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Bernard Baruch to Leslie Groves Nuclear Disarmament & Tensions between the Soviet Union and China
Bernard Baruch to Leslie Groves Nuclear Disarmament & Tensions between the Soviet Union and China
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Description:

Baruch Bernard

Bernard Baruch to Leslie Groves Nuclear Disarmament & Tensions between the Soviet Union and China

 

“mankind cannot lie idle waiting for the human pyre.”

 

BERNARD M. BARUCH, Typed Letter Signed, to Leslie R. Groves Jr., August 9, 1963, New York, NY. 2 pp., 7.75" x 9.875". Includes Typescript of “Disarmament,” January 6, 1961. 5 pp., 8.5 x 11. Letter very good; typescript has (coffee?) stains on first page, stapled in corner.

 

Excerpts

“I think the last paragraph of your very remarkable letter of August 8th carries the reasons for the action by Khrushchev. Russia occupies a great deal of Chinese territory which the Chinese will always try to regain. Furthermore, Russia has the largest border in history, without a friend on it. It also has attempted to absorb, and not successfully, large territories with an enormous alien population. For many years I have been drawing the attention of the Russians to the fact that sooner or later the Chinese will move in on them. This particularly to the people you and I have met on so many occasions.”

 

“Herewith is a copy of a conversation I had with Jack McCloy and which I sent to him at his request when Eisenhower appointed him in 1960 as our Disarmament representative.”

 

“I still believe that the only possible solution is the one we advocated. The Chinese now say that nobody shall have the bomb. The great difficulty is that even our friends say it is impossible to enforce but mankind cannot lie idle waiting for the human pyre. It can be done but every day it is getting more difficult.”

 

“I remember you with great admiration and most affectionately for your fine work and gentlemanly attitude toward all others.”

 

[Copy of Disarmament]

“One of the great fallacies of our times is that peace, for which men everywhere yearn, may be attained through disarmament.... peace does not follow disarmament; disarmament follows peace.”

 

“I cannot agree with those who would accept an inadequate or faulty plan on grounds that good will result merely from the fact of agreement. Those who would be willing to take a ‘calculated risk’ by accepting less than an effective plan for atomic testing for example, may be placing in jeopardy the security, the freedom, indeed the survival of the free world. Facing the hard realities of the world as they exist today we must place our first reliance on our own strength.”

 

Historical Background

In 1961, President John F. Kennedy gave a speech to the United Nations General Assembly in which he challenged the Soviet Union “not to an arms race, but to a peace race - to advance together step by step, stage by stage, until general and complete disarmament has been achieved.” He also envisioned general and complete nuclear disarmament on a global scale.

 

On August 5, 1963, just days before Baruch wrote this letter, the governments of the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, and the United States signed a Partial Test Ban Treaty in Moscow. The treaty prohibited all above-ground tests of nuclear weapons. Since 1963, 123 additional countries have become a party to that treaty.

 

The Soviet Union under Nikita Khrushchev sent massive aid to communist China under Mao Zedong in the 1950s and planned to provide China with an atomic bomb and full documentation. As relations cooled, the Soviets changed their minds in 1959 and destroyed the bomb instead. In mid-July 1963, Khrushchev announced wage increases for eighteen million Soviet workers including doctors, teachers, and government employees, to remove differences between the rich and poor in the Soviet Union. Mao Zedong sharply criticized Khrushchev in a long article published in the Chinese communist party’s newspaper for trying to restore capitalism to the Soviet Union.

 

In October 1964, Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev engineered Khrushchev’s removal from power.

 

 

Bernard M. Baruch (1870-1965) was born in South Carolina into a Jewish family, but the family moved to New York City in 1881. Baruch graduated from the City College of New York and became a financier and investor. By 1910, he was one of the most well-known financiers on Wall Street. He advised President Woodrow Wilson during World War I on national defense. In 1918, Baruch became chairman of the War Industries Board. During the 1930s, he was an adviser to President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who appointed him as a special adviser to the Office of War Mobilization at the beginning of World War II. Baruch supported a “work or fight bill” and helped American industries mobilize to produce war materials. In 1946, President Harry S. Truman appointed Baruch as U.S. representative to the United Nations Atomic Energy Commission, where he proposed international control of atomic energy, but the Soviet Union rejected the plan. Baruch resigned from the Commission in 1947, but he continued to advise on international affairs until his death.

 

Leslie R. Groves Jr. (1896-1970) was a United States Army General with the Corps of Engineers who oversaw the construction of the Pentagon and directed the Manhattan Project that developed the atomic bomb during World War II. Born in New York to a Protestant pastor who became an army chaplain, Groves graduated from the United States Military Academy in 1918 in a course shortened because of World War I. He entered the Corps of Engineers and gained promotions to major by 1940. In 1941, he was charged with overseeing the construction of the Pentagon, the largest office building in the world, with more than five million square feet. Disappointed that he had not received a combat assignment, Groves instead took charge of the Manhattan Project, designed to develop an atomic bomb. He continued nominally to supervise the Pentagon project to avoid suspicion, gained promotion to brigadier general, and began his work in September 1942. The project headquarters was initially in the War Department building in Washington, but in August 1943, moved to Oak Ridge, Tennessee. He and physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer selected the site in Los Alamos, New Mexico, for a laboratory, and Groves pushed successfully for Oppenheimer to be placed in charge. Groves was in charge of obtaining critical uranium ores internationally and collecting military intelligence on Axis atomic research. Promoted to major general in March 1944, Groves received the Distinguished Service Medal for his work on the Manhattan Project after the war. In 1947, Groves became chief of the Armed Forces Special Weapons Project. He received a promotion to lieutenant general in January 1948, just days before meeting with Army Chief of Staff Dwight D. Eisenhower, who reviewed a long list of complaints against Groves. Assured that he would not become Chief of Engineers, Groves retired in February 1948. From 1948 to 1961, he was a vice president of Sperry Rand, an equipment and electronics firm. After retirement, he served as president of the West Point alumni association and wrote a book on the Manhattan Project, published in 1962.

 

 

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