The St. Louis Post-Dispatch editorialized that the bomb may have “signed the mammalian world’s death warrant and deeded an earth in ruins to the ants.” The usually stolid Corpus Christi Caller-Times in south Texas concluded that “man’s mechanical progress has outstripped his moral and cultural development,” and addressed the new leveling force in the upper case. “Perfection of the Atomic bomb should make us readjust our values. . . . It should serve to give all of us a feeling of humanity.”
When the news reached Los Alamos, there was a general excitement, and scientists rushed to book tables at Santa Fe’s best restaurant to celebrate the achievement. But that night’s party on the mesa was a grim affair. Almost nobody danced, and people sat in quiet conversation, discussing the damage reports on the other side of the world. When J. Robert Oppenheimer left the party, he saw one of his colleagues—cold sober—vomiting in the bushes.
“Certainly with such godlike power under man’s control we face a frightening responsibility,” wrote the military affairs reporter Hanson W. Baldwin in the New York Times. “Atomic energy may well lead to a bright new world in which man shares a common brotherhood, or we shall become—beneath the bombs and rockets—a world of troglodytes.”
In an influential piece entitled “Modern Man Is Obsolete,” written just four days after Hiroshima, the editor of the influential Saturday Review, Norman Cousins, tried to put a name to the dread:
Whatever elation there is in the world today because of final victory in the war is severely tempered by fear. It is a primitive fear; the fear of the unknown, the fear of forces man can neither channel nor comprehend. The fear is not new; in its classical form it is the fear of irrational death. But overnight it has become intensified, magnified. It has burst out of the subconscious and into the conscious, filling the mind with primordial apprehensions. . . . And now that the science of warfare has reached the point where it threatens the planet itself, is it possible that man is destined to return the earth to its aboriginal incandescent mass blazing at fifty million degrees?
Lurking behind much of the anxiety was an instinct of self-preservation. It was obvious that such a weapon could not remain exclusive to the United States forever and that what had been meted out to Hiroshima and Nagasaki could easily be returned to Chicago and Dallas, and in much deadlier portions. In an essay for the first postwar issue of Time, James Agee called Hiroshima “an event so much more enormous that, relative to it, the war itself shrank to minor significance. The knowledge of victory was as charged with sorrow and doubts, as with joy and gratitude.”
Agee was even more pessimistic in a conversation with a friend: He called the bomb “the worst thing that ever happened” and predicted that it “pretty much guarantees universal annihilation.” A poll taken one year later revealed that nearly two-thirds of Americans believed that atomic bombs would one day be used against the United States; an even higher percentage in another poll believed that most city dwellers would perish in such a war.
The fear of species extinction was not confined to America. In Rome, the Vatican Press Bulletin said the atomic bomb “made a deep impression in the Vatican, not so much for the use already made of the new death instrument as for the sinister shadow that the device casts on the future of humanity.” In Britain, the Guardian observed caustically that “man is at last well on the way to the mastery of the means of destroying himself utterly.” In France, the underground journalist Albert Camus, no stranger to combat, said, “Technological civilization has just reached its final degree of savagery. . . . Humanity is probably being given its last chance.”
In Japan, the writer Yoko Ota, who had survived Hiroshima, remembered thinking the white flash was “the collapse of the earth which it was said would take place at the end of the world.” Emperor Hirohito told his people he surrendered to prevent “the total extinction of human existence.” In India the following year, Mahatma Gandhi said, “As far as I can see, the atomic bomb has deadened the finest feelings which have sustained mankind for ages.” Also in India that year, the philosopher Yogananda reflected on the discovery of uranium. “The human mind can and must liberate within itself energies greater than those within stones and metals, lest the material atomic giant, newly unleashed, turn on the world in mindless destruction.” In Russia, a biologist told Pravda that the Americans had plans to “wipe from the face of the earth . . . all that has been created through the centuries by the genius of mankind.”
Eschatological thoughts had already occurred to some of the Manhattan Project scientists. Enrico Fermi took ironic wagers during the Trinity countdown that the resulting generation of heat would set the earth’s atmosphere on fire and kill all life on the planet (this possibility had been raised and then quickly dismissed at the outset of the project). The day after Trinity, Leo Szilard persuaded sixty-seven fellow scientists at the University of Chicago to sign a confidential letter to Harry Truman urging him not to use the bomb on Japan. “If after the war a situation is allowed to develop in the world which permits rival powers to be in uncontrolled possession of this new means of destruction, the cities of the United States as well as the cities of other nations will be in continuous danger of sudden annihilation,” he wrote. He would later refer to himself, and other atomic scientists, as “mass murderers.”
The bomb’s first inspirer, H. G. Wells, was still alive when the Enola Gay dropped its payload on Hiroshima. In the grip of liver cancer and too weak to write with much energy, he nevertheless managed a desultory essay for the Sunday Express, one of his last, in which he said that “there is no way out, around, or through the impasse” and “even unobservant people are betraying by fits and starts a certain wonder, a shrinking fugitive sense that something is happening so that life will never be the same.”
Wells died at home in Regent’s Park the following year; his ashes were scattered off the Isle of Wight.
There was a great deal of curiosity about uranium, a thing many Americans had never heard of before. Newspapers published diagrams of its enrichment cycle and maps pinpointing the now-unveiled complexes at Oak Ridge, Hanford, and Los Alamos. Graphics illustrating a chain reaction inside a cluster of U-235 were also displayed, albeit in generalized form. “This diagram merely illustrates the principle on which the atomic bomb works, not the specific processes occurring in the bombs dropped on Japan,” noted Time, cautiously.
Worries arose over the security of uranium. Who owned it? Who would try to get it? Could it be stolen?
“Not only must this uranium be controlled, but, just in case a substitute is found, any suspect nations will have to be kept under surveillance to prevent the building of atom bomb plants,” said the Los Angeles Times (an analysis that remains true today). At Rice University in Houston, the physics professor H. A. Wilson amplified the call for a multinational body to control the world’s uranium supply “to see that the mastery of the destructive principle of atomic disintegration does not fall into the wrong hands.” The comedian Bob Hope made it the punch line of a gloomy Valentine’s Day joke: “Will you be my little geranium until we are both blown up by uranium?” A sketch artist on the boardwalk in Ocean City, New Jersey, said federal agents had interrogated him for several hours in 1943 because he drew an explosion and labeled it the work of a “ten-pound uranium bomb.” The state geologist of Pennsylvania was moved to reassure local coal companies that they were still relevant—for the time being.
Such was the mystique accorded uranium in those days that Scientific American (apparently in all seriousness) proposed it be used as the world’s monetary standard—not to be minted into coins, but to be used as a substance to guarantee the value of paper currency. Bars of uranium would play a role like that of bars of silver and gold in the nineteenth century. “Under such a scheme, atomic energy would be the basis of a reasonable currency whose value would be keyed to available energy, upon which depends production, the true measure of wealth,” reasoned the magazine. The Federal Reserve Bank was not responsive to this i
dea.
There was curiosity about Shinkolobwe, the fabulous mine in Africa that had made all the difference. Edgar Sengier usually hated publicity, but did accept a congressional Medal of Merit from his friend Leslie Groves in a private ceremony. (When a new oxide of uranium was discovered in the Congo, geologists named it sengierite in his honor.) Sengier also granted an on-the-record interview in Paris to the newsman John Gunther in which he retold the story of slipping the uranium barrels out of Africa when nobody was watching. “I did this without telling anything to anybody!” he said.
Gunther later visited a town near Shinkolobwe and was allowed to see a piece of what he called the “brilliant, hideous ore.”
“The chunk looked like a metal watermelon, pink and green, but it also had flaming veins of gamboge, lemon, and orange,” he said. “The reflection was trite, but not difficult to summon—rocks like these have fire in them, not only figuratively but literally. The fate of civilization rests on a more slender thread than at anytime in history because of energies imprisoned in these flamboyant stones.”
The mine itself was strictly off limits. Only one road led in or out. Arthur Gavshon of the Associated Press was turned away by armed guards at the gate. He later “met a blank wall of refusal” when he tried to talk to Union Minière officials. “We do not discuss uranium,” one told him. The one thousand black workers who continued to labor in the pit for 20 cents a day had been instructed to keep silent, even though their work was no longer a wartime secret. Security had grown tight after reports that Soviet agents had set up a radio antenna in a nearby village and were recruiting some of the villagers for nonspecific “jobs.”
One of the only visitors ever permitted inside the gates was the elderly Robert Rich Sharp, who had found the hill of radium as a young man almost forty years prior. Sharp had long since retired to a farmer’s life in nearby Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe. He took a nostalgic trip back to his old haunts in the Congo in 1949, and Union Minière officials allowed him a brief honorary tour of Shinkolobwe so he could see what his discovery had wrought. The mine, he reported, was “surrounded by impenetrable barbed wire entanglements, with armed guards at the gates.” But his memoirs discreetly make no further mention of what he saw there.
The caution seemed only logical, as “no metal in the world’s history will be so jealously guarded or sought after,” in the judgment of William L. Laurence of the New York Times. It had become the “most highly prized of all the natural elements, more precious than gold or any precious stone, more valuable than platinum, or even radium.”
A respected science journal held up uranium as the new tool of global hegemony, equating this inanimate stone with the might of nineteenth-century armies. “If cannons were the final argument of kings, atomic power is the last word of great powers,” said Science News Letter in its first commentary after the bombing. “This has apparently already happened without our realizing it in the case of the United States and the British Commonwealth. Whether we fancy it or not, these two great composite powers are now welded by a ring not of gold, but of uranium.”
The mineral received more scornful treatment in one of the first pieces of fiction to incorporate the Hiroshima bombing as a plot point. The Time essayist James Agee, who believed uranium’s ascendance was a guarantee of universal death, wrote his story “Dedication Day” in a blaze of anger. The story tells of a giant commemorative arch made of pure uranium metal about to be dedicated on the Mall in Washington, D.C. The arch bears the cryptic inscription THIS IS it. The crowd is excited. But an atomic scientist makes a spectacle of committing suicide to atone for bringing such a monstrous thing into the world. The uranium, meanwhile, is “glistering more subtly than most jewels” in the capital’s sunlight.
The story is a bricolage of ideas and images—a bit like The World Set Free, minus the optimism—and Agee lamented he couldn’t find a way to adapt it into a movie.
But not all the initial reactions to Hiroshima touched on ominous themes, or on man’s venality. BusinessWeek called it “that amazing atomic bomb.” The Las Vegas Review-Journal hailed it as “one of the most important scientific achievements of all time” and speculated that mankind might be “on the threshold of one of those new eras which was ushered in by the invention of the steam engine, the internal combustion engine, harnessing electricity, discovering of the principle of radio. . . .”
In the White House, Truman was confident the United States would enjoy a long exclusive on the atom, thanks in part to the false uranium forecast he had received from Groves. The stuff was supposed to be rare in the earth, and America had done outstanding work in securing most of the supply for itself—particularly at Shinkolobwe. Recent assessments had indicated the world’s supply would last only until the year 2000. Truman also believed the enrichment process was too complex for the Russians to master. He said as much to J. Robert Oppenheimer during a conversation in the Oval Office.
“When will the Russians be able to build the bomb?” Truman asked.
“I don’t know,” said Oppenheimer.
“I know.”
“When?”
“Never.”
Oppenheimer went on to tell the president that some scientists felt they had blood on their hands for what had been accomplished at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and for what the world could expect in the future.
An infuriated Truman would say later that he pulled out his handkerchief and handed it to the father of the A-bomb.
“Here,” he said. “Would you like to wipe the blood off your hands?”
After Oppenheimer left the Oval Office, Truman turned to an aide and said, “I don’t want to see that son of a bitch in here ever again!”
There was guilt and fear in America in the late summer of 1945, but there were also two important counterforces. The first was genuine patriotic pride. The country had just emerged victorious from a punishing two-front war with the help of a magic solution that had emerged from its innards. American muscle and intellect had forged this world-beating gadget and, in a flash over Japan, it had vaulted the country to the top of the international order.
The second was a hope that this new destructive force of uranium—the “Frankenstein,” as one radio commentator termed it—might be turned into a servant of mankind. The beginning of the atomic age presented hazards, but it could bring a future of increased comfort and luxury. Managed carefully, it might even be a utopia. There could be atomic-powered cars, airplanes that would run on a pellet of uranium, ships that could fly to Mars in a week. In the words of an early newspaper report: “Furnaces of vest-pocket size. Power for whole cities produced from a few handfuls of matter.”
These forecasts ranged from the ludicrous to the merely overoptimistic, but they helped ease the country through a period of disruption. They also highlighted a central truth about uranium that had been on display ever since Soddy’s report first landed on the desk of H. G. Wells. Uranium was a mansion of physical violence, but the greatest part of its powers had always been rooted in the role it played in the human imagination.
In those first hours after Hiroshima, most of what America understood about atomic fission was based on newspaper reports and official statements of the U.S. War Department. And all were the literary output of just one man.
The person who would do more than anyone in history to present uranium as a friend to mankind held down two jobs at once—he was a beat reporter at the New York Times and also a paid author of press releases for the U.S. government.
William L. Laurence had already written the Times’s first stories about the discovery of atomic fission. He took a leave of absence in the crucial summer of 1945 to work as the “official journalist” for the Manhattan Project. Laurence was the only reporter permitted within the gates of Los Alamos and was allowed to personally witness both the Trinity and Nagasaki detonations. He had the unique role, therefore, of acting as a stenographer for the War Department while holding a position as the top science reporter for the nation’s
most influential newspaper.
The atom could scarcely have found a better spokesman. For Laurence, the advent of the atomic era was an unalloyed miracle: “an Eighth Day wonder, a sort of Second Coming of Christ yarn,” as he once put it in a note to his editor. Most of the predictions he made were later discredited, but he succeeded in countering some of the fear of apocalypse by creating a sunny and blameless image around uranium. He bore a resemblance to that other influential poet of radioactivity, H. G. Wells, in that the two shared an exuberant prose style and a near-mystical appreciation for the powers of atomic physics. But though Laurence was working within the forms of nonfiction, he lacked Wells’s sense of morality and balance. For him, the news was only good.
He was born in a Lithuanian village in 1888, a place he later described as “out of space and time,” with mud streets and no running water. One of his earliest memories was grieving the death of a sick kitten. He went for a walk in the grain fields, asking, as he walked, “God, why did you kill my little kitten?” Field led to field, and the place he tried to reach—the spot “where the earth met the sky”—kept retreating in front of him. His earliest memory was also his earliest spiritual shock: the horizons never seemed to end. By the age of eight, he had memorized large portions of the Old Testament in the original Hebrew. But Laurence would later conclude that his prayers were useless and religion was a fairy tale.
Tom Zoellner Page 10