By that time, sufficient quantities of weapons-grade fissionable uranium and plutonium were finally being produced at Oak Ridge and Hanford. Oppenheimer and his team were confident that they could deliver three bombs—one uranium and two plutonium—by the middle of the year. Because the implosion mechanism entailed a risk of failure, they planned to test the first plutonium bomb in July 1945. (Confident that the simpler gun-type trigger in the uranium bomb would work as designed, they did not believe it needed advance testing.) By sheer quirk of fate, therefore, the first atomic bombs would become available after the defeat of Germany but before the defeat of Japan.
Before succeeding to the presidency, Truman had been only faintly aware of the Manhattan Project. In 1943, when he was still a senator from Missouri, his select committee to investigate waste and corruption in the war industries (the “Truman Committee”) had demanded information about the mysterious plants under construction in Tennessee and Washington. Secretary Stimson had warned him off, referring only to a top-secret weapons program involving a new field of science, and Truman had gamely agreed to inquire no further. As vice president he had been told nothing more, in conformity with the strict need-to-know stricture enforced upon the project. On his first day as president in April 1945, Truman received a short verbal briefing from Stimson about the secret drive to build “a new explosive of almost unbelievable destructive power.” Later that afternoon, Truman learned more from James F. Byrnes, the former war mobilization tsar who would soon be appointed secretary of state. In his memoir, Truman wrote that he was “puzzled” by these thumbnail sketches of a bomb that might have the power to “destroy the whole world.”68 On April 25, he received a formal soup-to-nuts briefing from Stimson and Groves (since promoted to major general), who answered all of the president’s many questions about the project.
To advise on the issues presented by atomic weapons and energy, its use in the war and the postwar period, Truman established a committee of senior political, industrial, and scientific figures. Its ad hoc character was reflected in its name: the “Interim Committee.” More formal agencies would be created later; for now, however, the limitations of secrecy allowed only for a small panel whose members were already “read in.” Stimson was appointed chairman, and Byrnes was among its members; others included Vannevar Bush, James Conant, Karl Compton, Ralph Bard (Forrestal’s deputy at the Navy Department), and William Clayton, an assistant secretary of state. A scientific advisory panel was added as a subcommittee; Robert Oppenheimer and Enrico Fermi were among its members.
In introductory remarks at the first meeting of the Interim Committee, Stimson urged his colleagues to think broadly about the issues before them: “While the advances in the field to date had been fostered by the needs of war, it was important to realize that the implications of the project went far beyond the needs of the present war.”69 Meeting for two consecutive days on May 31 and June 1, 1945, the committee agreed that the new bomb should be used against Japan “as soon as possible.”70 Formal recommendations to the president were deferred to a later date, but the minutes reflected a collective view that “we could not give the Japanese any warning; that we could not concentrate on a civilian area; but that we should seek to make a profound psychological impression on as many of the inhabitants as possible.” Dr. Conant suggested, and Stimson agreed, that the “most desirable target would be a vital war plant employing a large number of workers and closely surrounded by workers’ houses.”71 Selection of targets was referred to a target committee, whose members included General Groves and several Manhattan Project scientists.
The welter of major policy decisions taken by American leaders between May and August 1945 were among the most complex in the nation’s history. Purely military strategy was amalgamated into high considerations of foreign policy; all minds, including those of senior generals and admirals, were turning toward the postwar order. The president’s men were absorbed in the day-in, day-out skirmishes with Stalin over the Yalta accords, the occupation and reconstruction of Germany, the political claims of Charles de Gaulle in France, and the charter of the United Nations. They were just beginning to think about the future of Asia, the status of former Japanese territories, the fate of British colonies, the red insurgency in China, the future of Japan under Allied occupation, and the still-uncertain matter of whether Japan’s overseas armies would lay down arms if ordered to do so by Tokyo, or if they would have to be beaten in the field even after the home islands were subjugated. Major decisions were confronted under pressure of time and events. They were rendered by a tiny circle of civilian and military officials whose numbers were limited by secrecy, and who had been carrying a staggering workload for years. In some cases, by their own accounts, the president’s men were feeling the strain of prolonged physical and mental fatigue. Far-reaching decisions were made “on the road,” while they were at the Allied conference in Potsdam, Germany. Their neophyte commander in chief had not been well prepared for the job, and he had not been doing it long enough to acquire his predecessor’s expertise, self-assurance, and finesse.
In considering whether to leave Hirohito on his throne, U.S. policymakers were of two minds. Joseph C. Grew, the last prewar ambassador to Tokyo, who now served as undersecretary of state, was sensitive to American public opinion, which demanded that the emperor be held accountable as a war criminal. He took a hawkish tone in his public statements, as when he told a radio audience that negotiating terms of surrender with Japan would be to “temporize with murder and to negotiate with treachery embodied in human flesh.”72 Grew was wary of diplomatic exchanges that might draw the Allies into protracted negotiations. But he privately argued that Hirohito must play a role in the war’s final act, because he alone possessed the power to compel all his forces at home and overseas to lay down arms. An imperial rescript issued by the Showa emperor, Grew told a journalist friend, was “the one thing that might do the trick and it might save the lives of tens of thousands of our own fighting men.”73
In deliberations preceding the issuance of the Potsdam Declaration, most of the leading American players (including Truman) favored signaling to the Japanese that their imperial house would survive unconditional surrender. In JCS and cabinet meetings in June, a consensus seemed to gel that it would serve the interests of the United States and the Allies to retain the emperor as a partner or puppet. But the precise wording of such a statement always evoked dissent. All were sensitive to the charge that they were subverting their late commander in chief’s doctrine of unconditional surrender. In answer to seemingly ad hoc objections, they repeatedly struck all references to the emperor or his dynasty from American and Allied public statements. That did not change until the second week of August 1945, following the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki but before the final Japanese surrender, when the Americans implicitly promised to leave Hirohito alone. In the end, as Grew put it ruefully, the United States “demanded unconditional surrender, then dropped the bomb and accepted conditional surrender.”74
Meeting with the president in the Oval Office on June 18, Secretaries Stimson and Forrestal and the four Joint Chiefs reviewed their overall strategy against Japan. The blockade of the home islands was underway and would intensify, and all could hope that a surrender might precede the invasion of Kyushu, or at least the invasion of Honshu the following spring. In either case, however, planning and logistical moves had to be taken immediately to prepare for a landing on November 1. Marshall argued that Operation OLYMPIC was “essential to a strategy of strangulation” because it would have the effect of tightening the air-sea blockade while at the same time providing the logistical backstop for the decisive coronet invasion of the Kanto Plain. Admiral King, speaking for the navy, agreed that it was important to proceed with all contingent preparations for olympic and coronet. However, he believed that “the defeat of Japan could be accomplished by sea-air power, without the necessity of invasion.”75 Leahy continued to argue that an invasion of Japan was neither necessary nor
desirable, but he did not object to preparing contingency plans. Truman approved the DOWNFALL plans and signed orders to transfer the necessary forces from Europe and the United States.
One of the knottiest questions that summer was the desirability of Soviet participation in the East Asian war. FDR had gone to great lengths to secure Stalin’s promise to join the war against Japan; in 1943 and 1944, it had probably been the highest U.S. priority in diplomacy with Moscow. But by June 1945, as it became clear that communism and democracy must wage a long global contest in the decades ahead, many in the U.S. camp questioned whether the Russians were needed or even wanted in the war against Japan. Soviet entry into the war was more likely to force Japan to surrender, but it would also allow the Red Army to seize strategic territory from which it would not be easily dislodged. A larger Soviet footprint in East Asia threatened to enhance communist influence throughout the region. MacArthur later declared that he was “astonished” to learn that a deal had been struck to bring the Soviet Union into the war: “From my viewpoint, any intervention by Russia during 1945 was not required.”76 King and Eisenhower each separately advised the president to offer no concessions or inducements to secure Russia’s participation.77 Newly sworn Secretary of State James F. Byrnes had earlier favored inviting the Soviets into the war; now he wanted to keep them out. Byrnes distrusted the Russians, based on their treacherous conduct in Eastern Europe; and he did not think they were needed, because he expected the atomic bomb to force a quick Japanese surrender.78 Byrnes’s assistant Walter Brown recorded in his diary: “JFB still hoping for time, after atomic bomb Japan will surrender and Russia will not get in so much on the kill, thereby being in a position to press for claims against China.”79
Truman was not pleased about traveling to Potsdam, and he would have liked to give the conference a miss. But the JCS and cabinet was unanimous in agreeing that the president’s presence was necessary. On the train from Washington to Newport News, Virginia, where he would embark upon the cruiser Augusta for the eight-day transatlantic passage, Truman wrote his wife to say that he was “as blue as indigo about going.”80 Leading his entourage were Admiral Leahy, Secretary Byrnes, and a large deputation of military and civilian aides. (Byrnes had managed to keep his rival, Henry Stimson, off the ship; Stimson flew to Europe and joined the party in Potsdam.) The Augusta arrived at Antwerp on July 15. Truman and his party traveled in a forty-car motorcade to an airfield near Brussels, and then flew over the war-scarred wastelands of the fallen German Reich to Potsdam, a historic seat of Prussian kings, south of Berlin.
The Potsdam Conference would deal mainly with European questions, unresolved in the Yalta talks earlier that year, including German-Polish-Soviet borders, reparations, occupation zones in Germany, and Turkish sovereignty over the Dardanelles. The final push against Japan, and the arrangements that would prevail in postwar Asia, were addressed only between the seams of the main conference agenda, largely in informal sessions among the principals. Churchill traveled to Potsdam, but during the second week of the conference he was replaced by a new prime minister, Clement Attlee, whose Labour Party had won a landslide victory in Britain’s first national election since 1939.
Potsdam being in the Russian zone of occupation, Stalin served as the conference host. Formal meetings were held in the opulent halls of the Cecilienhof Palace, a former royal prince’s residence. Dignitaries of the several powers were quartered at grand houses in Babelsberg, a nearby town, from which the residents had been summarily expelled at gunpoint. Truman and his party moved into a three-story stucco house on Kaiserstrasse, which the Americans called the “Little White House.” Listening devices had been placed throughout the house, and the service staff included several Soviet NKVD agents.
Stalin, arriving a day late, first met Truman at the Little White House at noon on July 17. The two leaders shook hands with a cheerful flourish, grinning broadly and baring their teeth at each other. Stalin summarized his government’s ongoing negotiations with the Chinese, aimed at securing an agreement that would establish borders and conditions for the pending Soviet attack on Manchuria. Truman was noncommittal, a posture that may have disappointed Stalin; the Soviet leader had hoped that the U.S. president would issue a formal request for the USSR’s participation in the East Asian war, providing a pretense for the Russians to abrogate their neutrality pact with Japan. But Truman and his government had no intention of providing that satisfaction, because it was now clear that they had soured on the prospective Soviet entry into the war. Winston Churchill noticed this new attitude and remarked upon it in a note to Sir Anthony Eden, the British foreign secretary: “It is quite clear that the United States do not at the present time desire Russian participation in the war against Japan.”81
THE SITE CHOSEN FOR TRINITY, the first nuclear test, was a desolate plain deep in the New Mexico desert, about 200 miles south of Los Alamos. The bomb would be detonated atop a 100-foot steel tower, at the coordinates designated “Ground Zero.” A control bunker built of heavy timbers covered by earth was located 6 miles from the tower; the base camp was 10 miles away. The test was scheduled for dawn on July 16, 1945.
As the clock ticked down to “Zero-Hour,” the desert was dark and chilly. The beam of a searchlight, positioned near the tower, sliced through the low overcast. At Sandy Ridge, an observation site south of the base camp, scientists, journalists, and visitors drank coffee from thermoses and stamped their feet to keep warm. Passing around a pair of binoculars, they took turns studying the distant floodlit tower. An army sergeant read out instructions by the light of a flashlight. When the two-minute countdown began, he said, the observers should lie down on the ground, faces turned away from the tower. After the blast, they could turn and look at the cloud above the tower, but to avoid injuring their eyes they should not gaze directly at the fireball. For those determined to look directly at the explosion, plates of welding glass were handed out; they were instructed to hold them in front of their faces and to peer through them. They should wear long sleeves and trousers to protect their skin. Bottles of suntan lotion were passed around in the inky darkness, and people smeared it on their exposed faces and hands. They should remain prone until the shockwave had passed over: “The hazard from blast is reduced by lying down on the ground in such a manner that flying rocks, glass and other objects do not intervene between the source of blast and the individual.”82 Automobile windows should be left open.
A siren would indicate when it was safe to rise from the ground. At that point, all personnel whose duties did not require them to remain in the area should return to base camp immediately and board the waiting buses. The zone would be evacuated until radiation measurements were taken.
At an earlier stage of the Manhattan Project, physicists had debated the risk that the blast might be much larger than predicted by their calculations. Some had worried that it would ignite the nitrogen in Earth’s atmosphere, perhaps even annihilate the planet. Subsequent calculations had seemed to rule out that scenario. But Enrico Fermi, who was at the observation post at Sandy Ridge that night, had a predilection for gallows humor. He offered to take wagers on the odds that the bomb would set fire to the atmosphere, and if so, whether it would destroy the State of New Mexico or the entire world. Either way, his colleagues might have retorted, no one would collect winnings.
At the control bunker, Oppenheimer and Groves presided over a technical and communications staff of about twenty. The small, enclosed space was cluttered with electronic equipment and radios. They were concerned about the weather. Flashes of lightning were seen in the overcast, and scattered showers had been reported to the south. A meteorology team was in radio contact with specially equipped B-29 weather reconnaissance planes overhead. If the wind was blowing too hard in the wrong direction, there was a risk of deadly fallout traveling 300 miles east to descend over Amarillo, Texas. But an hour before dawn, conditions were deemed suitable for the test.
At zero minus twenty minutes, the first of several
red warning flares went up at Ground Zero. All remaining personnel at the steel tower left by jeep for the bunker. The time intervals were announced by an impassive voice on the radio net. In the bunker, men crouched over their instrument panels. Tension escalated; time seemed to slow down. Dr. Conant said he “never imagined seconds could be so long.”83 Oppenheimer did not speak, and did not even seem to breathe; he held on to a wooden post to steady himself as he gazed through the bunker’s nearly opaque blue-tinted windows. At zero minus ten seconds, a green flare shot up and descended slowly through the clouds above Ground Zero. The final ten seconds seemed to last an eternity. Whatever they thought of the bomb as a military weapon, the scientists had dedicated years of their lives to building it; they had staked the prestige of modern physics upon it; they had convinced Uncle Sam to divert rivers of the taxpayers’ money to pay for it. Whatever their religious beliefs, or lack thereof, an observer noted: “It can safely be said that most of those present were praying and praying harder than they had ever prayed before.”84
Twilight of the Gods Page 87
