Bomb

by Steve Sheinkin

  *

  “IF I LIVE A HUNDRED YEARS, I’ll never quite get these few minutes out of my mind,” said Robert Lewis, copilot of the Enola Gay.

  The plane was nine miles from the explosion when the bomb’s shock wave hit.

  “The plane bounced,” Theodore Van Kirk remembered, “it jumped and there was a noise like a piece of sheet metal snapping.”

  Tibbets held tight to the controls. The plane was undamaged.

  “Now that I knew we were safe from the effects of the blast, I began circling so that we could view the results,” said Tibbets. “We were not prepared for the awesome sight that met our eyes.”

  The men saw a purple-gray mushroom cloud rising above Hiroshima, its top reaching three miles above their plane. The cloud boiled and writhed, they said, like a living thing.

  “Even more fearsome was the sight on the ground below,” said Tibbets. “At the base of the cloud, fires were springing up everywhere amid a turbulent mass of smoke that had the appearance of bubbling hot tar.… The city we had seen so clearly in the sunlight a few minutes before was now an ugly smudge.”

  The entire city, said Van Kirk, looked like “a pot of boiling black oil.”

  “A feeling of shock and horror swept over all of us,” said Tibbets.

  Robert Lewis picked up his pencil and made a note in his logbook: “My God, what have we done?”

  After turning back toward Tinian, Tibbets wrote out a coded report and handed it to the radio operator. “Clear-cut successful in all respects. Visual effects greater than Trinity.… Proceeding to regular base.”

  As the plane headed home, the crew felt a mix of emotions, including relief that the job was done and hope that the war would now end. But something else entered the mix, a thought Paul Tibbets would never forget.

  “We were sobered by the knowledge that the world would never be the same,” he said. “War, the scourge of the human race since time began, now held terrors beyond belief.”

  REACTION BEGINS

  PAUL TIBBETS’S REPORT was relayed from Tinian to Leslie Groves’s office in Washington, D.C. Groves picked up his phone and called Los Alamos. Robert Oppenheimer lifted the receiver to his ear.

  “I’m proud of you and all of your people,” Groves said.

  “It went all right?” asked Oppenheimer.

  “Apparently it went with a tremendous bang.”

  “I extend my heartiest congratulations,” Oppenheimer said. “It’s been a long road.”

  “Yes, it has been a long road, and I think one of the wisest things I ever did was when I selected the director of Los Alamos.”

  “Well, I have my doubts, General Groves.”

  “Well, you know I’ve never concurred with those doubts at any time.”

  *

  PRESIDENT TRUMAN WAS ON A SHIP back to the United States, eating lunch with the crew. An officer walked in and handed him a message that had just come in from Secretary of War Stimson, along with a map of Japan. On the map, circled in red, was the city of Hiroshima.

  Truman read the note. He jumped up, grabbed a fork from beside his plate, and began banging it against the side of his water glass. Everyone in the mess hall turned to the president.

  “Keep your seats, gentlemen,” Truman said, an excited smile on his face as he waved the note in his hand. “I have an announcement to make. We have just dropped a new bomb on Japan which has more power than twenty thousand tons of TNT. It has been an overwhelming success!”

  The room erupted in cheers.

  In Washington, the White House released a statement that Truman had prepared ahead of time. “An American airplane dropped one bomb on Hiroshima,” Truman announced to the world. “We are now prepared to obliterate more rapidly and completely every productive enterprise the Japanese have above ground in any city.… Let there be no mistake; we shall completely destroy Japan’s power to make war.… If they do not now accept our terms they may expect a rain of ruin from the air, the like of which has never been seen on this earth.”

  *

  AT LOS ALAMOS, most scientists first heard the news over the public address system.

  “Attention please, attention please,” announced a voice over the Tech Area intercom. “One of our units has just been successfully dropped on Japan.”

  Richard Feynman described his first reaction as “very considerable elation and excitement.”

  “There was a sudden noise in the laboratory, of running footsteps and yelling voices,” remembered Otto Frisch. Scientists ran from door to door shouting, “Hiroshima has been destroyed!”

  Frank Oppenheimer, who was standing outside his brother’s office, remembered thinking, “Thank God it wasn’t a dud.” But a second thought followed quickly. “Before the whole sentence of the broadcast was finished, one suddenly got this horror of all the people who had been killed.”

  Frisch saw fellow scientists rushing to the phone to make reservations at Santa Fe restaurants to celebrate. “Of course they were exalted by the success of their work, but it seemed rather ghoulish,” he later said. “I still remember the feeling of unease, indeed nausea.”

  As the news spread, children of scientists grabbed pots and pans and ran outside banging them together and shouting. Parties started all over the mesa.

  Feynman sat on the hood of a jeep, playing bongos as people danced in the dirt streets. “I was involved in this happy thing,” he remembered, “with the excitement running over Los Alamos—at the same time as the people were dying and struggling in Hiroshima.”

  Almost everyone was feeling that same strange mix of pride and horror. That night Oppenheimer went to a party in one of the men’s dorms, carrying in his hand a message from Washington with more details on the destruction in Hiroshima. As he showed the note around, the mood in the room darkened. The party broke up early. As Oppenheimer walked home, he saw one of his scientists bent over a bush, vomiting.

  He thought to himself, “The reaction has begun.”

  *

  JUST BEFORE DINNER time at Farm Hall, the English mansion at which Germany’s top scientists were being held, a British officer named T. H. Rittner asked to speak to Otto Hahn in private.

  Hahn had discovered fission less than seven years before. Now Rittner told him the news: The Americans had just dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima.

  “Hahn was completely shattered by the news, and said he felt personally responsible,” Rittner reported. “He told me that he had originally contemplated suicide when he realized the terrible potentialities of his discovery and he felt that now these had been realized and he was to blame.”

  Rittner forced Hahn to gulp down a glass of whisky. Slightly calmer, Hahn walked to the dining room, where the other German scientists were gathered for dinner. He announced the news.

  “The guests were completely staggered,” recalled Rittner. “At first they refused to believe it.”

  Rittner excused himself and shut the door. With no idea they were being recorded, the Germans talked freely.

  “Did they use the word uranium in connection with this atomic bomb?” Heisenberg asked.

  Hahn said he wasn’t sure.

  “Then it’s got nothing to do with atoms,” insisted Heisenberg. The Allies may have used a very powerful bomb, he said, but not a real atomic bomb, not a bomb based on the fission of uranium atoms.

  “If they have really got it,” said Hahn, “they have been very clever in keeping it secret.”

  “I still don’t believe a word about the bomb,” said Heisenberg, “but I might be wrong.”

  A little later that night they turned on a radio and heard Truman’s official announcement. Forced to concede that an atomic bomb had destroyed Hiroshima, the German scientists began trying to figure how the bomb had been made. They discussed the technical challenges and lack of key materials that had slowed their own bomb-making efforts.

  Then they began trying to convince themselves they could have built the bomb—if they had really wanted to.
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br />   “If we had all wanted Germany to win the war, we would have succeeded,” claimed Carl von Weizsacker.

  “I don’t believe that,” said Hahn, “but I am thankful we didn’t succeed.”

  “The Americans could do it better than we could, that’s clear,” added Horst Korsching.

  Weizsacker wasn’t convinced. “If they were able to complete it in the summer of 1945,” he said, “we might have had the luck to complete it in the winter of 1944–1945.”

  “The result would have been that we would have obliterated London but still would not have conquered the world,” said Karl Wirtz. “And then they would have dropped them on us.”

  “I thank God on my bended knees that we did not make the uranium bomb,” said Hahn.

  Heisenberg said, “I would like to know what Stalin is thinking this evening.”

  *

  THE SOVIET DICTATOR WAS FURIOUS.

  “Stalin had a tremendous blow up,” recalled one top official, “losing his temper, banging his fists on the table and stamping his feet.” He had known the American bomb was coming, of course. But reports of its devastating power shocked him.

  “Hiroshima has shaken the whole world!” he shouted to his advisors. “The balance has been destroyed.” Stalin wanted his own atomic bomb—and he wanted it quickly. “Provide us with atomic weapons in the shortest possible time. It will remove a great danger from us.”

  Stalin called Igor Kurchatov to his office and chewed him out for not demanding the resources he needed to move more swiftly.

  “So much is destroyed, so many people perished,” said Kurchatov. “The country is on starvation rations and everything is in shortage.”

  Yes, Stalin admitted, thousands of Soviet towns and factories lay in ruins. More than twenty million people had been killed in the war with Germany. But that wouldn’t stop the Soviet Union from building an atomic bomb.

  “If the baby doesn’t cry, the mother doesn’t know what he needs,” Stalin lectured Kurchatov. “Ask for anything you need. There will be no refusals!”

  And just to make sure Kurchatov and his team understood what was at stake, Stalin placed his head of secret police, Lavrenti Beria, in charge of the bomb project. Beria was to be Stalin’s Leslie Groves—but with additional powers.

  “One gesture of Beria,” said a Soviet scientist, “was sufficient to make any of us disappear.”

  *

  THE FIRST REPORTS to reach the Japanese capital of Tokyo were panicked and sketchy. Some kind of catastrophe had occurred at Hiroshima, but no one knew the details. Government officials tried to contact the army command center in Hiroshima. There was no response.

  Then came Truman’s announcement that the Americans had dropped an atomic bomb. And the next morning a telegram from southern Japan reached Tokyo: “The whole city of Hiroshima was destroyed instantly by a single bomb.”

  General Torashiro Kawabe immediately sent an officer to the lab of Yoshio Nishina, Japan’s top atomic physicist. When the war began, the government had put Nishina in charge of fission bomb research in Japan. But the country never made building the bomb a high priority.

  Now, the moment Nishina walked into Kawabe’s office, the general demanded, “Could you build an atom bomb in six months? In favorable circumstances we might be able to hold out that long.”

  Nishina shook his head. “Under present conditions six years would not be long enough. In any case we have no uranium.”

  Kawabe then asked if there was any defense against the bomb.

  “Shoot down every hostile aircraft that appears over Japan,” said Nishina.

  Both knew that was impossible.

  Government and military leaders gathered to discuss the next question: Was it time to accept the Potsdam Declaration—and unconditional surrender?

  Yes, urged foreign minister Shigenori Togo, because America’s atomic bomb “drastically alters the whole military situation.”

  “Such a move is uncalled for,” countered Korechika Anami, the war minister. “Furthermore, we do not yet know if the bomb was atomic.”

  General Seizo Arisue, the army’s chief of intelligence, was sent to investigate. As Arisue’s plane circled above what appeared to be a smoking, ash-gray desert, the pilot pointed down.

  “Sir,” he said, “this is supposed to be Hiroshima. What should we do?”

  “Land,” Arisue said.

  The moment he stepped out of the plane, Arisue was hit by the horrible stench of burning flesh. It would take time to compile official statistics, but he could see that the city was gone. Of the 76,000 buildings that had stood two days before, 70,000 were completely destroyed. About 70,000 people were dead already. Over 100,000 more would die of wounds, burns, and radiation poisoning.

  Yoshio Nishina toured Hiroshima on August 8. “I decided at a glance,” he later said, “that nothing but an atomic bomb could have created such devastation.”

  That same day, the Soviet Union declared war on Japan, eager to grab a piece of the dying empire. And still, the debate continued in Tokyo. Political leaders urged surrender. Military leaders refused.

  *

  IN TRUMAN’S OFFICE in the White House, Secretary of War Stimson handed the president photographs of the ruins of Hiroshima, taken by American planes. Truman studied the pictures. “He mentioned the terrible responsibility that such destruction placed upon us,” Stimson remembered.

  “We ought to proceed with Japan in a way which will produce as quickly as possible her surrender,” Stimson told the president.

  Truman agreed—but aside from dropping another bomb, what options were there?

  Reword the Postdam Declaration, Stimson suggested. Tell Japanese leaders they could keep their emperor—as long as it would get them to surrender.

  Not possible, Truman insisted. Ever since Japan had attacked Pearl Harbor, the United States had been demanding unconditional surrender. Now, after the enormous sacrifices American fighters had made, Truman felt he could not back down from that demand. Political worries played a role too. If Truman began negotiating with Japan now, it could be seen as a sign of weakness. Political opponents would attack him for flinching under pressure.

  Truman decided he’d wait to hear from Japan. Until then, the atomic bombs would continue to fall.

  Another day passed with no word from Tokyo.

  *

  “BACK ON TINIAN, the second atomic bomb was being assembled even as the world was learning about the first,” remembered Paul Tibbets. Known as Fat Man, this was a large, round plutonium implosion bomb similar to the one tested at Trinity.

  Unless Tibbets heard otherwise, his orders were to drop the bomb as soon as weather conditions permitted. “The use of a second bomb the same week,” he said, “was calculated to indicate that we had an endless supply of this super weapon for use against one Japanese city after another.”

  Tibbets assigned the mission of dropping the second bomb to a pilot named Charles Sweeney. Fat Man was loaded into a B-29, and Sweeney and his crew took off and flew toward Japan early on the morning of August 9.

  Sweeney reached his target, the city of Kokura, at about ten-thirty. The city was covered with clouds, invisible from the sky. Sweeney circled the plane, looking for an opening.

  “Two additional runs were made, hoping that the target might be picked up after closer observation,” weaponeer Frederick Ashworth wrote in his flight log. “However, at no time was the aiming point seen.”

  Japanese anti-aircraft guns opened fire on the B-29. “We had some flack bursts,” said Jacob Beser, the radar operator. “Things were getting a little hairy.”

  “We’ll go on to secondary target, if you agree,” announced Sweeney.

  Ashworth nodded.

  “Proceeding to Nagasaki.”

  Fat Man exploded over the city of Nagasaki with the force of 22,000 tons of TNT. At least 40,000 people were instantly killed, and tens of thousands more fatally wounded or poisoned with radiation.

  *

&nb
sp; “PEOPLE WERE SAYING that Tokyo would be next,” remembered a Tokyo resident named Yukio Mishima. As he walked the streets of Japan’s capital, Mishima could feel the agonizing suspense in the air; he could see it in passing faces. “It was just as though one was continuing to blow up an already bulging toy balloon, wondering, ‘Will it burst now? Will it burst now?’”

  “If it had gone on any longer,” he said, “there would have been nothing to do but go mad.”

  In Washington, Leslie Groves told Truman a third atomic bomb “should be ready for delivery on the first suitable weather after 17 or 18 August.”

  Truman was hoping not to use it. “It is not to be released on Japan without express authority from the president,” George Marshall ordered Groves.

  Japan’s Big Six leaders gathered in Tokyo for an emergency meeting. Once again, the top generals resisted surrender. The desperate debate lasted late into the night before Emperor Hirohito stepped in. The emperor did not normally make policy decisions, but in times of crisis his word was final.

  “I cannot endure the thought of letting my people suffer any longer,” he said. “The time has come when we must bear the unbearable.”

  That ended the argument. Japan surrendered on August 15. World War II was over.

  END GAME

  WHILE AMERICANS CELEBRATED VICTORY, a woman in her early thirties, with short, dark hair stepped off a train in the tiny town of Las Vegas, New Mexico. She walked to a boarding house and asked for a room, explaining to the clerk that she suffered from tuberculosis and that her doctor had told her to spend some time breathing dry desert air.

  Actually, Lona Cohen was perfectly healthy. She was an experienced spy and courier for KGB agents in New York, and she was in New Mexico to meet Ted Hall.

  Stalin was screaming for the bomb, and Soviet scientists still needed more information from Los Alamos—they needed final reports on how the atomic bombs had been made. A meeting had already been arranged with Hall, but Anatoly Yatzkov decided not to use Hall’s friend Saville Sax as a courier. This mission was too important to trust to an amateur.