Big Science

by Michael Hiltzik

  The episode was a reminder for Bush and Conant that if they did not begin outlining a postwar research program within the Manhattan Project, its members would start taking matters into their own hands. They also understood that, beyond keeping the program’s scientists mollified, there were other reasons to think about postwar policy. One was that the secret of atomic weapons was bound to get out one way or another, whether through deployment of the bomb itself, or the natural march of basic research, or through leaks from the huge contingent of scientists who had worked on the project. Estimates of how long it might take the Soviets to develop their own bomb ranged from three or four years (the view of Oppenheimer, Bush, and Conant) to twenty (the opinion of Groves, who saw the matter through the prism of his own efforts to manage the enormously complicated program). The Soviet Union was a crucial ally in the war effort, but the leaders of the US and Great Britain mistrusted Stalin and feared that the Soviet leader’s thirst for European domination would make for an uneasy postwar peace. Divulging the bomb to the Soviets and enlisting them in an international control regime prior to a public demonstration of the weapon’s power, Bush and Conant reasoned, might be the best way to avoid an arms race that would threaten the world.

  Ideas for international control had been making their way to Roosevelt and British prime minister Winston Churchill for months, albeit haphazardly. In August, Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter, an old friend of FDR’s, had brought Niels Bohr to the White House with a proposal for immediate disclosure of the bomb secret as a prelude to establishing an international control regime. The proposal landed on the agenda of the September 1944 Quebec summit meeting between Roosevelt and Churchill, but they decided instead to maintain the bomb exclusively as an Anglo-American technology even after the war, in effect establishing the two countries as permanent stewards of world peace and excluding the Russians.

  Bush and Conant, who learned of this decision from Secretary of War Stimson, responded on September 30 with a memo pointing out that news of the atomic bomb was likely to reach the world by August 1945 either through a nonmilitary demonstration or deployment in war. The weapon in development, with the power of about ten thousand tons of TNT, had the capacity to dramatically alter the nature of war and peace; but that was modest compared with the potential of a thermonuclear “Super” bomb, which was already the subject of theorizing by Manhattan Project scientists and might be a thousand times more powerful. The United States and Britain could not hope to keep a monopoly on nuclear technology for more than a few years, they warned. Bush and Conant also were aware that as long as the atomic bomb was a secret, the talks already taking place on postwar diplomacy—specifically the 1944 Dumbarton Oaks conference, which would set the foundations for the United Nations—would be proceeding in a vacuum. As James Franck would write in early 1945, scientists “know in our hearts that all these plans are obsolete, because the future war has an entirely different and a thousand times more sinister aspect than the war which is fought right now.”

  The efforts by Bush and Conant yielded little in terms of policy movement. The White House was gearing up for the conference of the Big Three—Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin—in Yalta, scheduled for the beginning of February 1945 amid indications of Stalin’s growing intransigence over a strong Soviet Union role in postwar Europe, especially Eastern Europe. Military planning, meanwhile, was proceeding at full speed. Groves had begun training of the airborne unit that would deliver the bomb to its target in Japan; on December 30, 1944, he received approval from FDR to inform key combat officers of the army, air force, and navy about essential details of the mission. In this frenzied atmosphere, the inchoate ideas of Bush and Conant about international control made barely a ripple.

  After Yalta, however, opportunity seemed to beckon. The White House was euphoric over what it considered to be a successful summit. More to the point, the bomb program was moving toward a concrete conclusion, with plans laid for a decisive test in the desert. As Stimson recalled the moment, “it was considered exceedingly probable that we should by midsummer have successfully detonated the first atomic bomb . . . What had begun as a well-founded hope was now developing into a reality.” Bush and Conant urged upon Stimson the idea that serious preparatory steps needed to be taken before the bomb was revealed to the world: the drafting of public statements and legislation addressing the question of international control, and of domestic management of a postwar technical program. The world would move from the prenuclear age to the nuclear era with the very first atomic fireball; if there were a vacuum of national or international control at that moment, the result could be “something akin to mass hysteria.”

  Stimson brought these warnings to a meeting with FDR on March 15. His nominal goal was to end backbiting about the bomb program from Roosevelt’s director of war mobilization, James F. Byrnes, a former senator and Supreme Court justice. The courtly South Carolinian New Dealer, who knew almost nothing about the program, had been plying FDR with alarming rumors of extravagant spending by the Manhattan Project and suggestions that, with the cost having grown to $2 billion, “Vannevar Bush and Jim Conant have sold the president a lemon on the subject and ought to be checked up on,” as Stimson paraphrased him. In a memo to FDR, Byrnes had urged that an outside panel of eminent scientists give the program a once-over—“rather a jittery and nervous memorandum and rather silly,” Stimson recalled. At the White House, he dismissed Byrnes’s concerns by pointing out that the scientific team behind the bomb included Ernest Lawrence and three other Nobel laureates, along with “practically every physicist of standing.” Then he addressed the lingering issues of future control and the necessity of having some sort of statement at hand to release to the world along with the first news of the explosion. Roosevelt agreed that those issues should be settled in advance, but no action ensued. The meeting was Stimson’s last with FDR. Less than four weeks later, on April 12, the president was dead of a massive stroke at the age of sixty-three.

  Stimson’s next visit to the White House occurred on April 25, when his task was to explain the cataclysmic implications of nuclear energy to a new president “whose only previous knowledge of our activities was that of a senator who had loyally accepted our assurance that the matter must be kept a secret from him.” President Harry S. Truman, Stimson observed with relief, accepted his new responsibility “with the same fine spirit that Senator Truman had shown before in accepting our refusal to inform him.” Stimson did not minimize the international and political importance of the weapon. As his advance notes for the meeting stated, without robust principles in place for sharing knowledge of the bomb and placing it under control, “the world in its present state of moral advancement compared with its technical development would eventually be at the mercy of such a weapon. In other words, modern civilization might be completely destroyed . . . On the other hand, if the problem of the proper use of this weapon can be solved . . . the peace of the world and our civilization can be saved.” Stimson’s immediate goal was to obtain Truman’s permission to establish a committee devoted to these postwar issues. He received it on the spot.

  By May 1, the Interim Committee was established—so named on the assumption that Congress would appoint a permanent committee as soon as the war was over—with Stimson as chairman and Byrnes, Bush, Conant, and Karl Compton as its members. Not long afterward, Stimson named a scientific panel to advise the committee: Ernest Lawrence, Robert Oppenheimer, Arthur Compton, and Enrico Fermi. They were all leaders of Big Science, convened to contemplate its most important creation.

  The scientific panel’s role was never precisely spelled out. Conant, who had come up with the idea, thought it could serve as a conduit to the Interim Committee for the views of bomb scientists who had become restless about the implications of their work. It is doubtful that the other members agreed with that role; Compton was the only one who oversaw a lab where the scientists’ ambivalence was expressed openly.

  In formal terms, the scientific p
anel would have the opportunity to give its advice on any subject brought before the interim committee. This appeared at the outset to be an expansive portfolio. In the event, however, both committees soon got drawn into what Conant later described as “the most important matter on which an opinion was to be recorded. This was the question of the use of the bomb against the Japanese.”

  The Interim Committee met with its scientific panel for the first time on May 31 at the Pentagon, with Groves and Army Chief of Staff George C. Marshall in attendance. It had been three weeks since the fall of Germany, and attention was focused on Japan. As Compton recalled the discussion, Japan “was an overpowered nation, but she was fighting desperately, unwilling to acknowledge defeat . . . The great danger was that the fanatical military group would retain such control of Japan that surrender would be impossible.” The historical debate over the likely intensity of Japanese resistance and therefore the possible cost of an invasion of the home islands in Allied lives has continued to this day, but there can be little doubt that for decision makers in 1945, the magnitude of possible losses—one million lives was a not-uncommon estimate—looked horrific. The May 31 discussion unfolded against that backdrop.

  Compton placed the concerns of rank-and-file scientists about the social and political implications of the bomb on the committee record, via a memo from the Met Lab’s Franck. The document warned that the use of a weapon that could kill thousands of people in a single strike would mean “moral isolation” for the United States; if America was hoping to outlaw the use of atomic weapons by international treaty, Franck wrote, their prior use would put the country “in a weak position to recommend their prohibition.”

  Instead, Franck proposed “a demonstration before the eyes of all the world on some barren island.” This was by no means the first time the idea of a nonmilitary demonstration had been heard; in fact, it had been in the wind for years. Bush and Conant had proposed something of the sort to Stimson in September 1944: “complete disclosure” of the technology, omitting manufacturing and military details, “as soon as the first bomb has been demonstrated.” They specified, “This demonstration might be over enemy territory, or in our own country, with subsequent notice to Japan that the materials would be used against the Japanese mainland unless surrender was forthcoming.”

  But the May 31 meeting was the first time that the idea of a demonstration was placed before a decision-making body of the US government. Even so, it was presented delicately, not as part of the official agenda, and only after the committee addressed several other formal agenda items. These included America’s supposed head start on the rest of the world in atomic weaponry. (In context, “the rest of the world” meant the Soviet Union.) Compton estimated the American lead on the atomic bomb at no more than six years. As for developing and producing the next-generation weapon, a thermonuclear bomb, Oppenheimer reckoned that would take the United States three years—not a comforting timeline for anyone concerned about the proliferation of weapons capable of menacing civilization. Byrnes, who up to then had viewed the atomic bomb largely as an abstract device useful for bargaining with the Russians, would recall that Oppenheimer’s astonishing figures left him “thoroughly frightened.”

  When the discussion turned to the future of the American technical program, Lawrence took the opportunity to secure a foothold for postwar Big Science by lobbying for a “vigorous program of plant expansion and stockpiling” with government support. This was an idea endorsed by both Arthur and Karl Compton, who had large academic institutions of their own to nurture. Lawrence appeared untroubled by the prospect of continued military oversight of the program, which was where Oppenheimer drew the line. Oppie thought such conditions could only stifle basic research; there was a fundamental difference, he said, between basic science and the work that had taken place at Los Alamos and the other Manhattan Project labs, which had only “plucked the fruit of earlier discoveries.” To keep American science in full flower, he asserted, what was needed was “a more leisurely and normal research environment.” On that point, he won the assent of Bush.

  Then it was time for lunch. All during the morning session, Compton would recall, “it seemed to be a foregone conclusion that the bomb would be used. It was regarding only the details of strategy and tactics that differing views were expressed.” Yet during the morning, Lawrence had alluded approvingly to the possibility of a nonmilitary demonstration. At lunchtime, Byrnes asked him to expand on it. “It was discussed at some length,” Lawrence remembered, “perhaps ten minutes.”

  As Lawrence and Compton both recalled, the general reaction was negative. “An atomic bomb was an intricate device, still in the developmental stage,” Compton recounted the conversation. “We could not afford the chance that one of them might be a dud . . . Though the possibility of a demonstration that would not destroy human lives was attractive, no one could suggest a way in which it could be made so convincing that it would be likely to stop the war.” Oppenheimer was uncomfortable with the entire discussion, for he considered the question of the bomb’s deployment to be outside the scientists’ expertise. “We didn’t think that being scientists especially qualified us as to how to answer this question of how the bombs should be used or not,” he recalled years later, taking it upon himself to articulate the sense of the entire scientific panel. “We didn’t know beans about the military situation in Japan. We didn’t know whether the invasion was really inevitable . . . We did say that we did not think that exploding one of these things as a firecracker over a desert was likely to be impressive.” But as he observed in recalling the discussion, that was before they actually had exploded their firecracker, which yielded a display that turned out to be very impressive indeed.

  Oppenheimer’s point made a vivid impression on Lawrence. “Oppenheimer felt, and this feeling was shared by Groves and others, that the only way to put on a demonstration would be to attack a real target of built-up structures,” he related in late August to his friend Karl Darrow. As the general explained, this narrowed the targets to cities hosting large munitions plants surrounded by worker housing.

  The other telling argument against a demonstration, Lawrence recalled for Darrow, was that “the number of people that would be killed by the bomb would not be greater in order of magnitude than the number already killed in fire raids.” To the extent this represented a quantitative judgment, it was certainly true; yet in qualitative terms, it may be viewed as a desperate rationalization of a foregone conclusion. Oppenheimer estimated for the committee that the bomb might take twenty thousand lives; later estimates place the death toll from the blast itself, not counting subsequent deaths from radiation exposure, at sixty thousand to eighty thousand in Hiroshima and forty thousand to fifty thousand at Nagasaki. These figures are indeed within or even somewhat below the range of estimated deaths from the firebombings of Tokyo, the raids by low-flying aircraft carrying incendiary bombs, which had commenced that February and climaxed on the night of March 9–10. Yet the comparison ignores the fact that almost everyone involved in the Manhattan Project and the bombing decision recognized that a nuclear bomb was transformative, certain to introduce a new type of warfare and new relationships among nations; that was the point of establishing the Interim Committee in the first place. Stimson acknowledged this himself in fragmentary handwritten notes he prepared for the May 31 meeting:

  “We don’t think it mere new weapon . . . infinitely greater, in respect to its Effect—on the ordinary affairs of man’s life. May destroy or perfect International Civilization . . . Frankenstein or means for World Peace.” If it were just a matter of counting casualties, the decision to drop the bomb would have been much simpler. Stimson wrote later that at the May 31 meeting, he and Marshall both expressed the view that atomic energy “could not be considered simply in terms of military weapons but must also be considered in terms of a new relationship of man to the universe.” But he remained silent about the incompatibility of that view with the cold calculation of acc
eptable casualties.

  The May 31 meeting broke up with the Interim Committee and its scientific panel at cross-purposes. After lunch, Compton recalled, the scientific panel was asked to prepare a report “as to whether we could devise any kind of demonstration that would seem likely to bring the war to an end without using the bomb against a live target.”

  The scientists therefore were justified in thinking that a final decision on dropping the bomb would await their further input. But matters were moving ahead without them. One day after the Pentagon meeting, the Interim Committee adopted three recommendations for President Truman: (1) the bomb should be used against Japan “as soon as possible”; (2) it should be used on a “dual target,” such as a military installation or munitions plant surrounded by “houses and other buildings most susceptible to damage”; and (3) there should be no prior warning. The vote was unanimous, although one member, navy undersecretary Ralph Bard, presently dissented from the third recommendation, resigned his post, and proposed to Stimson that the Japanese receive two or three days’ warning. His views made it all the way to the White House where, plainly, they were disregarded.