Free Armageddon Science by Brian Clegg Page B

done”—but instead of using the bomb, inviting the rest of the world to share in the knowledge of nuclear technology so that everyone could work together to prevent the proliferation and the use of nuclear weapons.
    Presciently, the report went on, “If the United States would be the first to release this new means of indiscriminate destruction upon mankind, she would sacrifice public support throughout the world, precipitating the race of armaments, and prejudice the possibility of reaching international agreement on the future control of such weapons.”
    We can’t tell how Japan would have reacted to such a show of strength without actually experiencing the impact of an atomic bomb on a Japanese city—but we do know that proliferation and difficulties of agreement over arms control did follow from the use of nuclear weapons. As soon as the bomb was dropped, the arms race was on, though for a brief moment toward the end of 1945, it had looked as if such action would prove unnecessary.
    The three leaders of the Western powers involved in the development of the successful bomb—President Harry Truman for the United States, and Prime Ministers Clement Attlee and William King for the United Kingdom and Canada—met in Washington, D.C., on November 11, 1945. The three men came up with a proposal that seemed to carry forward the spirit of the Franck report. In it they said that the atomic bomb was a means of destruction previously unknown to mankind, against which there could be no adequate military defense, and which could not be a monopoly for any nation.
    To ensure that this was the case, the triumvirate suggested setting up a United Nations commission to eliminate “the use of atomic energy for destructive purposes” and to promote its “widest use for industrial and humanitarian purposes.” This was agreed to by the Soviet Union, and in January 1946 the UN Atomic Energy Commission was established with a purpose that included “the elimination from national armaments of atomic weapons and of all other major weapons adaptable for mass destruction.”
    President Truman had a U.S. committee established to lay the groundwork for taking the concept of worldwide nuclear control from idea to practical plan. This group, relying heavily on the technical advice of Robert Oppenheimer, decided that the UN organization’s mandate did not go far enough. The resultant Acheson-Lilienthal report, named for Dean Acheson and David Lilienthal, the chairmen of the committee and its board of consultants, proposed nothing less than handing every bit of the atomic behemoth, from uranium mines to nuclear reactors, over to a single, peaceful world organization.
    This was a brief moment when, despite the two bombs dropped over Japan, the world could have stepped back from nuclear brinkmanship. The Acheson-Lilienthal proposals would have turned the atomic arms race on its head. Instead of nations competing to have the greatest destructive force, this American proposal for world peace suggested that nuclear technology should be spread to every country, along with the scientific and industrial capability to handle it. This technology would be controlled by the UN-owned organization, not by any nation-state.
    Any attempt to subvert that central control would be deterred by the awareness that the rest of the world would respond by switching to the production of atomic weapons. This would be mutually assured deterrence, but one where any offender was inherently outnumbered—and the deterrence was at arm’s length, as the atomic weapons did not yet exist, only the capability to produce them.
    This idyllic world peacemaking body was never to be made a reality. Diplomatic relations between the USSR and the West were worsening. In March 1946, Winston Churchill, the wartime British prime minister, who still held a lot of influence and was dogmatically opposed to any collaboration with the Soviet Union, gave a speech in Fulton, Missouri, where the