by P. D. Smith
At the moment of the explosion, Farrell voiced the deep anxiety that many felt, but few would admit. As night was turned to day and the desert melted in the heat of the superbomb, the battle-hardened soldier cried out: ‘The long-hairs have let it get away from them!’21
Five miles away from Farrell, James Conant also feared that the atmosphere had been ignited: ‘The whole world has gone up in flames,’ he thought in a fleeting but terrible moment of utter panic.22
The violence and intensity of what they all witnessed that morning was unprecedented. Over a hundred miles away, the residents of Gallup, New Mexico reported that their windows rattled in their frames. People thought that a meteorite had impacted nearby. The flash of the Trinity blast was seen as far away as Amarillo, Texas, 450 miles to the east. It was bright enough to light up the face of the moon for an instant. The flash had such an unearthly brilliance that it was glimpsed a hundred miles away by Georgia Green, who was being driven to an early class at the University of New Mexico. When the bomb exploded she cried out, ‘What was that?’23 Georgia was blind.
Edwin McMillan, the nuclear physicist whose discovery of element 93 (neptunium) had led Glenn Seaborg to plutonium, was on the hill with Laurence. He recalled that:
The whole spectacle was so tremendous and one might almost say fantastic that the immediate reaction of the watchers was one of awe rather than excitement. After some minutes of silence, a few people made remarks like, “Well, it worked,” and then conversation and discussion became general. I am sure that all who witnessed this test went away with a profound feeling that they had seen one of the great events of history.24
A few hours after the blast, the young physicist Herbert Anderson was driven in a lead-lined army tank to Ground Zero. He observed the bomb crater through the tank’s periscope. ‘The sand within a radius of 400 yards was transformed into a glasslike substance the colour of green jade. A steel rigging-tower weighing 32 tons, at a distance of 800 yards, was turned into a twisted mass of wreckage. The tower at Zero was completely vaporized.’25 Analysis of the debris revealed that the explosion had been bigger than Fermi had calculated – the equivalent of 18,600 tons of TNT, or 18.6 kilotons in the language of the new nuclear age.
Szilard’s friend from the Berlin years, Victor Weisskopf, watched the Trinity test from Base Camp. The initial flash of light was too bright to look at, even through welder’s glass. Afterwards, Weisskopf recalled seeing
a reddish glowing smoke ball rising with a thick stem of dark brown color. This smoke ball was surrounded by a blue glow which clearly indicated a strong radioactivity and was certainly due to the gamma rays emitted by the cloud into the surrounding air. At that moment the cloud had about 1,000 billions of curies of radioactivity whose radiation must have produced the blue glow.26
In his autobiography, Weisskopf describes this ‘uncanny’ glow around the initial cloud as ‘a blue halo surrounding the yellow and orange sphere, an aureole of bluish light around the ball’. He was reminded of a painting by Matthias Grünewald, the Isenheim Altarpiece, which he had once seen in the Alsatian town of Colmar. One of the wings of this folding masterpiece, painted in about 1515, depicts the Resurrection. This striking image shows Jesus almost entirely enclosed in an ascending sphere of bright yellow and orange, surrounded by a bluish halo, against a night sky. To be reminded of the Resurrection of Christ by the explosion of an atomic bomb was, as Weisskopf acknowledged, ‘a paradoxical and disturbing association’.27
As he watched the awesome explosion, Robert Oppenheimer, who had studied Sanskrit, recalled some ancient lines from the sacred Hindu text, the Bhagavad Gita: ‘Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.’28 Later, Oppenheimer said that he knew that a new world had been born that morning in the desert. He also understood that the problems it raised were as old as humankind itself:
When it went off, in the New Mexico dawn, that first atomic bomb, we thought of Alfred Nobel, and his vain hope, that dynamite would put an end to wars. We thought of the legend of Prometheus, of that deep sense of guilt in man’s new powers, that reflects his recognition of evil, and his long knowledge of it.29
In 1962, just days before the Cuban Missile Crisis and the threat of global nuclear war, General Groves asked Oppenheimer why he had named the first test of the atomic bomb Trinity. Oppenheimer replied that he wasn’t entirely sure himself, ‘but I know what thoughts were in my mind. There is a poem of John Donne, written just before his death, which I know and love.’ In his reply to the general, he quoted a passage from Donne’s ‘Hymne to God My God, in My Sicknesse’:
As West and East
In all flat Maps – and I am one – are one,
So death doth touch the Resurrection.
The theme of this poem, and of another by Donne which Oppenheimer recommended to Groves, ‘Batter My Heart, Three Person’d God’, is the paradox of what Richard Rhodes rightly calls ‘destruction that might also redeem’.30
For both Oppenheimer and Weisskopf, as well as many other scientists including Leo Szilard, although the atomic bomb was a device of ultimate destruction it also held out the possibility of creating a lasting peace. They hoped that the atomic superweapon would prove so terrible that nations would forgo war and embrace peace. But was the atomic bomb big enough, Niels Bohr asked Oppenheimer when he first arrived at Los Alamos. The visionary scientist hoped that the weapon would be so destructive that war would be meaningless, other than as an act of mutual suicide. The fictional saviour scientists had also hoped that their superweapons would bring about lasting peace. Wells predicted that the world would have to pass through the fires of atomic war before it was transformed into what Frederick Soddy had memorably called ‘one smiling Garden of Eden’.31 Many scientists watching the Trinity test shared this dream of a new world arising like a phoenix from the atomic ashes. After death would come resurrection.
Such thoughts might even have been in President Truman’s mind, less than a month after Trinity, when he heard that the atomic bomb had destroyed Hiroshima. On his way to the Potsdam Conference, at which three world leaders shaped the post-war world, Truman had re-read those lines from Tennyson’s poem that he had copied out thirty-five years earlier, in the same year that Jack London had fantasized about a scientific superweapon wiping out the threat from the Far East. When Truman was interviewed in 1951 by journalist John Hersey, whose reports on Hiroshima for the New Yorker had shocked America, the President spoke of the significance that Tennyson’s lines held for him: ‘I guess that’s what I’ve been really working for ever since I first put that poetry in my pocket.’32 Tennyson had written of a final war in which ‘there rain’d a ghastly dew’ and of an ensuing age of peace in which ‘the Parliament of man, the Federation of the world’ is established.33 Truman clearly saw an anticipation of both the United Nations and the atomic bomb in those lines penned a century earlier by an English poet. But Tennyson would have been utterly appalled by the hellish weapons that progress and science created in the twentieth century. In the future, the price of peace would be high indeed.
On a spring night in May 1942, Air Marshal Arthur Harris, Commander in Chief of British Bomber Command, conducted his first thousand-bomber raid against Germany. It was the start of a new and terrible tactic in the war against Hitler’s Third Reich. Harris was convinced that the war could be won by strategic area bombing, or ‘carpet bombing’, as opposed to the precision bombing of specific targets.
The ancient Rhine city of Cologne was the target of the raid, code-named Millennium. Air Vice-Marshal Baldwin accompanied the mission in a Stirling bomber. He described how ‘the sky was full of aircraft all heading for Cologne’. As they approached the city, he ‘caught sight of the twin towers of Cologne cathedral, silhouetted against the light of three huge fires that looked as though they were streaming from open blast furnaces’. After Baldwin’s bomber dropped its bombs and headed for home, he looked back and saw an unforgettable scene of devastation: ‘the fires seemed like rising suns and
this effect became more pronounced as we drew further away… it seemed that we were leaving behind us a huge representation of the Japanese banner. Within nine minutes of the coast, we circled to take a last look. The fires then resembled distant volcanoes.’34
In Cologne, 480 people were killed. That is not a huge death toll in a vicious and bloody war, but it was to be the beginning of a concerted campaign against what was referred to as enemy ‘morale’, a euphemism for civilians. In the year that poison gas first rolled across the Ypres fields, British mathematician Frederick W. Lanchester had argued that the objective of air warfare should be to overwhelm ‘the fire-extinguishing appliances of the community’, with the result that ‘the city may be destroyed in toto’.35
On 24 July 1943, when the attack on Hamburg code-named Operation Gomorrah began, Lanchester’s abstract prediction became brutal reality. For three nights and days the city was attacked from the air with high explosives and incendiaries. On the night of 27/28 July, a massive raid took place. It unleashed something never before seen in the history of warfare. The Hamburg Fire Department called it a Feuersturm, a ‘firestorm’. As the inferno caused by the bombing forced hot air upwards, sucking in air from the surrounding districts, it created hurricane-force winds. Trees tumbled like matchsticks; civilians were blown screaming into the flames; window panes melted in the intense heat. People attempting to flee became stuck fast in the now-molten asphalt of the roads, unable to escape the raging fires. As many as 50,000 people died, more than the total killed in all the air raids on Britain in World War II.
Physicist and mathematician Freeman Dyson, who in the 1950s worked in America on designs for a nuclear spaceship, was at the time a civilian operations analyst for British Bomber Command. He was disturbed by the Hamburg raids. The operation made him question his daily role of ‘carefully calculating how to murder most economically another hundred thousand people’. After the war he even compared himself to the Nazi analysts and bureaucrats doing similar work: ‘They had sat in their offices, writing memoranda and calculating how to murder people efficiently, just like me. The main difference was that they were sent to jail or hanged as war criminals, while I went free.’36
Terrible though Operation Gomorrah was, the tactics of firebombing had yet to be perfected. This happened during 1945. Research conducted by British and American scientists using recreations of German and Japanese towns – accurate down to the correct make of soft furnishings – had revealed the optimum mix of high explosives and incendiaries. This knowledge was used in the raids on Dresden and Tokyo in the final year of hostilities. They are among the most horrific acts of war to be carried out in the whole of the twentieth century.
A sense of the awfulness managed to penetrate even the censored and jingoistic media of the day. Newsweek reported the bombing of Dresden beneath the headline NOW TERROR, TRULY. It quoted Associated Press: ‘Allied air chiefs had decided to adopt deliberate terror bombing of German population centers as a military means of hastening the Reich’s surrender by snarling up communications and sapping morale.’37 British and American bombers incinerated and pulverized the elegant city of Dresden. At least 35,000 people were either burnt alive or blown apart – soldiers, women, children, even Allied prisoners of war. The precise death toll will never be known.
The novelist Kurt Vonnegut was a 22-year-old GI and, at the time of the raid, a prisoner of war in Dresden. ‘They burnt the whole damn town down,’ he recalled.38 In his novel Slaughterhouse 5 (1969), his character Billy Pilgrim describes the city afterwards as being ‘like the moon’.39 Vonnegut and his fellow prisoners had to collect corpses after the raid. They dug down through the rubble into basements where people had thought they would be safe. What the GIs found resembled ‘a streetcar full of people who’d simultaneously had heart failure. Just people sitting there in their chairs, all dead. A firestorm is an amazing thing. It doesn’t occur in nature. It’s fed by the tornadoes that occur in the midst of it and there isn’t a damn thing to breathe.’40
Before the raid, said Vonnegut, Dresden had been ‘the most beautiful city in the world’. After the swarms of British and American bombers had left, Allied newsreels of the city boasted that Dresden had been ‘bombed to atoms’. Vonnegut was profoundly shocked by the experience: ‘We had no idea that our side was capable of such indiscriminate destruction.’ It was, he said, a ‘total calamity of civilization’.41 Afterwards even Winston Churchill questioned the strategy of bombing German cities ‘simply for the sake of increasing the terror… The destruction of Dresden remains a serious query against the conduct of Allied bombing.’42 By the end of the war, some 600,000 Germans, mostly civilians, had been killed by bombing. In Japan, the figure would rise even higher.
In 1945 the commander of the United States Army Air Forces, Major General Curtis E. LeMay, was tasked with taking the war to the Japanese mainland. For LeMay, killing civilians was not an ethical problem: ‘We’re at war with Japan. We were attacked by Japan. Do you want to kill Japanese, or would you rather have Americans killed?’43 He ordered over three hundred of the latest B–29 bombers to attack Tokyo on the night of 10 March. Man and nature conspired that night to produce truly horrific results. The US Strategic Bombing Survey described how the prevailing 20 mph wind created not just a firestorm but a ‘conflagration’. This ‘wall of fire’ swept across fifteen square miles in six hours, burning everything in its path. At least 100,000 people were killed and over 41,000 seriously injured.44
This was killing on an unimaginable scale. At the time, the justification for such carnage was that because the Japanese Government had mobilized the entire population in the war effort, civilians were deemed a legitimate military target. Newspaper headlines conditioned the public in America and Britain to view such bombing as part of the normal course of war. In pre-war fiction, it had always been the enemy – the ‘baddies’ – who targeted civilians. Now British and American planes were routinely bombing cities, indiscriminately killing men, women and children in their thousands. For Einstein’s close friend Max Born, forced out of Germany by the Nazis, this was a step too far:
Britain was in the war precisely to fight this kind of barbarity. Can one rid the world of an evil by committing the same evil, planned and amplified? I think one cannot. The bombing war as practised by the allied air forces appeared to me, right from the beginning, as morally wrong. That it was also strategically wrong has now been proved without doubt.45
The moral objections of Born and others has subsequently been vindicated. Since 1980, the use of incendiary bombing on civilian targets has been prohibited under international law.46
The news reports of area bombing of cities in Germany and Japan in the final stages of the war served another important purpose. They mentally prepared Allied populations for the next generation of weapons of mass destruction: the atomic bomb. According to Rudolf Peierls, one of the scientists who helped to make this superweapon a reality, ‘without this background the atomic bomb raids on Japan might not have taken place’.47
In 1953, Churchill recalled that there ‘never was a moment’s discussion as to whether the atomic bomb should be used or not’.48 That was not Leo Szilard’s view. Once it became clear that the Nazis did not have the bomb, Szilard was determined that it should not be used on a Japanese city without warning.
Joseph Rotblat shared this view. He had been shocked to hear General Groves admit at an informal dinner party held at Los Alamos in March 1944 that ‘the real purpose in making the bomb was to subdue the Soviets’. At the time, Niels Bohr used to come to Rotblat’s room every morning at 8 a.m. to listen to the BBC World Service news on his radio. Rotblat’s conversations with Bohr convinced him that the Nazis were not the real target of the atomic bomb. ‘When it became evident, toward the end of 1944, that the Germans had abandoned their bomb project,’ recalled Rotblat, ‘the whole purpose of my being in Los Alamos ceased to be, and I asked for permission to leave and return to Britain.’49
As soon as Rotb
lat expressed his desire to go, the military authorities at Los Alamos forbade him to tell anyone why he wanted to leave. His colleagues were informed that he was leaving for personal reasons. His decision to get out was an act of great moral courage. Why did other scientists not follow him? On the ‘magic mesa’ there was little if any debate among the scientists about the morality of what they were doing. As historian Richard Rhodes notes, ‘Oppenheimer had sold it as work that would end the war to end all wars and his people believed him.’50
Later, Joseph Rotblat identified three different moral stances among his fellow Los Alamites. One group was motivated by ‘scientific curiosity – the strong urge to find out whether the theoretical calculations and predictions would come true’. These scientists wanted to wait until the bomb had been tested before discussing its use as a weapon. Others argued that using the bomb to end the war with Japan would save American lives; only then would they ‘take a hand in efforts to ensure that the bomb would not be used again’. Another group believed that the project should have been halted once it became clear that there was no Nazi bomb. However, they ‘were not willing to take an individual stand because they feared it would adversely affect their future career’. But these three groups ‘were a minority in the scientific community’, those with a ‘social conscience’. The vast majority of scientists on the Hill were not bothered by moral scruples: ‘they were quite content to leave it to others to decide how their work would be used’.
When Rotblat asked to leave Los Alamos, military intelligence immediately accused him of being a Soviet spy. Their allegations were pieced together from hearsay and surveillance. He refuted all the charges. Before leaving America, Rotblat visited the Chadwicks, who were now living in Washington. He then boarded a train bound for New York, carrying a suitcase and a box containing his research notes and correspondence. ‘When I arrived there a few hours later, the box was missing. Nor, despite valiant efforts, was it ever recovered.’51 Rotblat sailed for Britain on Christmas Eve 1944, leaving behind his work on the atomic superweapon and determined to dedicate his life to peaceful uses of science.