Interim Committee

California State Senate 1956, California 1955/56 Senate Interim Committee on the Treatment of Mental Illness. First Partial Report. California State Senate, Sacramento CA. 

The next morning the Interim Committee met for the first time in Stimson s office. The gathering was preliminary, to fill in Byrnes, State s Clayton and the Navy s Bard on the basic facts, but Stimson made a point of introducing the former assistant President as Truman s personal representative. The membership was thus put on notice that Byrnes enjoyed special status and that his words carried extra weight. 

Bohr s proposal to enlist the Soviet Union in discussions before the atomic bomb became a reality here slips to the question of whether or not to tell the Soviets the bare facts after the first bomb had been tested but before the second was dropped on Japan. Byrnes thought the answer to that question might depend on how quickly the USSR could duplicate the American accomplishment. The Interim Committee s recording secretary, 2nd Lieutenant R. Gordon Ameson, remembered after the war of this confrontation that Mr. Byrnes felt that this point was a very important one. The veteran of House and Senate cloakrooms was at least as concerned as Henry Stimson to extract a quid pro quo for any exchange of information, as Conant s next comment to Bush demonstrates ... 

If Byrnes had begun his service on the Interim Committee respecting the men who had carried the Manhattan Project forward, he must have conceived less respect for them now. Both Stimson and Bush, Conant told Byrnes, had talked to Churchill in Quebec. If, as it seemed, they could be conned by the British into giving away the secrets of the bomb—whatever... 

The Interim Committee was to meet in full dress with its Scientific Panel on Thursday, May 31, and on Friday, June 1, with its industrial advisers. The Joint Chiefs of Staff prepared the ground for those meetings on May 25 when they issued a formal directive to the Pacific commanders and to Hap Arnold defining U.S. military policy toward Japan in the months to come ... 

When Szilard returned to Washington from South Carolina he looked up Oppenheimer, just arrived in town for the Interim Committee meeting, to lobby him. So hard was the Los Alamos director working to complete... 

The next morning, June 1, the Interim Committee met with four industrialists. Walter S. Carpenter, the president of Du Pont, estimated that the Soviet Union would need at least four or five years to construct a plutonium production facility like Hanford. James White, president of Ten-... 

Stimson still quailed at destroying entire cities with atomic bombs. In the afternoon, absenting himself from the Interim Committee discussions, he distanced that horror by pursuing the precision-bombing question further with Hap Arnold, whom he says he sternly questioned. I told him of my promise from [War Department Undersecretary for Air Robert] Lovett that there would be only precision bombing in Japan I wanted to... 

It remained to carry the decision to the President for endorsement. Byrnes headed straight for the White House as soon as the Interim Committee adjourned ... 

I told the President of the final decision of his Interim Committee. Mr. Truman told me he had been giving serious thought to the subject for many days, having been informed as to the investigation of the committee and the consideration of alternative plans, and that with reluctance he had to agree that he could think of no alternative and found himself in accord with what I told him the Committee was going to recommend... 

Truman saw his Secretary of War five days later. The President, Stim-son noted in his diary, said that Byrnes had reported to him already about [the Interim Committee s decision] and that Byrnes seemed to be highly pleased with what had been done. ... 

After the Interim Committee meeting on May 31 Robert Oppen-heimer had sought out Niels Bohr. I was very deeply impressed with General Marshall s wisdom, he remembered in 1963, and also that of Secretary Stimson and I went over to the British mission and met Bohr and tried to comfort him but he was too wise and too worldly to be comforted, and he left for England very soon after that, quite uncertain about what, if anything, would happen. ... 

From secret participants in a top-secret project the two men and their colleagues had emerged as public heroes, the artificers of a military revolution. With the discovery of fission, C. P. Snow comments, ... physicists became, almost overnight, the most important military resource a nationstate could call upon. The letter on postwar planning that the Berkeley and Los Alamos directors polished that last weekend of the war tried out their new authority in it the members of the Interim Committee Scientific Panel—Lawrence, Oppenheimer, Compton, Fermi—set aside merely technical advice to propose a radical rethinking of national policy. In doing so they began to outline the nuclear dilemma as they understood it. 

Oppenheimer had discovered such convictions in his discussions with Bohr, but Lawrence had advised the Interim Committee only two months earlier to build up stockpiles. For a time at the end of the war the reality of the bomb seems to have moved the Berkeley laureate to at least limited in-ternationahsm. There is no doubt in my mind, he wrote during this period, that the best channel of information about what is going on in Russia would be developed by encouraging free interchange of science and scientists. In fact it is the only avenue I can think of that has a reasonable chance of working. ... 

His immediate response was to take his problem to Fermi. Fermi apparently argued with him, consistent with the Interim Committee Scientific Panel letter of August 17, that the solution to the problem of nuclear weapons must be a political solution. Fermi thought Teller was overly optimistic as well about the early prospects for a successful thermonuclear. Not only... 

May 31 Interim Committee meeting cf. notes at Bush-Conant File, f. 100. S. 1. .. World Peace handwritten notes To the Four, May 31, 1945. Bush-Conant File, f. 100. 

The Interim Committee meets to make recommendations on wartime use of atonuc weapons, intonational regulation of atomic information, and legislation riding domestic control of the atomic enterprise (the Committee s draft legislation becomes the basis for the Nfey-Johnson InIQ. 

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