The Basis of Everything

by Andrew Ramsey

  The letter gave no indication of whether he anticipated that the bomb’s ‘incalculable destruction’ would be wrought, as he hoped, upon the planet itself, or unleashed directly on its people.

  Having settled back in Britain, his final correspondence with Groves on 3 July 1945 also carried no trace of misgiving as to how the United States military might choose to use their new super-weapon.

  ‘May I congratulate you also on having brought to fruit so great and so novel a venture,’ Oliphant wrote. ‘If the imminent next step proves as successful as I believe it must, we will see a complete vindication of the faith of those of us who have fostered this revolutionary undertaking, and incidentally a great demonstration of the practical value of academic nuclear physics.’15

  Thirteen days later, that ‘imminent next step’ was irreversibly taken.

  22

  ‘DEATH, THE SHATTERER OF WORLDS’

  United States and Japan, 1945

  At 5.30am on 16 July 1945, upon the barren desert stillness of

  Alamogordo Army Air Base, the world’s first plutonium bomb lit the pre-dawn New Mexico horizon with a blazing, faux sunrise that announced the nuclear age.

  Delayed ninety minutes due to poor weather, the test designed to prove the device’s implosion detonation mechanism was codenamed Trinity. Its success led Oppenheimer to famously recite a line from the Hindu scripture the Bhagavad Gita: ‘I am become Death, the shatterer of worlds.’

  For members of the Los Alamos laboratory’s co-ordinating committee – who had been bussed to a viewing site thirty kilometres from ground zero and provided with a sheet of welder’s glass as they lay prone on the cold earth – it brought a perverse wonder. For an agitated few, it also ushered in a wave of comfort amid their genuine dread that ‘big science’ might have grotesquely over-reached.

  As early as 1942, as Oppenheimer’s small group of theorists met at the ridge-top compound to brainstorm the latest apocalyptic insights, Hungarian physicist Edward Teller had brought the gathering to silence when he mused that a nuclear fission bomb might feasibly set the entire planet ablaze. That such an unprecedented, unknown surge of energy could potentially ignite the flammable nitrogen in the earth’s atmosphere, and even set fire to hydrogen in the oceans – ending all planetary life in a blinding inferno.

  ‘The earth would blaze for less than a second in the heavens and then forever continue its rounds as a barren rock,’ former United States military advisor Daniel Ellsberg reckoned of that plausible threat.1 Following Teller’s macabre scenario, another of the group’s émigré scientists, German Hans Bethe, had gone away to calculate the probability and found it ‘extremely unlikely to say the least’. It was not, astonishingly, absolutely zero, despite Oppenheimer’s post-war pronouncement that ‘the impossibility of igniting the atmosphere was . . . assured by science and common sense’.2

  Not everyone at Los Alamos was so easily placated, however. On the eve of the Trinity Test one of the theorists, Robert Serber, met Teller pacing the windy, dust-strewn streets of Los Alamos. The Hungarian asked Serber how he planned to counter the threat of rattlesnakes, which Oppenheimer had warned might be lurking in the dark while his team lay on the desert floor, awaiting whatever the bomb would bring.

  ‘Well, I’ll take a bottle of whiskey,’ Serber answered facetiously. As he wrote years later: ‘Then he [Teller] brought up the notion that the atmosphere might be set on fire by the bomb and he said, “What do you think of that?” And I said, “I’ll take another bottle of whiskey.”’3

  General Groves’s thirteen-page report on the Trinity Test for United States Secretary of War, Henry Stimson, evaluated the exercise as ‘successful beyond the most optimistic expectations of anyone’.4 ‘The Gadget’, as it had become known, was released not from an airborne bomber, but from a thirty-metre-high steel tower that vaporised when the plutonium core, conservatively estimated to equal the force of 20,000 tons of TNT, fissioned in a millionth of a second. It blew a crater more than 350 metres in diameter into the earth’s surface. When he saw the damage it wrought upon another steel tower one kilometre from the drop zone, Groves knew that not even his prized Pentagon building would offer safe shelter from such a weapon.

  Oliphant was taking lunch at Birmingham University when the first nuclear bomb was detonated in the chill of the New Mexico dawn. Groves’s censorship powers had ensured that the inevitable news inquiries would be met with an official four-paragraph statement, disingenuously attributing the dazzling effect of the monstrous fireball – visible up to 300 kilometres away – to ‘a remotely located ammunition magazine containing a considerable amount of high explosives and pyrotechnics [that] exploded’.5

  However, Oliphant’s friend Ernest Lawrence had stood barely forty kilometres from the point where history erupted, and later that day wrote an account of what he saw.

  Through my dark sunglasses 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 colour and I judge a mile in diameter. At higher levels it became purple and this purple afterglow persisted for what seemed a long time (possibly it was only for a minute or two) at an elevation of 20–25,000 feet.6

  Oliphant, like Lawrence, would have understood the violet glow preceding the violent roar to be the radioactive discharge within the surrounding atmospheric gases. It was an effect they had often seen on a vastly smaller scale within the high-energy cyclotron. When Oliphant learned the details of the Trinity Test from sources within the Manhattan Project, he also knew what that success meant for the bomb project he had so devotedly helped nurture to nativity.

  ‘Once the test in the desert took place in New Mexico and it was clear that all our fears were justified, it then was no longer the concern of the scientists,’ Oliphant would reflect almost fifty years after the Trinity Test. ‘It went straight into the hands of the military and the politicians. Scientists had nothing more to do with it.’7

  * * *

  In the Pacific, the atrocities of conventional war mounted even as Britain rejoiced at Germany’s defeat in May 1945. In March, a single United States firebombing raid on a section of Tokyo, densely packed with timber-and-paper houses, had killed more than 100,000 men, women and children, and injured a million more in the space of six hours. Yet Japan’s leaders refused to yield.

  Winston Churchill was at Potsdam in newly occupied Germany, meeting with United States president Truman and Soviet premier Josef Stalin, when he learned of the Trinity Test. Britain’s leader immediately announced that anything other than unconditional surrender from Japan would compel Allied forces to ‘conquer the country yard by yard [and] might well require the loss of a million American lives and half that number of British – or more’.8

  Then, just days after the release of the Potsdam Declaration, which included terms to which Japan must agree or face ‘prompt and utter destruction’, the heavy cruiser USS Indianapolis was attacked and sunk by a Japanese submarine, while travelling between Guam and the Philippines.

  The Indianapolis had only recently arrived in the Pacific from San Francisco, and four days earlier (on 26 July) had delivered the atomic bomb’s gun assembly mechanism to its destination. Of the more than 500 crew who died, those who did not burn in the flaming fuel slicks that spread across the Philippine Sea, or were not entombed in the ship’s steel carcass as it plunged bow-first to the ocean bed, most were taken by sharks during the four days they waited for rescuers to arrive. That rescue mission was mounted on the morning of 2 August 1945, which would have been the day after the first atomic bomb was dropped had a typhoon approaching Japan not forced that plan’s delay.9

  A further two days later, on the sugarcane-covered Northern Marianas island of Tinian – which had been seized from the Japanese a year earlier and was barely wide enough to support a full-length military runway – the events Mark Oliphant so feare
d were unfolding, under secrecy’s heavy cloak.

  The sixty-four kilograms of concentrated uranium-235 collected from Lawrence and Oliphant’s calutrons at a rate of around 250 grams per day over the previous months were now packed inside a four-ton bomb known as ‘Little Boy’. It was different in both shape and science from the plutonium bomb, a prototype of which had been successfully tested in the New Mexico desert the previous month.

  In line with the codenames attached to all other elements of the Manhattan Project, the two types of bomb were disguised in Air Force communications to give the impression that their cargo was VIP passengers rather than precious ordnance items. Thus ‘Thin Man’ – which evolved into ‘Little Boy’ – suggested Roosevelt, but was instead a reference to the uranium bomb. Its larger plutonium cousin became ‘Fat Man’, representing Churchill.

  The culmination of five years’ pioneering science, complemented by human endeavour on a scale considered civilisation’s largest single-focus enterprise since the construction of the pyramids, Little Boy was essentially a steel-encased cannon. Inside it, explosives would fire a bullet of uranium-235 down a short barrel, at the end of which it would slam into three rings of the enriched isotope.

  The bounty of a process that had – as Bohr predicted – required the resources of an entire nation resembled ‘an elongated trashcan with fins’,10 according to a crew member, as it was loaded gently into a B-29 Superfortress bomber, freshly emblazoned with the given names of pilot Paul Tibbets’s mother, Enola Gay.

  * * *

  At 8.15am on 6 August, on a flawless summer morning in Hiroshima, hell appeared out of the cobalt-blue sky. The bomb, inscribed with messages from United States ground crew that included ‘Greetings to the Emperor from the men of the Indianapolis’, detonated – by means of an airborne radar unit adapted to engage the gun mechanism at a predetermined altitude – 500 metres above the city, which housed a sizeable army depot.

  Souls were seared into the streetscape. Buildings were reduced to memories beyond dust. Passing birds were vaporised in the blazing sky.

  As had been foreseen by the men of the MAUD Committee, the gun method of initiating the catastrophic chain reaction worked without a hitch. What was not known until the first – to date, the only – atomic bomb was set loose was that only around two per cent of its uranium core underwent fission before the evil consumed itself and blew apart the remainder of the enriched material in the burning air. That was sufficient to replicate the effect of almost 12,500 tons of TNT.

  Of the 76,000 structures in Hiroshima, around 70,000 were damaged. It was only pre-emptive fear of possible Allied bombing, which had led to large-scale evacuation from the city in previous weeks, that had reduced its population from 400,000 to less than 300,000 that Monday. Of that number, around 140,000 died as a direct result of the blast. Those who weren’t instantly incinerated subsequently succumbed to horrific burns.

  Three days later, ‘Fat Man’, an even more powerful plutonium device, exploded above Nagasaki, the city where the torpedoes dropped on Pearl Harbor had been manufactured.

  The Japanese Empire’s unconditional surrender came less than a week afterwards, on 15 August 1945.

  23

  ‘WE HAVE KILLED A BEAUTIFUL SUBJECT’

  North Wales, Birmingham and New York, 1945

  The age of atomic annihilation might have arrived out of flawless blue sky above Hiroshima on a busy Monday morning, but in the United Kingdom it was August bank holiday weekend. And the Oliphant family were on seaside vacation in North Wales.

  Like many who rambled along Rhyl’s carnival shorefront and braved the torpid water, which kept a sharp chill despite heavy humidity, seven-year-old Vivian Oliphant was basking in freedom. The first summer season after six years of wartime privation, with its airborne night terrors and restrictions on food and comfort and normality, meant that, for most holidaymakers, the long weekend stretched even longer – into Tuesday and beyond.

  In that euphoric season following Germany’s defeat, many of Rhyl’s waterfront hotels and private boarding houses had been requisitioned for use by Britain’s army and civil service, and subsidised rentals offered as reward to personnel who had helped repel the Nazi threat. It lent the careworn coastal community a gala veneer as victory celebrations entered their third month.

  British rail officials reported the train network’s heaviest bank holiday patronage in twenty-five years. One group of unfortunate travellers were prevented from disembarking at their intended destination due to the crush in their carriage, and were forced to alight at the next stop, almost 480 kilometres up the line in Scotland.1

  Signs that hardships were lifting like morning fog from the Irish Sea were obvious along Rhyl’s beachfront. During daytime, families queued for pantomime performances at the open-air Coliseum Theatre. Ethel ‘Sunny’ Lowry, the local heroine who twelve years earlier had secured stardom as the first British woman to swim the English Channel, presented her wildly popular aquatic shows at the outdoor baths. Even the town’s landmark pavilion – with its ornate domes still swathed in camouflage cloth as a legacy of the days when German bombers stalked the breadth of the British Isles – hosted a slate of new stage plays.

  On that cloudy and muggy Tuesday morning, however, freedom for Vivian Oliphant – whose only conscious memories were of life during wartime – took the form of stolen escape from the hawk-like vigilance of her parents. For reasons that had escaped Vivian’s notice, her mum and dad had opted to retreat to a nearby café while she skipped her way to the waterfront.

  If Vivian sensed something was awry in her family, it was not sufficient to dissuade her from tackling her first-ever solo ocean swim. A slight, dark-haired girl who had not been taught the essentials of water safety, Vivian seized her rare moment of independence and waded uncertainly into the shallows, which lapped lazily at the coarse brown sand.

  But her optimism slipped away as suddenly as the ocean floor disappeared underfoot. Her arms flailed in panic above her head, plunging her face beneath the now-frothing surf. Brine flooded her nose and throat, further gagging her fitful peals of distress.

  Her guttural cries for help were lost among the languid squawks of Atlantic gulls gliding above, while around her groups of revelling Britons squealed and laughed, splashed and frolicked. Blissfully oblivious.

  For the rest of her days, Vivian would have no clue as to the identity of the teenage boy who saw her struggle and saved her from drowning. She knew only that it was not her brother Michael, who had been unaware of the emergency. Nor could she recall how she was helped ashore, where beachgoers crowded around her in a flap.

  Disoriented by her trauma, Vivian could only assume that someone from that swarm had found Mark and Rosa Oliphant at one of the nearby tea houses. But her understanding of why her dad and mum had been so uncharacteristically negligent would soon become clear, and that memory would remain with her, pin-sharp, forever.

  That same morning – Tuesday, 7 August 1945 – Britain had awoken to details of the atomic bomb that had unleashed hellfire on Hiroshima. And of Mark Oliphant’s central role in delivering that atrocity.

  * * *

  It was early Sunday evening in Rhyl when Enola Gay throttled down the pitch-dark runway and rose, groaning, into infamy. She had begun her twelve-hour, 5000-kilometre round trip from Tinian to Hiroshima at the appropriately ungodly local hour of 2.45am. On the following evening, the Oliphants took their holiday-Monday dinner at the prescribed time, after which Michael and Vivian, worn out by a day of paddling and playing, fell quickly asleep.

  Having been made aware of the United States Army’s successful nuclear bomb test in the New Mexico desert three weeks earlier, Mark Oliphant suspected it would not be long before another device was detonated, in a bid to end the ongoing war with Japan in the Pacific. Not that he spoke those misgivings aloud, to either his wife or his children.

  He was, however, one of eight British scientists involved with the atomic bomb program to h
ave received a telegram from Wallace Akers on Saturday, 4 August 1945.

  It is possible that an official announcement on your project may be issued any time from now on. You are likely to be approached by the press as the names of the members of the technical committee will be given. You should state that you regret that you are not permitted to give any information whatever and that you are advised that a fuller official statement will be released very shortly to the press.

  You must not allow yourself to be drawn into any discussion on the underlying scientific phenomena as the fuller statement will include a most carefully composed historical survey and it is very important that this should be dealt with as a whole. You may of course give biographical details about yourself if asked. I suggest that you should get in touch with me by telephone on Tuesday to discuss further arrangements. Akers.2

  Unfortunately, by the time the telegram boy cycled to Peto that Saturday afternoon with the cryptic communiqué in hand, the Oliphant family were already enjoying the seaside delights of Rhyl. So the cable remained, uncollected, at Barnt Green’s post office.

  Instead, the news was delivered by the radio set around which Mark and Rosa sat on the following Monday night. At that point, the weapon’s true impact still remained mostly unknown, due to the vast cloud of smoke and dust that had followed the fireball when it exploded in the dead of the previous Welsh night. The gruesome detail of the bomb’s effect, therefore, would emerge only in the ensuing weeks, months, years.

  However, the enormity of that moment and its immediate relevance to the Oliphant family were conveyed that evening by a BBC newsreader, who reported with sombrely patriotic pride the ‘tremendous achievement of Allied scientists [in] the production of the atomic bomb’.3 He read from a 1500-word pre-drafted statement, released by British Prime Minister Clement Attlee but attributed to recently toppled wartime leader Winston Churchill.