This text comes from our book, Light to the Nations, Part 2.
It was morning, August 6, 1945. Colonel Paul W. Tibbets of the United States Army Air Force and his crew had boarded a bomber aircraft called the Enola Gay to fly an expedition over the Japanese city of Hiroshima. Tibbets knew his plane carried a new sort of bomb, but what sort of bomb he could not say. Its nature was top secret. To Tibbets and his men, it was just “The Gimmick.” Just before 9:15 a.m., as it was flying over Hiroshima, Enola Gay dropped its “Gimmick.” A tremendous shock followed, unlike any the crew had ever known. The sky was filled with a bright and blinding light. The first thing written in the Enola Gay’s logbook after the bombing were two words—“My God.”
The bomb that struck Hiroshima that morning had a destructive power beyond the worst dreams of mankind to that time. Its blast leveled four square miles of Hiroshima and killed 60,175 people—soldiers, men, women, the old, and children—the innocent with the guilty. In subsequent days, weeks and months, many more would die of radiation poisoning from the bombing. Three days later, the United States dropped the second atomic bomb, this time on nearby Nagasaki, a city of no military importance. Nagasaki was the Catholic center of Japan; ground zero was near the Catholic cathedral. Thirty-six thousand civilians died in this terror bombing.
The bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki had their desired effect. Japan surrendered to the United States, ending the war in the Pacific. The new bomb, however, created a new problem—what to do with such a powerful agent of destruction?
Having learned during the war that German scientists were working on how to produce a bomb by uranium fission (the splitting of the uranium atom), the United States commenced its own “Manhattan Project” to do the same thing. By 1944, the first atomic bomb had been produced in the laboratories at Los Alamos, New Mexico, and on July 16, 1945, an atomic bomb was successfully exploded at Los Alamos. In a message to Churchill, President Truman called the new weapon “the Second Coming in wrath.”
Atomic energy was among the issues the United Nations General Assembly took up at its first session in London on January 10, 1946. The destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki had shown how atomic energy had the power to destroy civilization, and so the General Assembly voted to establish an agency, the United Nations Atomic Energy Commission, whose purpose would be to find ways to control atomic energy throughout the world.
One plan of what to do with atomic energy was drawn up by David Eli Lilienthal, an advisor to President Truman, and Dean Acheson, an American statesman. The Acheson-Lilienthal Report, published in March 1946, said that atomic research should be used for peaceful development of nations rather than war. It called for the establishment of an international authority, under the control of the world’s nations, that would own the raw material (plutonium and uranium) used to produce atomic energy as well as the reactors and facilities used in its production.
President Truman, however, did not submit the Acheson-Lilienthal plan to the UN Atomic Energy Commission. In 1946, only the United States possessed atomic weapons, and Truman was not willing to give up ownership of these weapons, and the raw materials used to make them, to an international authority. Instead, in June 1946, Truman sent a modified plan to the commission, suggesting that the international authority would not own atomic raw materials but simply have oversight of them. The authority, said Truman’s plan, would have the right to inspect a country’s stockpiles of uranium and plutonium as well as its atomic weapons. The authority also would have the power to levy sanctions against nations that refused to participate in the inspection. No member of the UN Security Council would have veto power over the international authority.
The Soviet Union and Poland, however, rejected Truman’s plan. They said it would give the United States control of the international authority. (Secretly at this time, the Soviets were working on their own atomic weapons program.) Instead, the Soviets called for the immediate dismantling of all atomic arsenals and the establishment of an international authority with only limited powers of inspection. Being the only nation with atomic weapons, the United States rejected the Soviet proposal.
Meanwhile, Communism was spreading to new areas of the world. In 1945, a civil war between the Chinese Nationalist Party, led by Chiang Kai-shek, and the Communist Party of China, under Mao Tse-tung, again broke out. (It had begun in 1927, but World War II forced both sides to unite against Japan.) By the end of 1949, Chiang’s government was forced to flee to the island of Taiwan. Meanwhile, on mainland China, Mao set up a Communist regime that was allied with Moscow and called the People’s Republic of China. Mao’s government, like that of other Communist regimes, was brutal. Not only did he expel all Western missionaries from China and persecute religious believers, but his policies led to the deaths of millions of Chinese in the years to come.
While Mao’s Communists battled Chiang’s Nationalists, the United Nations Atomic Energy Commission (founded in 1946) continued discussing what to do with atomic energy. The Soviets carried on their secret work to develop an atomic bomb, and the United States continued to produce its own atomic weaponry. Then, in August 1949, the event that the world had feared came to pass; the Soviet Union successfully tested its first atomic bomb. The nuclear arms race had begun.
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