4. A Fiery Peace in a Cold War, by Neil Sheehan, pp. 77-94

Book II: Inheriting a Different World: 15. A Confrontation and a Misreading; 16. Containing the Menace

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The turning point in the war in Europe, Sheehan points out, was the defeat of the Germans at Stalingrad, which weakened them and made the invasion on D-Day less difficult to accomplish. But Truman "viewed the Red Army as a potential threat rather than as a savior of American lives." And the opening of the Soviet archives and the subsequent work of Russian historians has tended to show that Stalin's "imperial ambitions were limited." He was not interested in invading Europe. But American specialists in Soviet policy misinterpreted Stalin's reindustrialization plans, with their emphasis on heavy industry, "as an ominous sign of military preparations."

When Stalin gave a speech on February 9, 1946, announcing these plans, George Kennan, who was chargé d'affaires in the U.S. embassy in Moscow, was asked for an interpretation of the speech. Kennan wrote a 5,500-word analysis that became known as the Long Telegram, which presented Stalin as "a fanatical revolutionary, not the complex mixture of genuine Marxist faith, cynicism, Realpolitik calculation, and suspicion and cruelty that history has shown him to be." Kennan believed Stalin to be bent on world conquest and argued that Western nations should unite to block Soviet expansion. This was what many in Washington wanted to hear:

Having just triumphed over the expansionist monster Hitler and the forces of Imperial Japan, they seemed, unconsciously, to be seeking a new monster with whom to do mortal combat.... If Russia was a society with a profound sense of insecurity, as Kennan maintained, America was equally so.

Stalin himself, being a paranoid bully, played into this image of Soviet expansionism. Britain and the Soviet Union had invaded Iran in 1941 to keep it from falling into German hands. The agreement was that both countries would withdraw in March 1946 and turn the country over to a new Iranian government, but Stalin decided to keep his troops there and support the separatist Azerbaijanis in the north, which was also where the Iranian oilfields were. Truman feared that the Soviets would take over the whole country with an eye to further expansion into Saudi Arabia. Threatened with war, Stalin withdrew in the spring of 1946.

The next crisis was in the Turkish Straits, the Dardanelles and the Bosporus, which provided vital access to the Black Sea. Turkey had been neutral in World War II, but had allowed the Germans to use the Straits for raids on the Soviet Union. In March 1946, Stalin demanded joint Soviet and Turkish control of the Straits and mobilized a tank force to intimidate the Turks. Truman commissioned a study group led by Dean Acheson; their report, presented to Truman on August 15, "was the first statement of the domino theory that was to so govern and oversimplify and distort American thinking during the Cold War." If the domino that was Turkey were to fall to the Soviets, the next domino would be Greece. So Truman sent a naval task force led by the Missouri to the Dardanelles. Again Stalin backed down.

The next crisis was Greece, where the British had been supporting a right-wing government against Communist rebels. But Britain was nearly bankrupt and in February 1947 informed Truman that it could no longer maintain its force there. Truman went to Congress with a request for funding economic and military aid to Greece and Turkey. Dean Acheson, then assistant secretary of state for economic affairs, was in charge of scaring Congress into voting the money, arguing that "Soviet pressure on Iran, the Turkish Straits, and now northern Greece, where the guerrillas were strongest, had brought Moscow to the point where it might break through and penetrate three continents."

In fact, Stalin was not supporting the Communist guerrillas in Greece: He and Winston Churchill had come to an agreement in 1944 that Greece would remain under British purview in exchange for the Soviet Union's maintaining its interests elsewhere in Eastern Europe. It was Tito of Yugoslavia who was backing the guerrillas, which was one of the reasons why Stalin and Tito would openly break with each other in 1948.

Truman got the $300 million he wanted for Greece, and in announcing it, he proclaimed what became known as the Truman Doctrine: that it was "the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures." This was an explicit proclamation that the United States would support any nation, anywhere, that was being threatened by the communists. It was partly a reaction -- as so much American foreign policy has been since then -- to the "appeasement" of Hitler by Neville Chamberlain in 1938 that had been so disastrous. Acheson, who was an anglophile, also modeled it on the "Pax Britannica" in which the Royal Navy had ruled the seas after the defeat of Napoleon. "The 'Pax Americana' that he and Truman and their associates intended to create was not, however, going to be an exploitative system akin to British and European colonialism."

Mistrust of the Soviet Union also led to a change of American attitude toward the reparations that Roosevelt had agreed to at Yalta: The Germans were to pay $10 billion for the destruction they had wrought in Russia. The British were opposed to the reparations because Germany itself was devastated and obviously unable to pay such a sum. (With reason: The harshness of the Treaty of Versailles had contributed to the rise of Hitler.) And the Americans came round to that point of view:  "By 1947, no matter how persistently Molotov might read off the list of devastated Russian towns and cities, no one in Washington or London wanted to do anything to strengthen the Soviet Union."

But the devastation of Western Europe remained, and George C. Marshall, the secretary of state, argued that the condition of these countries might lead to electoral victories by the local Communist parties, especially in France and Italy. So Marshall proposed what became known as the Marshall Plan: billions of dollars in aid to European countries to help them rebuild "and created an environment in which capitalism would thrive." Stalin recognized the Marshall Plan for what it was: "a declaration of economic warfare." And his fears increased when Czechoslovakia and Poland showed interest in participating in the Marshall Plan. So although the plan was a huge success -- "an act of generosity, if also self-interest, that was without precedent in history" -- it also led to a divided Europe, the one split by the "Iron Curtain" that Churchill had described in a speech in 1946. Stalin began, with the help of Beria's secret police, to purge the coalition governments he had permitted in Eastern Europe of non-communists and anyone who deviated from Stalin's policies. Wladyslaw Gomulka in Poland had backed down from his interest in the Marshall Plan, so he managed to save his life. Jan Masaryk in Czechoslovakia, however, was reported to have committed suicide, but was very likely murdered. And in 1952, Moscow staged show trials in Czechoslovakia that led to the execution of eleven members of the Communist Party. 

3. A Fiery Peace in a Cold War, by Neil Sheehan, pp. 40-77

Book I, Becoming an American: 10. The Test of War. Book II: Inheriting a Different World: 11. Atomic Diplomacy; 12. Spies Inside the Barbed Wire; 13. "The Balance Has Been Destroyed"; 14. The State That Was Stalin

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As chief of maintenance and engineering, Schriever initially clashed with Brigadier General Ennis Whitehead, the deputy for combat operations, by taking initiative on some matters and thereby violating the chain of command. But his skill at his job won Whitehead over, and in March 1943 he was promoted to lieutenant colonel and in August became chief of staff of the Fifth Air Force Service Command. In December, at the age of 33, he was promoted to full colonel.

The success of the Air Corps led to its expansion and in September 1944 Schriever was put in charge of the Advance Echelon of the Far East Air Service Command, tasked with solving supply problems and constructing new airfields and depots. But the European war took priority over the Pacific, and the Navy seemed to take priority over the Air Corps. Schriever was good at scrounging, and when he somehow came in possession of a supply of toilets, he used them to barter things he needed.

When the war ended, Schriever got a good look at the devastating power of the bombers he supplied when he flew over Tokyo, which had been laid waste by Curtis LeMay's B-29s. He was awarded the Distinguished Service Medal, "the highest noncombat award an officer can receive." And on September 24, 1945, he returned to his family, which except for a two-week break in 1943, he hadn't seen for three years and three months.

Schriever's story is interrupted at this point for background on the beginnings of the Cold War and the arms race. President Truman, Sheehan notes, was "much more militantly anti-Communist" than FDR had been, and in September 1945, at a meeting of the Council of Foreign Ministers in London, Secretary of State James Byrnes responded to some stalling tactics by Soviet foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov, "I'm going to pull an atomic bomb out of my hip pocket and let you have it." The joke acknowledged the United States' new trump card in international diplomacy.

The Soviets had, however, already started the race to catch up: "On August 20, 1945, just five days after the surrender of Japan, Stalin had ordered an all-out, no-expense-barred program to build a Soviet bomb." They were able to do so because they already had well-placed spies in the Manhattan Project. At Los Alamos there were two physicists, Klaus Fuchs and Theodore Hall, who were spying for the Soviets, though neither was aware of the other. Another spy, George Koval, worked at the atomic research plants at both Oak Ridge, Tenn., and Dayton, Ohio. His story went unknown until 2007, when he died in Moscow and was named a Hero of the Russian Federation by Vladimir Putin. Fuchs confessed when he was arrested by the British in 1950, and was imprisoned for nine years; after his release, he went to work for the East Germans. Hall was undiscovered until the Venona documents were made public after the fall of the Soviet Union. His own brother, Lt. Col. Edward Hall, who was an Air Force engineer who worked on the development of rocket engines, was unaware that Theodore was a spy until then.The success of Soviet espionage reveals the considerable flaws in security at the time. Fuchs had been approved by the British before it became apparent that the British Foreign Office and intelligence services were riddled with Soviet spies such as Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean, Kim Philby, John Cairncross and Anthony Blunt. But the Americans also failed to do background checks on spies like Ted Hall, who developed simple but ingenious ways of delivering his information to his Soviet contacts.

Stalin made Igor Kurchatov "in effect the Soviet equivalent of J. Robert Oppenheimer in the Manhattan Project," and proceeded to spend enormous sums on the development of a weapon, even though the Soviet Union had been devastated by the conflict with Germany. It was not just a matter of "bombs not butter," but of completely neglecting reconstruction of the devastated country. Sheehan goes out of his way to portray Stalin as a figure of monstrous evil: "after Adolf Hitler, the second great monster of the twentieth century," citing Stalin's "suspicion virtually to the point of clinical paranoia and cruelty to the point of sadism" and his "sick imagination."

He wanted the bomb as quickly as possible, not because he was worried about any immediate threat of war -- relations [with the United States] were only beginning to become strained -- but because he was concerned that Truman and Byrnes, through their atomic diplomacy, might succeed in imposing a postwar settlement inimical to Soviet interests. Stalin understood the political implications of the atomic bomb.

No one, of course, argued against Stalin, not after the purges of the 1930s, although Peter Kapitsa, the internationally known Soviet physicist, did point out to Stalin that an American-style effort to create a bomb "would put too great a burden on the war-ravaged Soviet economy" and suggested a less costly and expensive approach. Stalin disregarded the advice: He rewarded nuclear physicists and engineers with the perks given to the Soviet elite, but also kept them under threat of reprisal for failure. They knew that tried another approach than the one the Americans had taken, that if they "sought a different design and it fizzled, the senior physicists and engineers involved would be shot." He also put the sadistic Lavrenti Beria, the head of the NKVD, in charge of overseeing the scientists. And he enlisted thousands of slave laborers to create the facilities at Arzamas-16, the Soviet equivalent of Los Alamos, and to mine the uranium in Soviet Central Asia. The miners were worked literally to death and the few who survived the construction and the mining were "shipped to the Gulag's worst camps, the gold mines of Kolyma in the Far East, where they died."