by American Prometheus: The Triumph;Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer
But Byrnes was already beginning to think of the bomb as an American diplomatic weapon. Running roughshod over Oppenheimer’s and Marshall’s arguments, the secretary of state–designate reinforced Lawrence by insisting that they had to “push ahead as fast as possible in [atomic] production and research to make certain that we stay ahead and at the same time make every effort to better our political relations with Russia.” The minutes record that Byrnes’ view was “generally agreed to by all present.” And yet Oppenheimer—and surely many others in the room—understood that they could not rush to “stay ahead” in atomic weapons without pushing the Russians into an arms race with the United States. This gaping contradiction was papered over by Arthur Compton, who stressed the importance of maintaining American superiority through “freedom of research” while also reaching a “cooperative understanding” with Russia. On this ambiguous conclusion, the committee adjourned at 1:15 p.m. for a one-hour lunch.
Over lunch, someone raised the question of the use of the bomb on Japan. No notes were taken, but when the formal meeting resumed, the discussion continued to focus on the effect of the impending bombing. Stimson, always alert to the political implications of any decision, altered the agenda to allow the discussion to carry on. Someone commented that one atomic bomb would have no more effect than some of the massive bomber strikes launched against Japanese cities that spring. Oppenheimer seemed to agree, but added that “the visual effect of an atomic bombing would be tremendous. It would be accompanied by a brilliant luminescence which would rise to a height of 10,000 to 20,000 feet. The neutron effect of the explosion would be dangerous to life for a radius of at least two-thirds of a mile.”
“Various types of targets and the effects to be produced” were discussed, and then Secretary Stimson summarized what seemed to be a general agreement: “. . . that we could not give the Japanese any warning; that we could not concentrate on a civilian area; but that we should seek to make a profound psychological impression on as many of the inhabitants as possible.” Stimson said he agreed with James Conant’s suggestion “that the most desirable target would be a vital war plant employing a large number of workers and closely surrounded by workers’ houses.” Thus, with such delicate euphemisms, did the president of Harvard University select civilians as the target of the world’s first atomic bomb.
Oppenheimer voiced no disagreement with the choice of the defined target. Instead, he seems to have initiated a discussion of whether several such strikes could be mounted simultaneously. He thought multiple atomic bombing “would be feasible.” General Groves vetoed this idea, and then went on to complain that the program had been “plagued since its inception by the presence of certain scientists of doubtful discretion and uncertain loyalty.” Groves had in mind Leo Szilard, who he had just learned had attempted to see Truman in his effort to persuade the president not to use the bomb. After Groves’ comments, the minutes record that it was “agreed” that after the bomb was used, steps would be taken to sever these scientists from the program. Oppenheimer seems to have given his assent, if only silently, to this purge.
Last, someone—most likely, one of the scientists—asked what the scientists might tell their colleagues about the Interim Committee’s deliberations. It was agreed that the four scientists in attendance should “feel free to tell their people” that they had met with a committee chaired by the secretary of war and had been given “complete freedom to present their views on any phase of the subject.” On this note, the meeting was adjourned at 4:15 p.m.
Oppenheimer had played an ambiguous role in this critical discussion. He had vigorously advanced Bohr’s notion that the Russians should soon be briefed about the impending new weapon. He had even persuaded General Marshall, until Byrnes had effectively derailed the idea. On the other hand, he had evidently felt it prudent to remain silent as General Groves made clear his intention to dismiss dissident scientists like Szilard. Neither had Oppenheimer offered an alternative to, let alone criticism of, Conant’s euphemistic definition of the proposed “military” target—“a vital war plant employing a large number of workers and closely surrounded by workers’ houses.” Though he had clearly argued for some of Bohr’s ideas about openness, in the end he had won nothing and acquiesced to everything. The Soviets would not be adequately informed about the Manhattan Project, and the bomb would be used on a Japanese city without warning.
MEANWHILE, a group of scientists in Chicago, spurred on by Szilard, organized an informal committee on the social and political implications of the bomb. In early June 1945, several members of the committee produced a twelve-page document that came to be known as the Franck Report, after its chairman, the Nobelist James Franck. It concluded that a surprise atomic attack on Japan was inadvisable from any point of view: “It may be very difficult to persuade the world that a nation which was capable of secretly preparing and suddenly releasing a weapon as indiscriminate as the [German] rocket bomb and a million times more destructive, is to be trusted in its proclaimed desire of having such weapons abolished by international agreement.” The signatories recommended a demonstration of the new weapon before representatives of the United Nations, perhaps in a desert site or on a barren island. Franck was dispatched with the Report to Washington, D.C., where he was informed, falsely, that Stimson was out of town. Truman never saw the Franck Report; it was seized by the Army and classified.
By contrast to the people in Chicago, the scientists in Los Alamos, working feverishly to test the plutonium implosion bomb model as soon as possible, had little time to think about how or whether their “gadget” should be used on Japan. But they also felt that they could rely on Oppenheimer. As the Met Lab biophysicist Eugene Rabinowitch, one of the seven signatories of the Franck Report, observed, the Los Alamos scientists shared a widespread “feeling that we can trust Oppenheimer to do the right thing.”
One day, Oppenheimer called Robert Wilson into his office and explained that he was a consultant to the Interim Committee that was advising Stimson on how the bomb should be used. He asked Wilson for his views. “He gave me some time to think about it. . . . And so I came back and said I felt that it should not be used, and that the Japanese should be alerted to it in some manner.” Wilson pointed out that in just a few weeks they would be conducting a test of the bomb. Why not invite the Japanese to send a delegation of observers to witness the test?
“Well,” Oppenheimer replied, “supposing it didn’t go off?”
“And I turned to him, coldly,” Wilson recalled, “and said, ‘Well, we could kill ’em all.’ ” Within seconds, Wilson—a pacifist—regretted having said “such a bloodthirsty thing.”
Wilson was flattered to have been asked, but disappointed that his views had not changed Oppie’s thinking. “He should have had no business talking to me about it in the first place,” Wilson said. “But he clearly wanted some advice from somebody and he liked me, and I was very fond of him.”
Oppenheimer also talked with Phil Morrison, his former student and, since his transfer from the Met Lab in Chicago, one of his closest friends in Los Alamos. Morrison remembers participating in a meeting of Groves’ Target Committee in the spring of 1945. Two such meetings took place in Oppenheimer’s office on May 10 and 11, and the official minutes record the participants’ agreement that the target for the bomb should be located “in a large urban area of more than three miles diameter.” They even discussed targeting the emperor’s palace in downtown Tokyo. Morrison, sitting in as a technical expert, remembers speaking up in favor of some kind of formal warning to the Japanese, if a demonstration seemed impractical: “I thought even leaflet warning would have been enough.” But when he suggested this, the notion of a warning was quickly dismissed by an unidentified Army officer. “If we give a warning they’ll follow us and shoot us down,” said the officer dismissively. “It’s very easy for you to say and it’s not easy for me to accept.” And Morrison got no support for his position from Oppenheimer.
“Essential
ly,” he recalled much later, “I was given rather a hard time. I was excluded from having any real comment. . . . I came away with the realization that we had little influence on what was going to happen.” Morrison’s recollection was confirmed by David Hawkins, who also was in the room. “Morrison represented the concerns of many of us,” Hawkins wrote. “He said that he proposed that a warning be sent to the Japanese . . . giving them a chance to evacuate. The officer sitting across from him—name not known, or remembered—spoke vehemently against the proposal, saying something like, ‘They’d send up everything they have against us, and I’d be in that plane.’ ”
IN MID-JUNE, Oppenheimer convened a meeting in Los Alamos of the Scientific Panel—himself, Lawrence, Arthur Compton and Enrico Fermi— to discuss their final recommendations to the Interim Committee. The four scientists had a freewheeling discussion about the Franck Report, which Compton summarized for them. Of special interest was its call for a non-lethal, but dramatic, demonstration of the power of the atomic bomb. Oppenheimer was ambivalent: “I set forth my anxieties and the arguments . . . against dropping [the bomb] . . . but I did not endorse them,” he later reported.
On June 16, 1945, Oppenheimer signed a short memorandum summarizing the Scientific Panel’s recommendations “on the immediate use of nuclear weapons.” Addressed to Secretary Stimson, it was a diffident document. The panel members recommended, first, that prior to the use of the bomb, Washington should inform Britain, Russia, France and China of the existence of atomic weapons and “welcome suggestions as to how we can cooperate in making this development contribute to improved international relations.” Secondly, the panel reported that there was no unanimity among their scientific colleagues on the initial use of these weapons. Some of the men who were building them proposed a demonstration of the “gadget” as an alternative. “Those who advocate a purely technical demonstration would wish to outlaw the use of atomic weapons, and have feared that if we use the weapons now our position in future negotiations will be prejudiced.” Although Oppenheimer surely sensed that most of his colleagues at Los Alamos and at Chicago’s Met Lab favored such a demonstration, he now weighed in on the side of those who “emphasize the opportunity of saving American lives by immediate military use. . . .”
Why? Oddly enough, his reasoning was essentially as Bohrian as that of the men who favored a demonstration. He had become convinced that the military use of the bomb in this war might eliminate all wars. Oppenheimer explained that some of his colleagues actually believed that the use of the bomb in this war might “improve the international prospects, in that they are more concerned with the prevention of war than with the elimination of this specific weapon. We find ourselves closer to these latter views; we can propose no technical demonstration likely to bring an end to the war; we see no acceptable alternative to direct military use.”
Having offered such a clear, unambiguous endorsement of “military use,” the panel could come to no conclusion as to how to define “military use.” As Compton later informed Groves, “There was not sufficient agreement among the members of the panel to unite upon a statement as to how or under what conditions such use was to be made.” Oppenheimer ended his memo with a curious disclaimer: “[I]t is clear that we, as scientific men, have no proprietary rights . . . no claim to special competence in solving the political, social, and military problems which are presented by the advent of atomic power.” It was an odd conclusion—and one that Oppenheimer would soon abandon.
There was much that Oppenheimer did not know. As he later recalled, “We didn’t know beans about the military situation in Japan. We didn’t know whether they could be caused to surrender by other means or whether the invasion was really inevitable. But in the backs of our minds was the notion that the invasion was inevitable because we had been told that.” Among other things, he was unaware that military intelligence in Washington had intercepted and decoded messages from Japan indicating that the Japanese government understood the war was lost and was seeking acceptable surrender terms.
On May 28, for instance, Assistant Secretary of War John J. McCloy urged Stimson to recommend that the term “unconditional surrender” be dropped from America’s demands on the Japanese. Based on their reading of intercepted Japanese cable traffic (code-named “Magic”), McCloy and many other ranking officials could see that key members of the Tokyo government were trying to find a way to terminate the war, largely on Washington’s terms. On the same day, Acting Secretary of State Joseph C. Grew had a long meeting with President Truman and told him the very same thing. Whatever their other objectives, Japanese government officials had one immutable condition, as Allen Dulles, then an OSS agent in Switzerland, reported to McCloy: “They wanted to keep their emperor and the constitution, fearing that otherwise a military surrender would only mean the collapse of all order and of all discipline.”
On June 18, Truman’s chief of staff, Adm. William D. Leahy, wrote in his diary: “It is my opinion at the present time that a surrender of Japan can be arranged with terms that can be accepted by Japan. . . .” The same day, McCloy told President Truman that he believed the Japanese military position to be so dire as to raise the “question of whether we needed to get Russia in to help us defeat Japan.” He went on to tell Truman that before a final decision was taken to invade the Japanese home islands, or to use the atomic bomb, political steps should be taken that might well secure a full Japanese surrender. The Japanese, he said, should be told that they “would be permitted to retain the Emperor and a form of government of their own choosing.” In addition, he said, “the Japs should be told, furthermore, that we had another and terrifyingly destructive weapon which we would have to use if they did not surrender.”
According to McCloy, Truman seemed receptive to these suggestions. American military superiority was such that by July 17 McCloy was writing in his diary: “The delivery of a warning now would hit them at the moment. It would probably bring what we are after—the successful termination of the war.”
According to Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, when he was informed of the existence of the bomb at the Potsdam Conference in July, he told Stimson he thought an atomic bombing was unnecessary because “the Japanese were ready to surrender and it wasn’t necessary to hit them with that awful thing.” Finally, President Truman himself seemed to think that the Japanese were very close to capitulation. Writing in his private, handwritten diary on July 18, 1945, the president referred to a recently intercepted cable quoting the emperor to the Japanese envoy in Moscow as a “telegram from Jap Emperor asking for peace.” The cable said: “Unconditional surrender is the only obstacle to peace. . . .” Truman had extracted a promise from Stalin that the Soviet Union would declare war on Japan by August 15—an event that he and many of his military planners thought would be decisive. “He’ll [Stalin] be in the Jap war on August 15,” Truman wrote in his diary on July 17. “Fini Japs when that comes about.”
Truman and the men around him knew that the initial invasion of the Japanese home islands was not scheduled to take place until November 1, 1945—at the earliest. And nearly all the president’s advisers believed the war would be over prior to that date. It would surely end with the shock of a Soviet declaration of war—or it might end with the kind of political overture to the Japanese that Grew, McCloy, Leahy and many others envisioned: a clarification of the terms of surrender to specify that the Japanese could keep their emperor. But Truman—and his closest adviser, Secretary of State James F. Byrnes—had decided that the advent of the atomic bomb gave them yet another option. As Byrnes later explained, “. . . it was ever present in my mind that it was important that we should have an end to the war before the Russians came in.”
Short of a clarification of the terms of surrender—a move Byrnes opposed on domestic political grounds—the war could end prior to August 15 only with the use of the new weapon. Thus, on July 18, Truman noted in his diary, “Believe Japs will fold up before Russia comes in.” Finally, on August 3,
Walter Brown, a special assistant to Secretary Byrnes, wrote in his diary, “President, Leahy, JFB [Byrnes] agreed Japs looking for peace. (Leahy had another report from the Pacific.) President afraid they will sue for peace through Russia instead of some country like Sweden.”
Isolated in Los Alamos, Oppenheimer had no knowledge of the “Magic” intelligence intercepts, no knowledge of the vigorous debate going on among Washington insiders over the surrender terms, and no idea that the president and his secretary of state were hoping that the atomic bomb would allow them to end the war without a clarification of the terms of unconditional surrender, and without Soviet intervention.
No one can be certain of Oppenheimer’s reaction had he learned that on the eve of the Hiroshima bombing, the president knew the Japanese were “looking for peace,” and that the military use of atomic bombs on cities was an option rather than a necessity for ending the war in August. But we do know that after the war he came to believe that he had been misled, and that this knowledge served as a constant reminder that it was henceforth his obligation to be skeptical of what he was told by government officials.
TWO WEEKS after Oppenheimer wrote his June 16 memo summarizing the views of the science panel, Edward Teller came to him with a copy of a petition that was circulating throughout the Manhattan Project’s facilities. Drafted by Leo Szilard, the petition urged President Truman not to use atomic weapons on Japan without a public statement of the terms of surrender: “. . . the United States shall not resort to the use of atomic bombs in this war unless the terms which will be imposed upon Japan have been made public in detail and Japan knowing these terms has refused to surrender. . . .” Over the next few weeks, Szilard’s petition garnered the signatures of 155 Manhattan Project scientists. A counter-petition mustered only two signatures. In a separate July 12, 1945, Army poll of 150 scientists in the project, seventy-two percent favored a demonstration of the bomb’s power as against its military use without prior warning. Even so, Oppenheimer expressed real anger when Teller showed him Szilard’s petition. According to Teller, Oppie began disparaging Szilard and his cohorts: “What do they know about Japanese psychology? How can they judge the way to end the war?” These were judgments better left in the hands of men like Stimson and General Marshall. “Our conversation was brief,” Teller wrote in his memoirs. “His talking so harshly about my close friends and his impatience and vehemence greatly distressed me. But I readily accepted his decision. . . .”