by Steve Olson
The committee and its scientific advisors began to discuss what would happen once the war was over. Lawrence, who had become more hawkish over the course of the war, insisted that the United States needed to know more and do more than any other country to stay ahead in both nuclear research and the application of that research. He “recommended that a program of plant expansion be vigorously pursued and at the same time a sizable stock pile of bombs and material should be built up,” the meeting notes say. Oppenheimer countered with an argument made by many Manhattan Project scientists. Fundamental knowledge of nuclear physics existed throughout the world. Other nations would rapidly catch up with the United States once the existence of atomic bombs became public knowledge. Exchanging information with other nations would enhance international stability and human welfare in a nuclear world. Furthermore, “if we were to offer to exchange information before the bomb was actually used, our moral position would be greatly strengthened.”
Others at the meeting wondered whether international control was feasible. How could the United States remain permanently ahead of other nations, and especially the Soviet Union, if it made all its nuclear research public? How could the United States be sure that other countries were not building nuclear weapons no matter what they said publicly? Army Chief of Staff Marshall, who was not a member of the Interim Committee but had been invited by Stimson to attend the meeting, cautioned against putting too much faith in an inspection system to ensure compliance with a system of international controls.
The most powerful objections to sharing information with other countries came from Byrnes, who, as the president’s representative, inevitably had more sway than the others. Byrnes, whom Roosevelt had passed over when he unexpectedly picked Truman as his vice president in 1944, was always intensely focused on politics. If nuclear information were provided to other nations, he observed at the meeting, the Soviet Union, as a wartime ally of the United States, would demand the information, too. Bush objected that the most sensitive information could be kept secret. But Byrnes insisted that the United States should keep all its nuclear knowledge secret. As the notes put it, he expressed “the view, which was generally agreed to by all present [emphasis in original], that the most desirable program would be to push ahead as fast as possible in production and research to make certain that we stay ahead.”
The meeting adjourned at 1:15 for lunch in a Pentagon cafeteria, during which the participants apparently divided themselves among tables. At one table, Byrnes asked Lawrence about something he had heard Lawrence mention earlier in the day—something about demonstrating the bomb’s power to the Japanese to convince them to surrender. Yes, said Lawrence, some of the scientists with the Manhattan Project believed strongly that an atomic bomb should be demonstrated before it was dropped on Japanese cities. Others at the table raised objections to the idea. What if the bomb didn’t work, since it hadn’t been tested? Wouldn’t that just strengthen Japanese resolve? If the demonstration were in Japan, military leaders could move American prisoners of war into the area or shoot down the plane delivering the bomb. The American fire-bombings of Japanese cities had already killed more people than an atomic bomb probably would. Wasn’t a nuclear weapon just a continuation of bombing by other means?
With the question of a demonstration unresolved, the meeting resumed at 2:15, and the conversation soon turned to potential targets for nuclear weapons. Groves and other military leaders had already been working on targeting, and the Interim Committee had not been asked to examine the issue. Nevertheless, the committee discussed targeting at length, both in the morning and afternoon. The bomb should make as profound a psychological impression on the people of Japan as possible, they said. According to the meeting notes, Conant suggested that “the most desirable target would be a vital war plant employing a large number of workers and closely surrounded by workers’ houses.” This wording made an impression. In the meeting of the Interim Committee the next day, at which the Scientific Panel was not present, the notes record that “Mr. Byrnes recommended, and the Committee agreed, that the Secretary of War should be advised that, while recognizing that the final selection of the target was essentially a military decision, the present view of the Committee was that the bomb should be used against Japan as soon as possible; that it be used on a war plant surrounded by workers’ homes; and that it be used without prior warning.”
The power of the Interim Committee to influence the use of atomic bombs has been much debated. To some extent, it was established as a way to quell the objections of scientists who had begun arguing against the use of an atomic bomb in Japan. Groves also had an interest in manipulating the Interim Committee so that it would arrive at conclusions he had already made. By this time, Groves had been planning for months to drop atomic bombs on Japanese cities, and the committee’s idea that such a bomb be used on a “war plant surrounded by workers’ homes” was a non sequitur if the committee meant that the bomb should not be used on cities. War plants in Japan were in the middle or on the outskirts of cities, as they were in the United States.
The Interim Committee also failed to consider many critical issues. For example, it never appears to have discussed the number of Japanese civilians who might be killed by nuclear bombs. By the end of the war, that issue ranked relatively low in importance. On September 1, 1939, the day Germany invaded Poland to start World War II, President Roosevelt called on every nation engaged in hostilities “publicly to affirm its determination that its armed forces shall in no event, and under no circumstances, undertake the bombardment from the air of civilian populations or of unfortified cities, upon the understanding that these same rules of warfare will be scrupulously observed by all their opponents.” Yet beginning with the Japanese bombing of Chinese cities in the 1930s; the attacks by Italian and German fascists on the Spanish cities of Barcelona, Granollers, and Guernica in 1937–1938; Germany’s bombing of Warsaw, Rotterdam, London, and other cities during World War II; the widespread bombing of Germany by Britain and the United States; and the United States’ incendiary bombing of Japanese cities starting in March 1945, the leading industrial nations of the world pursued a steady descent into barbarism. By the last few months of World War II, some prominent military officers and public figures still recoiled from the use of indiscriminate bombing in war, but their voices were a minority and easily ignored. Especially regarding Japan, the question of civilian casualties was essentially moot. The attack on Pearl Harbor, the wartime atrocities committed by Japanese soldiers, the vicious fighting taking place on islands in the Pacific, and the overt racism of US news reports and public opinion all created a thirst for blood.
If the Interim Committee had never existed, things probably would have turned out more or less the same. Yet its existence also provided an opening for one of the most provocative and far-reaching documents from the dawn of the nuclear age.
AT ITS MEETING with the Interim Committee, the four members of the Scientific Panel had been told that they could present their views to the committee at any time. Arthur Compton returned to Chicago determined to take up the committee’s offer. He quickly organized five groups, with a sixth added later, to prepare reports for an upcoming meeting of the Scientific Panel. These groups were mostly organized around issues of postwar research, production, and education. But one—the Committee on Social and Political Implications—had a broader mandate. Chaired by James Franck, its members included Leo Szilard, Glenn Seaborg (who later wrote that Szilard had the greatest influence on the committee), and biophysicist Eugene Rabinowitch, who later cofounded and edited the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.
The committees were not starting from scratch in preparing their input for the Scientific Panel. For more than a year, the intensity of the research being done at the Met Lab had declined as work picked up at Hanford, Oak Ridge, and Los Alamos. Some of the scientists and engineers had moved to other locations, such as Fermi. Others, like Seaborg, remained in Chicago doing research on the many technic
al problems associated with nuclear energy. Various groups of Met Lab scientists had already put together reports on the future of what they had come to call nucleonics. Now the thinking that went into these reports fueled the work of the Franck Committee. The week after Compton’s return from Washington, DC, Franck and his committee met several times and began writing. Rabinowitch took the lead in drafting the committee’s report, with Szilard and Franck suggesting much of the report’s content. By the following weekend, what became known as the Franck report was done.
“The scientists on this Project do not presume to speak authoritatively on problems of national and international policy,” the report stated in its preamble. “However, we found ourselves, by the force of events, the last five years in the position of a small group of citizens cognizant of a grave danger for the safety of this country as well as for the future of all the other nations, of which the rest of mankind is unaware.” The committee pointed out that the development of nuclear power was much more dangerous than any previous invention. It gave humanity the ability to wreak unlimited devastation upon itself, to create “a Pearl Harbor disaster, repeated in thousand-fold magnification, in every one of our major cities.” Other nations would quickly catch up with the United States after the war, it observed. In particular, “the experience of Russian scientists in nuclear research is entirely sufficient to enable them to retrace our steps within a few years, even if we make all attempts to conceal them.” Nor could the United States hope to monopolize the materials needed to make nuclear weapons. The Soviet Union controlled about one-sixth of the land area of the Earth. Certainly it would be able to find all the uranium it needed.
Because the United States could not monopolize nuclear weapons, a nuclear arms race among nations was sure to ensue, the report said, unless nuclear materials and technologies could be brought under some form of international control. As an option, the report suggested forming a partnership of nations to control and ration the raw materials needed to build weapons—primarily uranium ore. “Efficient controls” then would need to be in place to ensure compliance with international agreements not to divert nuclear materials to weapons. The report did not explicitly call for international inspection of possible weapons-producing plants, but it noted that “no paper agreement can be sufficient, since neither this or any other nation can stake its whole existence on trust into other nations’ signature.”
Finally, the committee stated that “the way in which nuclear weapons, now secretly developed in this country, will first be revealed to the world appears of great, perhaps fateful importance.” If bombs were to be dropped on Japanese cities without warning, the report said, the prospects for international control would be severely damaged.
Russia, and even allied countries which bear less mistrust of our ways and intentions, as well as neutral countries, will be deeply shocked. It will 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 rocket bomb and a million times more destructive is to be trusted in its proclaimed desire of having such weapons abolished by international agreement.
Instead of dropping an atomic bomb on cities, the report argued, “a demonstration of the new weapon may best be made before the eyes of representatives of all the United Nations, on the desert or a barren island. . . . After such a demonstration the weapon could be used against Japan if a sanction of the United Nations (and of public opinion at home) could be obtained, perhaps after a preliminary ultimatum to Japan to surrender or at least to evacuate a certain region as an alternative to the total destruction of this target.”
On Monday, June 11, Franck got on the train to deliver the report personally to Stimson in Washington, DC. But he was told that Stimson was out of town—which was not true—so he left the report with Stimson’s assistant Harrison. Meanwhile, Compton had written a cover note for the report that essentially undercut its main arguments. The report failed to point out that forgoing use of atomic bombs could make the war longer and cost human lives, Compton’s letter stated. He also wrote that if atomic bombs were not used for military purposes, “it may be impossible to impress the world with the need for national sacrifice in order to gain lasting security.” In other words, the world had to see what atomic bombs were capable of doing before the public would agree to reining them in.
Whether Stimson ever read the Franck report remains questionable, and he certainly never passed it on to Truman. As the test date for the plutonium bomb drew nearer, he was getting advice about the use of nuclear weapons from many people, both inside and outside government. As historian Alice Smith has written, “In the light of what has transpired the Franck Report strikes many people as a singularly moving and prescient statement; in the busy days of June, 1945, it was one of an endless succession of memoranda to be read if time permitted.”
THE WEEK AFTER Franck took his committee’s report to Washington, DC, the four members of the Scientific Panel—Oppenheimer, Fermi, Lawrence, and Compton—gathered in Los Alamos to prepare their follow-up input to the Interim Committee. They were all familiar with the arguments of the Franck report, even if they had not read its full text. But they had received a request from Stimson’s assistant Harrison to comment separately on whether an atomic bomb should be demonstrated first or used without warning on a Japanese city.
It was a dreadful assignment. The Scientific Panel did not know enough about the political, military, and economic circumstances of the war to make an informed recommendation—and they admitted as much in their report to the Interim Committee. But they all had worked on the Manhattan Project, and all had thought carefully about how atomic bombs might be used. In the end, they accepted the Interim Committee’s charge.
In a brief report over Oppenheimer’s signature, the Scientific Panel said:
The opinions of our scientific colleagues on the initial use of these weapons are not unanimous: they range from the proposal of a purely technical demonstration to that of the military application best designed to induce surrender. 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. Others emphasize the opportunity of saving American lives by immediate military use, and believe that such use will 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, and we see no acceptable alternative to direct military use.
In later years, all four of the scientists had—or were reported by other members of the panel to have had—misgivings about recommending “direct military use” in their report. But the panel member who reportedly held out longest against the report was Fermi. According to a 1983 interview with Oppenheimer’s secretary, Oppenheimer and Fermi argued until five o’clock in the morning before Fermi accepted the statement Oppenheimer had written. Since the beginning of the Manhattan Project, Fermi had become increasingly alarmed by the prospect of nuclear weapons. Once, while visiting Los Alamos, he was shocked by the enthusiasm of the scientists Oppenheimer had recruited to the lab. “I believe your people actually want to make a bomb,” he had said. If atomic bombs did work, Fermi believed, the United States should keep their existence secret for as a long as possible. That way, the inevitable escalation of tensions created by nuclear capabilities could at least be postponed.
Fermi never expressed regret in later years for signing the Scientific Panel’s statement, but Oppenheimer did. “We didn’t know beans about the military situation in Japan,” he later admitted. “We didn’t know whether they could be caused to surrender by other means or whether the invasion was really inevitable. But in the back of our minds was the notion that the invasion was inevitable because we had been told that.”
The argument that appears to have p
ersuaded the members of the Scientific Panel is the one Compton used in his letter to Stimson—that the full horror of atomic weapons had to be experienced for the world to turn forcefully against them after the war. If the use of atomic weapons “would result in the shortening of the war and the saving of lives—if it would mean bringing us closer to a time when war would be abandoned as a means of settling international disputes—here must be our hope and our basis for courage,” Compton later wrote.
The Interim Committee met again in Washington, DC, on June 21, and toward the end of the meeting it turned its attention to the Scientific Panel’s report. The report gave the committee no need to reconsider its former decision. “The committee reaffirmed the position taken at the 31 May and 1 June meetings,” the meeting notes state, “that the weapon be used against Japan at the earliest opportunity, that it be used without warning, and that it be used on a dual target, namely, a military installation or war plant surrounded by or adjacent to homes or other buildings most susceptible to damage.”
IN THE FIRST FEW MONTHS of 1945, just as plutonium production was ramping up at Hanford, strange objects began to appear in the sky above Washington and other western states. After the Doolittle raid of April 1942, the Japanese military decided that it needed to retaliate against the US mainland. It could not get bombers all the way across the Pacific, so it opted for an unexpected alternative. The jet stream was not formally discovered until B-29s flew high enough during World War II to encounter its high-speed winds. But Japanese meteorologists had suspected its existence earlier, and weapons designers in Japan realized they could use the jet stream to bomb the United States. They built thousands of balloons filled with hydrogen that bore incendiary bombs and 32 dangling sandbags. When the balloons dropped below a certain altitude, an altimeter caused one of the sandbags to drop off. The bomb designers calculated that by the time the thirty-second sandbag was gone, the jet stream would have blown the balloons across the Pacific. They then would descend, explode when they reached the ground, and set fire to American forests.