Man of the Hour

by Jennet Conant

  Later that same day, with still no response from the White House on their memos, Conant and Bush huddled with Harvey Bundy and Assistant Secretary of War John J. McCloy, both of whom were close to Stimson, and told them that planning for international safeguards for the bomb had to begin at once. Bush suggested that an advisory committee be appointed to consider postwar atomic matters. They all agreed that the time had come to let the State Department in on the secret. Edward R. Stettinius, a white-haired businessman who had only recently been named secretary of state—more for political reasons than for his nodding acquaintance with foreign policy—had not yet been informed about the Manhattan Project. The next day, December 9, Bundy met with Stimson and brought their suggestions to his attention. Four days later, Bush went over them with him again. But Stimson was not ready to commit himself. It was an exceedingly difficult decision, he said, and demanded enormous care.

  * * *

  Just before the close of the year, Conant and Groves returned to Los Alamos for a conference on the implosion group’s progress. As they approached, they could hear the distant boom of explosions echoing in the proving grounds in the surrounding canyons. The most recent tests showed favorable results, but they were just beginning to experiment with different kinds of detonators. A lot of work still had to be done, and time was very short. Conant was so dubious about implosion’s chances, he bet Oppenheimer that the gun weapon would be ready first. It was a pretty feeble wager. By then, both he and Groves were so discouraged, they had abandoned the idea of using the available U-235 in an implosion weapon and planned to assign it all to the gun bomb, which was as close to being a sure thing as you could get in untried technology. But the implosion assembly was so uncertain that after much debate that spring and summer, Oppenheimer had decided they would have a controlled test, even though Groves was annoyed at the prospect of squandering so much plutonium.

  The New Year brought the first reports of real progress in implosion. In late February 1945 Conant and Groves went to Los Alamos for a comprehensive review of the best design options for the implosion bomb. An ingenious proposal made by Robert Christy, one of Oppenheimer’s students, entailed using a smaller, solid core of plutonium—approximately the size of a grapefruit—that would theoretically be much easier to compress while still achieving criticality. The modifications involved in the Christy design were simple yet promised to produce enough compression for success. When the meeting was over, Oppenheimer, Groves, and the others left the room. Conant sat in contemplative silence, and Teller, who had also remained behind, heard him mutter, more to himself than anyone else, “This is the first time I really thought it would work.” Teller stared at him in disbelief. “That was the first indication I had of how little confidence those in the highest scientific quarters had in our work,” he recalled.

  Kistiakowsky had further breakthroughs to report. Thanks to some very clever engineering and Luis Alvarez’s invention of electric detonators, they had finally achieved the smooth, inward-moving spherical shock wave they needed to compress the core and get all of the explosive to detonate simultaneously. After this was confirmed in a second successful test on February 24, Groves announced the time had come to “freeze” the design for the implosion weapon. Even though the “Christy bomb” design with a solid core still needed to be proven experimentally in the weeks to come, it was incorporated in their thinking. Groves had set a deadline of August 1 for a bomb to be ready for combat use, and together they drew up a schedule of deadlines to solve the remaining difficulties and allow them time to stage a dry run.

  The following month, planning began in earnest for the full-scale test of an implosion bomb. Oppenheimer, who had a flair for the dramatic, suggested the code name for the test project: Trinity. He later claimed the choice was inspired by one of John Donne’s Holy Sonnets: the fourteenth, about death and the resurrection, or possibly another favorite poem that opens, “Batter my heart, three-person’d God.” Oppenheimer was already thinking ahead: to their place in history, or perhaps a special corner of hell. So much of their work seemed macabre, the moral dilemmas about what they were doing grating their conscience like the sand in their teeth. This would be the culmination of all their efforts. If it worked, the tremendous demonstration of power they were planning in a desolate stretch of desert would change the world forever.

  Oppenheimer asked the capable Harvard physicist Kenneth Bainbridge to take charge of all the arrangements for the Trinity test, scheduled for mid-July. He and Groves had already found a suitably isolated eighteen-by-twenty-four-mile tract of land in a barren desert that early Spanish settlers had dubbed Jornada del Muerto (Journey of Death). It was part of the Alamogordo Army Air Base, but far enough from the airfield to conduct the test shot safely; and some two hundred miles south of Los Alamos, which was close enough to facilitate the transportation of men and materials. To be on the safe side, the US Army secured an area four hundred square miles and posted No Trespassing signs along the dusty roads. Construction began on the test site, and Bainbridge selected a flat area he designated as zero point, where they would erect the hundred-foot steel tower on which the bomb would be detonated.

  Because of the remaining fears of predetonation, and Grove’s concern about wasting the only plutonium they had, they came up with the idea of testing the bomb inside a container. That way, if the bomb failed and a nuclear explosion did not take place, they would at least be able to recover some or most of the plutonium. The result was Jumbo, a giant 214-ton ellipsoidal steel tank with fourteen-inch thick walls, which they believed would be capable of withstanding the pressure created by the blast. It was hugely expensive to manufacture and, because of its monumental size and weight, had to be loaded onto specially reinforced railroad cars and then onto a custom-built sixty-four-wheel trailer to haul it to the site. By the time it arrived, however, more plutonium was available, and the timing and symmetry of implosion had improved enough that Jumbo was no longer needed. Instead, it was hoisted up a second steel tower eight hundred feet from zero point, a $500,000 monument to Groves’s prudence. A third tower was built for a pre-atomic test: a practice run prior to Trinity, so the physicists could calibrate their instruments. Hundreds of crates of TNT were stacked on the twenty-foot-high tower’s wooden platform. On May 7, 1945, the massive explosion—the most powerful in history at that point—produced a fireball and sent a mushroom cloud of smoke and dust fifteen thousand feet into the desert sky.

  In a strange twist of fate, the “hundred-ton test,” the dress rehearsal for Trinity, came on the last day of the European war. May 8 was V-E day, but for Conant, like most of the Manhattan Project scientists, the celebration was muted. Still reeling from Roosevelt’s sudden death from a cerebral hemorrhage on April 12, he felt a sharp stab of disappointment that the wartime commander in chief had not lived to see the unconditional surrender of the German army. Back home in Cambridge, he told reporters he would not be making an address, nor would there be anything comparable to the mass rally at Sanders Theatre that had followed the Pearl Harbor attack. “The war is not over,” he told them. Men were still fighting in the field, and they had a long way to go in their efforts to realize Roosevelt’s aims in the Pacific.

  An unassuming, little-known former senator from Missouri, unprepared and unsure of himself, was now the leader of the United States in a time of global war. By all accounts, Harry S. Truman had not even wanted to be vice president, and had accepted the nomination only reluctantly when Roosevelt told him his current vice president, Henry Wallace, had become a liability and the party needed his help to win. The newspapers portrayed Truman as a man of character and integrity. Conant was not sure that would be enough in the present crisis. Roosevelt had been part of the genesis of the Manhattan Project, had personally approved it, and had been aware of the events that shaped its development and the decisions already taken. Truman would be coming in cold.

  * * *

  At noon on Wednesday, April 25, Stimson briefed the new presiden
t on the bomb. Then he brought in Groves, who was spirited into the West Wing of the White House via an underground passage to avoid reporters, to walk Truman through the report General Marshall had prepared on the status of the Manhattan Project. According to their timetable, the gun-type bomb would be ready by August 1. Another type of bomb, an implosion weapon, would be ready to test in July. They forecast that Fat Man would be available for combat before the end of summer. Japan was the designated target. For three quarters of an hour, the president listened to his senior military advisors lay out the facts about this “new force.” Stimson, choosing his moment well, requested permission to establish a special select committee “charged with the function of advising the president on the various questions raised by our apparently imminent success in developing an atomic weapon.” Truman told him to go ahead.

  A week later, Truman signed off on the suggested membership of the Interim Committee, so named because Stimson assumed that after the war Congress would want to appoint a permanent commission to regulate atomic energy. Stimson would serve as chair, with the other members being Bush, Conant, Karl Compton, Undersecretary of the Navy Ralph A. Bard, Assistant Secretary of State William L. Clayton, and a personal representative of the president, whom they agreed should be James Byrnes, who had just resigned as director of the Office of War Mobilization. Stimson’s alternate would be George L. Harrison, president of the New York Life Insurance Company and special consultant to the War Department. Stimson had finally succeeded in gaining approval for the advisory committee that Conant and Bush had been advocating. “Now we can start at work preparing for the many things that must be planned for S-1,” he wrote in his diary, before sending out the invitations the next day.

  When Conant learned of his appointment to the Interim Committee, he told Stimson he “doubted” whether he and Bush should represent the project scientists. There was a “growing restlessness” in the various laboratories, he wrote Stimson on May 5. Many of the men were extremely worried about the international problems arising from the use of the weapon, particularly in regard to Russia, which might be spooked into an arms race if they dropped the bomb in battle without prior notice. Unaware that he and Bush had been pressing the issue at the highest levels, the project scientists were convinced the OSRD leadership was woefully shortsighted when it came to national policy. Some of the Chicago contingent, headed by James Franck, were against the bomb’s military use and were desperate to have their objections taken into account. If the United States were to use this means of “indiscriminate destruction” without prior warning, the Franck report argued, she would sacrifice her moral position in the world, precipitate an arms race, and “prejudice the possibility of reaching an international agreement on the future control of such weapons.” They insisted that the only way to reveal this awful weapon to the world was “by way of demonstration in an . . . uninhabited area.”

  On top of everything, Niels Bohr had turned up at the OSRD’s Washington headquarters brandishing the document on international control he had used during his conversation with Roosevelt, along with a new addendum inspired by the upcoming San Francisco conference to draft the United Nations charter, and was determined to bring it to the attention of responsible officials. Conant thought that it was “essential” they enlist the support of the scientific community to avoid “public bickering” among the experts after the bomb became public knowledge. Unless the administration did something to acknowledge their concerns, confusion and hysteria would fill the vacuum. The scientists had to be heard.

  Conant told Stimson that if he were to serve on the committee, he had two conditions: first, he wanted to be allowed to show the Bush-Conant memorandums of September 30 to a few key project leaders to reassure them that Stimson was relaying their postwar concerns to President Truman; second, he would like some scientists to be allowed to present their views to the committee. Stimson told Conant he was needed on the committee and agreed to his requests. He was sympathetic to his arguments that they could not put off the scientists indefinitely and that the rumors were getting out of hand. In the last conversation he had with Roosevelt on March 15, they had discussed a report from Assistant Secretary of State James Dunn, who was troubled by talk of “extravagance in the Manhattan Project” and that “Vannevar Bush and Jim Conant had sold the president a lemon.” Dunn suggested they bring in a body of “outside” scientists to review the situation because it “might become disastrous.” Stimson dismissed it as a “nervous memorandum” and told the president as much. Still, he had come prepared with a list of the Nobel Prize winners and “practically every physicist of standing” who were backing up Bush and Conant on the project. It was a reminder, he later noted, that it was “always necessary to suppress the lingering doubts that such a titanic undertaking could be successful.”

  Stimson opened the first meeting of the Interim Committee on Wednesday, May 9, by soberly addressing the eight men gathered in his office at the Pentagon. “Gentlemen, it is our responsibility to recommend action that may turn the course of civilization.” He went on to explain their broad mandate, which ranged from what would be said after the atomic attacks to what should be done about postwar research, developments, and controls. Groves, who was not a member of the committee but was invited to sit in on all the sessions, formed the distinct impression he was there “to make certain that the American people as well as leaders of other nations would realize that the very important decisions as to the use of the bomb were not made by the War Department alone but rather that [they] were decisions reached by a group of individuals well removed from the immediate influence of men in uniform.”

  Conant missed the second informal meeting on May 14 that saw approval of his scientific panel, with Oppenheimer, Fermi, Lawrence, and Arthur Compton as its members. Four days later, the committee reviewed the draft press releases that would go out after the bomb was dropped. William L. Laurence, the science editor of the New York Times, who was under contract to Groves, was asked to prepare the statements. They had no trouble with the two versions for release by the commanding officer of the Alamogordo Army Air Base, but Conant thought the seventeen-page presidential statement was too long, overly exaggerated, and sounded “phony.” It was decided Truman should make only a brief announcement.

  Foreign relations and the Russian situation took up most of the meeting, and especially interested Byrnes, who was soon to be named Truman’s secretary of state, though it had not yet been announced. Byrnes had read the Bush-Conant memorandums and took issue with their judgment that the Soviet Union could catch up with the US atomic program in three to four years. Groves also disputed their estimate. Given his full knowledge of the enormous engineering feats that had been accomplished, and correspondingly dim view of Russian efficiency, he thought it would take a good twenty years. As Bush was absent, Conant defended their estimate, asserting that it would be unsafe to count on much more of a lead than a handful of years before the American atomic monopoly was broken.

  At ten in the morning on May 31, the Interim Committee gathered at the Pentagon for the last crucial two days of deliberations. For the benefit of the scientific advisory panel, which had been asked to join them, Stimson gave a short opening speech, his voice tired and ragged. He wanted it understood that he and General Marshall were looking on the whole question of atomic energy “like statesmen and not merely soldiers anxious to win the war at any cost.” He went on to assure the physicists that the committee did not regard the bomb “as a new weapon merely but as a revolutionary change in the relationship of man to the universe.” The project might be “a Frankenstein” that would devour civilization or, if controlled, a means by which mankind could secure “the peace of the world.” After technical presentations by Compton and Oppenheimer, there followed a lively debate about the need for ongoing atomic research to produce and stockpile materials for America to maintain its nuclear superiority; the prospects of international control, with Conant insisting on the necessity of inspection
s; and the problem of Russia.

  At the luncheon that followed, Byrnes asked Lawrence about something he had said earlier in the morning about first providing the Japanese with “some striking but harmless” demonstration of the bomb. For the next ten minutes, they debated whether it would be possible to arrange “a nonmilitary demonstration of the bomb” that would result in the Japanese being so impressed by its destructive power that they would see the uselessness of continuing the war. “Various possibilities were brought forward,” Arthur Compton noted in his account of the discussion, but “one after another,” they were discarded:

  If a bomb were exploded in Japan with previous notice, the Japanese air power was still adequate to give serious interference. An atomic bomb was an intricate device, still in the developmental stage. Its operation would be far from routine. If during the final adjustments of the bomb the Japanese defenders should attack, a faulty move might easily result in some kind of failure. Such an end to an advertised demonstration of power would be much worse than if the attempt had not been made. It was now evident that when the time came for the bombs to be used, we would have only one available, followed afterwards by others at all-too-long intervals. We could not afford the chance that one of them might be a dud.

  The possibility of a purely technical demonstration that would not destroy human lives was attractive, but no one could suggest a way to do it that would be so convincing that it would end the war. A series of bloody, grinding battles in the Pacific had marked the preceding months. On February 19 the invasion of Iwo Jima, one of the crucial final steppingstones to Japan, resulted in a thirty-six-day siege that was one of the bloodiest in Marine Corps history. Despite heavy naval and air bombardment, the Japanese dug into bunkers deep within the volcanic rock, and the effort to drive them out claimed the lives of 6,281 American marines, wounded another 19,000, and killed most of the 21,000 Japanese defenders of the island. On April 1 the Battle of Okinawa commenced, and by mid-May, thousands of American soldiers had died in some of the worst fighting of the war. Though the Japanese Third Army was retreating, the island still had not been secured.III The planned invasion of the Japanese mainland in November promised terrible losses on both sides. Japan had never felt the conqueror’s foot on her soil and would mount a fierce defense. They had to find a way to end the slaughter once and for all. “We were keenly aware of our responsibility,” wrote Compton. “Experience of the determination of Japan’s fighting men made it evident that the war would not be stopped unless these men themselves were convinced of its futility.”