Big Science

by Michael Hiltzik

  Struggling to meet their final assignment from the Interim Committee, the four members of the scientific panel convened at Los Alamos on June 15. It was a painful, emotionally fraught gathering. “We thought of the fighting men who were set for an invasion which would be so very costly in both American and Japanese lives,” Compton reflected. “We were determined to find, if we could, some effective way of demonstrating the power of an atomic bomb without loss of life that would impress Japan’s warlords. If only this could be done!”

  “The last one of our group to give up hope,” Compton wrote later, was Ernest Lawrence. Ernest’s colleagues observed his “obvious distress” all weekend long; Compton suggested that he was excessively swayed by the friendships he had forged with Japanese physicists who had worked on the cyclotron. This was tactless but not necessarily inaccurate, for two Japanese scientists, Ryokichi Sagane and Tameichi Yasaki, had worked for more than a year at the Rad Lab before building the very first cyclotron outside the United States at Tokyo’s Institute for Physical and Chemical Research, copying Lawrence’s machine so slavishly that they even incorporated mistakes that the Berkeley cyclotroneers had already discovered and rectified.

  The panel, to its own dismay, could conceive of no alternative to bombing Japan. Oppenheimer, writing for the group, dispatched to Washington a dispirited one-page memo on June 16 memorializing their conclusion. The memo suggested that Britain, Russia, France, and China all be informed in advance of the progress of the work and the likelihood of the bombs’ deployment, and that the allies be solicited for suggestions “as to how we can cooperate in making this development contribute to improved international relations.” On the question of deployment versus demonstration, “we can propose no technical demonstration likely to bring an end to the war; we see no acceptable alternative to direct military use.” To what extent Ernest Lawrence concurred with that baleful conclusion is not documented, for no notes by him have been found. Oppenheimer’s memo acknowledged that “the opinions of our scientific colleagues on the initial use of these weapons are not unanimous,” but he might well have been referring to the range of thought within the entire scientific community, not merely among the four committee members. In any event, Lawrence put his name to the statement on June 16, and thereafter never admitted publicly to any misgivings about the result.

  By then, the die had been cast. The 509th Composite Group under the command of Paul Tibbets, a twenty-nine-year-old lieutenant colonel from Illinois, had been domiciled with its Boeing B-29 Superfortress heavy bombers on Tinian Island in the Northern Marianas, about 1,500 miles south of Japan, since the week before the scientific panel’s last meeting. At Los Alamos, the most important task remaining was to test a bomb using plutonium as its core, for its implosion design—in which a hollow plutonium sphere would be crushed into a supercritical ball by an outer shell of explosives, painstakingly arranged and timed to deliver a symmetrical shock wave—was so novel that no one could be absolutely sure it would work. By contrast, the bomb carrying the fissile uranium produced by Lawrence’s racetracks in Oak Ridge needed no testing, for its design was judged to be a trivial engineering feat; in any event, the output of enriched U-235 from Oak Ridge was so meager that there was only enough for one device, to be carried on Tibbets’s aircraft, the Enola Gay (named after his mother), to Hiroshima. The reactors at Hanford, however, were breeding plutonium in sufficient volume to make a test feasible and provide for an unlimited number of plutonium bombs afterward.

  • • •

  The Trinity test was to take place under nerve-wracking scrutiny. Present at the Alamogordo test range would be almost every high-level official of the Manhattan Project, from General Groves down. At Los Alamos, the almost insupportable tension fostered a sort of mania. “It was hard to behave normally,” recalled Elsie McMillan, Edwin McMillan’s wife and Molly Lawrence’s sister. “It was hard to think. It was hard not to let off steam. It was hard not to overindulge in all the natural activities of life.”

  Meteorologists at Los Alamos scanned their weather reports, searching for a period of clear skies under which to stage the test at Alamogordo, some 250 miles to the south. Finally, they settled on a span of a few days in mid-July. On July 5 Lawrence received a confirmatory cable from Oppenheimer in Los Alamos: “Anytime after the fifteenth would be good for our fishing trip. Because we are not certain of the weather, we may be delayed several days. As we do not have enough sleeping bags to go around, we ask you please do not bring any friends with you. Let us know where in Albuquerque you can be reached.”

  Groves arrived in Berkeley on July 13, with Bush and Conant in tow. That night, they were feted by Ernest at Trader Vic’s in Oakland, where the fare ran to spareribs eaten with the fingers and washed down with the restaurant’s signature mai tai cocktails. They all continued on the general’s plane to Albuquerque, where Groves was infuriated to discover eminent physicists gathered in clumps at the main hotel. On the reasoning that the recognition of any of them by an outsider would breach security, he ordered them dispersed to other hotels around town. At eleven o’clock on the night of the fifteenth, a government sedan picked up Lawrence for the bumpy three-hour ride to Compania Hill, a watching post twenty miles from the bomb site. Reaching his destination at two in the morning, he encountered McMillan, Robert Serber, Edward Teller, the newly knighted Sir James Chadwick, and a young Caltech physicist named Richard Feynman, who exercised his radio skills to pester the post’s balky shortwave to life. It instantly began broadcasting conversations between ground control and the B-29 observation planes. In the distance, Lawrence could see the glow of spotlights illuminating the spindly hundred-foot-tall test tower from which the plutonium “gadget” was suspended.

  The test shot had been postponed from four o’clock to five thirty to allow a pelting thunderstorm to pass. Each observer chose to fight off the tension in his own way. Lawrence placed wagers on the outcome and yield, as was being done at the main viewing post less than ten miles from the tower; the bets ranged from the equivalent of forty thousand tons of TNT down to zero. Teller slathered his face with suntan lotion. Others fidgeted with their protective goggles—McMillan had brought along a welder’s mask with the darkest visor he could find.

  At the base camp the observers were instructed to lay prone in ditches excavated to protect them from the blast, with their feet pointed toward the tower. The precautions at Compania Hill were less stringent. As the countdown squawked from the radio, Lawrence was unable to keep still. As he reported to Groves:

  I decided the best place to view the flame would be through the window of the car I was sitting in, which would take out ultraviolet, but at the last minute decided to get out of the car (evidence indeed I was excited!) and just as I put my foot on the ground I was enveloped with a warm brilliant yellow white light—from darkness to brilliant sunshine in an instant, and as I remember I momentarily was stunned by the surprise. It took me a second thought to tell myself, “this is indeed it!!” and then through my dark sun glasses there was a gigantic ball of fire rising rapidly from the earth—at first as brilliant as the sun, growing less brilliant as it grew boiling and swirling into the heavens. Ten or fifteen thousand feet above the ground, it was orange in color and I judge a mile in diameter. At higher levels it became purple, and this purple afterglow persisted for what seemed a long time . . . This purple glow was due to the enormous radioactivity of the gases. (The light is in large part due to nitrogen in the air, and in the laboratory we occasionally produce it in miniature with the cyclotron.) . . . It was a grand spectacle . . .

  A little over two minutes after the beginning of the flash, the shock wave hit us. It was a sharp loud crack and then for about a minute thereafter there were resounding echos from the surrounding mountains . . . like a giant firecracker set off a few yards away—or perhaps like the report of 37 mm artillery at a distance of about one hundred yards.

  Standing next to Lawrence, Serber had trained his unprotected eyes directly on
the fireball at the moment of detonation. The flash blinded him for many long seconds, during which he could make out only subtle changes in color and feel the heat of the blast on his face. McMillan perceived the same purple glow as Lawrence through his welder’s glass, and similarly attributed it to the ionization of atmospheric gas. All the observers shared the unsettling sensation of having witnessed a cataclysmic event. “The immediate reaction of the watchers was one of awe rather than excitement,” related McMillan.

  Oppenheimer’s recollection of his own reaction has been oft repeated; he claimed that a verse from the Sanskrit Bhagavad Gita leaped into his mind: “ ‘Now I am become death, destroyer of worlds.’ I suppose we all thought that, one way or another.” There is reason to believe that recollection was an ex post facto elaboration; those on the scene recall a sensation more suggestive of relief and euphoria in the air.

  In any case, Ernest Lawrence, a man normally not given to introspection in the Oppenheimer style, struggled to set down his emotions on paper. He incorporated the reactions he had witnessed in the others. “The grand, indeed almost cataclysmic proportion of the explosion produced a kind of solemnity in everyone’s behavior immediately afterwards,” he wrote. “There was restrained applause, but more a hushed murmuring bordering on reverence in manner as the event was commented upon[.] Dr. Charles Thomas (Monsanto) spoke to me of this being the greatest single event in the history of mankind, etc. etc.

  “As far as all of us are concerned, although we knew the fundamentals were sound and that the explosion could be produced, we share a feeling that we have this day crossed a great milestone in human progress.”

  • • •

  The outcome of the test was communicated promptly to Stimson, who had accompanied Truman to the conference of the Big Three in Potsdam, outside Berlin. The message from George Harrison, a prominent banker and member of the Interim Committee, read: “Operated on this morning. Diagnosis not yet complete but results seem satisfactory and already exceed expectations . . . Dr. Groves pleased.”

  The successful test brought into sharp relief the issue of what to disclose to America’s allies. Although the scientific panel had proposed informing Britain, France, China, and Russia, in practical terms the real question boiled down to what to tell the Soviets. In consultation with Stimson, Truman decided to wait until the final day of the Potsdam conference and then treat Stalin to a bare-bones report. As Truman later recalled the episode, he wandered around the baize-covered conference table to the Russian side, leaving behind his own interpreter, and ambled up to Stalin: “I casually mentioned to Stalin that we had a new weapon of unusual destructive force. The Russian Premier showed no special interest. All he said was that he was glad to hear it and hoped we would make ‘good use of it against the Japanese.’ ”

  Truman may have considered himself crafty in giving Stalin just enough information to forestall Russian complaints of having been left in the dark, without telling him enough to be useful. Stalin’s indifferent reaction could have been the product of Truman’s studied nonchalance. But it may also have reflected the fact that he already knew about the Alamogordo test, informed by his network of spies in the West. To Oppenheimer, Truman’s refusal to even try to forge a genuine partnership with the Soviet Union for the control of nuclear weapons was a tragic lost opportunity. “That was carrying casualness rather far,” he remarked later.

  • • •

  After Trinity, the drive toward the bombing of Japan proceeded without further consultation with the scientific panel. But the ferment among the bomb scientists continued—centered, as always, at the Met Lab in Chicago. Szilard circulated a petition arguing on moral grounds against any deployment of the bomb at all. (He later revised the text to condone the bomb’s use after giving “suitable warning and opportunity for surrender under known conditions.”) The petition carried the signatures of more than sixty Met Lab scientists when Compton delivered it to Washington. But it was not the only petition accumulating signatures at the Met Lab, where opposition to use of the bomb was by no means unanimous; one other petition read in part: “Are not the men of the fighting forces . . . who are risking their lives for the nation entitled to the weapons which have been designed? . . . If we can save even a handful of American lives, then let us use this weapon—now!”

  The precise timing of the Hiroshima mission was known only to a few physicists on the bomb team. Among them were Alvarez and Serber, who had been sharing a tent on Tinian for two months, preparing for their assignment tending gauges to be dropped by parachute with the bomb itself. At two forty-five on the morning of August 5, Alvarez climbed into the Great Artiste, the B-29 accompanying Tibbets’s Enola Gay on the bomb run. Almost exactly six and a half hours later, they were over Hiroshima. The Enola Gay dropped its payload, the uranium bomb christened Little Boy. Alvarez watched his three gauges waft down behind the bomb, and as his plane veered around in a turn of two g-forces to outrace the shock wave, checked his receiver to make sure the gauges were acquiring data. He felt the blast forty-five seconds after the bomb was released.

  “Suddenly a bright flash lit the compartment, the light from the explosion reflecting off the clouds in front of us . . . A few moments later, two sharp shocks slammed the plane.” Then the Great Artiste circled back over Hiroshima. “I looked in vain for the city that had been our target,” Alvarez recalled. “My friend and teacher Ernest Lawrence had expended great energy and hundreds of millions of dollars building the machines that separated the U-235 for the Little Boy bomb. I thought the bombardier had missed the city by miles . . . and I wondered how we would ever explain such a failure to him.” But the bomb had reached its target. Hiroshima could not be seen because it had been destroyed.

  Two days later, Alvarez was preparing for the second run that would drop the plutonium bomb, “Fat Man,” on Nagasaki. Taking a break in the Tinian officers’ club with Serber and Phil Morrison, a theoretical physicist from Berkeley, he remembered Ryokichi Sagane and his two-year sojourn at the Rad Lab. Perhaps this personal connection could be used to press for an end of the war—one tiny personal step the three American scientists might take to counterbalance their role in raining destruction down upon Sagane and his countrymen. Hurriedly they drafted a message to be placed in envelopes taped to the three gauges launched into the maelstrom:

  We are sending this as a personal message to urge that you use your influence as a reputable nuclear physicist, to convince the Japanese General Staff of the terrible consequences which will be suffered by your people if you continue in this war . . . Within the space of three weeks, we have proof-fired one bomb in the American desert, exploded one in Hiroshima, and fired the third this morning.

  We implore you to confirm these facts to your leaders, and to do your utmost to stop the destruction and waste of life which can only result in the total annihilation of all your cities if continued. As scientists, we deplore the use to which a beautiful discovery has been put, but we can assure you that unless Japan surrenders at once, this rain of atomic bombs will increase manyfold in fury.

  They signed it “From three of your former scientific colleagues during your stay in the United States.”

  The letter, which was recovered from the rubble of Nagasaki, did not reach Sagane until after the Japanese surrender. Many months later, Wilson Compton, a brother of Arthur and Karl traveling in Japan, received a copy from Sagane. He passed it on to Alvarez, who put his signature to it and returned it to Sagane in 1949 as a mordant keepsake.

  Amid the public fascination with the “secret weapon” following its spectacular disclosure and the euphoria of the Japanese capitulation announced by Truman five days after Nagasaki, the bombings occasioned a surge of soul-searching among the scientists of the Manhattan Project. Lawrence was sympathetic to the displays of doubt shown by some of his closest friends and colleagues. But he also was impatient with the second-guessing of a decision that, as he saw it, ended this war and, conceivably, all war. “I am sure the wh
ole world will realize that war is no longer possible in human affairs,” he wrote to Lewis Akeley, the South Dakota professor who so many years earlier had set him on his career path in physics.

  Ernest fended off numerous efforts to draw him into the debate over the bomb. On August 9, in a moment of indiscretion following Nagasaki, he had confided to Karl Darrow that he had proposed a nonmilitary demonstration to the Interim Committee. Darrow, who hoped to head off public backlash for the scientists’ complicity in the creation of a lethal new technology, leaped at the chance to disseminate an example of ambivalence at the summit of the scientific community. “I hope you will publicize the fact that you made this plea . . . mainly because of the possibility of public opinion harmful to science,” he wrote Lawrence. “Some people go so far as to blame scientists for the consequences of their discoveries. I think it is not far-fetched nor absurd to conjecture that in time to come, people will be saying, ‘Those wicked physicists of the “Manhattan Project” deliberately developed a bomb which they knew would be used for killing thousands of innocent people without any warning . . . Away with physicists!’ It will not be accepted as an excuse that they may have disapproved in silence.”

  Lawrence would have none of it. After recapitulating the counterarguments raised at the Interim Committee against a demonstration, he advised Darrow, “I am inclined to feel that they made the right decision. Surely many more lives were saved by shortening the war than were sacrificed as a result of the bombs. Further, it goes without saying that . . . the world must realize that there can never be another war. As regards criticism of physicists and scientists, I think that is a cross we will have to bear, and I think in the long run the good sense of everyone the world over will realize that in this instance, as in all scientific pursuits, the world is better as a result.”

  He displayed the same impatience with Oppenheimer, who expressed his personal torment over the bomb while delivering the Arthur D. Little Memorial Lecture at MIT in 1947. “In some sort of crude sense which no vulgarity, no humor, no overstatement can quite extinguish,” he declared, “the physicists have known sin; and this is a knowledge which they cannot lose.”