Inside the Centre: The Life of J. Robert Oppenheimer

by Ray Monk

  On the day of the surrender Serber wrote to his wife, Charlotte, from Tinian, telling her: ‘There’s surprisingly little excitement or jubilation here. The army seems to be taking the news quite soberly . . . There is no sign at all, so far, of any celebration.’ At Los Alamos, the celebrations of peace were led by the GIs, who sounded sirens and klaxons and partied all over the laboratory. Among the scientists, there were mixed feelings. George Kistiakowsky remembers:

  A whole damn bunch started wanting to arrange to fire 21 guns. We didn’t have any guns so I got hold of one of my young assistants and we drove to the explosive store and got out 21 cases, 50-pound cases of composite TNT, set them up in the field and exploded them. It was quite a show. Then I came back to the party and was told I’d exploded only 20.

  However, the sense of triumph among the scientists at Los Alamos had been severely mitigated by the knowledge that their work had resulted in the deaths of tens – perhaps hundreds – of thousands of people. And many of them were struggling to see those deaths as justified, especially in connection with the second bombing. Otto Frisch recalls: ‘Few of us could see any moral reason for dropping a second bomb . . . Most of us thought the Japanese would have surrendered in a few days anyhow.’

  Certainly Oppenheimer was not, as he had been after Trinity, swaggering like a cowboy, nor was he, as he had been after Hiroshima, raising his hands in the air like a prize-winning boxer. On the contrary, on 9 August, the day of the Nagasaki bombing, he was described in an FBI report as being a ‘nervous wreck’, and the following day, when Lawrence came to Los Alamos for a meeting of the Scientific Advisory Panel, he found Oppenheimer unable to keep his mind for long off the distressing news of casualties from Nagasaki. Even before the bomb on Nagasaki, Oppenheimer was brought face-to-face with some of the extremely unpleasant realities of atomic bombing when he was asked to comment on reports of long-term damage from radiation. In a newspaper report published on 8 August, he was quoted as saying: ‘There is every reason to believe that there was no appreciable radioactivity on the ground at Hiroshima and what little there was decayed very rapidly.’ If Oppenheimer did not already know when he made that remark that it was misleading, he soon would know. In the days, weeks, months and years that followed, more and more information emerged from Hiroshima and Nagasaki, not only about the utterly horrific scenes in the immediate aftermath of the bombings, but also about the grisly and deadly long-term effects of radiation poisoning.

  According to Alice Kimball Smith, who was there at the time, there was at Los Alamos in the days following Nagasaki an increasing ‘revulsion’ towards the bombings, which, even for those who thought they were justified by the end of war, brought with it ‘an intensely personal experience of the reality of evil’. Some comfort was felt, says Smith, when word got round that ‘Oppie says that the atomic bomb is so terrible a weapon that war is now impossible’.

  This, of course, is the justification for using the bomb against civilians that Oppenheimer acquired from Bohr, and which he in turn persuaded many others to adopt. Though it had some plausibility as a justification for dropping one bomb, it was very hard to see how it justified the bombing of Nagasaki. Shirley Barnett, one of Oppenheimer’s secretaries at Los Alamos, was probably speaking for many when she said: ‘The reasons for using the first bomb were valid. I didn’t have any doubts about it. But I did feel bad about Nagasaki. The biggest sadness of my life, and that of many others, was the dropping of the second bomb.’

  In his remorse and anxiety following the second bomb (‘He smoked constantly, constantly, constantly,’ Dorothy McKibbin remembers of those days), Oppenheimer was determined to do everything he could to fulfil Bohr’s vision of the good that might come from the terrible weapon he had built. The report of the Scientific Advisory Panel that Lawrence had travelled to Los Alamos to help him write is dominated by that vision of an end of war – representing it as the only sane response, not only to the fearsome demonstration of the power of atomic bombs that the world had just witnessed, but also to the even more fearsome weapons that would inevitably be built in the future. Emphasising that the panel was unable to recommend ways to ensure US hegemony in the field of atomic weapons, the report – in the form of a letter from Oppenheimer to Stimson – stated: ‘We believe that the safety of this nation . . . can be based only on making future wars impossible.’ The concluding remarks urged upon the Interim Committee a ‘unanimous and urgent recommendation’ that ‘all steps be taken, all necessary international arrangements be made, to this end’.

  On 17 August, Oppenheimer travelled to Washington to deliver the letter personally to Stimson’s aide, George Harrison (Stimson himself was away), and also to Vannevar Bush. In conversation with these two, Oppenheimer, as he later put it in a letter to Lawrence, ‘had an opportunity with them to explain in more detail than was appropriate in a letter what our common feelings were in this all important thing’. These ‘common feelings’, it seems, arose out of the ‘revulsion’ described by Alice Kimball Smith. What Oppenheimer told Harrison and Bush was that the scientists ‘felt reluctant to promise that much real good could come of continuing atomic-bomb work’ and would be rather inclined to regard such bombs as ‘just like poison gasses after the last war’. This last analogy might suggest – though Oppenheimer does not spell this out in his letter to Lawrence – that they were urging the government to make atom bombs illegal.

  Oppenheimer evidently had hopes of winning the politicians in Washington round to his own and Bohr’s point of view, and there were some grounds for those hopes. After all, the government had taken what seemed to many at the time the extraordinary step of publishing on 12 August 1945 – two days before the Japanese surrender and the end of the war – a fairly full and, on the face of it, fairly open account of the Manhattan Project: Atomic Energy for Military Purposes, written by the Princeton physicist Henry Smyth, in collaboration with Richard Tolman. The ‘Smyth Report’, as it came to be known, became at once a best-seller. The openness of the US government was applauded by many and severely criticised by others, including the British scientist James Chadwick.

  Phil Morrison recalls reading the manuscript of the report at Los Alamos and marvelling: ‘Could all this be printed out so plainly for all to read, when we had kept it quiet for so long? It was a little shocking.’ But, he adds: ‘Our excitement dwindled on publication . . . the most vivid Los Alamos material had largely been excised under the sober blue pencils of Richard Tolman’s office.’ Neither Hiroshima nor Nagasaki is mentioned in the report. ‘Rather,’ writes Morrison, ‘this is the narrative of a Manhattan Project that for the physicists and for this document alike reached its peak at Trinity.’ And the apparent openness is largely an illusion. What worried Chadwick and others is that some clues are given about the merits of different methods of isotope separation, but nothing is revealed about the biggest secret of the Manhattan Project: implosion. All in all, the purpose of the Smyth Report was not to share information, but to establish the limits of what could and, perhaps more importantly, could not be shared.

  If the publication of the Smyth Report on 12 August had aroused in Oppenheimer and his colleagues hopes that the climate of opinion in Washington was, at the end of the war, favourable to a Bohr-like perspective on nuclear weapons, then his meetings with Harrison and Bush on 17 August soon showed those hopes to be ill-founded. With regard to international cooperation, Oppenheimer told Lawrence: ‘I had the fairly clear impression from the talks that things had gone most badly at Potsdam, and that little or no progress had been made in interesting the Russians in collaboration or control.’

  ‘While I was in Washington,’ he added, ‘two things happened, both rather gloomy.’ The first was that President Truman had issued ‘an absolute Ukase, forbidding any disclosures on the atomic bomb.’ The second was that Harrison showed Oppenheimer’s letter to Secretary Byrnes, ‘who sent back word just as I was leaving that “in the present critical international situation there was no alternati
ve to pushing the MED [Manhattan Engineer District] program full steam ahead.” This may have been somewhat garbled in transmission, but I fear not.’

  A ‘memo for the record’, written on 18 August by George Harrison, shows that Oppenheimer’s fears were well founded. ‘Secretary Byrnes,’ Harrison writes, ‘was definitely of the opinion that it would be difficult to do anything on the international level at the present time and that in his opinion we should continue the Manhattan Project with full force.’

  Secretary Byrnes felt so strongly about all this that he requested me to tell Dr Oppenheimer for the time being his proposal about an international agreement was not practical and that he and the rest of the gang should pursue their work full force.

  Frustrated and demoralised, Oppenheimer returned to Los Alamos, and then, with Kitty, took a break for a few days at Perro Caliente. From there, he caught up on his personal correspondence, including a belated reply to Chevalier’s letter of 7 August. Chevalier had written not just to send congratulations, but also to empathise with the ambivalence that he was sure Oppenheimer must be feeling. ‘I can understand now,’ Chevalier wrote, ‘the sombre note in you during our last meetings.’ ‘There is a weight in such a venture which few men in history have had to bear. I know that with your love of men, it is no light thing to have had a part, and a great part, in a diabolical contrivance for destroying them.’

  Oppenheimer’s reply, written on 27 August, responded to and echoed this solemn tone. ‘The thing had to be done, Haakon,’ he told his old friend, while conceding: ‘Circumstances are heavy with misgiving, and far, far more difficult than they should be, had we power to re-make the world to be as we think it.’

  The same tone pervades other letters that he wrote during this retreat to the Pecos, several of them to important people from his past whom he had not seen for many years, and who, like Chevalier, had sent their congratulations on his now-famous achievement. To his old teacher Herbert Smith, he wrote: ‘You will believe that this undertaking has not been without its misgivings; they are heavy on us today, when the future, which has so many elements of high promise, is yet only a stone’s throw from despair.’ In a letter to his old Harvard friend, Frederick Bernheim, he wrote that he and Kitty had come to their ranch ‘in an earnest but not too sanguine search for sanity’. His letter ends ominously: ‘There would seem to be some great headaches ahead.’

  While at the ranch, Oppenheimer took the opportunity to think seriously about what he would do after he left Los Alamos, which would be some time in the autumn. Having replaced Lawrence as the most famous scientist in the country, he was not short of offers. Columbia, Princeton and Harvard had all made it clear to him that they were prepared to offer him a very large salary. He was tempted by these offers, not only because of the pay, but because he had serious doubts about whether he wanted to return to either Berkeley or Caltech. During his time at Los Alamos he had been frustrated and exasperated by the difficulties he had experienced in dealing with the University of California, to whose provost, Monroe Deutsch, he wrote immediately before he set out for the Pecos. ‘You will understand,’ he told Deutsch, ‘that I did not come lightly or irresponsibly to a position of feud with the officers of the University. Nevertheless I wish that you would express to them my profound regret that the project could not be operated in a spirit of greater mutual confidence and cordiality.’

  Having got that off his chest, Oppenheimer then wrote a long letter to Charles Lauritsen at Caltech expressing several misgivings about returning there and asking various questions, none of which, he emphasised, were conditions of his return, ‘but I think it will be apparent that what we do will be affected by the answers collectively’. He wanted to know, for example, what provisions there would be to support graduate students, and whether the department had enough money to buy a big cyclotron. He also urged on Lauritsen the merits of attracting Rabi to Pasadena. ‘Don’t you yourself think,’ he wrote, ‘that it would be a good idea to bring a man, not ingrown in the institute, of such rare qualities as scientist and man?’ But, more important than all these things, was his last question:

  Would the institute welcome and support, if in conscience we thought it right, my advisory participation in future atomic national policy? I am plenty worried about this, far more of course than about the personal things, and if there were a real chance of helping would want to feel that this was welcome.

  After the horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, what Oppenheimer wanted, more than anything, was a chance to turn the atomic bomb into – as he put it in a letter to an old family friend called Marcy Bier – ‘a real instrument in the establishment of peace’. That, he told her, ‘is almost the only thing right now that seems to matter’.

  At the beginning of September, Oppenheimer returned to Los Alamos to find that it was facing its first fatality. Henry K. Daghlian was a young physicist who had joined Los Alamos in the autumn of 1944, when, aged just twenty-three, he was recruited to work with Otto Frisch on the notorious ‘tickling the dragon’s tail’ experiments. These involved bringing a mass of fissionable material to near-critical levels, a process Richard Feynman remarked was like tickling the tail of a sleeping dragon. Daghlian survived that experience, but on 21 August 1945 suffered an accident when performing similar experiments on plutonium. The point of these experiments was to determine how the critical mass of plutonium could be reduced by a tamper of tungsten carbide, and what Daghlian was doing was surrounding a plutonium core with bricks of the tamper material. As he was moving the final brick over the core, he was alerted by neutron counters to the fact that the addition of that brick would make the plutonium core supercritical. He tried to withdraw the brick quickly, but dropped it onto the plutonium assembly, at which point there was a burst of light and a release of vast amounts of radiation. He quickly disassembled the tamper he had built, but his body had been exposed to about 500 rem of radiation, and his right hand to about 20,000 rem (where 1,000 is regarded as a fatal dose). Immediately after the accident, Daghlian was rushed to the Los Alamos hospital, where he died on 15 September. During those last twenty-six days of his life he suffered terribly from nausea, vomiting and, towards the end, an inability to reason.

  The haunting thought that could not now be dispelled was that what Henry Daghlian was suffering had been inflicted upon countless Japanese people in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, thereby challenging in the most dramatic way possible the sanguine responses given by Oppenheimer and Groves to the publicly expressed concern about the effects of radiation. The issue was one that especially irked Groves, who was determined to show to the public at large that reports of lingering radiation and the horrors of radiation sickness were exaggerated and that the risk presented by radiation poisoning was very small. Indeed, Groves thought the reports of radiation sickness were a Japanese hoax. To back himself up, he phoned a military doctor at Oak Ridge, Lieutenant Colonel Rea, and read out what the newspapers had reported about the suffering of radiation-sickness victims. ‘I think it’s good propaganda,’ Rea told him. ‘That’s the feeling I have,’ Groves replied.

  Groves was sufficiently troubled by the issue, however, to send a team of scientists to Japan to investigate the levels of radiation in Hiroshima and Nagasaki and to study its effects. Among the team, which was headed by General Farrell, were Phil Morrison and Robert Serber. ‘I’ll be delayed a couple of weeks in returning,’ Serber wrote to his wife. ‘There’s a rather unpleasant job still to do.’ After being in Japan for a couple of days, he told her: ‘The most striking impression continues to be the complete breakdown, bankruptcy, destitution of everything in Japan.’ In a subsequent letter he wrote that any sympathy he might have felt for the Japanese people had been dispelled by meeting prisoners of war and hearing their stories of ‘callousness, starvation, and slave labour’. The tone changed again, however, when he got to Nagasaki and saw for himself the damage wrought by the bomb. ‘The ruins were hard enough to endure,’ he wrote in his autobiography, ‘but the really h
arrowing experience was a visit to a Nagasaki hospital.’

  It was a makeshift hospital, a building with the front wall blown out, the patients on cots inside and on stretchers outside on the ground. This was five weeks after the bombing and the patients were mostly suffering from flash burn or radiation sickness.

  About three weeks earlier, soon after the survey team had arrived in Japan, General Farrell gave a press conference at the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo, at which he stated unequivocally that there was no radioactivity left on the ground at Hiroshima and Nagasaki and that all those who had died had been killed either by the blast or by the fires. No one, he insisted, had died from radiation sickness. When the Australian journalist Wilfred Burchett challenged this, saying that he had been to Hiroshima and had seen for himself people dying of radiation sickness, Farrell accused him of having succumbed to ‘Japanese propaganda’. Now Serber, Morrison and the other members of the team were seeing for themselves that Farrell had been wrong. It is true that their Geiger counters had been unable to detect radioactivity on the ground, but it was also undeniably true that many people, several weeks after the blasts, were dying horribly, as Henry K. Daghlian had died, because of their exposure to radiation.

  Serber and Morrison arrived back at Los Alamos on 15 October. In a report that he gave to the people of Los Alamos (published as ‘Serber describes Japan’ in the Los Alamos Newsletter), Serber wrote: ‘No one that has not actually seen the completeness of the destruction in Hiroshima and Nagasaki can have any idea of what a terrible thing atomic warfare is.’ In the light of that terror, Serber told his readers (and fellow workers in creating the bomb): ‘I hoped that there would be an unanimous insistence on the free interchange among all nations of information dealing with atomic power. The alternative seems to me a desperate arms race and one that can only end in terrible catastrophe.’