How the US came to make and love the Bomb

Churchill described the Battle of El Alamein in July 1942 as the "Hinge of Fate" ,because thereafter the allies never lost another battle.

The true Hinge of Fate was the allied landings in North Africa later that year when the US entered the war in Europe as a a combatant nation.

This started the eclipse of British global power, and the acceleartion of the decline of the British Empire and the rise of US global hegemony.

Known only to a few at the same time was the effort being made to produce the Atomic bomb by the US with help from German refugees. The result of an agrreement between Churchill and Roosevelt at the Presd.ient's Hyde Park Home on the banks of the Hudson River.

In June 1942 Klaus Fuchs a refugee ( and committed Marxist) from Hitler signed the OfficialSecrets Act and began work on the Manhattan project.

Alan Nunn May was born in 1911 in Kings Norton, Birmingham, the son of a brass founder. He was a clever child and scholarships took him first to King Edward’s School, Birmingham, and then to Trinity Hall, Cambridge, where he was tutored in physics by the inspirational P. M. S. Blackett and met some of the notorious group of spies with who he shared thier Marxist views.

When he went on to work in Canada on Project Manhattan he spied forthe Russians and provided a detailed account of the detonation of the first atomic bomb at Alamagordo, New Mexico, on June 16th 1945.

Donald Duart Maclean one of the Cambridge spies worked in the British Emabassy in Washington from 1944 to 1948 he ws the British representative on the American-British-Canadian council on the sharing of atomic secrets, he was able to provide the Soviet Union with minutes of Cabinet meetings. This knowledge alone gave the Soviet scientists the ability to predict the number of bombs that could be built by the Americans.

When the levels of broken secrets became apparent the US very sensibly passed The Atomic Energy Act of 1946, which determined how the United States government would control and manage the nuclear technology it had developed. Significantly it determined 2 vital points ;

1.Nuclear weapon development and nuclear power management would be under civilian, rather than military, control, and established the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission for this purpose.
2. A strict ban on the release of atomic technology to other powers, even to allies. This served to galvanize countries such as the United Kingdom, which had supplied personnel and information to the Manhattan Project team into constructing their own nuclear weapons.

The Bill was sponsored by Senator Brien McMahon, a Democrat from Connecticut, the chair of the U.S. Senate Special Committee on Atomic Energy whose hearings led to the fine-tuning and passing of the Act.

It defined a new legal term “restricted data” as “all data concerning the manufacture or utilization of atomic weapons, the production of fissionable material, or the use of fissionable material in the production of power,” unless the information has been declassified. The phrase “all data” included every suggestion, speculation, scenario, or rumor—past, present, or future, regardless of its source, or even of its accuracy—unless it was specifically declassified.

This restriction on free speech, covering an entire subject matter, is unique in American law. It is still in force.[1]

The Act passed through both houses of Congress and was signed by President Harry Truman on August 1, 1946 and it went into effect on January 1, 1947.

When the UK secretly attempted to develop their own nuclear weapons, they were forced after the failre of the Christmas island BOmb tests to discontinue research and buy their weapons from the US.

The UK is effectively now a launch pad for US Nuclear weapons - which the UK pay for... another legacy of the treachery of the war time Cambridge spies.

A commemorative stamp honoring Brien McMahon and his role in opening the way to peaceful uses of atomic energy was issued by the United States on July 28, 1962 at Norwalk, CT. The stamp features a portrait of McMahon facing a rendition of an atomic symbol.

McMahon also proposed proposed an "army" of young Americans to act as "missionaries of democracy", which sowed the seeds for what would later become the Peace Corps.

He died in Washington in 1952 aged 48. A wise and far sighted man.

It is against this that once must necessarily measure the US manic desire to repress ownership of atmic weapons technology.