Man of the Hour

by Jennet Conant

  The project leaders exercised more restraint. Although they were gratified that all their efforts, and the vast expenditures, had not gone to waste, their thoughts were already “wrapped up in the future,” Groves recalled, and whether they could repeat that morning’s performance and soon bring the war to an end. They had managed to prove that the plutonium implosion bomb worked, but that did not mean the next one would. Or that the completely untested uranium gun-type bomb would go off in combat—but that would have to be the first one deployed, as they had used up their entire supply of plutonium in the Trinity test, and it would take time to produce more fissionable material. As Conant put it later, “It was only a matter of probability that the first bombs used would be successful.”

  By then, the reports began coming in from all over. Kistiakowsky came over, covered in dust and grinning broadly. He had been standing at the South-10,000 bunker and said the force of the blast had “knocked him off his feet.” Kisty had bet Oppenheimer a month’s salary against $10 that the implosion device would work and was looking forward to collecting his winnings. The most exciting news was that the steel tower over Jumbo eight hundred yards away had “disappeared,” Conant recalled. “This was unexpected and showed a very much more powerful effect than expected.” Someone with binoculars located what looked like the remains of the twisted wreckage lying on its side. The blast scorched the heart of the test area, vaporizing the main tower and leaving a mile-wide swathe flattened and devoid of life. Later, two lead-lined Sherman tanks drove to zero point and discovered a vast sloping crater coated in molten gray-green glass formed from fused sand. There was no question they had achieved a nuclear reaction. Rabi won the pool: the test instruments showed that the force of the blast was around 18,600 tons of TNT. According to Teller, there was so much uncertainty that apart from himself, practically everyone bet too low, and Rabi admitted that he bet high only out of courtesy.

  Later in the morning, they received more sobering reports. The scientists at the North-10,000 shelter had been forced to evacuate in a hurry when their meter went “off the scale.” There was some radioactive fallout, but the level of toxicity, Conant wrote, proved “not serious.” Still, the question of fallout would need closer examination. They had a network of men equipped with Geiger counters taking readings from the moving cloud. By eleven in the morning, they were faced with a security problem. With the “usual freakiness” of such explosions, the bomb had done little damage at base camp, or anywhere else nearby, but had cracked two plate glass windows in Silver City, New Mexico, 180 miles away. The blast had been much bigger than expected and was exciting the interest of reporters across the state. Groves approved a press release explaining that a remote ammunition dump had accidentally exploded. There was no loss of life, but weather conditions affecting the “content of gas shells” might make it necessary for the army to “evacuate temporarily a few civilians from their homes.”

  Before he left at noon, Conant ran into Sam Allison. The initial euphoria had faded, and the Chicago physicist looked distraught. “Oh, Dr. Conant,” he said, as though just realizing that they had created a weapon of war. “They’re going to take this thing and fry hundreds of Japanese!”

  Conant drove to Albuquerque with Groves, Bush, Tolman, and Lawrence, and traveled on the general’s plane to Nashville, where they spent the night. Groves had counted on holding meetings later that afternoon but recognized that “no one who had witnessed the test was in a frame of mind to discuss anything.” On the way back, while the scientists talked over what they had seen, comparing notes on the world’s first nuclear explosion, Groves turned his attention to the next phase of operations against Japan. A coded telegram had already been sent to Potsdam informing Stimson that the results of the “operation” were “satisfactory and already exceed expectations” and that “Dr. Groves was pleased.” They could now start preparing for the transport of the components of the Little Boy bomb, along with the precious uranium—in two separate shipments, one by air and one by sea—to Tinian, the tiny Pacific island where the weapon would be assembled.

  When Conant arrived at his Washington office the following afternoon, one of the first things he did was write up his account of the cataclysmic display in the desert for the OSRD files. There was no room for any soul searching or regret in his detailed eight-page report. A habit of a lifetime disinclined him from expressing his feelings and private fears, but he had been shaken to the core. A scientist to the last, he logged his clinical observations of the climax of the atomic project, noting only by way of conclusion its potential for global destruction:

  “My first impression remains the most vivid, a cosmic phenomena like an eclipse. The whole sky suddenly full of white light like the end of the world. Perhaps my impression was only premature on a time scale of years!”

  * * *

  I. Aage Bohr has always disputed the claim that Heisenberg gave his father a drawing, and Jeremy Bernstein speculates that it may have been Bohr’s idea of a reactor based on his discussions with Heisenberg and the German physicist J. Hans D. Jensen.

  II. Heisenberg was detained along with other German nuclear scientists at a British manor house called Farm Hill for six months and interrogated about how close they came to making an atomic bomb. Freed in 1946, he returned to Germany, where he lived and worked for another thirty years. The question of whether he attempted to build a bomb for Hitler, or consciously obstructed his country’s atomic program, remains a subject of debate.

  III. The Okinawa campaign would last eighty-two days, not ending until June 22. More than 13,000 American soldiers perished and almost 36,000 were wounded, while 70,000 Japanese soldiers were killed. The highest toll was reserved for civilians caught in the crossfire: an estimated 100,000 to 150,000 Okinawan men, women, and children lost their lives.

  IV. The firebombing of Tokyo on March 9–10, 1945, and before it the bombing of Dresden, Germany, on February 13–15, 1945, are considered to be the most destructive attacks by conventional weapons in history, and have been roundly condemned.

  V. Secretary of the Navy Ralph A. Bard subsequently changed his mind about using the bomb against Japan without some “preliminary warning,” and on June 27, 1945, submitted a memorandum expressing his reservations.

  CHAPTER 17

  * * *

  A Changed World

  The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything save our modes of thinking, and we thus drift toward unparalleled catastrophe.

  —Albert Einstein

  At eleven o’clock on the morning of August 6, 1945, radio stations began broadcasting a message from President Truman informing the American public that the United States had dropped an atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. Speaking in a stilted voice, with his flat Missouri inflections, he explained that the United States had “loosed” a weapon “harnessing the basic power of the universe.” American and British scientists, working under the direction of the United States Army, had created the largest bomb in the history of warfare, adding “a new and revolutionary increase in destruction” to their arsenal. They were now prepared to obliterate every productive enterprise above ground in any city in Japan. The Potsdam ultimatum issued on July 26 had been designed to spare the Japanese people from “utter destruction,” but their leaders had rejected it. If they did not accept American terms now, “they may expect a rain of ruin from the air, the like of which has never been seen on this earth.”

  Conant listened to the prepared statement with a mixture of pride and anguish. The White House announcement broke four years of silence, wrenching him from the clandestine cocoon of S-1 into the harsh glare of the spotlight. He had gone about the grim business of making weapons, carrying the tremendous secret burden foisted on him. He had achieved his objective: providing a weapon to end the war. It would eliminate the need for conquest by invasion, which the president’s top military advisors estimated would save tens of thousands of American lives.

  Conant did not
doubt the “correctness of the action taken.” The atomic bomb would force the Japanese Empire to bow to the Allies’ superior power. The sooner Japan agreed to surrender, the sooner they could start working toward a stable peace. But at the same time, he could not help feeling a certain measure of dread. The bomb’s efficient, deadly effect had been unleashed against the enemy—and it had been a terrible blow. Unless Japan acted quickly to sue for peace, more blows would follow. The components of Fat Man had already arrived at Tinian and were in the process of being assembled. A second plutonium bomb would be ready for use by August 24. Still more were in the pipeline: possibly another three in September and an additional seven in December. Truman had warned Japan that the retribution for continued resistance would be the annihilation of its industrial cities. Millions of leaflets carrying his warning were being dropped over the intended targets, instructing people to evacuate.

  The next morning, Conant read his way through a stack of national newspapers. All of them dutifully printed the official history of the hitherto classified Manhattan Project—complete with his congratulatory handclasp with Groves after the Trinity test—supplied by the War Department. Truman, who had addressed the nation from aboard the USS Augusta as he sailed back from Potsdam, praised the atomic bomb as a technical triumph and a “marvel.” It was the brainchild of many “scientists of distinction,” who had worked together with their British colleagues to beat the Germans in the “battle of the laboratories” and win the race of discovery. “What has been done is the greatest achievement of organized science in history,” the president declared, and it was done in an amazingly short time, “under pressure and without failure.”

  The laudatory language made Conant distinctly uneasy. He did not like seeing his name and face featured so prominently with the weapon that had decimated an entire city in a fraction of a second. The papers had gone to press before the details of the damage were known, but early estimates were that a greater part of Hiroshima had been gutted and the number of casualties might reach two hundred thousand—ten times Oppenheimer’s estimate to the Interim Committee.I “Air became flame, walls turned to dust,” reported the crew of the Enola Gay of the immolating blast. A monstrous column of smoke had erupted forty thousand feet into the sky, where it spilled into a huge, billowy mushroom cloud that hung over what was left of the teeming factory town. The poisonous radioactive particles had not yet settled, but when they did, those within a certain radius who escaped death would be burned, blinded, maimed, or diseased. Conant knew the American public would recoil from these horrors of war. He had seen it happen after World War I: the general rejoicing on the day of triumph, the relief that millions of troops would be coming home, and then, as memories of the suffering attending each additional day of war dimmed, the widespread repudiation of the weapons of mass destruction. He knew how quickly gratitude for victory abated in the face of such indiscriminate slaughter.

  While the front-page stories celebrated the “Atom Age” and the “greatest scientific gamble” of all time, the editorial columns already contemplated the terrifying new chapter in human history. In an editorial entitled “The Haunted Wood,” the Washington Post observed that most Americans responded to the revelations about the secret weapon “not with exultation but a kind of bewildered awe,” wondering at the grotesque science-fiction fantasy they now found themselves in. Out of the wreck of the rational universe had come an invention whose development was driven by a race for survival but now threatened to doom civilization. With characteristic American optimism, Truman had announced “a new era in man’s understanding of nature’s forces,” and predicted the day when atomic energy would replace coal, oil, and hydroelectric dams, but what was really necessary, the Post warned, was “a new era in the understanding of the nature of man, and whether it was really desirable for him to play with such toys as atoms. Otherwise the story of homo sapiens would become, as the late Lord Balfour once said, ‘a brief and unpleasant episode in the history of one of the minor planets.’ ”

  The New York Times foresaw an uncertain future dominated by a weapon with the gravest consequences. “Yesterday we clinched victory in the Pacific, but we sowed the whirlwind,” wrote the paper’s military analyst Hanson Baldwin on August 7. “Certainly with such God-like power under man’s imperfect control, we face a frightful responsibility.”

  From war-ravaged England, Winston Churchill, who had led his country to victory only to be defeated in July by Clement Attlee’s Labour Party in the first general election since the war began, observed solemnly that the atom bomb, “more surely than the rocket, carries the warning that another world war would mean the destruction of all regulated life.”

  The comments reflected Conant’s own growing sense of foreboding since Trinity. He, too, recognized the revolutionary character of atomic weapons and that without a means of control, such unprecedented power could overwhelm mankind. His main argument for the combat use of the bomb had been the need to prove its “devastating strength” to the world, so that warring nations would realize that the stakes had become too high and armed conflict too costly. Most Los Alamos scientists, from Bohr to Oppenheimer, had come to embrace the view that the bomb might bring an end to war itself. There could be no defense against such a destructive force. Once the nuclear threat went from scare propaganda to fearful reality, atomic energy could be used as an instrument of diplomacy in negotiations, and ensure worldwide cooperation in outlawing its military use and evolving peacetime applications for human welfare. Surely avoiding an arms race and future atomic wars, Conant and Bush had written to the Interim Committee days after the Alamogordo test, “must be the prime objective of every sane man.”

  All his hopes for the postwar situation depended on Japan’s recognizing the larger significance of the weapon and conceding defeat immediately. Yet only a deathly silence came from the shattered island. Radio Tokyo was continuing to exhort people to defend the honor of their country and keep fighting. With so much riding on the bomb providing the necessary “shock” to compel the enemy’s capitulation, Conant could hardly tear himself away from the radio. The strain of waiting was almost unbearable. If Japan did not respond soon, did not accept the Potsdam terms of unconditional surrender, the war would drag on to the bitter end, and any possibility of the weapon becoming an aid to peace would go up in smoke.

  On August 8 Russia kept its promise to enter the war against Japan, sending a million troops into Manchuria to drive back the once-mighty Kwantung Army. It had long been believed that Soviet assistance in the Pacific would shorten the war, but it took Truman’s whisper of a new weapon at Potsdam to seal their cooperation. The expert opinion was that the combination of Russian belligerency and the bomb would convince the Japanese that they were completely outmatched and enable the end-of-war advocates in the Suzuki government to begin negotiations. On Capitol Hill, there were complaints about Stalin’s self-serving maneuver, timing his “Joey-come-lately” entrance after America’s show of power and just before Japan’s imminent collapse. Although he shared their cynical view of Moscow, Conant was counting on Russia’s declaration to finally make the Japanese military leaders accept the humiliation of defeat. In view of the “hopeless odds,” reported the Times, Washington was predicting an “early peace.” The end was near.

  Conant was not prepared for the terrible swiftness of the assault on Nagasaki. The implosion bomb disemboweled the imperial port city on August 9, digging a huge crater and destroying more than a square mile. As expected, the improved Fat Man bomb created a bigger blast than Little Boy—twenty-one thousand tons of TNT versus fifteen thousand—immediately rendering its predecessor obsolete. The death toll and magnitude of the damage would have been considerably greater except that dense fog hid the naval base, causing the bomb to be dropped two miles wide of its target. Twelve hours later, Nagasaki was still a mass of flames, a scorched ruin covered by a dense cloud of acrid smoke. The tall, black pyre, visible to reconnaissance pilots two hundred miles away,
was thought to be the pulverized remains of the Mitsubishi Steel and Arms Works that had made the torpedoes used in the Pearl Harbor attack. According to Japanese news reports, the jammed shipbuilding yards and warehouses “crumbled and disintegrated under the devastating effect of the atomic bomb.” Seventy thousand were instantly incinerated, the charred and blistered corpses “too numerous to be counted.”

  Conant had known, of course, that a second bomb was possible, even inevitable, though he did not take part in the final operational meetings held by Secretary of War Stimson, Groves, and Generals Marshall and Carl A. Spaatz, commander of the Twentieth Air Force. The scientists had been responsible for the development of the weapon, but the specific decisions about its deployment were a military matter—that had been understood from the beginning. There were no last-minute discussions in the seventy-five-hour interval following the Hiroshima attack in which to consider a second strike or its role in possibly hastening the end of the war. By that time, he noted in his memoir, they were already committed to an unswerving course, “and the detailed arrangements had been made for the use of a bomb as soon as enough material had been produced.” The plans were locked in place and military protocols took over: the Tinian bomber command never received a direct order to destroy a second city, it simply carried out Groves’s original directive, which included the instruction to deliver “additional bombs” to the designated targets as they became available and the weather permitted.