The Real Reason America Didn't Nuke the Soviet Union

For four years after Hiroshima, only America had the atomic bomb. So why did Truman never use it on Stalin's Soviet Union? Most people assume the answer is mutually assured destruction. The Soviets had the bomb too, so attacking them would have been suicide. But from 1945 to 1949 the Soviet Union had no atomic bomb at all, while American war plans already named Soviet cities as targets. This video follows the people, the plans, and the numbers that kept those bombs from falling during the most dangerous years of the early Cold War. The story begins with the target lists drawn up weeks after Japan surrendered and with General Leslie Groves's memo of January 1946 on destroying any rival's bomb program. It follows the war plans Pincher, Halfmoon, and Trojan, which aimed 133 bombs at 70 Soviet cities, and the B-29s sent to England during the Berlin blockade of 1948. It covers the GI protests in Manila, the rapid demobilization, and the defense budget falling from about 83 billion dollars to about 9 billion. It explains Truman's Atomic Energy Act of 1946 and his refusal to hand the bombs to the military in July 1948, the Harmon report of 1949, and David Lilienthal's briefing of April 1947 on the real size of the stockpile, which stood at about 13 bombs at the end of that year. It then turns to the Soviet test of August 1949, Klaus Fuchs, the preventive war calls of 1950, NSC-68, the Korean War, the transfer of nine bombs to Guam, the dismissal of Douglas MacArthur, and Kennedy and the Berlin crisis of 1961. The video also covers the people who paid for the atomic age. More than 100,000 people died in Hiroshima and Nagasaki by the end of 1945. The people of Bikini Atoll were moved from their home for nuclear tests. American bombing devastated North Korea's cities, and families living downwind of test sites carried the damage to their health for decades. Subscribe for more history that follows the decisions and the money behind the turning points. Was Truman right to keep the bomb out of his generals' hands in 1948, or did that choice simply buy time? Sources: David Alan Rosenberg, The Origins of Overkill, International Security, 1983 Richard Rhodes, The Making of the Atomic Bomb, 1986 David McCullough, Truman, 1992 Nina Tannenwald, The Nuclear Taboo, 2007 Foreign Relations of the United States, 1946, Volume I, Groves memorandum of January 2, 1946 Foreign Relations of the United States, 1950, Volume I, NSC-68 Harmon Committee, Evaluation of Effect on Soviet War Effort Resulting from the Strategic Air Offensive, 1949 U.S. Department of Energy, Restricted Data Declassification Decisions on the Stockpile, 1993 Central Intelligence Agency, Center for the Study of Intelligence, on the Soviet bomb estimate Stephen I. Schwartz, ed., Atomic Audit, Brookings Institution, 1998 National Security Archive, documents on SIOP-62 and the 1961 first strike study Harry S. Truman Library, radio report to the American people, September 1, 1950 ARCHIVAL PHOTOGRAPHS Archival photographs in this video are in the public domain or CC0. Other images are illustrations created for this video. #ColdWar #HarryTruman #SovietUnion #AtomicBomb #NuclearHistory #BerlinBlockade #KoreanWar #Stalin #History