Certainly, there was nothing in the behaviour of either Stalin or any other Russians at Potsdam after they had been told about the new weapon to suggest that anything quite unusual had happened. Their plans about Japan were not changed one whit. The negotiations with the Chinese were resumed in Moscow after Stalin's and Molotov's
return from Potsdam. There was no suggestion of the Russians being more nervous than before.
If there was anything strange about these negotiations with the Chinese on something which had already been approved in advance by both Roosevelt and Churchill, it was the Chinese attempt to draw out the discussions. What was behind these delaying tactics has since been explained by Mr Byrnes: "If Stalin and Chiang were still negotiating, it might delay Soviet entrance and the Japanese might surrender.
[J. Byrnes, All in One Lifetime (New York, 1958), pp. 291-9.]
And to drag out the Moscow discussions was precisely what on July 23 Chiang Kai-shek had been asked by Washington to do.
On the face of it, these Soviet-Chinese talks, which went on for a fortnight (from June 30
to July 14) before Potsdam, and for another week (August 7 to 14) after Potsdam, should have been little more than a formality. True, the Yalta Agreement said that "the agreement concerning Outer Mongolia and ports and railroads ... will require concurrence of Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek"; but it also said:
The President [Roosevelt] will take measures to obtain this concurrence. .. The
Heads of the three Great Powers have agreed that these claims of the Soviet Union shall be unquestionably fulfilled after Japan has been defeated.
Yet the talks on the above questions and on the Friendship and Alliance Pact with China, also provided for in the Yalta Agreement, were not concluded—as they were expected to be—before the Soviet Union entered the war on August 8, i.e. two days after the
Hiroshima bomb.
It was the atom bomb that precipitated Russia's entry into the war. No doubt, after the bomb, Chiang Kai-shek would have liked to back out of the agreement with Russia, but it was scarcely possible in view of Roosevelt's and Churchill's firm commitments at Yalta
— and, above all, perhaps, because there was now an enormous Russian army
overrunning Manchuria.
What annoyed the Russians at Potsdam was not the vague news of some American
"super-bomb", but the "Potsdam Ultimatum" to Japan of July 26 demanding unconditional surrender. They claim that they had not been consulted about this Anglo-American-Chinese Ultimatum, and when they asked that its publication be postponed for two days, they were told that it had already been released. This may well have made them wonder whether the United States and Britain were not in a hurry to obtain a Japanese capitulation before the Soviet Union entered the war.
They may have wondered—and yet they did nothing about it, still assuming that the war could not be won in a short time without their participation. And they were certainly going to participate, since Stalin thought the spoils promised him at Yalta well worth a major military effort.
There is much conflicting evidence about the Japanese response to the Potsdam
Ultimatum. According to both the American official version and the Russian (repeated in the official History) the Japanese rejected it; according to certain Japanese sources, the Japanese Government "virtually" accepted it, though it asked for further clarifications.
[The German writer Anton Zischka, Krieg oder Frieden (War or Peace), Gütersloh, 1961, pp. 61-5 puts forward the view that the Japanese reply to the Ultimatum was either
accidentally or, more probably, deliberately mistranslated by certain American officials, Premier Suzuki's "no comment pending further information" being translated as "we are ignoring the ultimatum", the word mokusatsu meaning either "ignoring" or "no comment", according to the context.]
Be that as it may, it is certain that on August 2 Ambassador Sato paid an urgent visit to Molotov in connection with the Potsdam Ultimatum; he was anxious to obtain the
immediate cessation of hostilities and hoped that, with Russian mediation, the absolutely crucial question of the Emperor—not mentioned in the Potsdam Ultimatum—would be
settled in an acceptable manner. Molotov was totally unresponsive, obviously unwilling to see Japan capitulate before Russia had joined in the war. When, six days later, he asked Sato to call on him, it was only to inform him of the Soviet Union's declaration of war on Japan. That was two days after the Hiroshima bomb.
The wording of the Soviet declaration of war on Japan was odd. It said that, since the capitulation of Germany, Japan was the only Great Power wanting to continue the war; since Japan had rejected the Potsdam Ultimatum the Japanese Government's proposals
that the Soviet Government act as a mediator had "lost all basis". Since Japan had refused to capitulate, the Allies had asked the Soviet Union to join in the war, and so to shorten it.
The Soviet Government considers that such a policy is the only one that will bring about an early peace, rid peoples of further sacrifices and sufferings and enable the Japanese people to avert the dangers and destruction that Germany suffered after
her refusal to surrender unconditionally.
As from August 9, the Soviet Union would consider herself in a state of war with Japan.
On that night of August 8 Molotov received the press, simply to communicate to it the text of the Soviet declaration of war. He looked even more stony-faced than usual and, after answering only two or three quite innocuous questions, hastened to end this "press conference". Molotov did not mention the Hiroshima bomb; and nor did anyone else.
Yet the Bomb was the one thing everybody in Russia had talked about that whole day.
The bomb had been dropped on Hiroshima on the morning of the 6th, but it was not till the morning of the 8th that the Soviet press published, almost at the bottom of the foreign page, a short item—one-third of a column to be exact—which was part of the Truman
statement on Hiroshima. The bomb, this statement said, was equal in power to 20,000
tons of TNT.
Although the Russian press played down the Hiroshima bomb, and did not even mention
the Nagasaki bomb until much later, the significance of Hiroshima was not lost on the Russian people. The news had an acutely depressing effect on everybody. It was clearly realised that this was a New Fact in the world's power politics, that the bomb constituted a threat to Russia, and some Russian pessimists I talked to that day dismally remarked that Russia's desperately hard victory over Germany was now "as good as wasted".
The news, that same day, that Russia had declared war on Japan aroused no enthusiasm at all. The idea of fighting another war, so soon after all the losses suffered in the war against Germany, had never been popular. Knowing nothing about the Yalta Agreement,
most Russians now felt that the new war had been forced on Russia, or at any rate
precipitated, by the Hiroshima Bomb. It had, of course, been known for a long time that masses of Russian troops were being sent to the Far East, but everybody felt that there must be some connection between the news about Hiroshima in the morning, and
Russia's declaration of war on Japan a few hours later.
On August 7—the day after Hiroshima—Stalin summoned to the Kremlin five of the
leading Russian atomic scientists and ordered them to catch up with the United States in the minimum of time, regardless of cost. Beria was placed in charge of all the
laboratories and industries which were to produce the atom bomb. Contrary to American expectations, the first Soviet A-bomb was exploded in the Ust-Urt Desert, between the Caspian and the Aral Sea on July 10, 1949; two further A-bombs were exploded within