At 5:30 a.m., the countdown reached zero and the voice on the loudspeaker said, “Now.” A pinprick of searing white light expanded almost instantly to become a small sun, half a mile in diameter, and the predawn darkness vanished in a cosmic flash, as blinding as a photographer’s flashbulb. For a moment, the desert was lit to the horizon by a noonlike brightness, until most of the light was suddenly sucked back into the vortex of the blast, or so it appeared to the witnesses. Ascending, the great orb seemed to liquefy and dissolve into boiling neon colors, a mesmerizing kaleidoscope of gold, green, orange, blue, gray, and purple. Elongating vertically into the shape of a column, it rose through the cloud ceiling and climbed to 10,000 feet, 20,000 feet, 30,000 feet. A mushroom cloud formed at the top, at an altitude later estimated at 41,000 feet, while the base remained a surging, seething, churning mass of gas, smoke, and dust, as bright as burning magnesium but more colorful. For 40 miles in every direction, the New Mexico wilderness was bathed in a violet light that illuminated every hill, ridge, and gulch with searing clarity.
At the bunker, the observation posts, and the base camp, men rose to their feet and embraced, slapped backs, shook hands, shouted in glee, and laughed and danced like children. The tension on Oppenheimer’s face dissolved and was replaced by an expression of grateful relief. Dr. Kistiakowsky, designer of the plutonium implosion trigger that had just proven itself to work, threw his arms around Oppenheimer and shouted in triumph. Someone said to General Groves: “The war is over.” Groves replied, “Yes, after we drop two bombs on Japan.”85
At Sandy Ridge, most observers ignored the instruction to lie down while awaiting the arrival of the shockwave. Forty-five seconds after the explosion, the phantasmagoric tableau remained silent—they felt heat on their faces but had heard no noise at all. Finally the sound fell upon them, a sustained, awesome, guttural rumble with a gust of warm air and a tremble in the earth underfoot. The reverberations merged into waves of sound that rose and fell for a long time before subsiding. Some found the blast wave gentle or even anticlimactic after the spectacular visual effects they had witnessed. That was undoubtedly true, but only because they were a long way from Ground Zero.
After their first flush of triumph, the observers became more subdued and reflective. Ernest O. Lawrence recalled “hushed murmuring bordering on reverence.”86 To Kistiakowsky, the atomic blast was “the nearest thing to doomsday that one could possibly imagine. I am sure that at the end of the world—in the last millisecond of the earth’s existence—the last man will see what we have just seen.”87 As they boarded their vehicles to clear out of the area, the sun peeked over the eastern horizon. Philip Morrison noticed that the sensation of heat on his face was the same as that produced by the earlier explosion. On that morning, he said, “we had two sunrises.”88
The light had been seen in communities as far away as Santa Fe to the north, Silver City to the west, and El Paso to the south. In Albuquerque, 175 miles north of Ground Zero, early-rising civilians had stopped and wondered at the flash of light on the southern horizon. According to a story in the local press, a blind girl in the city had cried out, “What was that?”89 To discourage inconvenient questions, Groves arranged to have the commanding officer of the Alamogordo Air Base announce that an ammunition depot had blown up.90
In the days following the test, a few brave souls returned to the TRINITY site to investigate the results. Their portable Geiger counters cried out so loudly and insistently that they switched them off. To limit their exposure to radiation, a ten-minute rule was applied: each individual could visit the site only once, and could remain for only ten minutes. A mile from Ground Zero, the desert brush was blackened and flattened, facing away from the blast site; closer in, it was entirely burned away. Where the tower had once stood was a bowl of pulverized earth at the bottom of a shallow crater, 1,200 feet in diameter. The ground was glassy and smooth, with greenish streaks running through it; the sand had literally been turned to glass.
A faint rust-red blotch stained the ground at the center of the crater. Investigators determined that it was vaporized ferrous oxide, which had condensed and fused with the silicon in the sand—or in other words, the last trace of the ten-story steel tower that had held the TRINITY bomb.
THE FIRST REPORT ARRIVED IN POTSDAM later that day, at 7:30 p.m. local time. A War Department aide telegrammed Stimson: “Operated on this morning. Diagnosis not yet completed but results seem satisfactory and already exceeded expectations.”91 Stimson walked over to the “Little White House” to deliver the news to Truman and Byrnes, who were delighted. The cryptic first telegram was followed by several more, all inscribed in similarly cagey terms. A long and detailed report from Groves arrived by courier on July 21. The force of the explosion had equaled between 15,000 and 20,000 tons of TNT, which was at the higher end of the range of predictions. Groves had once boasted that the Pentagon (his earlier creation) was invulnerable to aerial bombing; he now withdrew that claim.
Stimson read the entire text to Truman and Byrnes. The war secretary recorded in his diary that the president was “tremendously pepped up and spoke to me of it again and again when I saw him.”92 Churchill noted that Truman’s newfound pep was on display the next morning in negotiations with Stalin, when he “stood up to the Russians in a most emphatic and decisive manner, telling them as to certain demands that they absolutely could not have, and that the United States was entirely against them.”93
After discussing it with his advisers, Truman decided to let Stalin know of the TRINITY test, though only in the most general terms. He approached the Soviet dictator on the evening of July 24, and told him (through an interpreter) that the United States had developed a “new weapon of unusual destructive force.” Stalin seemed unmoved, remarking casually that he hoped the Americans would make good use of it against Japan. Truman wondered whether the other man had grasped the significance of what he had been told. He did not know or suspect that Soviet espionage had successfully penetrated the Manhattan Project, and that the Russians were already well informed about the bomb.
American cryptanalysts had long since broken the codes used by the Japanese government to communicate with its diplomats in foreign capitals. This message traffic, codenamed MAGIC, was summarized and analyzed in top-secret memoranda distributed to senior American civilian and military officials. By this means, U.S. leaders were fully aware of Tokyo’s bid to persuade the Soviet government to mediate an armistice with the Allies. The spirited exchanges between Foreign Minister Shigenori Togo and Ambassador-in-Moscow Naotake Sato made for lively and fascinating reading. The tenor of Togo’s “extremely urgent” cables to Sato revealed his sense of desperation. On July 11, he urged the ambassador to act with “all haste” in petitioning the Kremlin. The following day, Togo added that Sato should convey to Foreign Commissar Molotov that “His Majesty” personally hoped “to restore peace with all possible speed.”94 In a comment accompanying this intercept, U.S. intelligence analysts noted that it offered the first tangible evidence that Hirohito was behind these diplomatic appeals to Moscow.
Sato’s length of service in the diplomatic corps made him senior to Togo, and he had previously served as foreign minister (in 1937). As such, he was not at all cowed by the current head of the ministry, and did not hesitate to express his own magnificently blunt opinions about these desperate eleventh-hour overtures. Sato informed Togo that the Kremlin would never be enticed by the vague petitions he had been instructed to make. Being “extremely realistic,” the Russians would not be moved by anything short of concrete proposals to end the war on terms that the Allies might deem acceptable. “If the Japanese empire is really faced with the necessity of ending the war,” he lectured the foreign minister on July 12, “we must first of all make up our minds to do so.”95 Truer words had never been written, but Togo could act only according to the halfhearted consensus agreed to by the SWDC. Any proposal including specific peace terms would divide the ruling group and cause the Suzuki government
to fall.
In his subsequent cables to Tokyo, Sato urged the government to recognize that the war was already lost, which meant that Japan had “no alternative but unconditional surrender or its equivalent.” The sole condition that might tempt the Allies, he judged, would be “maintenance of our national structure,” meaning an assurance to leave Hirohito on his throne.96 But Togo only reiterated his prior instructions to petition the Kremlin for assistance in arranging a truce. Peace was urgent, he wrote, but “on the other hand it is difficult to decide on concrete peace terms here at home all at once.”97 Sato could read the meaning between those lines: the regime was hopelessly divided, and the intransigent militarists abhorred any terms resembling unconditional surrender. Togo’s hands were tied, and so were Sato’s.
As the second week of the Potsdam Conference got underway, the Americans confronted pressing decisions about the Pacific endgame. Preparations for DOWNFALL were underway with a scheduled invasion date of November 1. Intelligence sources had detected a buildup of Japanese troop strength on Kyushu. The Americans had become wary of Russian participation in the war, but they knew they could do nothing to keep their erstwhile communist allies out of it, and the Red Army would be prepared to invade Manchuria by mid-August at the latest. According to General Groves, two atomic bombs would be ready for use against Japan within the next two weeks. Some had raised objections on moral grounds against using the weapons without providing an explicit prior warning, or using them against cities instead of military targets. Petitions had been submitted by various groups of Manhattan Project scientists. Ralph Bard, undersecretary of the navy and a member of the Interim Committee, favored a preliminary warning. He wrote Stimson: “The position of the United States as a great humanitarian nation and the fair play attitude of our people generally is responsible in the main for this feeling.”98
But the prevailing assumption in the Interim Committee, its subcom-mittees, and the cabinet had always been that the bombs would be used against Japan. Proposals for a demonstration or a warning were considered and rejected, chiefly because they seemed unlikely to lead to surrender. Admitting that opinions among Manhattan Project scientists were varied, the Scientific Panel (Oppenheimer, Conant, Lawrence, and Fermi) concluded: “We can propose no technical demonstration likely to bring an end to the war; we see no acceptable alternative to direct military use.”99
The Target Committee had produced a final list of four cities: Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Kokura, and Niigata. The four were selected because they had not yet been leveled by conventional bombing, and thus promised to give the fullest and most dramatic expression to the bomb’s power. Stimson had struck Kyoto off an earlier list. Reasoning that the ancient capital’s historical and cultural significance made it unique, Stimson worried that destroying it would arouse the hatred of future generations of Japanese. (The war secretary was obliged to nix Kyoto twice: evidently, Groves really wanted to hit the city.) Hiroshima and Kokura were home to important military bases, depots, or arsenals; Nagasaki and Niigata were identified only as important shipping and industrial centers. By order to the Twentieth Air Force, those four cities had been set aside—preserved, quarantined, left intact, spared the fury of LeMay’s incendiaries, so that the atomic bombs could destroy them at one stroke. Although radar targeting was now reliable, the bombs were to be dropped in clear weather, so that the explosions could be seen and photographed from the air: “The four targets give a very high probability of one being open even if the weather varies . . . as they are considerably separated.”100
The Allies had agreed in principle that a final warning would be issued to Japan. Issuing this declaration from Potsdam, amidst the ruins of Nazi Germany, would lend symbolic power to the ultimatum—emphasizing that Japan was now without allies, and would soon share the same fate. But the precise wording of the declaration was the subject of prolonged and intricate debate. In several previous statements, including the Atlantic Charter, the Cairo Declaration, and the United Nations Charter (signed in San Francisco a month earlier), the Allies had already set forth their war aims and their vision for the postwar international order. The question now arose: Should these be repeated and amplified? To what extent should the Allies spell out intentions for the occupation of Japan? Several leading figures in the American camp, including Stimson and Grew, favored giving an assurance that the imperial dynasty could continue as a constitutional monarchy. They reasoned that such an assurance might empower the peace faction in Tokyo, perhaps bringing the emperor directly into the decision. Moreover, they added, the Allies were going to need Hirohito to enforce the surrender and to serve as a consenting vassal. Others, notably Secretary of State Byrnes, objected that any such pledge would compromise the doctrine of unconditional surrender, and might be read by the Japanese as a sign of irresolution.
On July 17, as the draft “Three-Party Statement” circulated through the Allied governments, the Joint Chiefs of Staff organization recommended edits in a cable from Washington. The draft had stated that the Japanese people would choose their own government, and “This may include a constitutional monarchy under the present dynasty if it be shown to the complete satisfaction of the world that such a government never again will aspire to aggression.” On the recommendation of the JSSC—the internal JCS “think tank”—the chiefs recommended deleting that sentence entirely. Two reasons were offered: first, because the reference to the “present dynasty” might be misconstrued as an intention to depose Hirohito in favor of his son; and second, because the provision might discourage “radical elements in Japan” by suggesting that the Allies intended to maintain the system of “Emperor worship.”101 The reasoning was not persuasive on either count. The first objection called for a clarification of the wording, not wholesale deletion; the second made little sense at all, because “radical elements in Japan” had no power to influence the decision to surrender. Nevertheless, the proposed deletion was accepted by Truman and his advisers in Potsdam, apparently without much discussion or debate. Both Leahy and Marshall seem to have supported the deletion without objection, although both had earlier favored clarifying the emperor’s postwar status.
On July 24, Stimson made a last-ditch attempt to reinsert a provision offering to retain the Japanese monarchy. According to a diary entry he made later that day, Stimson met with Truman and “spoke of the importance which I attributed to the reassurance of the Japanese on the continuance of their dynasty and I had felt that the insertion of that in the formal warning was important and might be just the thing that would make or mar their acceptance.”102 Truman declined on practical grounds, explaining that a draft of the declaration had already been sent to Chiang Kai-shek for his signature. Stimson accepted that reasoning, but he recommended that Truman be prepared to offer verbal assurances through diplomatic channels if and when direct talks were opened with the Japanese government.
Meanwhile, orders to carry out the atomic attacks were being written and distributed in Washington. A special B-29 air group based on Tinian had trained to drop the atomic bombs, and was ready to perform their mission. Various components of the weapons were being transferred to the Marianas by air and sea. General Carl Spaatz, recently named overall commander of USAAF Strategic Air Forces in the Pacific, was in Washington. On July 25, he reported to the War Department and conferred with Marshall’s deputy, General Thomas T. Handy, the acting army chief of staff in Marshall’s absence. Spaatz had received verbal orders to drop the two bombs, but he told Handy that he needed a “piece of paper” spelling out the order. Handy drafted and signed an order directing the Twentieth Air Force to deliver the “first special bomb as soon as weather will permit visual bombing after about 3 August 1945 on one of the targets: Hiroshima, Kokura, Niigata and Nagasaki.” Additional bombs would be dropped on the same list of target cities “as soon as made ready by the project staff.”103 A final clause added that the directive had been issued “by direction and with the approval” of Secretary Stimson and General Marshall. That was th
e only written order pertaining to the use of atomic bombs against Japan.
At the “Little White House” in Potsdam, on that same date (July 25), Truman met alone with his secretary of war—and if the president’s diary is to be believed, his verbal instructions to Stimson could not be reconciled with the orders just issued in Washington:
I have told the Sec. Of War, Mr. Stimson to use it so that military objectives and soldiers and sailors are the target and not women and children. Even if the Japs are savages, ruthless, merciless and fanatic, we as the leader of the world for the common welfare cannot drop this terrible bomb on the old Capitol or the new [i.e., Kyoto or Tokyo].
He & I are in accord. The target will be a purely military one and we will issue a warning statement asking the Japs to surrender and save lives. I’m sure they will not do that, but we will have given them the chance.104
But Handy’s order, written under Stimson’s authority, was in line with the instructions he had already received from Potsdam. It was based upon the recommendations of the Interim Committee and its subcommittees, as approved by the cabinet and the president. The bombs would be dropped as they were made ready, and as weather conditions permitted, on the four Japanese cities selected by the Target Committee. The order made no mention of warnings, military objectives, or sparing women and children. The cities had not been chosen for their military character, and the military installations therein were not specified as aiming points for the bombs. They were chosen because they fulfilled the three conditions specified by the Target Committee—namely, that they were “large urban area[s] of more than three miles diameter,” which were “capable of being damaged effectively by a blast,” and were “likely to be unattacked by next August.”105
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