Cold War

temporarily papered over, but no progress was made on untying the Gordian knots that plagued the wartime alliance. Truman sought to improve the Allies' postwar settlement with Italy, hoping to align that country more closely with the West. Stalin agreed on the condition that changes favorable to the Soviets be approved for Romania, Hungary, Bulgaria, and Finland. When Truman replied that there had been no free elections in those countries, Stalin retorted that there had been none in Italy either. On the issue of general reparations the three powers agreed to treat each occupation zone separately. As a result, one problem was solved, but in the process the future division of Germany was almost assured. The tone of the discussions was clearly not friendly. Truman raised the issue of the infamous Katyn massacre, where Soviet troops killed thousands of Polish soldiers and bulldozed them into a common grave. When Truman asked Stalin directly what had happened to the Polish officers, the Soviet dictator responded: "they went away." After Churchill insisted that an iron fence had come down around British representatives in Romania, Stalin dismissed the charges as "all fairy tales." No major conflicts were resolved, and the key problems of reparation amounts, four-power control over Germany, the future of Eastern Europe, and the structure of any permanent peace settlement were simply referred to the Council of Foreign Ministers. There, not surprisingly, they festered, while the pace toward confrontation accelerated.

The first six months of 1946 represented a staccato series of Cold War events, accompanied by increasingly inflammatory rhetoric. In direct violation of a wartime agreement that all allied forces would leave Iran within six months of the war's end, Russia continued its military occupation of the oil-rich region of Azerbaijan. Responding to the Iranian threat, the United States demanded a U.N. condemnation of the Soviet presence in Azerbaijan and, when Russian tanks were seen entering the area, prepared for a direct confrontation. "Now we will give it to them with both barrels," James Byrnes declared. Unless the United States stood firm, one State Department official warned, "Azerbaijan [will] prove to [be] the first shot fired in the Third World War." Faced with such clear-cut determination, the Soviets ultimately withdrew from Iran.

Yet the tensions between the two powers continued to mount. In early February, Stalin issued what Supreme Court Justice William Douglas called the "Declaration of World War III," insisting that war was inevitable as long as capitalism survived and calling for massive sacrifice at home. A month later Winston Churchill—with Truman at his side—responded at Fulton, Missouri, declaring that "from Stetting in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the [European] continent." Claiming that "God has willed" the United States and Britain to hold a monopoly over atomic weapons, Churchill called for a "fraternal association of the English speaking people" against their common foes. Although Truman made no public statement, privately he had told Byrnes in January: "I'm tired of babying the Soviets. They [must be] faced with an iron fist and strong language. . . . Only one language do they understand—how many divisions have you?" Stalin, meanwhile, charged Britain and the United States with repressing democratic insurgents in Greece, declaring that it was the western Allies, not the Soviet Union, that endangered world peace. "When Mr. Churchill calls for a new war," Molotov told a foreign ministers' meeting in May, "and makes militant speeches on two continents, he represents the worst of twentieth-century imperialism."

During the spring and summer, clashes occurred on virtually all the major issues of the Cold War. After having told the Soviet Union that the State Department had "lost" its $6 billion loan request made in January 1945, the United States offered a $1 billion loan in the spring of 1946 as long as the Soviet Union agreed to join the World Bank and accept the credit procedures and controls of that body. Not surprisingly, the Russians refused, announcing instead a new five-year plan that would promote economic self-sufficiency. Almost paranoid about keeping Westerners out of Russia, Stalin had evidently concluded that participation in a Western-run financial consortium was too serious a threat to his own total authority. "Control of their border areas," the historian Walter LaFeber has noted, "was worth more to the Russians than a billion, or even ten billion dollars." A year earlier the response might have been different. But 1946 was a "year of cement," with little if any willingness to accept flexibility. In Germany, meanwhile, the Russians rejected a Western proposal for unifying the country and instead determined to build up their own zone. The United States reciprocated by declaring it would no longer cooperate with Russia by removing reparations from the west to the east. The actions guaranteed a permanent split of Germany and coincided with American plans to rebuild the West German economy.

The culminating breakdown of U.S.-Soviet relations came over the failure to secure agreement on the international control of atomic energy. After Potsdam, some American policymakers had urged the president to take a new approach on sharing such control with the Soviet Union. The atom bomb, Henry Stimson warned Truman in the fall of 1945, would dominate America's relations with Russia. "If we fail to approach them now and continue to negotiate with . . . this weapon rather ostentatiously on our hip, their suspicions and their distrust of our purposes and motives will increase." Echoing the same them, Dr. Harold Urey, a leading atomic scientist, told the Senate that by making and storing atomic weapons, "we are guilty of beginning the arms race." Furthermore, there was an inherent problem with the "gun on our hip" approach. As the scientist Vannevar Bush noted, "there is no powder in the gun, [nor] could [it] be drawn," unless the United States were willing to deploy the A-bomb to settle diplomatic disputes. Recognizing this, Truman set Dean Acheson and David Lilienthal to work in the winter of 1945—46 to prepare a plan for international control.

But by the time the American proposal had been completed, much of the damage in Soviet-American relations seemed irreparable. Although the Truman plan envisioned ultimate sharing of international control, it left the United States with an atomic monopoly—and in a dominant position—until the very last stage. The Soviets would have no veto power over inspections or sanctions, and even at the end of the process, the United States would control the majority of votes within the body responsible for developing peaceful uses of atomic energy inside the Soviet Union. When the Russians asked to negotiate about the specifics of the plan, they were told they must either accept the entire package or nothing at all. In the context of Soviet-American relations in 1946, the result was predictable—the genie of the atomic arms race would remain outside the bottle.

Not all influential Americans were "pleased by the growing polarization. Averell Harriman, who a year earlier had been in the forefront of those demanding a hard-line position from Truman, now pulled back somewhat. "We must recognize that we occupy the same planet as the Russians," he said, "and whether we like it or not, disagreeable as they may be, we have to find some method of getting along." The columnist Walter Lippmann, deeply concerned about the direction of events, wondered whether the inexperience and personal predilections of some of America's negotiators might not be part of the problem. Nor were all the signs negative. After his initial confrontation with Molotov, Truman appeared to have second thoughts, sending Harry Hopkins to Moscow to attempt to find some common ground with Stalin on Poland and Eastern Europe. The Russians, in turn, had not been totally aggressive. They withdrew from Hungary after free elections in that country had led to the establishment of a noncommunist regime. Czechoslovakia was also governed by a coalition government with a Western-style parliament. The British, at least, announced themselves satisfied with the election process in Bulgaria. Even in Romania, some concessions were made to include elements more favorably disposed to the West. The Russians finally backed down in Iran—under considerable pressure—and would do so again in a dispute over the Turkish straits in the late summer of 1946.

Still, the events of 1946 had the cumulative effect of creating an aura of inevitability about bipolar confrontation in the world. The preponderance of energy in each country seemed committed to the side of suspicion and hostility rather than mutual accommodation. If Stalin's February prediction of inevitable war between capitalism and communism embodied in its purest form Russia's jaundiced perception of relations between the two countries, an eight-thousand-word telegram from George Kennan to the State Department articulated the dominant frame of reference within which Soviet actions would be perceived by U.S. officials. Perhaps the preeminent expert on the Soviets, and a veteran of service in Moscow in the thirties as well as the forties, Kennan had been asked to prepare an analysis of Stalin's speech. Responding in words intended to command attention to Washington, Kennan declared that the United States was confronted with a "political force committed fanatically to the belief that [with the] United States there can be no permanent modus vivendi, that it is desirable and necessary that the internal harmony of our society be broken if Soviet power is to be secure." According' to Kennan, the Russians truly believed the world to be divided permanently