Man of the Hour

by Jennet Conant

  America might be powerful, but cognizant as he was of how easy it would be for a country to secretly develop a bomb, Conant believed this was no time for the United States to soft-pedal foreign policy. He addressed a general warning to Harvard alumni in June, reviving what he described as his old interventionist “fight talk” and calling for a “decisive victory.” Peace lay not in the vague resolutions of a united nations organization but in harsh, realistic measures that would prevent Germany and Japan from renewing their hostilities, and keep them “in check” for as long as fifty years—or until a new generation of leaders, untainted by Fascism or a desire for vengeance, could emerge.

  Conant’s views may have been influenced to some degree by the growing discontent of some of the Manhattan Project scientists. As usual, the restless souls at the Met Lab in Chicago were the loudest, with Szilard busily cataloguing their errors, as he put it to Bush, in order to “make a ‘stink’ after the war.” They found fault with everything from Groves’s repressive regime and Kafkaesque compartmentalization to Conant’s brutish handling of the interchange with the British.

  Rumors about costly delays became so widespread that at one point Roosevelt called Conant and asked him to deal with “a friend of Eleanor’s,” a young Met Lab physicist named Irving S. Lowen, who had gotten some “queer ideas” about what was going on. Lowen came to the OSRD’s Washington offices and behind closed doors confided his disturbing discoveries, which Conant recognized as a rehashed version of the old “bill of complaints”: the project was being poorly run, and it was slowing down the pace of the bomb work. Lowen ended his rant by saying he was determined to inform Roosevelt of this “almost treacherous situation.”

  It did not make the president’s science advisor happy to learn there was so much “loose talk about the inadequacies of the top management.” Conant knew that as an unenlightened chemist, he was regarded by many of the project physicists as deficient in his ability to understand atomic energy. He told himself that his critics “did not know the score,” and that if security permitted him to bring them into the picture about the status of other processes and parts of the project, they might see things differently. Privately, though, he worried about the resentment building beneath the surface “because hundreds of young scientists felt left out.”

  His attempts to reassure the overwrought Chicago physicist failed. After Lowen repeated his story to a number of the First Lady’s prominent Washington friends, Conant recalled, “the question was raised whether it was safe to leave him free to circulate his ideas?” Eleanor was worried enough to seek the advice of an old family retainer: Bernard Baruch. “I don’t want to know anything,” Baruch told Conant when he called about the young man’s complaint. “I just want to know whether you are well informed and can assure me all is well.” Conant assured his old rubber colleague that everything was being done that could be done “Your word is enough for me,” Baruch replied. “I shall tell the lady to relax.”

  Prompted in part by the turbulent “spirit in Chicago,” and the unrest triggered by the extreme secrecy that shrouded every aspect of the project, Conant began to consider the postwar political consequences of the bomb, and its domestic and diplomatic implications. At some point, it was going to have to be revealed to the world. He believed the Manhattan Project was “so significant it neither could or should be kept a secret,” and had suggested a scientific summary of their work be prepared to be released after the war to help shape the public’s—and Congress’s—view of the revolutionary new weapon. The idea for the report emerged from conversations among Conant, Arthur Compton, and the Princeton physicist Henry DeWolf Smyth, and resulted in Smyth being commissioned to write a book about the development of the bomb, Atomic Energy for Military Purposes, to be published after the war.

  During an inspection trip to Los Alamos in August, Conant mentioned his concerns to Bush, who was just back from London, and they took advantage of the “complete privacy” of their surroundings to discuss at length the problems posed by atomic weapons and “what the policy of the United States should be when the war was over.” They both knew the Chicago scientists were increasingly alarmed about the bomb’s impact on the international scene and their belief that it would require a worldwide organization and complicated new controls to keep them out of the hands of the next generation of dictators. On the basis of that conversation and those that followed, they decided it was time to call the government’s attention to the crucial need to devise effective policies to bring atomic power under national and international control.

  On September 19, 1944, Bush and Conant addressed a letter to Stimson expressing their grave concerns about the alarming situation that would result if no US policy was developed before the bomb was dropped. “We cannot emphasize too strongly the fact that it will be quite impossible to hold essential knowledge of these developments secret once the war is over,” they wrote. “Furthermore, we should like to emphasize that the progress of this art and science is bound to be so rapid in the next five years in some countries that it would be extremely dangerous for this government to assume that by holding secret its present knowledge we should be secure.” They went on to advocate the release of a Manhattan Project history, along with the basic scientific information and domestic legislation to control atomic power. While they urged the importance of a treaty with Great Britain and Canada, they did not want America to align itself so closely with Britain as to jeopardize its future relations with the Soviet Union. With the first bomb still a year away from being delivered, Conant and Bush had only begun to formulate their ideas about international control, but they knew that the only alternative to a reasonable approach to Russia was a nuclear arms race.

  On Friday, September 22, three days after they sent their letter, Roosevelt summoned Bush to a meeting in the Oval Office that exposed the wide gulf that had developed between the president and his atomic advisors when it came to the future of atomic power. Unbeknownst to them, FDR had been making his own forays into nuclear diplomacy. Bush found himself “very much embarrassed” to hear the president, in the presence of Lord Cherwell, who had just come from the second secret wartime conference in Quebec, holding forth on aspects of the bomb’s effect on international relations that he had neglected to first review in private with his own experts. To Bush’s growing dismay, it became clear that while the president still heeded their advice on administrative and technical matters, when it came to the bare-knuckle business of politics, he had no wish to consult his scientists. Roosevelt reserved solely to himself the right to make policy.

  Roosevelt had begun the meeting by talking about the ideas of Niels Bohr, who had intentionally bypassed Bush and Conant in order to make his case to the president in person. Felix Frankfurter had brought him to the White House in late August, but Roosevelt was so distracted by what he saw as a possible security breach—the justice was not supposed to know about S-1—that it may have prejudiced him against the physicist. Bohr, who had a tendency to mumble and spoke in long, convoluted sentences, proceeded to urge that America and Britain inform Stalin about the bomb and make a generous offer to share its control if they hoped to avoid a disastrous arms race with the Soviet Union. He had made the same plea for postwar cooperation during an interview with Churchill in April and been roundly rebuffed. Roosevelt had been ambiguous in his response, but it was now apparent to Bush from the president’s remarks that both leaders had flatly rejected Bohr’s approach. (In fact, FDR had known for almost a year that the Russians were aware that the United States and Britain were working on a bomb, and both he and Churchill thought Bohr’s proposals were so dangerous that while in Quebec they ordered surveillance of the Danish physicist to make sure he did not leak atomic secrets to the Soviets.)

  In his meeting with Bush, the president touched on other aspects of his talks with Churchill at Quebec the previous week, stressing his belief in the “necessity for maintaining the British Empire strong” and that there should be complete interchan
ge on all phases of atomic energy. What Roosevelt hinted at, but did not reveal, was that on September 19 at Hyde Park, he and Churchill had secretly signed an aide-mémoire pledging to continue their exclusive atomic alliance beyond the end of the war. Bush could only guess at the extent of the commitment, which both he and Conant opposed. But with Lord Cherwell present, as well as Admiral William D. Leahy, FDR’s chief of staff, Bush felt it was not the time to probe further, or point out that it would be all but impossible to maintain an Anglo-American atomic monopoly after the war, as scientific discussions and publications about atomic energy would be inevitable. During the awkward ninety-minute meeting, the president also raised the issue of whether the atomic bomb should actually be used against Japan or used only as a threat after a demonstration in the United States. Bush replied that the question warranted careful consideration, “for certainly it would be inadvisable to make a threat unless we were distinctly in a position to follow it up if necessary.” Roosevelt agreed.

  Startled and upset by what he had heard, Bush apprised Conant of the unhappy state of affairs. Though Bush acknowledged they were not the president’s “normal advisors” on international agreements or on postwar matters, they had been cut out of high-level diplomatic discussions about the bomb to a far greater degree than either of them had suspected. Both agreed that FDR had steered American atomic policy in the wrong direction, and it was imperative they try to reassert their influence. They hastened to alert Stimson to this “highly dangerous situation.” He shared their forebodings but thought it was doubtful they would be able to hold the president’s attention long enough to get through to him. He had had little luck getting him to discuss a number of issues on his own agenda.

  Five days later, on September 30, Conant and Bush sent Stimson two memorandums along with a cover letter that conveyed their message in a few stark sentences. They wanted to be sure the seventy-seven-year-old secretary of war, who still liked to be called Colonel in honor of his time as a field artillery officer in France in 1918, grasped the magnitude of the new threat they would soon be facing. There was every reason to believe, they reported, that atomic bombs would be demonstrated before August 1, 1945. The blast damage would be equivalent to up to ten thousand tons of high explosives or a raid by a thousand B-29s. This was frightening enough, but, in the near future, loomed the hydrogen bomb, or “super-super” bomb, which was a thousand times more destructive. Every major population center in the world would lie at the mercy of the nation that struck first. It would be foolhardy to believe their present head start guaranteed their security or that secrecy offered lasting protection, as any nation with good scientific and technical resources could overtake them in three or four years. To head off this catastrophic competition, they proposed disclosing all but the manufacturing and military details of the bomb as soon it was demonstrated. “This demonstration,” they wrote, “might be over enemy territory, or in our own country, with subsequent notice to Japan that the materials would be used against the Japanese mainland unless surrender was forthcoming.” After the fighting was over, they proposed placing control of atomic weapons in the hands of an international agency.

  Because the Bush-Conant memorandums, both in timing and tone, echo Bohr’s advice to the US and British leaders, historians credit the Danish physicist with being the first to appreciate the political dangers posed by the bomb and to agitate for immediate diplomatic action. In his classic account of the origins of the arms race, A World Destroyed: The Atomic Bomb and the Grand Alliance, Martin J. Sherwin contends that Conant’s and Bush’s original proposals were “tentative” by comparison. Even by late September, they suggested “no diplomatic initiatives” likely to encourage international cooperation and never advocated that Roosevelt make any overtures to the Russians during the war, “as Bohr and the Chicago scientists had urged.” But FDR’s atomic advisors were nothing if not realistic about the American political system and what it would take to persuade the president and Congress to accept the idea of international control, and they believed that only a cautious approach had any chance of working. For better or worse, as Sherwin notes, “because of their position and present responsibilities, it was Bush and Conant who, inevitably, came to be cast in the role of brokers between the recommendations of the scientists and the inclinations of the policy makers.”

  There is evidence that by the spring of 1944, Conant had independently arrived at many of the same conclusions as Bohr but was not ready to advertise them. In a scribbled response to a Bush memo in mid-April, and in another private handwritten document dated two weeks later, Conant indicated that he, too, believed the only hope for humanity was a global association: “Alternatives[:] race between nations and in the next war destruction of civilization, or a scheme to remove atomic energy from the field of conflict.”

  The “scheme” Conant contemplated in his May 4 ruminations was a powerful fifteen-member international commission—which would include representatives from the United States, Britain, and the Soviet Union, and perhaps six other nations—that would have complete authority over all work on atomic energy conducted anywhere in the globe. After describing this hypothetical body, which would act as “trustees and custodians” of the nuclear arsenal—ensuring full inspections, scientific reciprocity, the end of military secrecy, and even something approaching a world government—he asked at the end, “What would be the result: Everyone would know where each nation stood???” But as biographer James Hershberg, who unearthed the document, observes, “The question marks perhaps express Conant’s doubts that such radical ideas could ever be implemented.” The fact that it remained a rough draft and was never circulated suggests that Conant “lacked the sense of urgency that drove Niels Bohr to all but plant himself on the doorsteps of 10 Downing Street and 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.”

  Unlike Bohr, however, Conant was focused on making the bomb as fast as possible and had had little time for serious, orderly reflection on what would come afterward. But that was beginning to change. He recognized the need to speak out on postwar planning for Germany, one of the most controversial subjects at the Quebec Conference. A week after sending the bundle of memorandums to Stimson, he delivered a major speech on the disarmament of Axis countries, calling for dismantling their industry and converting them to pastoral economies. Addressing the Foreign Policy Association at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York on October 7, Conant declared that modern science and technology had “so transformed the art of war as to require us to rethink many of the problems involved in an international attempt to keep the peace.” The mounting curve of aerial offensive power—from long-range bombers to V-1 rockets—meant that American cities were now vulnerable to a “sudden onslaught.” For its own self-protection, the United States not only had to destroy the enemies’ “engines of war,” but also had to collaborate with other countries to prevent them from ever rearming again. “Only ignorance can lead one to deny the alternatives which face the country,” he warned. “Either we must play our part in a world organization to preserve the peace, or we must convert this nation into an armed camp bristling with weapons.”

  While they waited for a response to their memos, Conant and Bush became increasingly apprehensive about the administration’s attempts to map its postwar strategy without taking the bomb into account. The recently concluded Dumbarton Oaks Conference on a united nations organization had been a step toward greater cooperation but also a missed opportunity. They needed to begin laying the groundwork for their atomic energy agreement, which Conant believed could come about only gradually, “with a series of quid pro quos at every step.” They decided to prod Stimson further and prepared a joint paper on deadly biological warfare, another weapon of mass destruction that could be developed in secret by an aggressor, which posed a threat to world peace. America and Britain were already exchanging information on biological warfare, Bush wrote Conant on October 24, and the United States could offer Russia a chance to participate, creating an opening or “entering
wedge” for a similar proposal on atomic energy.

  November passed in a blur of meetings and war business. Public discussion over what to do about postwar Germany continued to dominate the papers: Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau Jr. had proposed a plan forcing Germany to pay heavy reparations, partly through forced labor—but Conant did not like the vindictive tone and dropped out of the debate. Bush had to go to Europe, and the president, ill and exhausted from the chaotic last weeks of the 1944 election, was rarely in Washington. He had won a narrow victory over New York’s governor, Thomas Dewey, but at considerable cost to his health. Postwar planning had to wait while Roosevelt recuperated at the “little White House” in Warm Springs, Georgia.

  On December 8 Conant was summoned to a last-minute meeting with Groves, who was making his way back from Montreal to Washington. The general rushed directly from Union Station to the Cosmos Club to tell him the news: an Alsos team, part of Groves’s military and scientific intelligence-gathering mission, had followed the Sixth Army into Strasbourg, France, and reported back that the German bomb program was far behind. Newly seized documents and interviews with captured scientists indicated that German research on nuclear fission had stalled. It seemed not to have progressed much beyond the stage reached by the Americans and British in 1940–41. So they were not facing an immediate threat from a German bomb.

  For both men, the news came as a huge relief. But their elation was tempered by the realization that this was just one cache of papers, and the information would have to be analyzed thoroughly and nailed down by their experts on the ground. It was too early to assume they were out of the woods. They knew there were other laboratories, heavy water plants, secret pile operations, possibly even a centrifuge plant. Many of Germany’s leading nuclear scientists were still at large—including Heisenberg. They could also not dismiss the possibility that this was a ploy, designed to divert their attention from the major effort being mounted elsewhere.