Even the most persuasive document in the world might however have failed to achieve this in view of the superimposition of the proclamation, at an interval of only a week, on the news that the Soviet union had achieved an atomic bomb. The device had in fact been exploded in late August. It was similar to the bomb which the Americans had exploded at Alamogordo four years and one month previously. The monopoly had been short-lived. The Russian bomb was between three and six years in advance of Washington intelligence expectations. Its early arrival aroused public suspicion that it had been assisted by Soviet spying penetration of United States establishments. The suspicion was to some extent well-founded, though it was in fact the British defector Fuchs who had done most to help the Russians. It created a more fertile soil for the start of McCarthy’s campaign five months later.
It also created strong pressure for the stepping up both of America’s nuclear armament and of its conventional defence. In the former case the result was an immediate decision to increase the stockpile of atomic bombs, followed by Truman’s more reluctant decision, taken in the following January, to begin work on the thermo-nuclear or hydrogen bomb. He had a three to two recommendation against from his Atomic Energy Commissioners. The majority of three believed that the destructive qualities of the new bomb—perhaps a hundred times those of the A-bomb—would be too great to make its possession, let alone its use, acceptable. But a special committee of the National Security Council, composed of the Secretary of State, the Secretary of Defense and Lilienthal, reported by a slightly less clear two to one in favour of going ahead. Truman was finally persuaded to give his approval by the argument that the Russians could and would make their own H-bomb. The Americans had their bomb by 1952. The Russians had theirs in 1955. So the nuclear race was firmly launched.
The end of the American nuclear monopoly also meant the end of four years of a relatively relaxed approach to conventional military strength in the United States. This change came at an unfortunate time for Truman. Major politico-military decisions he made with firmness and even wisdom. But with the internal organization of defence he never had a felicitous touch. ‘The disorder in military policy,’ Robert Donovan has written harshly but not without justification, ‘had its origins in Truman’s first term, and reached a climax in the second.’3 This was mainly because of unfortunate Cabinet dispositions, which accentuated what would in any event have been a bitter Navy rearguard action against what it regarded as the depredations of the Air Force, part of the Army until the National Security Act of 1947, but from that date a fully-fledged service. This was a botched act. It was supposed to unify the services, and did indeed create the office of Secretary of Defense. But it did so in such an attenuated form as to make unity almost meaningless. The Secretaries of the individual services (their number paradoxically swollen from two to three by the establishment of an independent air force) retained their existence and most of their prerogatives, while the new Secretary of Defense was given neither adequate staff nor effective power.
James Forrestal was largely responsible for this. He came late into Roosevelt’s Cabinet, but was its only member to survive deep into the Truman administration. A former head of the Wall Street firm of Dillon, Read, he was a tense, able man. From 1944 to 1947 he was Secretary of the Navy. As such he effectively resisted a National Security Bill in a form which would have given real power to the head of the Pentagon. Having made a shell of the office of Secretary of Defense he was then appointed to occupy it. The result, not unnaturally, was that he became more tense and increasingly frustrated. He ostensibly stood back from Truman’s 1948 campaign and made it dangerously clear that he believed in a Dewey victory. On March 3rd, 1949, Truman sacked him, partly because General Vaughan, the White House joker who occasionally indulged in more serious pursuits, harped on his disloyalty, and partly because his behaviour was becoming increasingly irrational. Ten weeks later Forrestal committed suicide.
In his place Truman appointed Louis Johnson, who had a claim on his loyalty as the 1948 chairman of the Democratic Finance Committee. He had not raised many dollars before the result, but he had at least tried. He was a lawyer from Clarksburg, West Virginia, who had first made a political impact as national commander of the American Legion in 1932-3. He became Assistant Secretary of War in 1937, but flounced out in 1940 when Roosevelt failed to promote him and brought in the Republican Stimson as Secretary. Johnson was a committed Democrat but a very conservative one. However his greatest commitment was to his own political advancement. He quickly made it clear that his principal intent was to use the Department of Defense as a stepping stone to the Democratic nomination in 1952. As Truman’s own intentions for that year were unannounced this was not the best way of underpinning his relations with the President and his staff. He also began a running feud with Dean Acheson, confident that on most aspects of foreign policy he knew more than did the Secretary of State. By dismissing Forrestal and appointing Johnson Truman had replaced a neuropath with a megalomaniac.