A general alert had been sounded at seven in the morning, four hours before two B-29s appeared, but it was ignored by the workmen and most of the population. The police insist that the air raid warning was sounded two minutes before the bomb fell, but most people say they heard none.
In swaybacked or flattened skeletons of the Mitsubishi arms plants is revealed what the atom can do to steel and stone, but what the riven atom can do against human flesh and bone lies hidden in two hospitals of downtown Nagasaki. Look at the pushed-in facade of the American consulate, three miles from the blast’s center, or the face of the Catholic cathedral, one mile in the other direction, torn down like gingerbread, and you can tell that the liberated atom spares nothing in the way. Those human beings who it has happened to spare sit on mats or tiny family board-platforms in Nagasaki’s two largest undestroyed hospitals. Their shoulders, arms and faces are wrapped in bandages. Showing them to you, as the first American outsider to reach Nagasaki since the surrender, your propaganda-conscious official guide looks meaningfully in your face and wants to know, “What do you think?”
What this question means is: Do you intend writing that America did something inhuman in loosing this weapon against Japan? That is what we want you to write.
Several children, some burned and others unburned but with patches of hair falling out, are sitting with their mothers. Yesterday Japanese photographers took many pictures of them. About one in five is heavily bandaged, but none are showing signs of pain.
Some adults are in pain as they lie on mats. They moan softly. One woman caring for her husband shows eyes dim with tears. It is a piteous scene and your official guide studies your face covertly to see if you are moved.
Visiting many litters, talking lengthily with two general physicians and one X-ray specialist, gains you a large amount of information and opinion on the victims’ symptoms. Statistics are variable and few records are kept. But it is ascertained that this chief municipal hospital had about 750 atomic patients until this week and lost by death approximately 360.
Dr. Uraji Hayashida shakes his head somberly and says that he believes there must be something to the American radio report about the ground around the Mitsubishi plant being poisoned. But his next statement knocks out the props from under this theory because it develops that the widow’s family has been absent from the wrecked area ever since the blast yet shows symptoms common with those who returned.
According to Japanese doctors, patients with these late-developing symptoms are dying now—a month after the bombs fall—at the rate of about ten daily. The three doctors calmly stated that Disease X has them nonplussed and that they are giving no treatment whatever but rest. Radio rumors from America received the same consideration with the symptoms under their noses. They are licked for cure and do not seem very worried about it.
Nagasaki, Japan—September 9, 1945
The atomic bomb’s peculiar “disease,” uncured because it is untreated and untreated because it is undiagnosed, is still snatching away lives here. Men, women and children with no outward marks of injury are dying daily in hospitals, some after having walked around for three or four weeks thinking they have escaped. The doctors here have every modern medicament, but candidly confessed in talking to the writer—the first Allied observer to Nagasaki since the surrender—that the answer to the malady is beyond them. Their patients, though their skin is whole, are simply passing away under their eyes.
[Dr. Yosisada] Nakashima considers that it is possible that the atomic bomb’s rare rays may cause deaths in the first class, as with delayed X-ray burns. But the second class has him totally baffled. These patients begin with slight burns which make normal progress for two weeks. They differ from simple burns, however, in that the patient has a high fever. Unfevered patients with as much as one-third of the skin area burned have been known to recover. But where fever is present after two weeks, the healing of burns suddenly halts and they get worse. The burns come to resemble septic ulcers. Yet patients are not in great pain, which distinguishes them from any X-ray burns victims. Four to five days from this turn to the worse, they die. Their bloodstream has not thinned as in first class, and their organs after death are found in a normal condition of health. But they are dead—dead of the atomic bomb—and nobody knows why.
Twenty-five Americans are due to arrive on September 11th to study the Nagasaki bombsite. The Japanese hope that they will bring a solution for Disease X.
Section Eight
Reflections on the Bomb
Reflections on the Bomb
With the surrender of Japan and the end of World War II, hundreds of thousands of Allied soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines in the Pacific theater were immensely relieved to be heading home. On the home front, tens of thousands of people who worked on the Manhattan Project were genuinely proud that their efforts contributed to ending a long and devastating war.
This section examines reactions by scientists, political leaders and others shortly after the end of the war. In a speech to Los Alamos scientists in November 1945, J. Robert Oppenheimer explains how the atomic bomb transformed the nature of war and why new approaches are needed to resolve conflicts. The atomic bomb is “too revolutionary to consider in the framework of old ideas.”
On August 12, 1945, the United States government unveiled the Manhattan Project to the American people by publishing Henry DeWolf Smyth’s Atomic Energy for Military Purposes. While withholding technical details, the report is a remarkably straightforward description of what was entailed in building the first atomic bombs. The purpose was to inform the citizens and establish what atomic information could be shared publicly.
Gradually news about the full effects of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki reached the American public. John Hersey’s book Hiroshima comprised an entire issue of The New Yorker in August 1946. Through the stories of six who survived the initial blast, Hersey provided wrenching descriptions of the impact of the atomic bomb.
Immediately after the war, 85 percent of the American people approved of the use of the atomic bombs. Over the next year, the public’s confidence in that decision waned. In February 1947, Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson wrote an article in Harper’s Magazine explaining the Truman administration’s decision to use the bomb. According to historian Barton Bernstein, it was “history with a purpose,” intended to defuse rising public criticism. Other articles at the time reflect a wide spectrum of views, ranging from “Thank God for the Bomb” by Paul Fussell to “The Return to Nothingness” by Felix Morley.
In his recent book, historian Tsuyoshi Hasegawa examines the myths and simplified histories that the United States, Soviet Union, and Japan adopted to justify their decisions at the end of the war. J. Samuel Walker argues that current evidence shows a vastly more complex situation than many previous accounts have acknowledged. Because the history is full of ambiguity and controversy, Gar Alperovitz predicts that the debate will continue.
Outwitting General Groves
In 1943, Harold Agnew moved to Los Alamos from Chicago, where he was with Enrico Fermi when the first man-made nuclear chain reaction took place. A young college graduate, Agnew joined the Experimental Physics Division. In 1945 he was assigned to Tinian Island as a member of Project Alberta. There he noticed that technical reports were frequently intercepted by General Groves, failing to reach Oppenheimer as intended. When Groves ordered his men to seize the film taken of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings, Agnew determined to deliver it first to Oppenheimer. The following is how Agnew outwitted Groves’s men as they vied for possession of the film.
BY HAROLD AGNEW
On the mission to Hiroshima, I was assigned to the instrument plane, The Great Artiste, which was equipped with scientific instruments to measure the yield. I had a movie camera and after we completed our measurements, I filmed the Hiroshima cloud with black-and-white film. For the Nagasaki mission, I equipped the tail gunners on the strike and instrument planes with cameras with color film. Th
e films turned out to be the only movies of either Hiroshima or Nagasaki. When General Groves learned that we had the film, he directed his men to retrieve it as we made our way back across the Pacific.
At every stop en route to the mainland, Army personnel confronted me and demanded the film. Before we left Tinian, I had given the films to a courier who was allowed to give the film back only to me. At each stop on the return flight, I brushed the Army men off with, “I’m a civilian. Who are you?” I told them, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
From there we went to Kwajalein Island. When we landed, they asked, “Who’s Agnew?” I just stonewalled them. And we took off again to Hawaii. When we landed in San Francisco, some “gumshoes” or counter-intelligence guys came up to me and again asked for the film.
I said, “How do I know who you are? You have to verify who you are.” That sort of stymied them. By the time they could authenticate who they were, we had taken off.
It worked like this all the way back until we got to Albuquerque where they really had me nailed since the courier had returned the film to me. But I cut a deal. I said, “What we will do is go back to the lab and let Oppie adjudicate what is going to happen to the film.”
Oppie decided to first develop the cassettes to see if we had anything on them or not. Because two were in color, Julian Mack, head of photography, had to take them to the Lookout Mountain Air Force laboratory on the West Coast. After developing them and making copies, he brought them back the next day. They were spectacular. Then Oppie, with great grandeur, gave copies to General Groves’ representative.
Toward the end of the project, Oppie personally gave me the originals. I have since given them to the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace at Stanford University. Today, the Hoover Institution makes them available to anyone at a reasonable price. In retrospect, I should have held them until today and sold them on eBay and become a millionaire.
Oppenheimer’s Speech to Los Alamos Scientists
Oppenheimer spoke to the Association of Los Alamos Scientists on November 2, 1945, about the challenges they faced since the atomic bomb arrived in the world with “a shattering reality.” Rather than apologize, Oppenheimer justified pursuit of an atomic bomb as inevitable; scientists must “find out what the realities are” and expand man’s understanding and control of nature. He argued that new approaches are needed to govern atomic energy as it is “too revolutionary to consider in the framework of old ideas.” Excerpts from this speech follow.
BY J. ROBERT OPPENHEIMER
I think there are issues which are quite simple and quite deep, and which involve us as a group of scientists—involve us more, perhaps than any other group in the world. I think that it can only help to look a little at what our situation is—at what has happened to us—and that this must give us some honesty, some insight, which will be a source of strength in what may be the not-too-easy days ahead. I would like to take it as deep and serious as I know how, and then perhaps come to more immediate questions in the course of the discussion later. I want anyone who feels like it to ask me a question and if I can’t answer it, as will often be the case, I will just have to say so.
What has happened to us—it is really rather major, it is so major that I think in some ways one returns to the greatest developments of the twentieth century, to the discovery of relativity, and to the whole development of atomic theory and its interpretation in terms of complementarity, for analogy. These things, as you know, forced us to re-consider the relations between science and common sense. They forced on us the recognition that the fact that we were in the habit of talking a certain language and using certain concepts did not necessarily imply that there was anything in the real world to correspond to these. They forced us to be prepared for the inadequacy of the ways in which human beings attempted to deal with reality, for that reality. In some ways I think these virtues, which scientists quite reluctantly were forced to learn by the nature of the world they were studying, may be useful even today in preparing us for somewhat more radical views of what the issues are than would be natural or easy for people who had not been through this experience.
I think that it hardly needs to be said why the impact is so strong. There are three reasons: one is the extraordinary speed with which things which were right on the frontier of science were translated into terms where they affected many living people, and potentially all people. Another is the fact, quite accidental in many ways, and connected with the speed, that scientists themselves played such a large part, not merely in providing the foundation for atomic weapons, but in actually making them. In this we are certainly closer to it than any other group. The third is that the thing we made—partly because of the technical nature of the problem, partly because we worked hard, partly because we had good breaks—really arrived in the world with such a shattering reality and suddenness that there was no opportunity for the edges to be worn off.
In considering what the situation of science is, it may be helpful to think a little of what people said and felt of their motives in coming into this job. One always has to worry that what people say of their motives is not adequate. Many people said different things, and most of them, I think, had some validity. There was in the first place the great concern that our enemy might develop these weapons before we did, and the feeling—at least, in the early days, the very strong feeling—that without atomic weapons it might be very difficult, it might be an impossible, it might be an incredibly long thing to win the war. These things wore off a little as it became clear that the war would be won in any case. Some people, I think, were motivated by curiosity, and rightly so; and some by a sense of adventure, and rightly so. Others had more political arguments and said, “Well, we know that atomic weapons are in principle possible, and it is not right that the threat of their unrealized possibility should hang over the world. It is right that the world should know what can be done in their field and deal with it.” And the people added to that that it was a time when all over the world men would be particularly ripe and open for dealing with this problem because of the immediacy of the evils of war, because of the universal cry from everyone that one could not go through this thing again, even a war without atomic bombs. And there was finally, and I think rightly, the feeling that there was probably no place in the world where the development of atomic weapons would have a better chance of leading to a reasonable solution, and a smaller chance of leading to disaster, than within the United States. I believe all these things that people said are true, and I think I said them all myself at one time or another.
But when you come right down to it the reason that we did this job is because it was an organic necessity. If you are a scientist you cannot stop such a thing. If you are a scientist you believe that it is good to find out how the world works; that it is good to find out what the realities are; that it is good to turn over to mankind at large the greatest possible power to control the world and to deal with it according to its lights and its values.
There has been a lot of talk about the evil of secrecy, of concealment, of control, of security. Some of that talk has been on a rather low plane, limited really to saying that it is difficult or inconvenient to work in a world where you are not free to do what you want. I think that the talk has been justified, and that the almost unanimous resistance of scientists to the imposition of control and secrecy is a justified position, but I think that the reason for it may lie a little deeper. I think that it comes from the fact that secrecy strikes at the very root of what science is, and what it is for. It is not possible to be a scientist unless you believe that it is good to learn. It is not good to be a scientist, and it is not possible, unless you think that it is of the highest value to share your knowledge, to share it with anyone who is interested. It is not possible to be a scientist unless you believe that the knowledge of the world, and the power which this gives, is a thing which is of intrinsic value to humanity, and that you are using it to help in the spread of knowledge
, and are willing to take the consequences. And, therefore, I think that this resistance which we feel and see all around us to anything which is an attempt to treat science of the future as though it were rather a dangerous thing, a thing that must be watched and managed, is resisted not because of its inconvenience—I think we are in a position where we must be willing to take any inconvenience—but resisted because it is based on a philosophy incompatible with that by which we live, and have learned to live in the past.
There are many people who try to wiggle out of this. They say the real importance of atomic energy does not lie in the weapons that have been made; the real importance lies in all the great benefits which atomic energy, which the various radiations, will bring to mankind. There may be some truth in this. I am sure that there is truth in it, because there has never in the past been a new field opened up where the real fruits of it have not been invisible at the beginning. I have a very high confidence that the fruits—the so-called peacetime applications—of atomic energy will have in them all that we think, and more. There are others who try to escape the immediacy of this situation by saying that, after all, war has always been very terrible; after all, weapons have always gotten worse and worse; that this is just another weapon and it doesn’t create a great change; that they are not so bad; bombings have been bad in this war and this is not a change in that—it just adds a little to the effectiveness of bombing; that some sort of protection will be found. I think that these efforts to diffuse and weaken the nature of the crisis make it only more dangerous. I think it is for us to accept it as a very grave crisis, to realize that these atomic weapons which we have started to make are very terrible, that they involve a change, that they are not just a slight modification: to accept this, and to accept with it the necessity for those transformations in the world which will make it possible to integrate these developments into human life.
The Manhattan Project Page 36