Abstract
Immediately after the war, the entire Manhattan Project fell into limbo. It remained in a generally confused state until the passage of the Atomic Energy Act in 1946 revitalized it with the creation of a new structure, the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC). The AEC officially took over on January 1, 1947. During this eighteen-month period, General Groves presided as best as he could over a sprawling, disintegrating organization. Much to his dismay, he watched the atomic scientists mobilize to defeat the proposed May-Johnson legislation (regarding the AEC), which they criticized as giving too much power to the military. Instead, the scientists threw their support behind a law drafted by Connecticut Senator Brien McMahon, the McMahon Act, which placed the chief power in civilian hands. Congress debated the issue for almost nine months. After numerous compromises, one of which established a powerful Military Liaison Committee, Truman signed the McMahon Act into law on August 1, 1946.1
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Notes
This period is expertly detailed in Alice Kimball Smith, A Peril and a Hope: The Scientists’ Movement in America: 1945–47 (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1965; 1970).
See also Byron S. Miller, “A Law Is Passed — The Atomic Energy Act of 1946,” The University of Chicago Law Review, Vol. 15 (Summer 1948), pp. 799–821
Gregg Herken, Counsels of War (New York: Knopf, 1985) tells of the advisors who influenced American nuclear policy in the postwar period.
Forrestal, as cited in Robert J. Donovan, Conflict and Crisis: The Presidency of Harry S Truman, 1945–1948 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1977), p. 143; Raymond Gram Swing to Ross, September 29, 1945, Papers of Harry Truman, Official File, HST Library
Necah Stewart Furman, The History of Sandia Laboratories — The Postwar Decade (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1990), p. 214.
Lloyd J. Graybar, “The 1946 Atomic Bomb Tests: Atomic Diplomacy or Bureaucratic Infighting?” Journal of American History, Vol. 72 (March 1986), p. 901.
W.A. Shurcliff, Bombs at Bikini: The Official Report of Operation Crossroads (New York: Wm. H. Wise, 1947).
See Richard G. Hewlett and Oscar E. Anderson, A History of the United States Atomic Energy Commission, Vol. I: The New World, 1939/1946 (University Park, Penn.: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1962), for the best discussion of this. Corbin Allardice to R.C. Smith, November 7, 1947; R.C. Smith, “Review of British Crossroads Report,” November 26, 1947, LANL Archives.
James L. Gormly, “The Washington Declaration and the ‘Poor Relation’: Anglo-American Atomic Diplomacy, 1945–46,” Diplomatic History, Vol. 81 (Spring 1984), pp. 125–43. Hewlett and Anderson, The New World, 1939/1946, pp. 478–81.
Eduard Mark, “‘Today Has Been a Historical One’: Harry S Truman’s Diary of the Potsdam Conference,” Diplomatic History, Vol. 4 (1980), p. 320
Robert H. Pilpel, Churchill in America, 1895–1961: An Affectionate Portrait (New York: Harcourt, Brace Jovanovich, 1976), p. 250.
Truman as quoted in Life (August 20, 1945), p. 32; and in A.J.R. Groom, British Thinking About Atomic Weapons (London: Francis Pinter, 1974), p. 25.
Francis Duncan, “Atomic Energy and Anglo-American Relations, 1946–1954,” Orbis, Vol. 12 (Fall 1968), pp. 1190–1.
David E. Lilienthal, The Journals of David E. Lilienthal, Vol. II: The Atomic Energy Years, 1945–1950 (New York: Harper & Row, 1964), pp. 175–6.
Gregg Herken, “‘A Most Deadly Illusion’: The Atomic Secret and American Nuclear Weapons Policy, 1945–1950,” Pacific Historical Review, Vol. XLIX (February 1980), pp. 51–77
David Alan Rosenberg, “A Smoking Radiating Ruin at the End of Two Hours: Documents on American Plans for Nuclear War with the Soviet Union, 1954–1955,” International Security, Vol. 6 (Winter 1981–82), pp. 1–37
David Alan Rosenberg, “U.S. Nuclear Stockpile, 1945–1950,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Vol. 38 (May 1982), pp. 25–30.
Duncan, “Atomic Energy and Anglo-American Relations, 1946–1954,” pp. 1197–8; Timothy J. Botti, The Long Wait: The Forging of the Anglo-American Nuclear Alliance, 1945–1958 (New York: Greenwood, 1987), p. 2.
Richard G. Hewlett and Frances Duncan, A History of the United States Atomic Energy Commission, Vol. II: Atomic Shield, 1947–1952 University Park, Penn. and London: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1969); Cf. Michael Howard’s Review of Gowing in The Times December 8, 1974, p. 38c.
Luis Alvarez, Alvarez: Adventures of a Physicist (New York: Basic Books, 1987), pp. 127–8.
Alfred Goldberg, “The Atomic Origins of the British Nuclear Deterrent,” International Affairs, Vol. 40 (July 1964), p. 418.
Randall Bennett Woods, A Changing of the Guard: Anglo-American Relations, 1941–1946 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990), pp. 405–6.
Chadwick, quoted in Margaret Gowing, “Britain, America and the Bomb,” in David Dilks (ed.), Retreat from Power: Studies in Britain’s Foreign Policy of the Twentieth Century, Vol. II: After 1939 (London: Macmillan, 1981), p. 132.
Westfall interview with Peierls, September 19, 1986, LANL Archives; Margaret Gowing, Independence and Deterrence: Britain and Atomic Energy, 1945–1953, Vol. I: Policy Making (London: Macmillan, 1974), p. 52.
Harold Macmillan, Riding the Storm, 1956–1959 (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), p. 320
Richard G. Hewlett and Jack M. Hall, Atoms for Peace and War, 1953–1961: Eisenhower and the Atomic Energy Commission (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), p. 467.
Lorna Arnold, A Very Special Relationship: British Atomic Weapons Trials in Australia (London: HMSO, 1987), p. 86
John Simpson, The Independent Nuclear State: The United States, Britain and the Military Atom (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1933), p. 143.
Alistair Home, Harold Macmillan, Vol. II, 1957–1986 (New York: Viking, 1989), pp. 53–4.
David Reynolds, “Roosevelt, Churchill, and the Wartime Anglo-American Alliance, 1939–1945: Towards a New Synthesis,” in William Roger Louis and Hedley Bull (eds), The ‘Special Relationship’ Anglo-American Relations Since 1945 (New York: Oxford, 1986), pp. 18–19
Henry Butterfield Ryan, The Vision of Anglo-America: The US-UK Alliance and the Emerging Cold War, 1943–1946 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987).
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© 1992 Ferenc Morton Szasz
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Szasz, F.M. (1992). The Aftermath. In: British Scientists and the Manhattan Project. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-12731-3_4
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