The Secret That Traveled to Potsdam

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July 1945: the war in Europe was over; but in prospect still was the long agony of battle against Japan. The experience at Okinawa was regarded as an indication of the ordeal that would have to be endured.

Truman, Stalin and Churchill had agreed to meet in mid-July in the vicinity of Berlin. TERMINAL was selected as an appropriate code designation for their conference. For its purposes were to dispose of the unsettled issues left by the European War and make a start upon the tasks of peace. Provisional lists of the matters to be discussed, charts of the work ahead, had been circulated by the governments.

But the Americans left for Potsdam with an exciting secret--which they kept out of their memos as well as off their tongues. They knew that soon the first test was to be made of the atomic weapon which had been long in conception and construction.^[i]

Secretary of War Stimson, who bore the focal responsibility for the quivering decisions that would have to be faced at once if the test went well, was planning to go to Potsdam. The President agreed that he should be close at hand when the results were known. Moreover, as Stimson told Secretary of State Byrnes, he wanted to learn for himself more about the task assigned to the Army in the American Zone in Germany and in the four-power administration.

His thoughts about S-1 (as the atomic weapon was identified), like those of the President, circled around its possible use in the war against Japan rather than its bearing on the matters that were to be discussed in the conference at Potsdam. Its first great impact was upon the issuance of a last warning to Japan--the Potsdam Declaration--and the ending of the struggle in the Pacific. However, before entering into the lanes along which the work of the conference flowed, we ought to summon the stirring reports that reached Potsdam about the test in New Mexico just as the conference was starting. Having done that we can yield to the temptation to speculate about the way in which these may have affected the outcome of the conference. In that connection we shall be obliged to note what was said to Stalin about the new weapon. As we tell of these events, we may find ourselves straggling from known facts--those conveyed by the reports from the scene of the explosion and in the minutes of the conference--to impressions and surmises.

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