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Atomic diplomacy refers to attempts to use the threat of nuclear warfare to achieve diplomatic goals. After the first successful test of the atomic bomb in 1945, U.S. officials immediately considered the potential non-military benefits that could be derived from the American nuclear monopoly. In the years that followed, there were several occasions in which government officials used or considered atomic diplomacy.
During the Second World War, the United States, Britain, Germany , and the U.S.S.R. were all engaged in scientific research to develop the atomic bomb. By mid-1945, however, only the United States had succeeded, and it . It used two atomic weapons on the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to bring a rapid and conclusive end to the war with Japan. U.S. officials did not debate at length whether to use the atomic bomb against Japan. Still, but they argued that it was a means to a faster end to the Pacific conflict that would ensure fewer conventional war casualties. They did, however, consider the role that the bomb’s impressive power could play in postwar U.S. relations with the Soviet Union.
While presiding over the U.S. development of nuclear weapons, President Franklin Roosevelt made the decision decided not to inform the Soviet Union of the technological developments. After Roosevelt’s death, President Harry Truman had to decide decided whether to continue this policy of guarding nuclear information. Ultimately, Truman mentioned the existence of a particularly destructive bomb to Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin at the Allied meeting at Potsdam. Still, but he did not provide specifics about the weapon or its uses. By mid-1945, it was clear the Soviet Union would enter into the war in the Pacific and thereby be in a position to influence the postwar balance of power in the region.
U.S. officials recognized there was little chance of preventing this, although they preferred a U.S.-led occupation of Japan rather than a co-occupation as had been arranged for Germany. Some U.S. policymakers hoped that the U.S. monopoly on nuclear technology and the demonstration of its destructive power in Japan might influence the Soviets to make concessions, either in Asia or in Europe. Truman did not threaten Stalin with the bomb, recognizing instead that its existence alone would limit Soviet options and be considered a threat to Soviet security.
Scholars debate the extent to which Truman’s mention of the bomb at Potsdam and his use of the weapon in Japan represent atomic diplomacy. In 1965, historian Gar Alperovitz published a book which that argued that the use of nuclear weapons on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was were intended to gain a stronger position for postwar diplomatic bargaining with the Soviet Union, as the weapons themselves were not needed to force the Japanese surrender. Other scholars disagree, and suggest that Truman thought the bomb necessary to achieve the unconditional surrender of recalcitrant Japanese military leaders determined to fight to the death. Even if Truman did not intend to use the implied threat of the weapon to gain the upper hand over Stalin, the fact of the U.S. atomic monopoly following the successful atomic test at Alamogordo, New Mexico in July of 1945 seemed to have bolstered his confidence at subsequent meetings, making him more determined to obtain compromises from the Soviet government. Even so, if U.S. officials hoped that the threat of the bomb would soften Soviet resistance to American proposals for free elections in Eastern Europe or reduced Soviet control over the Balkans, they were disappointed, as the security issues raised by the dawn of the atomic age likely made the Soviet Union even more anxious to protect its borders with a controlled buffer zone.
In the first two decades of years that immediately followed the Cold Second World War, there were a number the U.S. confidence in its nuclear monopoly had ramifications for its diplomatic agenda. The fact of occasions during which a form of atomic diplomacy the bomb was employed by either side of useful in ensuring that Western Europe would rely on the United States to guarantee its security rather than seeking an outside accommodation with the conflict. During Soviet Union because even if the Berlin Blockade United States did not station large numbers of 1948–49troops on the continent, President Truman transferred several B-29 bombers capable of delivering nuclear bombs to it could protect the region to signal to by placing it under the Soviet Union American “nuclear umbrella” of areas that the United States was both capable of implementing a nuclear attack and professed to be willing to execute it if it became necessaryuse the bomb to defend. The U.S. During insistence on hegemony in the occupation and rehabilitation of Japan stemmed in part from the Korean War, President Truman once again deployed confidence of being the B-29s sole nuclear power and in part from what that nuclear power had gained: Japan’s total surrender to signal U.S. resolveforces. In 1953Though it inspired greater confidence in the immediate postwar years, President Dwight Dthe U.S. Eisenhower considered, but ultimately rejected the idea nuclear monopoly was not of using nuclear coercion to further negotiations on long duration; the cease fire agreement that ended Soviet Union successfully exploded its first atomic bomb in 1949, the war United Kingdom in Korea. In an about face1952, France in 19621960, the Soviet deployment People’s Republic of nuclear missiles to Cuba China in order to try to force U.S. concessions on Europe became another example of atomic diplomacy1964.
* Republished from [https://history.state.gov/| Office of the Historian, United States Department of State]