Conant was handicapped by virtue of being part of the atomic establishment. He was too much an insider, and privy to too many military secrets, to state publicly what he believed privately to be the case. He fervently believed that to eliminate the threat of war, the United States had to be willing to make concessions to the Soviet Union to secure some kind of nuclear alliance. Surely some kind of agreement, even an imperfect one, was better than nothing. But because he held back from criticizing Baruch—unlike Henry Wallace, who repeatedly attacked the banker’s intransigence toward the Russians for discouraging rather than encouraging their cooperation—Conant appeared to have been converted to the administration’s conservative policies. In fact, he was closer to most of the activists’ way of thinking than they realized, and, as Alice Smith points out in her book A Peril and a Hope: The Scientists’ Movement in America, 1945–47, deserved credit for “more liberal thinking on the implications of atomic energy and for calling official attention to them” than his critics were willing to grant.
He was deeply concerned about the militarization of atomic research, and had earlier refused a direct request from the secretary of war and the secretary of navy that he sit on the Joint Chiefs of Staff Evaluation Board for the first peacetime tests of the atomic bomb at Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands. From the beginning, the scientists’ lobby protested that the timing of the tests—planned initially for May 15 but postponed until July by Truman so as not to interfere with Baruch’s opening statement at the UNAEC—would be a tragic mistake at the very moment America was trying to persuade the world it was a nonaggressive country committed to peace. While Conant opted for a less confrontational tone, he wrote Patterson and Forrestal that he felt there was a “certain degree of incompatibility” between their push to further develop and refine the weapon for combat and his efforts to restrict its use, noting pointedly that his preference would be to “concentrate my attention on this phase of the problem.”
On July 1 the United States set off its fourth atomic explosion. Two days later, just as the scientists predicted, Pravda declared that the Bikini test had “shattered faith” in the United States’ intentions and proved it was interested in perfecting, rather than limiting, the weapon. Those who worried that the sight of another incandescent fireball might make atomic bombs seem less of a cosmic force and more like “just another weapon,” as the Times’s William Laurence wrote, had their worst fears confirmed. This was compounded by a targeting error that resulted in disappointingly little damage—the blast sank only five of seventy-eight old battleships—inspiring some wags to dub the demo “No Atoll” or “Nothing Atoll.” A second test, a subsurface explosion, was held on July 25 and yielded far more impressive results. A third, scheduled for September, was postponed indefinitely due to radioactive contamination of the target fleet—a hazard the scientists had warned of in advance—though this fact was withheld from the public at the time. The irony of the Bikini show was that while it looked like America was flaunting its atomic monopoly as a form of international blackmail, the original motivation for the tests lay in the fierce postwar rivalry among the services and the navy’s insecurity that an army air force equipped with atomic weapons might render it obsolete.
On August 2 Conant telephoned the White House and declined the chairmanship of the Atomic Energy Commission. In a follow-up note to Truman, he wrote that it was a flattering proposition and blamed his obligation to Harvard, his usual excuse whenever he needed an out. After twice refusing major government posts, Conant reconciled himself to returning to academic life full-time. In his own mind, he had “turned his back” on any substantive role in the future of nuclear energy. “I really felt I was freed from the atom,” he wrote, “and need not give the terrible prospects of an atomic arms race another thought.”
But he was wrong to believe he could just walk away from the weapon he had brought into being. It was a responsibility he would never be free of, whether he liked it or not. If he was reluctant to recognize this fact, there were plenty in Washington who did, and they had no intention of letting him off the hook—or allowing his unquestioned expertise and competence go to waste. For its September 21, 1946, issue, Time put the fifty-three-year-old Harvard seer and “scientific celebrity” on the cover and reported that some of his former government colleagues wondered if Cambridge was the “most useful spot for him,” adding that there was talk of his “presidential potentialities.” The war-wrought scholar was the “No. 1 intermediary between the scientists, industrialists, and military,” and the “indispensable link in building the Bomb,” and he still had his work cut out for him. “His success in this role does not make Conant altogether happy. He considers control of the Bomb the world’s biggest job.”
A few weeks later, Conant received word from Bush that Truman wanted him to be a member of the high-level General Advisory Committee to the AEC, to provide counsel on a wide array of policy issues upon which the security and enrichment of the United States depended. David Lilienthal, who had agreed to serve as chairman of the AEC, would make the appointment official on January 1, 1947. From then on, the civilian AEC would take over from the Manhattan Project as custodian of the nation’s atomic stockpile and empire of laboratories and manufacturing facilities. For better or worse, Conant was once again in the “atomic harness,” and for a term of five years.
Bush, for one, was relieved to have him back in the fold. In a year when trust between the United States and the Soviet Union had steadily deteriorated, relations between America’s atomic leaders were almost as badly frayed. The Baruch team and the Acheson-Lilienthal group had been at each other’s throats for months. After Wallace followed up his attack on Baruch by giving a speech undercutting Byrnes’s “get-tough” foreign policy, Truman had kicked the errant secretary of commerce and former vice president out of his Cabinet. Bush had been “very much disturbed” by the idea that Conant was becoming so frustrated with the administration’s uncompromising stand toward the Russians that he might retreat from his public support of the Baruch plan, writing him on October 21 that “any indications whatever that we are willing to make any concessions at the present time would probably be fatal.” If everyone rowed in different directions, and there were dozens of formulations, it could “wreck the scheme.” This would play right into Moscow’s hands, because its strategy was always “to create confusion, delay, and opposition on all sorts of technicalities with the expectation that they can wear us down.”
Bush’s letter is full of his conviction that it was incumbent on the official family to maintain a united front and manage public expectations in order to guide the country through this critical moment and secure a nuclear alliance. They needed to be “decidedly stiff in their attitude,” he urged Conant, “and synthesize a steadfastness way beyond the ordinary.” It was imperative that they adhere rigorously to the plan, even if it took “several years of wrangling of one sort or another” to induce the Soviets to acquiesce.
Conant, who was not in the habit of going against Bush, held the line. He was nothing if not steadfast. He, too, was fearful of diplomatic softness in this antagonistic postwar era that British novelist George Orwell and others had taken to calling the “cold war.” In a wider sense, while he did not think the UN approach would amount to anything, Conant doubted the country was ready to hear the truth about the nuclear standoff that was just around the corner. In a speech that fall at a closed-door meeting at the National War College in Washington—a copy of which he sent to Bush with a note stating that he had been assured his remarks would be treated as “classified”—he outlined the necessary preparations for what he termed “the age of the Superblitz.”
In his grim assessment of the future, within ten years’ time, they would be living in a world in which two warring nations had stockpiles of bombs, and the “best” scenario he could imagine was that this simultaneous threat might prove to be an equalizer, producing an atomic “stalemate with both sides in a bad way.” A new book, Bernard B
rodie’s The Absolute Weapon: Atomic Power and World Order, elaborated a similar theory of nuclear deterrence, but Conant, who had been mulling a treatise on the subject, did not put much faith in the threat of retaliation as a permanent fix. “In such an age, war may well be inevitable,” he concluded. “It is hard to see a peaceful way out.” It is unlikely that his gloomy predictions received a standing ovation.
On the last day of 1946, the UNAEC voted 10 to 2 to approve the American plan, with Russia and Poland in the negative. Baruch celebrated his hollow victory, but even he could see that it was the end of the road and resigned in early January 1947. Without the Soviet Union, the international-control effort was dead. The atomic policy that Conant and Bush had been advancing for more than two years had failed, and with it any chance of sparing mankind the dread of weapons of mass destruction and Armageddon. In retrospect, Conant realized the Russians were never going to give up the veto. And ultimately, the United States was never going to trade its all-important secret. The odds were always against a good outcome, given that neither nation was willing to abandon its atomic program.
When the UNAEC resumed its deliberations in the New Year, the propaganda battle continued, but Conant’s last hope that they could build “a rickety bridge out of the shadow of the Superblitz” had collapsed. The arms race had begun.
* * *
By then, Conant’s attention was already being diverted from concerns about security in a divided world to another more immediate cause for worry: the growing public backlash against the bomb. On August 31, 1946, John Hersey’s “Hiroshima,” a thirty-thousand-word account of the devastating effects of the first atomic attack on six ordinary Japanese civilians, had appeared all at once in a single issue of the New Yorker. The article, oddly tucked behind a lighthearted collage of summer pastimes, was a publishing sensation. The magazine sold out at the newsstand within hours. Reviewers hailed the piece as a classic, and reprint rights were requested from all over the globe. When the Book-of-the-Month Club rushed it out in hardback form two months later, it was a runaway bestseller. The ABC radio network preempted regular programming to broadcast a staged reading of the entire work by well-known actors in four half-hour segments.
In the era before television, no newspaper story or grainy black-and-white newsreel had the immediate and profound impact of Hersey’s minutely observed report of the horrifying aftermath. In plain, unadorned prose, he described the human toll: “Their faces were wholly burned, their eyesockets were hollow, the fluid from their melted eyes had run down their cheeks. (They must have had their faces upturned when the bomb went off; perhaps they were antiaircraft personnel.) Their mouths were mere swollen, pus-covered wounds, which they could not bear to stretch enough to admit the spout of a teapot.” More than ten thousand staggered burned and vomiting into the best hospital in town, “which was altogether unequal to such a trampling, since it only had 600 beds.”
Among the many shocking aspects of the atomic blast Hersey brought into stark relief were the lingering effects of radiation poisoning, which meant that many of those lucky enough to find themselves alive in the smoldering city were sentenced to a slow, painful death. Within a few days, they developed a “rich repertory of symptoms”—nausea, fever, headaches, dizziness, diarrhea, nosebleeds, and fatigue—then their hair began to fall out in clumps, their gums swelled, and they developed bluish spots all over their bodies, a sign of hemorrhaging beneath the skin. The recurring waves of radiation illness that swept through Hiroshima and Nagasaki greatly compounded the suffering and tragedy, and added tens of thousands of civilians to the ever-rising casualty statistics.
While the Los Alamos scientists were aware to some degree of the danger posed by high doses of radiation—in a May 1945 memo, Oppenheimer predicted radiation emitted during detonation to be “injurious within a radius of a mile and lethal within a radius of about six-tenths of a mile”—they had had little time to study it in their rush to complete the weapon, and vastly underestimated the extent of the exposure and its devastating effects on the internal organs of the Japanese known as the hibakusha: the surviving victims of the bomb. Among the project scientists’ many wrong assumptions, they presumed that those exposed to fatal doses of radiation would be killed by the blast before the penetrating gamma rays manifested in skin and bone.
For most readers, Hersey’s graphic depiction of the radiation poisoning ravaging the bodies of Japanese civilians was their first introduction to this terrible unintended consequence of the atomic attacks. As a result of the strict censorship imposed by General Douglas MacArthur, the new supreme commander for the Allied powers and head of the US occupation in Japan, there had been almost nothing about radiation in the American press. Groves was convinced the Japanese claims of a new and deadly “A-bomb sickness” were a hoax, and other military leaders initially denied the reports or downplayed them as exaggerated and unsubstantiated. Hersey, a Pulitzer Prize–winning Time correspondent who spent three weeks in Hiroshima in the spring of 1946, succeeded in getting out the facts and figures on the dead and dying that government officials did not want printed for fear they would detract from their triumph.
After reading the article, Conant, who had just returned from a three-week vacation at his remote cottage in the White Mountains, became concerned that those facts might speak too loudly. He feared Hersey’s article might amplify the awful effects of the explosion to the point of turning the public against the bomb, undermining its diplomatic potency and derailing the American effort to force the Soviets to accept international control. If the New Yorker piece served as a wake-up call to the “terrible implications” of the bomb, as the editors stated in a brief note in the front of the magazine, it might launch a heated public debate over the Hiroshima and Nagasaki attacks, and lead to a fundamental reassessment of the use of the weapon and justification of atomic warfare.
From the moment Hiroshima and his part in the Manhattan Project had become known, Conant had received countless letters from church leaders protesting the slaughter of innocents and attacking his “end-justifies-the-means” argument as a dangerous fallacy. After a presentation he gave at the Harvard Club of Manchester, New Hampshire, Bradford Young, an Episcopalian clergyman, wrote that he felt like they were all “war criminals.” If there was no good reason why the new weapon could not have been demonstrated to the Japanese “as persuasively and harmlessly” as it was to Conant in New Mexico, then “the crime you helped us all commit was of the same stupendous order as the bomb.”
Young also took exception to Conant’s scientific detachment, which made it all seem that much more monstrous. “What bothered me,” the reverend wrote, “was to see you preparing and participating in such a Godlike decision with apparently no sense of presumption, no fear and trembling, no feeling of tragic involvement in a horrible deed.”
Conant allocated these sincere if, to his mind, naïve objections to the circular file. He disdained the scientists who “paraded their sense of guilt,” carefully hid his own moments of disquiet, and continued to defend the use of the bomb, as he had poison gas, on the grounds that war created its own unique moral framework, insisting, “War is ethically totally different from peace.”
He stuck to his fixed beliefs and saw no reason for further reflection until the spring of 1946, when suddenly the criticism gained in magnitude and meaning with the publication of a report on March 6 by a blue-ribbon panel of the Federal Council of Churches condemning the surprise bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as “morally indefensible.” Regardless of whether or not the atomic bomb shortened the war, the panel’s twenty-two prominent Protestant ministers, theologians, philosophers, and historians concluded, the “moral cost was too high.” Criticizing the “irresponsible use” made of the atomic bomb, and calling on American Christians to repent, they stated, “We have sinned grievously against the laws of God and the people of Japan.”
This damning indictment did not sit well with Conant. Moreover, he was stung to find the name o
f Reinhold Niebuhr, whom he knew and respected, among the signatories. An evangelical preacher and social activist, Niebuhr was regarded as one of the most eminent theologians of his time. He was the author of a dozen books, including an unsurpassed work of political philosophy, The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness, about the struggle between the proponents of democracy and the forces of anarchy, and posited that it was morally acceptable to go to war to defend civilized values. Conant, who admired Niebuhr’s stand against the isolationism and pacifism of the 1930s and support for the Allies during the war, and who recognized in his “Christian realism” a political pragmatism that mirrored his own—he was fond of quoting Niebuhr on the wise and courageous use of power, which he called “the triumph of experience over dogma”—had even tried to lure him to Harvard. Only hours after the council issued its call for repentance, Conant sent a strongly worded salvo to Niebuhr, questioning his moral judgment and arguing that there was no basis for condemning the atomic bomb so long as he accepted other weapons of mass destruction: namely, the strategic bombing of major European and Japanese cities that had laid waste to millions of lives during the war, the majority of whom were noncombatants.
“At the risk of having this letter considered a highly personal reaction by one who has a guilty conscience, I am writing you frankly about the report which you signed and which appeared in this morning’s papers,” he began, fairly bristling with indignation and firm in his denial of any need for contrition. Unapologetically attacking the council’s logic, he reasoned that its line of argument taken to its conclusion was to “scrap all our armament at once,” a plausible if not very realistic alternative, and distinctly out of character for Niebuhr, who’d consistently supported the use of the weapon to save the lives of American soldiers who would have otherwise perished on the beaches of Japan:
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