The Glory and the Dream: A Narrative History of America, 1932-1972

by Manchester, William

  In the middle of the Jornada del Muerto a 100-foot frame of iron scaffolding had been built against the facade of an old farmhouse. The bomb core would be fitted inside the house, but only at the last moment. The fear of lightning had increased. July was a bad month for thunderstorms in this barren wasteland, and a few days earlier, after a conventional bomb had been strung up here during a rehearsal, a bolt of forked light had struck and exploded it. The scaffolding and farmhouse were absolute Zero. Dr. Robert F. Bacher, head of the Los Alamos Bomb Physics Division, was inside putting the real thing together when, at about dusk, he had a bad moment. Every component had been machine-tooled to the finest measurement, and one of them got stuck in another. He waited, tried again, waited again, tried once more, and in it went, perfecting the mesh.

  Oppenheimer and the rest of the scientific command waited, watches in hand, in a bunker ten miles to the southwest, while two B-29s cruising overhead radioed weather conditions. The Oppenheimer bunker, S-10, was the control center and general headquarters. Three other forts of reinforced concrete had been built at other points of the compass, each 10,000 yards from Zero. Preliminary plans had called for a 4 A.M. shot, but the weather was playing hob with the schedule; every time the skies cleared, the B-29s reported new flashes on the horizon. The shot was postponed until 5:30 A.M. That held; the storms vanished. At 5:29:15 on July 16—forty-five seconds before the dawn of the Atomic Age—a University of California physicist flipped a switch activating a master transmitter, which set off second- and third-generation transmitters as each prearranged cumulation of electrons moved into position at exactly the right microsecond.

  5:29:50.

  A voice rang out, “Zero minus ten seconds!” It was the first countdown. Wordlessly lips formed in the new ritual—5:29:51, 5:29:52, 5:29:53, 5:29:54, 5:29:55, 5:29:56, 5:29:57, 5:29:58, 5:29:59—

  At 5:30 everything happened at once. Human beings cannot distinguish between millionths of a second, so no one saw the first flash of atomic fire. They did see its dazzling reflection on far hills. All of them went into mild shock—Oppenheimer was clinging to an upright in his bunker—and thirty seconds later they were jarred again as a wind of hurricane force, followed by a deafening roar, swept the desert. Meanwhile the rising emanation in the sky over Zero stunned and silenced its creators. It was, wrote William L. Laurence:

  …a sunrise such as the world had never seen, a great green supersun climbing in a fraction of a second to a height of more than eight thousand feet, rising ever higher until it touched the clouds, lighting up earth and sky all around with a dazzling luminosity. Up it went, a great ball of fire about a mile in diameter, changing colors as it kept shooting upward, from deep purple to orange, expanding, growing bigger, rising as it expanded, an elemental force freed from its bonds after being chained for billions of years. For a fleeting instant the color was unearthly green, such as one sees only in the corona of the sun during a total eclipse. It was as though the earth had opened and the skies had split. One felt as though one were present at the moment of creation when God said: “Let there be light.”

  Up and up it went, a giant column whose internal pressures found relief in a supramundane mushroom, then up, then another mushroom, finally disappearing into the night sky at an altitude of 41,000 feet, higher than Mount Everest. Oppenheimer was reminded of two passages from the Bhagavad-Gita: “If the radiance of a thousand suns were to burst into the sky, that would be the splendor of the Mighty One” and “I am become Death, the shatterer of worlds.” Others groped for words. “Good God!” a senior officer croaked. “I believe those long-haired boys have lost control!” One jubilant physicist shouted, “The sun can’t hold a candle to it!” It was literally true: at 5:30 the temperature at Zero had been one hundred million degrees Fahrenheit, three times the temperature in the interior of the sun and ten thousand times the heat on its surface. Sleeping Americans in New Mexico and western Texas had been wakened by the mysterious flash and then frightened as the storm wind blew angrily against their windowpanes.

  At Zero nothing could be seen. Fermi, advancing toward it in a Sherman tank lined with lead, gathered earth samples with a mechanical scoop for laboratory examination, but a thorough study had to be postponed; the radiation was too great. When the scientists could enter safely, they found that all life, plant and animal, including rattlesnakes, cacti and desert grass, had been destroyed within a mile of Zero. An antelope herd which the B-29s had spotted miles from the blast had vanished, and the skin of cattle in other parts of New Mexico had developed gray spots. A thirty-two-ton steel tower eight hundred yards from Zero was now a snarled wreck. Around Zero itself sand had been hammered into the desert like a white-hot saucer eight hundred yards in diameter. It wasn’t even sand any more. The heat had turned it into a jade-green substance unknown to man but resembling a heavy, unbreakable plastic. The farmhouse and the scaffolding were gone, just gone. They had been transformed into gas and blown away.

  ***

  General Groves, the first to regain his composure, said to his deputy, “The war’s over. One or two of those things and Japan will be finished.” The scientists standing around them said little, but one of them crossed his fingers, since “One or two” was all they had. The code name for the Los Alamos test had been Trinity, an allusion to the three gadgets-in-being. If Tokyo guessed the truth (and one of the emperor’s warlords was later to suspect it) America’s position would be difficult. The better part of a year would pass before any other missile could be readied. Two blasts now, however, just might bring instant peace.

  Only one man could make the next decision. Preparation for the test had been in final stages when President Truman sailed for Potsdam. As he later noted in his memoirs, he had been “anxiously awaiting word on the results” because “no one was certain of the outcome of this full-scale atomic explosion.” On the morning of July 16 two messages in improvised code reached Potsdam by courier plane. The first was from General Groves to the presidential party: “Operated on this morning. Diagnosis not yet complete but results seem satisfactory and already exceed expectations.” The second was addressed to Churchill on the personal stationery of the Secretary of War. Stimson had written, “Babies satisfactorily born.” The prime minister muttered, “This is the Second Coming, in wrath.” According to Truman’s recollection, he “casually mentioned” to Marshal Stalin that the United States had developed “a new weapon of unusual destructive force.” The Russian, who might have filled him in on a few details, evinced little interest. He merely replied that he was glad to hear it and hoped the Americans would make “good use of it against the Japanese.”

  On his desk top in the oval office Truman had put a small sign: “The buck stops here.” This buck was now his; he could pass it to no one. His ad hoc committee of advisers had just cabled its final conclusion: WE CAN PROPOSE NO TECHNICAL DEMONSTRATION LIKELY TO BRING AN END TO THE WAR. WE CAN SEE NO ACCEPTABLE ALTERNATIVE TO DIRECT MILITARY USE. As Truman saw it, he had no options. His military advisers were already urging him to let them press forward with what he called “the existing plans for the invasion of the Japanese home islands.”

  On July 24, eight days later, the President tentatively approved atomic strikes: “The 509th Composite Group, 20th Air Force, will deliver its first special bomb as soon as weather will permit visual bombing after about 3 August 1945, on one of the targets: Hiroshima, Kokura, Niigata and Nagasaki….” In print it looked cold-blooded to Truman. Stimson agreed. As early as June 19 the Secretary of War had written in his diary that a “last-chance warning” must be given to Tokyo. On the President’s initiative, he, Churchill and Chiang Kai-shek broadcast to the Japanese what subsequently became known as the Potsdam Declaration. Its first seven points gave detailed assurances of humane treatment, no recriminations, a Japanese “new order of peace, security and justice,” freedom of speech, religion, and thought; new industry, “participation in world trade relations,” and a limited occupation of strategic points in the home is
lands—an occupation which would swiftly end once stability had been achieved. The eighth and last point called upon Tokyo to proclaim unconditional surrender of all its armed forces. The alternative, the declaration warned, was “prompt and utter destruction.”

  In Tokyo the broadcast aroused mixed feelings. There were those who read in it a promise to let the Japanese determine their own form of government after American troops were withdrawn, and they were right; that was precisely what Truman was trying to tell them. But the samurai influence was too strong. Foreign Minister Shigenori Togo favored a waiting game, arguing that no answer at all would be preferable to the flat rejection which the military men in the cabinet could force. Then the premier, Admiral Baron K. Suzuki, blundered. During a July 28 press conference he called the Potsdam Declaration a rehash of old proposals, beneath Japanese contempt. Byrnes told correspondents that this was “disheartening.” Truman, hoping against hope that the enemy would reconsider, delayed giving the green light to Tinian until August 2, when he was back on the U.S.S. Augusta and sailing home. Then the orders were coded and radioed more than halfway round the world. The point of no return had been passed.

  ***

  The Thin Man had been flown to Tinian in three Superforts, and on the afternoon of Sunday, August 5, it hung, partially assembled, in the bomb bay of the B-29 Enola Gay, flagship of Colonel Paul W. Tibbetts, Jr., commanding officer of the 509th Composite Group, who had named the plane for his mother long ago. In less than twenty-four hours, he was told, he and his plane would enter history. By now his men had guessed that their days of ennui were over. Jeeps raced back and forth, bearing brass. Brigadier General T. F. Farrell, Groves’s deputy, had just arrived from Los Alamos and was explaining the gadget to Captain William S. Parsons, a naval ordnance expert who would ride to the Empire tomorrow aboard the Enola Gay. The more Parsons heard, the more he frowned. Since reaching the island he had seen several B-29s crack up in taking off. If that happened to a Superfort with an assembled bomb aboard it would become the most spectacular accident of all time. Farrell said they would just have to pray that there would be no crash. “Well,” Parsons persisted, “if I made the final assembly of the bomb after we left the island, that couldn’t happen.” Farrell asked, “Have you ever assembled a bomb like this before?” Parsons said no, but he had all day to learn. His decision meant he would be the only man on the Enola Gay who knew all the gadget’s secrets. Through a fluke he might wind up in enemy hands. As insurance against that, he borrowed a pistol from a young intelligence officer.

  That evening the 509th was ordered to meet in its assembly hall, and there, for the first time, Colonel Tibbetts told them their purpose: “We are going on a mission to drop a bomb different from any you have ever seen or heard about. The bomb contains a destructive force of twenty thousand tons of TNT.”

  He paused, awaiting questions. There were none. The fliers looked stricken.

  An extraordinary weapon, he went on, called for extraordinary tactics. That was why their maneuvers had been so peculiar. In a few hours, at 1:45 A.M., three Superforts would take off for the Empire. They would relay weather reports over targets and alternate targets. At 2:45 the second three B-29s would take off. He would be driving the Enola Gay, the strike plane, and his two escorts would rendezvous with him over Iwo Jima fifteen minutes after dawn. Then they would go in together. There was a final briefing at midnight, reviewing reports from Los Alamos and explaining why a naval ordnance captain would be aboard the lead bomber. Then the men lay sleepless, most of them wondering whether Captain Parsons could really put the bomb together in the air, Parsons wondering more than any of them.

  ***

  It was almost a milk run. Dodging large cumulus clouds south of the Bonins, they sailed under starlight until dawn, picked up their escorts at the Iwo tryst, and then soared northwest in the big left-hand turn toward Japan. Apart from a high thin cirrus, the overarching sky was cloudless, cerulean—and free of enemy aircraft. The crew had become restless; there was little conversation and no banter.

  Something of their mood is preserved in a Dear-Mom-and-Dad letter written during the flight by Captain Robert A. Lewis, Tibbetts’s copilot. “At 4:30,” he wrote on the plane, “we saw signs of a late moon in the east. I think everyone will feel relieved when we have left our bomb with the Japs and get half way home. Or, better still, all the way home.” The first sign of daybreak came at five o’clock. Nearly an hour later Lewis wrote, “It looks at this time (5:51) that we will have clear sailing for a long spell. Tom Ferebee”—the bombardier—“has been very quiet and methinks he is mentally back in the midwest part of the old U.S.A.” A minute later: “It is 5:52 and we are only a few miles from Iwo Jima. We are beginning to climb to a new altitude, at which we will remain until we are about one hour away from the Empire.”

  Over Honshu Parsons silently set about arming the device. Copilot Lewis’s handwriting became jagged and cramped: “…Captain Parsons has put the final touches on his assembly job. We are now loaded. The bomb is alive. It is a funny feeling knowing it is right in back of you. Knock wood.” Then: “We have set the automatic. We have reached proper altitude…. Not long now, folks….”

  They had a clear, straight, four-mile run over the target. Ferebee’s eye was concentrated on the sight’s cross hairs. At 9:15 he pressed his toggle, releasing the single missile. It descended in less than sixty seconds—timepieces below, some of them wristwatches later found on severed arms, confirmed the time—and as it fell its delicately adjusted cams and mechanisms moved faultlessly toward ignition. Captain Lewis had just written his parents: “There will be a short intermission while we bomb our target.” Then he scrawled wildly: “My God!”

  Through their welder’s goggles they first saw a tiny point of purplish-red fire, which within a millisecond expanded to a purple fireball a half-mile wide. The whole monstrous seething mass of red and purple fire rose, accompanied by vast gray smoke rings encircling the column of flames until, at ten thousand feet, the seething mass roiled outward to form the first mushroom. The base of the column was now three miles; it was sucking what was left of the city toward Zero and cremating everything combustible. At 50,000 feet the cloud’s second mushroom appeared. Taking evasive action from time to time, the Enola Gay and its two escorting Superforts snapped photographs and fled. Even after they had put 270 miles between them and Hiroshima they could still see the mushroom cloud entering the stratosphere and flashing every color in the spectrum.

  At 9:20 Tibbetts had radioed Tinian: “Mission successful.” Successful hardly seemed the right word, but no word was right. Suddenly Tibbetts realized that the 509th fliers would be kings of Tinian. Nobody back at field would mock them any more, and in America millions would believe they had won, or soon would win, the war. But something had been lost too. Hiroshima, a thriving city of 344,000 people at 9:14 A.M., had by 9:16 A.M. lost 60,175 in dead and missing. Four square miles of civilization had been vaporized. In Washington President Truman was soon announcing, “Sixteen hours ago an American airplane dropped one bomb on Hiroshima…. It is a harnessing of the basic power of the universe. The force from which the sun draws its power has been loosed against those who brought war to the Far East.” That was correct, but when he added that America had “spent two billion dollars on the biggest scientific gamble in history—and won,” it was wrong. To speak of such slaughter as a winning bet was tasteless. In savage irony, imprisoned Hermann Goring put it better. “A mighty accomplishment,” he said. “I don’t want anything to do with it.”

  Much indelicacy and outright vulgarity of those first days of the Atomic Age can be set down to incomprehension. The concept was too big, it couldn’t be grasped at once. It was one thing to say that under the Einstein formula a single gram of matter, four-tenths the weight of a dime, would lift a million-ton load to the crest of a mountain six miles high, or that a breath of air could fuel a powerful airplane, flying day and night, for a year. Accepting the facts was something else. Burl
esque queens who advertised themselves as “anatomic bombs,” and Sam Goldwyn’s unfortunate quip, “That A-bomb, that’s dynamite!” betrayed as much ignorance of nuclear fission as the farmer in Newport, Arkansas, who wrote the nonexistent “Atomic Bomb Co.” at Oak Ridge, “I have some stumps in my field that I should like to blow out. Have you any atomic bombs the right size for the job? If you have, let me know by return mail, and let me know how much they cost. I think I should like them better than dynamite.” Thousands who laughed at the Arkansas rube knew as little about a chain reaction as he did, and many more couldn’t, or wouldn’t, credit it. William L. Laurence of the New York Times, preparing to accompany the second atomic bomb to Nagasaki, eyed the Fat Man with wonder. He thought it “so exquisitely shaped that any sculptor would have been proud to have created it,” and although he had witnessed the Alamogordo desert test he asked himself, “Could it be that this innocent-looking object, so beautifully designed, so safe to handle, would in much less time than it takes to wink an eye annihilate an entire city and its population?” It could, it had, and on August 9 it did it again, destroying 35,000 lives in the second target city. Even then there were doubters. On Tinian Lieutenant General Carl Spaatz, commander of the Pacific Strategic Air Command, examined the dimensions of the case in which the U-235 destined for Nagasaki had been brought from New Mexico. “Of course,” he said to Dr. Charles P. Baker of Cornell, “the atoms in the material carried in here served as a fuse that set off the atoms of the air over Nagasaki.” “Oh no, General!” said Baker. “The explosion came entirely from the material in this case.” General Spaatz stared at him. “Young man,” he said, “you may believe it. I don’t.”