Hitler broke with him, and invaded Russia. (As Molotov said, quite rightly, when the Nazi ambassador handed him the declaration of war, 'We have not deserved this.') Thereupon, Stalin became Britain's ally in Europe; and in the following December, when America entered the war, he became her ally in Europe also. But he continued to honour his pact with Japan, Hitler's ally, who was attacking Britain and America in the Far East. Thus, he was a belligerent in Europe, and a neutral in Asia, linked to both sides at once.

Hitler had an ambassador in Tokyo, and so had Stalin. Japan had an ambassador in Berlin; and another in Moscow—Naotake Sato. When Sato published his memoirs in 1948, he called his book Futatsu no Roshia—The Two Faces of Russia.' This title sums up Stalin's position from Pearl Harbour to Hiroshima; for he was still at peace with Japan when the bomb was dropped with his approval.

Ambiguous as his position already was, Stalin soon went one better. He began to hint to America that presently he might break his word to Japan. According to General John R. Deane, head of the wartime American Military Mission in Moscow (in his book The Strange Alliance),

Harriman was the first American to receive an inkling of Stalin's intentions. In August, 1942, he accompanied Churchill to Moscow to present President Roosevelt. . . . Stalin told Harriman then that Japan was the historic enemy of Russia, and that her eventual defeat was essential to Russia's interests. He implied that, while the Soviet Union's military position at that time would not permit participation, eventually she would come in.

Twelve months, passed. Then Stalin moved again. In October, 1943, he made a firm offer to Cordell Hull, then US Secretary of. State, to fight Japan once Hitler had been beaten. Hull reveals in his memoirs that the offer was 'entirely un- solicited,' and had no strings attached. In Novem- ber, 1943, when Stalin met Roosevelt at Teheran, he renewed his offer; but now he made it condi- tional. He would promise to fight Japan, he said, if Britain and America would open a second front. He found Roosevelt 'a soft touch'—to quote Chester Wilmot's phrase in The Struggle for Europe; for Roosevelt volunteered to give him free access to warm-water ports. Stalin then began to put up his price. Soon he was asking, in veiled terms, for a promise of territory in the Far East as payment for fighting Japan. He first,broached this topic in October, 1944, when Churchill was in Moscow with Eden and Harriman. Deane, who was present at their meeting with Stalin, writes : In reply to a direct question from Harriman, Stalin said that the Soviet Union would take the offensive against Japan three months after Ger- many's defeat, provided the United States would assist in building up the necessary reserve sup- plies, and provided the political aspects of Russia's participation had been clarified. His later proviso referred to the recognition by China of Russian claims against the Japanese in the Far East.

In return, Stalin offered (adds Deane) to give the Americans air bases in Siberia, and the use of Petropavlovsk as a naval base. But the Americans never got the bases (although, if they had, Okinawa and Iwojima might never have hap- pened; they could have bombed Japan from Siberia, instead of from islands in the Pacific). And in December, 1944, Stalin withdrew his Siberia bases offer—`presumably,' writes Wilmot, 'with a view to strengthening the bargaining position of the Soviet Union at Yalta.'

The Promissory Note

On February 4, 1945, the Yalta conference began. Stalin was there; so were Roosevelt, Churchill, Eden, Stettinius, and Leahy, at that time Roosevelt's personal Chief of Staff. It ended on February 11. The day before, Stalin had a private interview with Roosevelt, and presented his terms for going to war with Japan. They had gone up since his no-strings offer to Cordell Hull in 1943.

'As a result of their interview,' says the Chatham House War History, 'Roosevelt and Stalin agreed upon a text defining the gains which Russia should have from Japan's defeat. On the next day, Feb- ruary 11, the text was shown to Churchill, and his concurrence requested. Despite the fact that he had taken no active part in drawing it up, the Prime Minister decided to sign the document, which accordingly took the form of a tripartite agreement' which said that 'within two or three months' after Hitler's defeat, Stalin would go to war with Japan on condition that:

1. Outer Mongolia--where a Communist Re- public had been carved out of China—should stay as it was; 2. Russia was given the Kurile Islands, north of Japan (which had never belonged to her); 3. Russia was given back all the rights and all the territories that she had lost when the Tsar was beaten by Japan in the war of 1904-5. This meant (a) Soviet leases on the ports of Dairen and Port Arthur, (I') Soviet control of the Manchurian railways, (c) the transfer to Stalin of the southern part of Sakhalin island, plus all the islands adjacent to it.

Nor was this all. Most of the promises could be kept only at the expense of China; but Chiang Kai-shek, then the ruler of China, was not repre- sented at Yalta, nor had he been consulted. Stalin feared that, when he came to hear about the deal, he might object. Stalin did not want this to happen, so he 'stipulated that Roosevelt should take on the job of getting Chiang to accept the terms. Roosevelt agreed. According to Wilmot, `Eden did all he could to dissuade the Prime Minister from setting his signature to the terms agreed upon by Roosevelt and Stalin. Churchill replied that he must sign. . . . The Prime Minister had good reason to fear that, since he had been excluded from the negotiations about the Japanese War, Britain might well be excluded from future dis- cussions about the Far East if she did not stand by the United States now.'

It was a singular agreement. To quote the Chat- ham House War History, 'Stalin was claiming the restitution of rights that had been won by the imperialistic methods he decried, and which had been enjoyed only fleetingly under the Tsars—in the case of Port Arthur, for only six years. . . . Roosevelt was surrendering Chinese claims in Manchuria and Outer Mongolia without consult- ing the Chinese themselves. Such an act certainly smacked of the imperialistic bargains among Great Powers of which Americans had often been critical in the past, and which Roosevelt himself had often attacked.'

It was also an ironic agreement. For when the Tsar had gone to war with Japan, Stalin had been a revolutionary Socialist. He and his party com- rades strove 'to paralyse the Tsardom, and to give victory to Japan. Some of his revolutionary fellow- travellers at that time took money from Japan. The Polish Socialist Party sent its leader, the future Marshal Pilsudski, to Tokyo in search of cash, which he got. The Russian Revolution of 1905, that dress-rehearsal for 1917, owed a good deal to the Japanese Treasury.

The agreement made plain Roosevelt's eager- ness to bring Russia into the war against Japan, no matter what the price. At that time, the Ameri-

cans were still in the grip of their fears about a Tokyo Gotterdiimineriing. Having got the British

and American signatures to his promissory note, Stalin returned from Yalta to Moscow and in April he gave the necessary twelve months' notice to Japan that he would not renew his pact with her when it ran out in 1946. On May 9, the war with Germany ended. Stalin's Yalta pledge there- upon came into force. By August 9, at latest, he had to fight Japan—in order to collect on the promissory note.

The Babies are Born

Truman reached Potsdam on Sunday, July 15. Next day, Churchill culled on Truman, who had never met him before. 'I had seen him on several occasions when he had been in Washington for conferences with Roosevelt, although I had not talked to him then,' writes Truman—which seems to tell us something about fhe status of the Vice- President, taken in conjunction with the fact that the bomb project was kept hidden from Truman so long as Roosevelt was alive.

On that Monday morning, Truman goes on, 'the historic message of the first explosion of an atomic bomb was flashed to me in a message from Secre- tary of War Stimson.' On Tuesday, Stimson

arrived • by air, bringing full details with him. Truman called an immediate conference with Byrnes, Marshall, Leahy, General Arnold, and Admiral King—who were all now in Potsdam.

'We reviewed our military strategy in the light of this revolutionary development,' writes Tru- man. `We were not ready to make use of this weapon against the Japanese, although [sic] we did not know as yet what effect the new weapon might have, physically of psychologically, when used against the enemy. For that reason, the military advised that we go ahead with the existing military plans for the invasion of the Japanese home islands.'

Churchill takes up the story. `On the afternoon of July 17,' he writes in Triumph amt Tragedy, `Stimson called at my abode and laid before me a piece of paper on which was written "Babies satisfactorily born." By his manner, I saw some- thing extraordinary had happened. "It means," he said, "that the experiment in the Mexican desert has come off. The atomic bomb is a reality."' Next morning a plane arrived with a full descrip-

tion. Stimson brought the report to him. Truman invited him to confer forthwith, and he did. Mar- shall and Leahy were also there.

It was at this meeting that Churchill agreed to the use of the bomb.

Up to that moment, he writes, we had shaped our ideas towards an assault on the Japanese home islands by air bombing and invasion. 'We had contemplated the desperate resistance of the Japanese fighting to the death with Samurai devotion.' He thought of Okinawa; of the possible loss of a million American lives and half a million British lives in a conquest of Japan. He goes on : 'Now all this nightmare picture had vanished. In its place was the vision—fair and bright indeed it seemed—of the end of the whole war in one or two violent shocks. . . . Moreover, we should not need the Russians. The end of the Japanese war no longer depended on the pouring in of their armies. . . . We had no need to ask favours of them.'

He had no doubt that these thoughts were present in the minds of the Americans also. 'At any rate, there never was a moment's discussion as to whether the atomic bomb should be used or not.' Then Churchill sums up—in four sentences that I quote in full : British consent in principle to the use of the weapon had been given on July 4, before the test had taken place. The final decision now lay in the main with President Truman, who had the weapon; but I never doubted what it would be, nor have I ever doubled since that he was right. The historic fact remains, and must be judged in the after-time, that the decision whether or • not to use the atomic bomb to compel the sur- render of Japan was never even an issue. There was unanimous, automatic, unquestioned agree- ment around our table; nor did 1 ever hear the slightest suggestion that we should do otherwise. Truman's account of this meeting with Churchill

is brief :

The final decision of where and when to use the atomic bomb was up to me. Let there he no mistake about it. I regarded the bomb as a military weapon, and never had any doubt that it should be used. The top military advisers to the President recommended its use. and when I talked to Churchill he unhesitatingly told me that he favoured the use of the atomic bomb if it might aid to end the war.

But there was a third man at Potsdam.

It was all very well for the .British and the Americans to think that they could do without the Russians now that they had the bomb. It was all very well for Churchill to reflect (in his own- words) that 'Stalin's bargaining power, which he had used with such effect on the Americans at Yalta, was therefore gone.' It was all very well for Byrnes to feel fear (as he reveals, in Speaking Frankly, that he did) about what would happen if Stalin were let loose in Asia—now that lie could see how the Russians were behaving in eastern Europe where, in violation of their agreements, they were mopping up Poland, Rumania, Bulgaria.

For Stalin had his promissory note. Roosevelt and Churchill had signed it at Yalta. Now he was coming to Potsdam to present it for payment.

What Shall We Tell Him?

Having reached their agreement about the use of the bomb, Churchill and Truman were con- fronted by a conundrum. It was, What about Stalin?

Were they to tell him that they had the bomb?

If they did that, how much information about it should they give him? Was he to receive some details, or full details, or no details? Should they tell him in writing, or by word of mouth? If by word of mouth, where: at the conference table, or at a special meeting, or in private?

They deliberated. 'We both felt,' writes Churchill, 'that he must be informed of the great New Fact which now dominated the scene, but not of any particulars.' Finally, Truman made up his mind. He said to Churchill (and Churchill quotes his words): think 1 had best just tell him after one of our meetings that we have an entirely novel form of bomb, something quite out of the ordinary, which we think will have decisive effects upon the Japanese will to continue the war.'

Churchill agreed; but he seems to have had some doubts, for he made the following note for the Cabinet: 18 July 45 The President showed me telegrams about the

recent experiment, and asked what I thought should be done about telling the Russians. He seemed determined to do this, but asked about the timing, and said he thought that the end of the conference would be best. I replied that if he were resolved to tell it might be better to hang it on the experiment, which was a new fact on which he and we had only just had know- ledge. Therefore, he would have a good answer to any question, 'Why did you not tell us this before?' He seemed impressed with this idea, and will consider it.

But all these calculations turned out wrong. For they ignored Stalin's Intelligence Service.

In the Room

Stalin reached Potsdam by air from Moscow on the morning of Tuesday, July 17—the day before Churchill and Truman had their conversation about him. He was late in getting there and Truman found out why; it was 'because of a slight heart attack that he had suffered—this was a well- kept secret.'

At 5 o'clock on Tuesday afternoon, the con- ference opened at the Cecilienhof Palace. The fleeting-place was a room with a round table in the middle. Details about that room are of his- torical importance. For here Truman was to have the private talk with Stalin that sealed the fate of Hiroshima. What was it like? Truman describes

The room, he says, was big. It measured about forty by sixty feet. At one end was a balcony. Around the room stood British, American and Russian secret service guards, 'placed unobtru- sively in strategic spots.' At the table, which was twelve or fourteen feet in diameter, sat the Big Three, each flanked by his principal colleagues and by his interpreter. Behind each sat a group of advisers.

A picture taken at the conference shows four- teen men sitting at the table. Churchill (in uni- form, cigar in mouth) is at the twelve o'clock posi- tion, On his right hand is Eden, on his left is a than in uniform (presumably Major Birse, his interpreter); and on this man's left is Attlee. Stalin, puffing a cigarette, sits at five o'clock.

roman sits at seven o'clock.

Attlee's position needs to be clarified, in view of what was to happen later. He sat in Churchill's Coalition War Cabinet from its formation on May 10, 1940, to its dissolution on May 23, 1945; and from February, 1942, onward, he was Deputy Prime Minister. When the Coalition broke up, Churchill formed a Caretaker Government, with Eden as Foreign Secretary, and Attlee became Leader of the Opposition. Then there was a general election. Polling was on July 5, 1945. But the count was delayed until July 26, so that Ser- vices votes might be included. The result was not known, therefore, when Potsdam began. 'In view of the uncertainty of the result,' writes Attlee in As It Happened, 'the Prime Minister, wisely in my view, invited me to accompany him to Potsdam as one of the British representatives. After con- sulting leading political colleagues, I accepted.'

On Tuesday, July 24, the conference ad- journed to await the result, and the British repre- sentatives went home for it. To Stalin's surprise, it was a Socialist victory. (Dining with Churchill on July 18, Stalin had predicted (a) a Tory majority of about eighty, and (h) between 220 and 230 Socialist MPs. In fact, the Socialists got 396 MPs, and a majority of 200.) On Saturday, July 28, the conference was resumed; but now Attlee was there as Prime Minister, accompanied by Bevin, his Foreign Secretary. Neither Chur- chill nor Eden came back after the adjournment. Attlee, therefore, was Britain's chief spokesman from July 28 until the conference ended on August 2.

`What a Bit of Luck I.'

Exactly what happened when Truman told Stalin about the bomb? Truman's own account is tantalisingly brief. Here it is in full, as given on page 346 of his memoirs:

On July 24th, I casually mentioned to Stalin that we had a new weapon of special destructive force. The Russian Premier showed no unusual interest. All he said was that he was glad to hear it, and hoped we would Make 'good use of it against the Japanese.'

Byrnes, who sat next to Truman, gives his version in Speaking Frankly: At the close of the meeting of the Big Three on the afternoon of July 24, the President walked around the large circular table to talk to Stalin. After a brief conversation, the President . . . said he had told Stalin that, after long experi- mentation, we had developed a new bomb far more destructive than any other known bomb, and that we planned to use it very soon unless Japan surrendered. Stalin's only reply was to say that he was glad to hear of the bomb, and he hoped we would use it. I was surprised at Stalin's lack of interest. I concluded that he had not grasped the importance of the 'discoVery. I thought that the following day he would ask for more information about it. He did not. Later, I concluded that, because the Russians kept secret their developments in military weapons they thought it improper to ask us about ours.

According to Leahy (in I Was There), 'The President said later that Stalin's reply indicated no special interest, and that the Generalissimo did not seem to have any conception of what Truman was talking about. It was simply another weapon, and he hoped we would use it effectively.' Attlee in As It Happened says simply: 'I recall very well Truman telling me that the atom bomb had been tried out successfully at Los Alamos, and how he informed Stalin of this. Stalin made no comment, though it must have given him a bad shock.' (From Attlee's words, it is not clear whether he was an eye-witness of the talk.) There is a fifth account, far more striking than any of the others. In Triumph and Tragedy, Churchill writes: Next day, July 24, after our plenary meeting had ended, and we all got up from the table and stood about in twos and threes before dis- persing, 1 saw the President go up to Stalin and the two conversed alone with only their interpre- ters, I was perhaps five yards away, and watched with the closest attention the momen- tous talk. I knew what the President was going to do. What was vital to measure was its effect on Stalin. I can see it all as if it were yesterday. He seemed to be delighted. A new bomb! Of extraordinary power! Probably decisive on the whole Japanese war! What a bit of luck! This was my impression at the moment, and I was sure that he had no idea of the significance of what he was being told. Evidently in his intense toils and stresses the atomic bomb had played no part. If he had had the slightest idea of the revolution in world affairs which was in progress, his reactions would have been obvious. Nothing would have been easier than for him to say, 'Thank you so much for telling me about your new bomb, I of course have no technical know- ledge. May I send my expert in these nuclear sciences to see your expert tomorrow morning?' But his face remained gay and genial. and the talk between these two potentates soon came to an end. As we were waiting for our cars I found myself near Truman. 'How did it go?' I asked. 'He never asked a question,' he replied. I was certain therefore that at that date Stalin had no special knowledge of the vast process of research upon which the United States and Britain had been engaged for so long, and of the production for which the United States had spent over four hundred million pounds in an heroic gamble.

This was the end of the story so far as the Potsdam Conference was concerned. No further reference to the matter was made by or to the Soviet delegation.

These five accounts are all we have. Eden, who was presumably in the room at the time, may add something in his forthcoming memoirs. Two other men could certainly add something : Pavlov, who was Stalin's interpreter, and Charles E. Bohlen, Truman's interpreter. (Bohlen, incidentally, could also cast light on a curious impression about Stalin that Truman recorded after Potsdam— 'there were times when I suspected he really understood English.')

Truman, Churchill, Byrnes, Leahy and Attlee all tell the same story. The last three got it from Truman. So, to a great extent, did Churchill. But Churchill, unlike them, used his eyes as well as his ears. Consequently, he supplements Truman —and thereby supplies the Hiroshima coroner with a further piece of primary testimony. For he records the glee on Stalin's face.

There was good reason for this glee. Stalin had led Truman—and, through Truman, Churchill— to believe that he knew nothing at all about the bomb. It was a masterly piece of bluff. For the full facts about the bomb were, at that time, in the hands of his intelligence chiefs in Moscow.

Fuchs at LOs Alamos

When the Los Alamos test took place on July 16, a group of men wearing dark glasses stood on a hill-top to watch. They were the scientists who had invented and designed the bomb.. One of them was Dr. Emil Julius Karl Fuchs; a Soviet intelligence agent.

The bomb had been built in the machine shops at Los Alamos by American Army technicians. One of them was Sergeant David Greenglass. He, too, was a Soviet intelligence agent.

In May, 1941, Fuchs had got a job at Birming- ham University; and they made him sign the Official Secrets Act, for the job was on atomic research: But soon after he got his Birmingham job, Fuchs turned informer. Through another German Communist refugee, he made contact with Simon Kremer, intelligence chief at the Soviet Embassy in London. He supplied Kremer regularly with full reports on his own work. While doing this, he became naturalised as a British citizen on August 7, 1942.

In August, 1943, Churchill agreed with Roose- velt to transfer our atomic research to North America. British scientists engaged in it were sent across the Atlantic—Fuchs among them. Before he sailed in November, 1943, Soviet intelligence here arranged a contact for him in New York. On a named day, at a time fixed, he was to stand at a street-corner on the lower East Side, carrying a tennis ball. There he was to wait for a man wear- ing gloves, carrying a second pair in one hand and a book with a green cover in the other. The man would say, '1 am Raymond.' Fuchs duly met Raymond, whose real name was Harry Gold (though Fuchs never knew this until 1950); and Gold put him in touch with Anatoli Yakovlev, Soviet vice-consul in New York and their intelli- gence chief in the US.

Fuchs knew a great deal about work on the bombs, uranium and plutonium, which were be- ing produced; and he met Raymond regularly in order to report. Sometimes Raymond would leave him standing in the street after they had talked, go round the corner where Yakovlev stood out of sight, then come back to put questions. In June, 1944, at a meeting outside Brooklyn town hall, Fuchs told Raymond that a uranium bomb had now been designed, and he handed over details.

Later he gave Raymond progress reports and in June told him that the bomb would be tested in July. From that interview, Raymond went to meet Greenglass, who had also been supplying him with reports from Los Alamos. (Although Fuchs knew Greenglass there, neither knew that the other was a Soviet agent.) Greenglass gave Raymond details, plus a drawing, of the device that the Americans intended to use to detonate their plutonium bomb. Raymond came back to New York with his reports, and handed them to Yakovlev on June 3; they were transmitted at once to the Director of Soviet Intelligence in Moscow.

Eight weeks before Truman tallied to Stalin in Potsdam, therefore, the Soviet Government had exact details both about the uranium bomb (which was dropped on Hiroshima) and about the plutonium bomb (which was dropped on Naga- saki).

Nor did their knowledge of the atomic research programme stop there. They had an intelligence chief in Canada, too; Colonel Zabotin, the mili- tary attaché at the Soviet Embassy in Charlotte Street, Ottawa. Zabotin ran a spy network among the scientists working in Montreal and at Chalk River, Ontario; one of the men in that network was Dr. Allan Nunn May. Another key agent of Soviet intelligence was Dr. Bruno Pontecorvo, employed at Hanford—where the Nagasaki bomb Was conceived.

The Canaries Sing

Nothing aboUt all this spying was known by Britain, or Canada, or the United States on July 24, 1945, when Truman got up from the table at Potsdam in order to talk to Stalin.

The first leak came six weeks later, after the end of the war. On September 5, Igor Gouzenko walked out of the Soviet Embassy in Ottawa for the last time. As the cipher clerk, it was his job to handle the coded messages that his boss, the intelligence chief, Colonel Zabotin, sent to, and received from, the Director of Intelligence in Moscow. He handed to the Canadian police a mass of documents, code messages, and other material that he had taken out of the Embassy safes.

To investigate all this, the Canadian Govern- ment set up a Royal Commission, whose report was published in 1946: it tells, in judicial English, how the Russians ran their spy ring in Canada during the war; who the agents were, and how they operated. Fuchs made a full confession be- fore he was arrested, and he also made a state- ment about the scientific data he had handed over.

At his trial, only part of his confession was made public, and his statement was not given at all. But the full texts of both were supplied to the US Joint Congressional Committee on Atomic Energy— which later published, in April, 1951, a 222-page report called Soviet Atomic Espionage (US Government Printing Office; No. 81095). This says about Fuchs that he 'shipped to Russia the most sensitive information, including extensive quantitative data in written form' about Los Alamos and other projects. It adds : `No informa- tion surrounding the wartime Los Alamos centre [was] withheld from him; and the evidence is plain that he effectively placed in Soviet hands the data at his command.'

From these facts about Fuchs and the others who worked for Soviet intelligence that are given in this report, it is as irresistible as a proof in geometry that Stalin's surprise at Potsdam was bogus.

But Stalin, as we know, said nothing to Truman. He merely smiled.

Two Words For Uncle Joe

Was it necessary to drop the bomb? The de- cision to do this flowed directly from two words: Unconditional Surrender.

Unconditional Surrender was a phrase used by Roosevelt at the Casablanca conference with Churchill in January, 1943. His son Elliott relates in his As He Saw It how the President rolled out the words at the Casablanca lunch-table : 'Just the thing for the Russians. They couldn't want anything better. Unconditional surrender,' he repeated, thoughtfully sucking a tooth, 'Uncle Joe might have thought of it himself.'

Roosevelt stuck to it to the end of his life; and when Truman came to Potsdam he brought with him a document demanding that Japan should surrender unconditionally. But when Churchill saw this, he demurred. The words had already caused trouble enough in Europe, where Goebbels had used them in order to stiffen German resist- ance. They must not be allowed to prolong the blood-letting in Asia as well.

Churchill relates how, lunching with Truman on July 18, dwelt on the tremendous cost in American life, and to a smaller extent in British life, which would be involved in forcing uncondi- tional surrender on the Japanese. It was for him to consider whether this might not be expressed in some other way, so that we got all the essen- tials for future peace and security, and yet left the Japanese some show of saving their military honour. . . . The President countered by saying that he did not think the Japanese had any mili- tary honour after Pearl Harbour. I contented myself by saying that at any rate they had some- thing for which they were prepared to face cer- tain death in very large numbers.'

With these words, Churchill struck a chord in Truman—who no doubt thought (as, no doubt, he was meant to think) about Iwojima and Okin- awa. For 'he then became sympathetic, and spoke . of the terrible responsibilities that rested on him for the unlimited effusion of American blood. I felt that there would be no rigid insistence on unconditional surrender. . . .' But Truman could not be parted from Roosevelt's phrase. He.would tolerate a separation; he shrank from a divorce. A document (christened the Potsdam Declaration) was drawn up. The key paragraph ran :

We call on the Government of Japan to pro- claim the unconditional surrender of all the Japanese armed forces, and to provide prompt and adequate assurances of their good faith in such action. The alternative for Japan is prompt

and utter destruction.

Having used the sacred words, the document proceeded to gloss them. It set out a string of conditions with which Japan had to comply— including the acceptance of occupation. But it failed to make plain either what Japan had to do about her Emperor, or what the victors proposed to do with him. Must she get rid of him, or not? Would he be tried as a war criminal, or not? The only light that the Declaration cast on these ques- tions was that 'There must be eliminated for all time the authority and influence of those who have deceived and misled the people of Japan into embarking on world conquest, for we insist that a new order of peace, security and justice will be impossible until irresponsible militarism is driven from the World.' What this meant, the Japanese were left to guess. It might be empty rhetoric; it might mean firing squads. The ob- scurity was to prove important—in view of the semi-divine status that Japan gave to her Em- peror.

Stalin was not consulted about the Declaration —since he was still at peace with Japan and bound by his own signature to stay at peace with her for another ten months. For this reason, he was not asked to sign it, either. But before it was issued, the signature of Chiang Kai-shek, the ruler of China, was sought. Chiang was not repre- sented at Potsdam, any more than at Yalta. Still, he was officially co-belligerent with Britain and America. Therefore, the text was sent to Hurley, the American Ambassador in Chungking, with orders to get Chiang to sign it as soon as possible.

On July 26, Hurley reported back to Truman. Chiang, he said, was willing to sign—on one con- dition. His name must come in front of Churchill's, instead of after, 'because it would help him at home.' So, to please him, the opening paragraph was changed to read, 'We, the President of the United States of America, the President of the National Government of the Republic of China, and the Prime Minister of Great Britain.'

Truman made the alteration, and issued the Proclamation that night from Potsdam. Then he ordered his Office of War Information in Wash- ington to make it known to Japan in every way they could.

Thursday, July 26, was the day of the British election result. The conference was not sitting. It had adjourned on the Tuesday, and would re- sume on Saturday.

Mr. Cohen Finds a Way

Meanwhile, comedy had broken out in Pots- dam. Stalin was having trouble with his con- science. He had been busy, ever since May, with moving the Red Army across Siberia, ready to swoop and gather in the territories promised to him at Yalta. But now a thought struck him. If he did swoop, base persons might impute base motives to him; they might even accuse him of be- having like an imperialist.

To guard against this, he told Truman (says Byrnes) that before he could go to war with Japan he must have Chiang's signature on the Yalta pro- missory note. So far, he had not got it. But T. V. Soong, Chiang's Foreign Minister, was at that moment in Moscow; and he, Stalin, was hopeful that Soong was about to sign on the dotted line. But until this happened, the Red Army could not and would not march. Chiang's agreement would give Stalin a good debating defence to any future accusation that he had invaded China. If there Was consent, there could not be rape.

But Stalin had another problem on his con- science. Suppose he made war on Japan; would this not expose him to the charge of treaty-break- ing'? If he now did to Japan what'Hitler had done to him, would not base persons say that he was no better than Hitler? And what could he reply to that?

Stalin put the matter frankly to Truman. He asked that the United States should formally invite him to declare war on Japan. But the Americans refused to do anything of the kind. They knew what would happen if they did. Stalin would boast, later on, that he had had to send his glorious Red Army to the rescue of the Yanks.

Undaunted, Stalin tried again. Could not the Americans at least find a formula that would give him absolution before he committed the sin?

Truman's advisers seem to have received all this with a mixture of bewilderment and incredu- lity. What was the matter with him? After all, neither he nor anyone else had boggled when he was asked at Yalta to violate his treaty with Japan. To quote the Chatham House War History : 'It is, incidentally, a striking demonstration of the bias of men's minds that no American or British spokesman considered the scrapping of this treaty to be a problem. National advantage, in this as in other cases, altogether eclipsed consideration of international law, the sacredness of treaties, or moral principle. This was true not only of Stalin, but of the American and British authorities who invited and urged him to join in war against Japan.'

However, if Stalin wanted a formula to appease his conscience, then a formula had to be found. Byrnes turned to his State Department colleague Ben Cohen. 'Cohen and I,' says Byrnes, 'spent hours trying to decide how the President could properly reply to the Soviet request. It was Ben who suggested ... ' the way out. Cohen recollec- ted that Russia had agreed to join the United Nations Organisation, set up at San Francisco in April, 1945. Well, the UN Charter said (in Article 103) that if a member-State was faced by a con- flict of obligations, then her Charter obligations came first. True, Russia had not yet signed the Charter; still, she had agreed to sign it. Was not this a good enough sop for Stalin's conscience?

Byrnes hailed Cohen's brain-wave. 'It was late at night,' he says. 'The staff had gone. With Ben's suggestion as a starter, I went to a typewriter and drafted the letter which the President later approved.' In it Truman assured Stalin that the UN Charter made it 'proper for the Soviet Union to indicate its willingness to consult and co-oper- ate with other great powers now at war with Japan to joint action on behalf of the community of nations to maintain peace and security.' (In other words; fight, and it will be legally all right.) Stalin was awe-struck. 'He expressed great appreciation. He should have,' says Byrnes, who adds that this Truman letter 'will enable the Soviet historians to show that Russia's declaration of war on Japan was in accordance with what they like to claim is their scrupulous regard for inter- national obligations.' All was now plain sailing. Stalin's conscience surrendered unconditionally.

The Clash in Tokyo

While the atom bomb was being prepared, what was happening inside Japan? Stalin knew. For he had two excellent sources of information. One was Jacob Malik, then his ambassador in Tokyo. The other was Naotake Sato, Japan's ambassa- dor in Moscow (who had been Foreign Minister, and ambassador in Brussels and in Paris, before he was accredited to the Kremlin in 1943).

At the time of Potsdam, Stalin was mourning the loss of a third source of information from Tokyo. For he had had a secret envoy in that city--though if he had revealed the man's name to Ribbentrop when he made his 1939 pact with the Nazis, Ribbentrop would have been flatly incredulous. This was Richard Sorge. From 1934 onwards, Sorge had been simultaneously Press Attaché at the German Embassy in Tokyo and a Soviet intelligence agent. He had joined the German Communist Party while an under-

graduate at Kiel University in the 1920s (as Fuchs was to do a decade later); and he ranks with Fuchs as ,the most remarkable spy in the history of the trade.

In November, 1944, however, the Japanese had

hanged Sorge, after wringing a complete con- fession out of him, and breaking up the spy ring that he had operated. With Sorge dead, Stalin had to rely on Malik and Sato. What did he learn from these sources? Malik's reminiscences are not yet announced, and Sato's still await a trans- lator. All the same, the question is by no means unanswerable.

When the Americans occupied Japan in 1945, Truman ordered the United States Strategic Bombing Survey to make a thorough investigation of the Japanese archives and to assess the reasons for her defeat. The officers of the Survey (which had been created in 1944) produced a series of reports, as they did about Germany; and these documents—which are now available to the general public on both sides of the Atlantic— disclose, in fascinating detail, the wartime secrets of Tokyo. More than 700 Japanese leaders were interrogated, among them Ministers, Service chiefs and Civil Servants. Two in particular of the reports issued by the Survey deserve the closest attention. One is called The Effects of A tontic Bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The other is Japan's Struggle to End the War. Together they throw a retrospective blaze of light on the Potsdam conference table. Let me summarise the facts thus illuminated.

The Cabinet headed by General Tojo that took Japan into the war stayed in power until July 18, 1944; then it was forced to resign. By that time, the Navy leaders had concluded that the war was lost (they had estimated, before the attack on Pearl Harbour, that Japan could not fight success- fully for more than two years). But the Army leaders were stubbornly hostile to any peace moves. Tojo was succeeded as Prime Minister by one of his critics—General Koiso, a retired officer. The new Cabinet decided to go on fighting in the hope of reaching an improved position from which to seek a compromise peace.

In April, 1945, the Koiso Cabinet fell. Two disasters drove it from office. One was the loss of Okinawa. The other was the notice given by Stalin, after his bargain with Roosevelt at Yalta, that he would not renew his non-aggression pact when it ran out in 1946. Admiral Suzuki there- upon became Prime Minister. When he took office (so he told the US investigators), 'it was the Em- peror's desire to make every effort to bring the war to a conclusion as quickly as possible, and that was my purpose.' He ordered his Cabinet Secretary to prepare a report on Japan's chances of fighting on.

In May, 1945, the report was presented. It said that Japan could not continue the war. (The Sur- vey prints the text in full.) Suzuki thereupon made peace feelers to Russia. He told ex-Premier Hirota to sound out Malik in Tokyo about whether Russia would intercede with America; and Hirota did so. He also told Sato in Moscow to prepare the way for a Japanese emissary to discuss 'Russia's intercession to end the war.' The Cabinet decided that the emissary should be Prince Kon- oye, Japan's principal elder statesman.

Then Malik became ill. Hirota's talks with him got nowhere. Consequently, Sato was instructed to tackle Molotov, Stalin's Foreign Minister, about receiving Konoye, On July 12, the Em- peror (to quote the Survey) 'called in Konoye, and secretly instructed him to accept any terms he could get.' But the Russians stalled. Molotov was too busy to see Sato. On July 13, Lozovsky, Molotov's deputy, told him that since Molotov was about to start for Potsdam with Stalin, his plea could not be answered until they came back. But it would be forwarded to the conference.

The Broken Code

Stalin knew, therefore, when he went to Pots- dam that Japan wanted to end the war. He knew this both from Malik and from Sato. But his knowledge did not end there. For his Tokyo Em- bassy must also have told him about the shatter- ing air attacks that the Americans were now making on the Japanese home islands. He must have been aware, for instance, of what befell Tokyo itself on March 9, 1945.

That night, Tokyo suffered the greatest raid in the history of air warfare. It was made by a fleet of Flying Fortresses. They attacked in two columns, 300 altogether, each with a bomb load of eight tons. They wiped out fifteen square miles of the city. The night's casualty list was : 83,000 killed, 102,000 injured. (Britain's civilian raid casualties for the whole war totalled 60,000 killed, 86,000 injured.) The Americans were able, of course, to estimate the devastation they were inflicting by raids of this kind on Tokyo and on other Japanese cities. But they were unable to do more than make estimates —until their post-war survey uncovered all the details. For, unlike Stalin, they had no Embassy in Tokyo. Stalin was far better informed than they were. He had access to first-hand reports and eye- witness accounts. From these sources, as well as from the peace feelers that he was receiving; he could calculate (as Britain and America could not) whether it was necessary to use the atom bomb against Japan.

A good deal is now known about the messages that were passing between Tokyo and the Japanese ambassador in Moscow. For these mes- sages were sent by wireless; and the Americans had broken the Japanese code. This fact was re- vealed after the war, when the diaries of the late James Forrestal, US Navy Secretary from 1944 to 1949, were published. Forrestal gives some of them. Others are given in the British war history, quoting US and Japanese sources. But the accounts are curiously incomplete. There is much obscurity, also, about the dates and the times when they were received.

They show, however, that while Japan was anxious for peace talks, the words 'unconditional surrender' stuck in her throat. On July 24; the day that Potsdam adjourned, Sato got a message from his Foreign Minister which said, '. . . it is desired that through the good offices of the Soviet Union, a peace be brought about that is not the so-called unconditional surrender demanded by the enemy.' This message urged Sato once more to try to arrange a Moscow interview for Konoye. On July 26 came the Potsdam Declaration.

`A Thousand Years of Regret'

Then an odd thing happened. Forrestal—who had been reading the intercepts in Washington —flew to Europe. He left on July 27, dined that night in Paris, arrived next day in' Potsdam. He came uninvited, says the editor of his Diaries. At 10.15 p.m. on Saturday, July 28, the conference was resumed. But now Attlee was there as Prime Minister, with Bevin beside him. It began, says Truman, with an announcement from Stalin that the Soviet delegation had received a message from Sato in Moscow. Stalin's interpreter read out the message—a further plea to Russia to receive Konoye. Then Stalin said the answer would be in the negative. Truman adds, 'I thanked Marshal Stalin.'

Japan had made no formal reply to the Potsdam Declaration. But on July 28, says Truman, 'Our radio monitors reported that Radio Tokyo had re- affirmed the Japanese Government's determina- tion to tight. Our proclamation had been referred to as "unworthy of consideration," "absurd," and "presumptuous." ' , Next day, Sunday, Forrestal went (as his Diaries record) to see Bevin. '1 asked him a question abOut the Emperor in Japan, whether we thought we ought to insist on the destruction of the Emperor concept along with the surrender. He hesitated, and said this question would require a bit of thinking, but he was inclined to feel there was no sense in destroying the instrument through which one might have to deal in order to effectively con- trol Japan.' Bevin went on that it might have been far better not to have destroyed the institution of the Kaiser after the last war; 'we might not have had this one if we hadn't done so.'

On Thursday, August 2, the conference broke up. There was still no reply from Japan. The bomb was about to drop. Then, on that day (as the British war history reveals) Tokyo made its final appeal. Sato in Moscow got a telegram from Togo.

It said : The battle situation has become acute. There are only a few days left. . . . Efforts will be made to gather opinions from the various quar- ters regarding definite terms. (For this, it is our intention to make the Potsdam Three-Power Declaration the basis of the study regarding those terms.) . .

It is requested that further efforts be exerted to somehow make the Soviet Union enthusiastic over the special envoy. . . . Since the loss of one day relative to this present matter may result in a thousand years of regret, it is requested that you immediately have a talk with Molotov. For the first time, in fact, Japan was ready to talk on the basis of Potsdam. But it was too late. Stalin and Molotov were still in Berlin. They did not return to Moscow until August 6, the day of Hiroshima.

Stalin Beats the Gun

At 5 o'clock in the afternoon of August 8, Sato went to the Kremlin; and Molotov saw him at last. Molotov handed him Russia's declaration of war. The Red Army would march next day.

Next day, the atom bomb was dropped on Nagasaki. Next day, also, Malik went to the Foreign Office in Tokyo, and presented the war declaration to Togo. When he did so, Togo told him that Japan had, offered to surrender on the Potsdam terms. It made no difference. The Red Army marched all the same. It entered Manchuria, took Port Arthur, Dairen, the Kuriles, every one of the areas named in the Yalta promissory note. Stalin was in such a hurry to cash the note_that he did not even wait (as he had said at Potsdam he would) for Chiang to countersign. For Chiang did so only on August 14, the day that Japan gave up. By that time Stalin was already in possession. Like Mussolini invading France in 1940, Stalin had waited until the penultimate second. He was ready to fight only when the way had been made clear for him by Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He had dupedithe Japanese pp to the last moment.

Stalin's swoop was saluted by his newspapers in Britain, France and Italy in words that need to be recalled. On the morning after Hiroshima, every London newspaper presented the news with horror—except one. The Daily Worker called for more atom bombs on Japan. It said on its front page : 'The employment of the new weapon on a substantial scale should expedite the surren- der of Japan.' On August 8, the eve of Nagasaki, it printed a cartoon that showed a bomber squad- dron labelled 'Surrender Or Die' dropping a swarm of missiles labelled 'Atomic Bombs' on a blazing target labelled 'Japan.' On August 11, after Japan had accepted the Potsdam terms, it said, 'For the peoples of the world, this is marvellous and inspir- ing news which will be greeted with intense joy in all democratic lands. . .

On August 14, the Daily Worker banner line read `DAPS STILL TRYING TO HAGGLE.' Its leading article criticised Britain and America for allowing this to happen, and went on : 'There was no official hint of the length of delay that the Japanese -are to be allowed before the full force of Allied power—including the atom bomb—is loosed against them in a blow intended to be final.'

Hindsight

The Potsdam decision must be judged on the basis of the facts as they were known to Britain, America and Russia at that time. On that basis, it is hard to see any ground on which either Britain or America can be criticised for anything that they said or did up to the time the ultimatum was issued on July 26: In order to reach a verdict on what happened afterwards, it is necessary to have the answer to this question :

Did either America or Britain know about the message sent from Tokyo to the Japanese Ambas- sador in Moscow on August 2 which indicated, for the first time, that Japan might talk on the basis of the Potsdam terms?

Previous messages had been intercepted by the Americans (as Forrestal's Diaries disclose). Was this one intercepted? If it was, what became of the intercept? The official British war history says : 'Unless the cipher had been changed in the interval, or there was some technical failure, Washington presumably received the message. Whether or not the translation reached any of the American authorities then in Europe, it is impossible to say. The Potsdam Conference broke up on the 2nd, and the President, Stimson, Byrnes and Forrestal himself were all on the move. It would have been an awkward, though doubtless not an impossible moment to convene a meet- ing.'

It must be added, in fairness, that the author goes on : 'But in any case even "the intention to make the Potsdam Three-Power Declaration the basis of the study regarding . . . terms" could have made no difference. The Western Allies were bound to the formula of unconditional surrender, and this message—the farthest the peace party could go—offered no particular hope, following Suzuki's open disregard of the Potsdam Declara- tion, that the Japanese would accept that formula.'

Perhaps not. All the same, it might have been worth trying to find out.

Two more pieces can be fitted into the Hiro- shima jigsaw. One has been supplied by Attlee. Writing in the Observer, he says, knew nothing whatever about the genetic effects of an atomic explosion. I knew nothing about fall-out and all the rest of what emerged after Hiroshima. As far as I know, President Truman, Sir Winston Churchill and Sir John Anderson knew nothing of these things.'

Then Attlee asks three highly pertinent ques- tions. They are: Did the scientists know? If so, did they warn the President? Or did they not know about the long-range effects of Mont' splitting?

Until those questions are answered, the last word on Hiroshima must be the verdict of the twelve men, all of them civilians, who compiled the volume called Japan's Struggle to End the Wilt for the US Strategic Bombing Survey. It is as follows : Based on a detailed investigation of all the facts and supported by the testimony of the sur.. viving Japanese leaders involved, it is the Survey's opinion that certainly prior to 31 December 1945, and in all probability prior to 1 November 1945, Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had, not entered the war, and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated.

There was only one beneficiary of Hiroshima. That was Stalin.