Earthshaking events had passed in a blur. The United Nations Charter had been signed in San Francisco. Winston Churchill, in American eyes the very embodiment of indomitable Britain, was swept out of office in a Labour party landslide. MacArthur reconquered the Philippine archipelago. Fantastic drugs (drug was a benign word then) were emerging from war laboratories. For the first time in eleven years Fiorello La Guardia was no longer mayor of New York, and the familiar old Bond sign was coming down in Times Square. Americans scarcely had time to comprehend the pilotless V-2 buzz bombs when they were confronted by reports of the slaughter of six million Jews in Nazi killing centers, of Japan’s kamikaze (“divine wind”) pilots, who loaded their warplanes and then dove into U.S. ships, and finally—this time at American hands—of the annihilation of two Japanese cities, the first of them the size of Denver and the second larger than Newark.
***
V-E Day had aroused hope west of Hawaii, but little elation. The ETO had been somebody else’s war; in the islands its chief significance lay in the promise of early reinforcement from Europe. Pacific veterans recited doggerel: “Home alive in ’45,” “Back in the sticks in ’46,” “Back to heaven in ’47,” “Golden Gate in ’48.” Barring a million-dollar wound (serious enough to make a soldier unfit for combat but fit for anything else), the men facing Japan were reconciled to the hard fact that expectations of returning home in ’45, ’46, or even in ’47 were unrealistic. Most of them would have settled for ’48; the chances of falling with an unlucky, mortal wound were growing with each battle. In Washington the Joint Chiefs agreed. The capture of Iwo Jima, less than eight square miles of volcanic ash, had cost 25,849 marines, a third of the landing force. Okinawa’s price had been 49,151; kamikazes diving from the skies over Okinawa had sunk 34 U.S. warships and damaged another 368. If the Japanese could draw that much blood in the outer islands of their defense perimeter, how formidable would they be on the 142,007 square miles of their five home islands, where they would be joined—as they had been on Saipan—by every member of the civilian population old enough to carry a hand grenade?1
The Joint Chiefs had made an educated guess, based on the Yalta guarantee that Anglo-American forces would receive full support from the Red Army. Assuming a November 1 landing on Kyushu and a midwinter invasion of Honshu, the number of battle deaths, it was anticipated, would eclipse all other U.S. casualty lists, ETO and Pacific, combined. In the February 1947 Harper’s, Stimson wrote: “I was informed that such operations might be expected to cost over a million casualties to American forces alone.” (Total U.S. Pacific losses in World War II in breaching Japan’s outer perimeter of defense were 170,596.) General MacArthur was less optimistic. So far, he pointed out, GIs and marines had been fighting isolated island garrisons, cut off from reinforcements. The vast mass of the Imperial Japanese Army, between five and six million troops with thousands of tons of ammunition stowed in underground caves, had never been defeated in battle. They were being brought home from China to defend the sacred soil of Dai Nippon, and were digging in. Unless the Japanese islands were to be blockaded and the people left to starve—the least humane of all solutions—that force must be met and defeated. MacArthur predicted the greatest bloodletting in history. He expected to take 50,000 casualties just in establishing that November 1 beachhead. Before an assault on Honshu could be contemplated, Allied navies must devise some way of protecting themselves against the 5,350 kamikazes known to be waiting in underground hangars, prepared to take that many vessels down with them. Finally, MacArthur warned Washington, all contact with an organized enemy might disappear. The Japs might fade into the mountains to fight as guerrillas. If they made that choice in Japan he predicted a ten-year war with no ceiling on Allied losses.
It was with this prospect that President Truman prepared for the coming conference in the Brandenburg city of Potsdam, seventeen miles southwest of Berlin. He had to have the Red Army. When Patton declared to a British audience that the U.K. and the U.S. must weld bonds of postwar friendship “because undoubtedly it is our destiny to rule the world,” Stimson quickly told the press that the general spoke only for himself. U.S. newspaper editorials urged Patton to confine his public remarks to “Forward, men,” “Fix bayonets,” and “Open fire.” Had Russia not been America’s ally, General Marshall told the press, twice as many GIs would have been needed in the ETO, and General Eisenhower flew to the Kremlin to further cement bonds between Moscow and Washington. The marshals admired him, the commissars liked him, and Joseph Stalin beamed on his distinguished guest. The Soviet dictator presented Ike with a photograph of himself and saw to it that the American general was invested with the Order of Suvorov and Order of Victory. The second of these was a magnificent ornament. With the possible exception of a gold sword trimmed with pearls from Queen Wilhelmina of Holland, it was the most expensive award Eisenhower ever received. Star-shaped and platinum, the medal was three inches in diameter and was set with ninety-one matched sixteen-carat diamonds. It is a historic irony that the holder of this decoration would later preside over an America in which men who had been favored in any way by the Soviet Union would lose their jobs, be browbeaten by congressional committees, and hounded in the streets by their neighbors. But in 1945 all that lay in the future. This was an era of good feeling between the world’s two new superpowers. In pleasing Stalin, Eisenhower served his country well, and if two columns of cosmic fire had not intervened that summer, his service might have been even greater.
***
Stalin was a busy man then, entertaining the Allied supreme commander at the Kremlin, taking the new President’s measure in Potsdam, and studying intelligence reports on the untried American super weapon known to the British as “tube alloys,” to Stimson as X, to the Joint Chiefs as S-1, to a select few at Oak Ridge as S-Y, and among an even smaller number of scientists in the Los Alamos Tech Area—where the thing existed—as “the gadget.”
The crowning achievement of scientific wisdom, the most expensive piece of hardware ever built, it had been designed to become the most efficient instrument of mass murder in history—if, of course, it worked; no one could be sure in advance. Meanwhile military security, unaware of the Fuchs-Gold-Rosenberg-Greenglass leaks, was keeping a tight lid not only on details, but also on the gadget’s very existence. Early that spring seventy-five picked fliers had been ordered to Wendover Field in Utah, where they formed the 509th Composite Group of the 313th Wing of the 21st Bombing Command of the 20th Air Force. None of them knew the 509th’s mission. All were volunteers, but when they asked just what it was they had volunteered for, they were told that they belonged to an organization which was “going to do something different.”
They already knew that. Their flight maneuvers were highly unusual. One B-29 would simulate a high-level raid alone while two others watched for unusual weather, especially electrical storms. The lone raider would carry no blockbusters, the huge high-explosive demolition bombs dropped by normal B-29s. Instead it would be loaded with a large, oddly shaped missile armed with ordinary explosives. In point of fact, the missile was a precise reproduction of the shell of the Los Alamos device, constructed from blueprints while the first bomb was being perfected. The 509th didn’t know what to make of it, and remained ignorant when sent overseas to Tinian, within easy bombing range of Japan. Here maneuvers were resumed while Dr. Philip Morrison, a young nuclear physicist, supervised the building of an advance laboratory on the island. The fliers weren’t introduced to Morrison; for all they knew, he might have been the planner of a new PX. To add to their frustration, they were receiving warnings against hazards which, to their knowledge, didn’t exist. Apparently someone in Washington thought they were all in danger of going blind; they were instructed to wear welders’ goggles when airborne and never to look in the direction of a target after the bombardier had emptied the bomb bay.
Each evening at dusk other B-29s took off for Japan, and Dr. Morrison later told a Senate Committee: “We came often to sit on t
op of the coral ridge and watch the combat strike of the 313th Wing in real awe. Most of the planes would return the next morning, standing in a long single line, like beads on a chain, from just overhead to the horizon. You could see ten or twelve planes at a time, spaced a couple of miles apart. As fast as the next plane would land, another would appear at the edge of the sky. There were always the same number of planes in sight. The empty field would fill up, and in an hour or two all the planes would have come in.”
To Morrison it was a majestic sight; to the 509th Composite Group it was a daily humiliation. They were all crack airmen, and leisure was eroding their morale. Tokyo Rose had greeted their unit by name when it arrived on Tinian; maybe she knew. Worst of all were the taunts from other fliers in the 313th who nightly dodged flak over the Empire, as B-29 crews called Japan. Some never came back, some returned wounded, while all the 509th did was cruise over tracts of the Empire so barren and strategically useless that the airmen never encountered antiaircraft fire. Now and then they would be told to drop a bomb—one lonely little bomb. It was demeaning, it was bewildering, and to compound their indignity a bombardier from another group mocked them in verse:
Into the air the secret rose,
Where they’re going, nobody knows.
Tomorrow they’ll return again,
But we’ll never know where they’ve been.
Don’t ask us about results or such,
Unless you want to get in Dutch.
But take it from one who knows the score,
The 509th is winning the war.
Tokyo Rose, with her omnipresent sources, picked up the satire. Take it from one who knew the score, she jeered, the 509th was winning the war.
Late in May the pariahs of Tinian were joined by a towering civilian named Luis W. Alvarez. Although no one on the island knew it or would have believed it, Alvarez had risked his life more often than any of them; working in remote canyons far from the mesa where the living quarters and Tech Area of Los Alamos stood, he had perfected the complex release mechanism of the gadget. He called it a “gun-type” contrivance—that is, a bomb in which one hemisphere of U-235 would be shot as a bullet into the second U-235 hemisphere. The Alvarez device, now accurate to one millionth of a second, completed technology’s answer to the challenge posed a year and a half earlier under the empty stands of Alonzo Stagg stadium in Chicago.
This is what the bomb looked like in the spring of 1945, and these were its secrets:
Black, whale-shaped, and exquisitely machined, it was 28 inches in diameter and ten feet long. The entire assembly weighed 9,000 pounds; most of it was ballast. Its uranium core weighed only 22 pounds. (If 100 percent efficiency had been achieved, only 2.2 pounds would have been required, but in those primitive days even 10 percent effectiveness was an impressive achievement.) Not only were the 22 pounds, or 10 kilograms, separated to make a premature buildup of the critical mass impossible; it was also important that they be unequal. The “bullet” part was perhaps five pounds, the “target” about seventeen. Obviously the shield dividing the two was crucial. The prime requisite of this shield, or envelope, was that it deflect the fast neutrons which would split U-235 atoms. If the shield failed, the 509th wouldn’t win anything, because it would be blown into oblivion—together with its hecklers and the entire island of Tinian. In the Chicago pile purified graphite had served the neutron-resistant function. But building a bomb was far more difficult than a pile. When Germany’s nuclear physicists first heard that America had exploded a nuclear weapon, Goudsmit reported, they “believed that what we had dropped on Hiroshima was a complete uranium pile.” Because graphite was impractical in a portable missile, the Allied scientists in New Mexico had spent months searching for some other neutron-resistant substance to serve as what was called in the Los Alamos Tech Area the “tamper.” The tamper had to be a metal of high density. Gold was a possibility, and at one point Oppenheimer had seriously considered asking for some. An alloy proved to be just as useful, and so twin wombs were woven around the two U-235 eggs, with layer after layer of shrapnel outside, until the completed device would occupy most of the space in a B-29 bomb bay. Contrary to widespread belief later, the bomb was not to be parachuted to its target. B-29s flew high enough and fast enough to permit pilots and crews to escape, so the missile was to be dropped free. It would never reach the ground, however. To achieve maximum effect, the Alvarez mechanism would trigger the explosion in the air above the target area, or, as the target was called in Los Alamos jargon, “Zero.” The actual fuse was the lens David Greenglass had sketched for Harry Gold on papers now in Moscow. At that fantastic micromoment when it was touched off by remote control, the neutrons would build up so rapidly that the explosion would take place in one-tenth of a millionth of a second.
***
Whatever his private misgivings, General Groves had to assume that the gadget wouldn’t misfire. He was a soldier and a committed man; after the expenditure of two billion dollars which had been hidden from Congress in countless appropriation bills, he had no intention of writing the project off on any grounds. As early as December 30, 1944, when Bastogne was still on half-rations and flags of the rising sun flapped confidently over Iwo Jima and Okinawa, Groves had written General Marshall that he felt “reasonably certain” a gun-type bomb would be operational at some point during the coming year. At that time Groves thought preliminary testing would be unnecessary. He estimated that the first bomb would be ready about August 1, 1945, the second by January 1, 1946, and the third at some later date, as yet undetermined.
On April 24 President Truman received his first complete briefing on the Manhattan Project from Stimson and Groves in the oval office. The President received them standing, and then, after he had heard it all, he abruptly sat down. The scenario had been changed somewhat, Stimson told him. A test would be held in the uninhabited desert near Los Alamos around the middle of July. If it succeeded, Stimson said, the test device would yield the equivalent of 500 tons of TNT, while the first “operational” bomb would be twice as powerful, yielding the equivalent of 1,000 tons. If anything were needed to show how little these men understood the evil jinni waiting to be born, these figures should suffice, for the test would reveal that the real force locked in that first missile would exceed 20,000 TNT tons. Even so, Truman was wary of it. His first decision on the bomb, reached toward the end of that April 24 briefing, was to order a search for other choices. The hunt would be conducted by two teams, an interim committee of soldiers and civilians and a scientific panel. On May 31 and June 1 the two met together—and discovered that each group while working independently had reached the same conclusions.
Moral implications were not ignored. The interim committee (whose members included Stimson, General Marshall, James F. Byrnes, Vannevar Bush, Karl T. Compton, and President James Bryant Conant of Harvard) was sensitive to the fact that atomic energy could not be “considered simply in terms of military weapons” but must also be viewed “in terms of a new relationship to the universe.” At the same time, the investigators were aware that every industrialized nation had its community of atomic physicists; nuclear arms were on the way, whatever the United States decided. Both the interim committee and the scientific committee (Oppenheimer, Fermi, E. O. Lawrence, and Arthur H. Compton) had studied the likeliest alternatives to operational use—a detailed advance warning or a demonstration in some uninhabited area. Both were rejected as infeasible. The nature of atomic explosions was still unfamiliar. Even the forthcoming Los Alamos test, if successful, would not guarantee that a missile would detonate when dropped from a B-29. The desert test would be static. It would tell the technicians nothing about the problem of exploding a bomb at a predetermined height by a complex, untried mechanism. Operational failure was a very real possibility, and if the Americans warned the Japanese and then dropped a dud, enemy morale would stiffen, intensifying last-ditch resistance. Finally, the Americans had no bombs to waste. Apart from the static apparatus to be exploded in t
he desert, there were just two, bearing the names “The Thin Man” and “The Fat Man.”
On June 1, therefore, the President’s advisers recommended that the bomb “should be used against Japan as soon as possible,” that it be directed at a dual target—a military installation near other buildings more susceptible to damage—and that it should be dropped “without prior warning.” The four scientists submitted a unanimous opinion: “We can promise no technical demonstration likely to bring an end to the war; we see no acceptable alternative to direct military use.” In a subsequent memorandum to the President, Stimson wrote: “Once started in actual invasion”—preparations for which would have begun instantly if Truman vetoed use of the bomb—“We shall in my opinion have to go through with an even more bitter finish fight than in Germany. I think that the attempt… will tend to produce a fusion of race solidarity and antipathy which has no analogy in the case of Germany.” Writing a year later in the Atlantic, Karl Compton said of the bomb, “I believe that no man could have failed to use it and afterwards looked his countrymen in the face.” Compton was not blind to the horror of Hiroshima’s 80,000 dead. He did suggest, however, that critics should remember the fire storms of Dresden and Hamburg and the two B-29 incendiary raids over Tokyo, one of which killed 125,000 Japanese and the other nearly 100,000. If morality was to be judged by statistics, he implied, the men who decided to use nuclear weapons against Japan were far from being the war’s greatest war criminals.
***
On Friday, July 13, exactly three months after Franklin Roosevelt’s death in Warm Springs, the U-235 hemispheres, the tamper, and the detonator for the test device left Los Alamos from the Tech Area’s “back door,” a secret road leading to Site S, a stretch of semidesert fifty miles from Alamogordo, New Mexico. The nearest village was called Obscuro—Spanish for “dark”—and natives knew the site itself as Jornada del Muerto—“Death Tract.” The coincidence evoked no gallows humor from the nuclear physicists. They knew they were taking a giant step into the unknown. The warnings to the 509th about lightning had not been fanciful. It was the one imponderable in equations. A stray bolt from an electrical storm could atomize all of them, and since the outer limits of a chain reaction were unknown, conceivably the entire planet might be destroyed. The weight of scientific opinion was against it, but no one could be sure. They drove past Obscuro in the dark, and no one said much.
The Glory and the Dream: A Narrative History of America, 1932-1972 Page 56