by A. J. Baime
“It would be too bad,” Davies told Truman, “if the seeds of a new world war were sown even before the fighting in this war had ended.”
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APRIL 25 would prove a momentous day for Truman. At the office that morning he held his usual staff meeting minutes after nine. “There was little on the appointment list of much importance,” recalled assistant press secretary Eben Ayers. How wrong he would prove to be.
Between 9:15 a.m. and noon, the president met with eleven congressmen in eight different meetings, fifteen minutes apiece, plus the outgoing postmaster general, Frank Walker. Then, at noon, the secretary of war Henry Stimson, entered the Oval Office. He had written a note to the president the day before asking for a discussion “as soon as possible on a highly secret matter.” Stimson arrived bearing a file. Through a second door in the Oval Office, another man entered, whom Truman quickly recognized. Major General Leslie Groves had been ushered into the White House through a back door and had walked through underground corridors, so as not to arouse the press who stalked the area around the West Wing’s main entrance. Groves was a robust man—nearly six feet and about 250 pounds—whose mustache curled around a mouth eternally fixed into a scowl. He had risen in the army through the Office of the Chief Engineers and had supervised the building of the Pentagon. He had since taken over a new project, as Truman was about to learn.
Stimson handed Truman a memo, and the president read it carefully while Stimson and Groves sat quietly. The memo began with the following sentence: “Within four months we shall in all probability have completed the most terrible weapon ever known in human history, one bomb of which could destroy a whole city.”
The secretary of war’s memorandum detailed a new invention in the making called the atomic bomb. Some basic science needed explaining. Groves had also penned his own long memorandum containing rudimentary information, which he handed to Truman. “An atom is made up of neutrons, electrons and protons,” it read. “When a free neutron, from outside the atom, strikes an atom of U-235 [uranium], the collision causes the atom to break into two parts freeing more neutrons and releasing a relatively large amount of energy.”
An atom bomb might explode with the equivalent of anywhere from 5,000 to 20,000 tons of TNT, Groves’s memorandum explained, which could make it the most powerful weapon ever imagined, if it in fact worked. The project was being called the Manhattan District Project. Groves’s memo also made the following statement: “The successful development of the Atomic Fission Bomb will provide the United States with a weapon of tremendous power which should be a decisive factor in winning the present war more quickly with a saving in American lives . . . If the United States continues to lead in the development of atomic energy weapons, its future will be much safer and the chances of preserving world peace greatly increased.”
Groves and Stimson proceeded to pull the curtain off the most ambitious industrial and scientific undertaking in human history.
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The U.S. government’s atomic bomb experiment had begun with a letter to Franklin Roosevelt almost six years earlier, dated August 2, 1939. It was a curious missive that would become as famed a document as any produced during the Roosevelt presidency. Signed by the theoretical physicist Albert Einstein, it told of how “the element uranium may be turned into a new and important source of energy in the immediate future . . . This new phenomenon would also lead to the construction of bombs, and it is conceivable—though much less certain—that extremely powerful bombs of a new type may thus be constructed.”
Roosevelt knew that theoretical scientists had a tendency to dream wildly. But Einstein’s dreams had a way of becoming reality. As the eminent physicist Arthur Compton noted, “Probably no other scientist since Charles Darwin had won as high a place in the history of human thought.” The president discussed Einstein’s letter with an economic advisor named Alexander Sachs (it was Sachs who had hand-delivered the Einstein letter to FDR). If such a bomb could be devised, Sachs was wondering, could the Nazis build it first? “Alex,” Roosevelt said, “what you are after is to see that the Nazis don’t blow us up.” The president called in an assistant and pronounced three words that set the atomic bomb project in motion: “This needs action.”
In the fall of 1939 the federal government transferred the first funds for a special military project—$6,000 to purchase materials, including a quantity of uranium. On June 27, 1940, Roosevelt created the National Defense Research Committee, a think tank headed up by Dr. Vannevar Bush, president of the Carnegie Institution; Dr. James Conant, president of Harvard; Dr. Richard Tolman of the California Institute of Technology; and Dr. Karl Compton, president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, among others. This group set to work gathering the brightest minds in physics, employing them in top-secret work devising methods of splitting atoms, to find out if in fact such highly theoretical ideas could be weaponized. The secretary of war first learned of this work on November 6, 1941 (just a month before Pearl Harbor). “Vannevar Bush came in to conveyto me an extremely secret statement,” Stimson wrote in his diary, “a most terrible thing.” (Stimson was the only high-level government figure involved from this point up until the meeting with Truman on April 25, 1945.)
The bomb project fell under the command of the United States Army. Through the early years of research, while war was raging in Europe and the Far East, army chief of staff George Marshall followed the work carefully, often confused by its extraordinary complexity. “I would spend so much time with the Encyclopedia Britannica and the dictionary trying to interpret . . . that I finally just gave it up, deciding that I never would quite understand,” he later said.
General Marshall and the secretary of war agreed to hand the day-to-day supervision of the project to Major General Leslie Groves on September 17, 1942. Groves was tasked with directing the expansion of work from the theoretical to the industrial phase. In June 1942, he appointed J. Robert Oppenheimer to be scientific director of a new secret laboratory, where the bomb would be built. Oppenheimer’s appointment letter read, in part:
The laboratory will be concerned with the development and final manufacture of an instrument of war, which we may designate as Projectile S-1-T. To this end, the laboratory will be concerned with:
a. Certain experimental studies in science, engineering and ordnance, and
b. At a later date large-scale experiments involving difficult ordnance procedures and the handling of highly dangerous material.
It was Oppenheimer who chose the location for his laboratory, barren land outside the village of Los Alamos, New Mexico, where he had spent part of his youth camping and riding horses in the high desert plains. There was an air of fate about this rugged land; as a young man, Oppenheimer had once said, “My two great loves are physics and New Mexico. It’s a pity they can’t be combined.” Now, at Los Alamos, that dream had been realized.
The federal government secretly funneled millions of dollars into Oppenheimer’s work, without the knowledge of Congress. An entire town had to be built at Los Alamos, with infrastructure to supply a population of scientists and military figures and their families, who would need clean water, shelter, schools, medical care, supplies of food, and all manner of technical equipment.
Groves, meanwhile, supervised the construction of two facilities even more ambitious than the Pentagon, all in secret. The first was at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, where uranium would be enriched for bomb making. The main building where this work took place spread out across forty-four acres, making it the largest building in the world. Housing had to be constructed for tens of thousands of workers, who had no idea what it was they were laboring to produce, because the project was so secretive. The site was not far from the city of Knoxville. “While I felt that the possibility of serious danger was small,” Groves later recalled, “we could not be absolutely sure; no one knew what might happen, if anything, when a chain reaction was attempted in a large reactor.”
The second site was at Han
ford, Washington—the world’s first full-scale plutonium production reactor, a facility that required a perimeter of 12 by 16 miles, 25,000 gallons per minute of water for cooling, and an immeasurable amount of electricity for power. Groves planned the site to be at least 20 miles from any town of one thousand inhabitants (the nearest real town was Pasco) and at least 10 miles from any highway. At Hanford, scientists were attempting to turn uranium into plutonium—another fissile material they hoped could be weaponized.
Everything Groves set in motion was potentially dangerous and extraordinarily expensive, and the end results of this work were unknown. “Never in history has anyone embarking on an important undertaking had so little certainty about how to proceed as we had then,” he recorded.
Keeping this work secret from the American public required the strictest of security measures, and a bit of luck. Roosevelt had agreed with Churchill at a conference in Quebec in August 1943 to share all atomic technology with the British, that the two nations would work together on the project, which Churchill code-named “tube alloys” in his top-secret correspondence with the president. And yet the work at Los Alamos, Oak Ridge, and Hanford remained mostly an American phenomenon. The early army budget appropriations were not nearly enough to pay for the project, so Stimson approached a select group of congressional leaders. He informed them of the secret work, and they were able to pilot funds through the Senate and the House without disclosing the money’s purpose.
Even two years after Pearl Harbor, among the highest echelons of government, few knew anything of this work’s existence. Jimmy Byrnes, the “Assistant President,” did not find out about the project until the summer of 1943, during a conversation with Roosevelt in the Oval Office. At this time, according to Byrnes, Roosevelt believed the Nazis were ahead of the Americans in the race to produce a bomb. Byrnes was astounded “with the scientists’ prediction of what atomic energy would do,” he recorded.
By the end of September 1944, Secretary of War Stimson had been informed of the following information regarding the atomic bomb, in a memorandum written by Arthur Compton of the National Defense Research Committee: “(1) By next summer this will become a matter of great military importance. (2) The art will expand rapidly after the war, and the military aspects may become overwhelming. (3) This country has a temporary advantage which may disappear, or even reverse, if there is a secret arms race on this subject.” Stimson struggled with this information; the Manhattan Project had become not just a military matter but an existential one.
“We were up against some very big decisions,” Stimson wrote in his diary. “The time is approaching when we can no longer avoid them and when events may force us into the public on the subject. Our thoughts went right down to the bottom facts of human nature, morals and government.”
All the while, Roosevelt feared what the Nazis were doing. If Hitler produced a bomb first, the face of humanity would never be the same. On December 4, 1943, the New York Times published an article quoting an official from German High Command saying that the Nazis “intended by one fell, drastic stroke” to strike back against the Allies, that “the retaliation will be so powerful . . . [it] will find quite a different and surprising expression spiritually as well as politically.” The German official concluded: “Mankind is not far from the point where it can at will blow up half the globe.”
Were the Nazis building an atomic bomb? If so, could they complete and deliver the weapon before the Allies had crushed them for good?
The secretary of war’s last meeting with Roosevelt on the subject had been less than a month before Roosevelt’s death. They discussed fears that the whole bomb project would fail, that the scientists had “sold the president a lemon.” Roosevelt had also received a memo from Jimmy Byrnes on this subject. “I understand that the expenditures from the Manhattan Project are approaching $2 billion with no definite assurance yet of production,” Byrnes wrote. He was worried. “If the project proves a failure,” he warned, “it will then be subjected to relentless investigation and criticism.”
Admiral Leahy, the nation’s highest-ranking military officer, was vocal with his opinion to President Roosevelt. The weapon, Leahy believed, was not going to work.
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Such was the state of the atomic bomb on April 25, when Truman learned of its details for the first time. When he asked for a timeline for a bomb to be ready, the only thing Stimson could offer was “within four months.”
Truman fired questions at Stimson and Groves. The president was amazed that an operation of this size, requiring $2 billion, massive forces of labor and materials on three built-from-scratch sites spread out across the country (Los Alamos, Oak Ridge, Hanford), could have remained so secret. Stimson suggested a few members of Congress be sent on a secret mission to see the plant at Oak Ridge, Tennessee; this would aid in clearing secret appropriations for the project in the future. Truman agreed to the idea.
The president understood how this weapon could force Japan to surrender unconditionally. But there were political matters to consider, and a terrifying future potentially, after the war. As Groves recalled Truman’s questioning during this meeting: “A great deal of emphasis was placed on foreign relations, and particularly on the Russian situation.” Stimson was sure that the USSR was spying on the work at Los Alamos, and—at this point, with Nazi Germany’s imminent collapse—he believed that the Soviets were the only nation capable of putting such a bomb into production within the next five years. Stimson concluded that the world could “be eventually at the mercy of such a weapon. In other words, modern civilization might be completely destroyed.”
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Soon after Truman’s meeting with Stimson and Groves on the atomic bomb, his day took an unexpected turn. The first sign of the Nazi surrender reached the White House on this afternoon, April 25. Truman received word that Heinrich Himmler, head of the Gestapo and one of the chief architects of the Nazi Final Solution, had submitted a surrender proposal to a high-ranking member of the Swedish Red Cross. Whether or not this surrender proposal had any validity was unclear. At 1:40 p.m. Truman left the White House in a motorcade bound for the Pentagon, where he was ushered into the secretary of war’s office, and from there to a secret communications room.
Surrounded by some of his highest-ranking advisors (Leahy, Marshall, Admiral King), Truman picked up a telephone and was patched through to Britain. He heard for the first time the unmistakable voice of Prime Minister Winston Churchill, crackly over a secure transatlantic phone line. A transcript of this conversation exists.
“Is that you, Mr. President?”
Truman said, “This is the president, Mr. Prime Minister.”
“How glad I am to hear your voice.”
“Thank you very much, and I am glad to hear yours.”
Churchill told Truman that Himmler had approached Count Folke Bernadotte of Sweden, claiming that Hitler had suffered a cerebral hemorrhage and was not expected to survive long. Thus Himmler was offering the surrender of the German forces to the United States and Britain. However, nothing was said of the Russian forces, who had on this very day surrounded Berlin completely.
Truman said, “I think he [Himmler] should be forced to surrender to all three governments—Russia, you, and the United States. I don’t think we ought to even consider a piecemeal surrender.” If the American and British governments were to accept any terms without the approval of the Soviet Union, Truman would infuriate his military ally, Joseph Stalin. It looked like the Germans were trying to “sow discord between the Western Allies and Russia,” Truman said into the phone. Churchill agreed. The United States and Britain would not entertain any such surrender offer from the Nazis.
“We are walking hand in hand together,” Churchill said.
“Well, I want to continue just that.”
“In fact,” concluded Churchill, “I am following your lead, backing up whatever you do on the matter.”
“Thank you,” Truman said. “Good night.”
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At the very moment that Truman was speaking via secure Pentagon telephone with Churchill, at hotels throughout San Francisco, the delegations of nearly fifty nations were hurrying through final preparations to launch the United Nations peace conference. The opening ceremony started at 4:30 p.m. Pacific time at San Francisco’s Opera House—a monument to Beaux-Arts architecture where for the past few years operas had been staged under the strict supervision of air-raid wardens.
The Americans, headed by Secretary of State Stettinius, had set up headquarters at the Fairmont Hotel’s penthouse, while the British checked into the Mark Hopkins Hotel. The Soviets, led by Molotov, had taken up on a ship docked in San Francisco Bay, for security purposes. (Reportedly the ship was loaded with secret communications technology, and endless caviar and vodka.) The conference had been years in the making and was set to begin amid disillusion due to the declining American-Soviet relations, most specifically regarding the government in Poland.
“The conference began in the midst of deep disturbances and tensions,” wrote a New Yorker correspondent covering the event. “You could feel them in the roots of your hair. Over the city the Polish question hovered like a foul bird.” It was up to Stettinius more than any other figure to iron out the problems with the Russians and see the United Nations to the finish line. “I’m counting on you,” Truman had told him. “I have complete confidence in you.”