Measures for Progress: A History of the National Bureau of Standards

428 THE NEW WORLD OF SCiENCE (1946-51)
The Truman Doctrine, announced on March 12, 1947, promised sup-
port to free nations resisting pressures from Communism, and a month
later the phrase "cold war" was born. The aftermath of World War II was
not to be depression but cold war. Out on Connecticut Avenue, Bureau
reports echoed the national tension as it prefaced its plans for research with
such phrases as "if war comes again," "in the event of any future emergency,"
"in time of emergency," and described some of its continuing programs as
"the difference between obliteration and survival." 2
A reluctant Nation delayed action on the Truman Doctrine until
the fall of Czechoslovakia under Communist domination in February 1948,
Russia's menace of Finland, the impasse marked by the Berlin airlift, and
the threat of Communist Party takeovers in France and Italy. Russian
aggression, aided by hunger, poverty, desperation, and chaos around the
globe, could be contained only by long-range economic aid. Under mount-
ing pressure, Congress adopted the Marshall Plan on April 2, 1948, to bolster
the economies of Turkey and all the European countries outside the Iron
Curtain. It called for an initial expenditure of $17 billion over approximately
4 years.
As the economies of the Western European nations swung upward
under the Marshall Plan, containment became policy. The cold war was
joined upon the signing of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO)
in March 1949, as 10 nations of northwestern Europe, Canada, and the
United States agreed to joint action should any one of them be .attacked
by Russia. In August of that same year the Marshall Plan received a
serious setback when, despite $2 billion in aid, Chiang Kai-shek's nation
fell to the Chinese Communist armies.
The cold war took still another turn for the worse. Some American
scientists had predicted that Russia would not have an atomic bomb before
1952 or 1953. Others hazarded dates as late as 1956 or even 1960. But
Stalin had expressed no surprise when at Potsdam he was first told of the
event that had occurred at Alamogordo; Russian scientists may well have
begun their study of the bomb as early as 1941, and certainly were at work
by 1943, assisted by the knowledge that England and the United States were
seriously engaged and, later, by acquisition of engineering designs of the
structures raised in Britain and at Oak Ridge, Hanford, and Los Alamos.
On September 23, 1949, 6 weeks after the actual event, the President an-
nounced the explosion of an atomic device in the U.S.S.R.
The cold war thus became a question of coexistence—a nebulous,
uneasy way of life, shaped by the spectre of annihilation and made even
more frightening by Truman's decision on January 31, 1950, to resume
development of the hydrogen or fusion bomb. The Russians had dupli-
NBS Annual Report 1947, pp. xiv, xv; Annual Report 1949, P. 49.