Oppenheimer could think of no solution “sufficiently spectacular” to convince the Japanese that further resistance was pointless. He stressed that the military use of the bomb was designed to induce surrender and that “several strikes would be feasible.” The “visual effect of an atomic bombing would be tremendous,” and would be accompanied by a “brilliant luminescence” that would rise to the height of ten thousand to twenty thousand feet. He estimated the number of deaths to be around twenty thousand, and the “neutron effect of the explosion would be dangerous to life for a radius of at least two-thirds of a mile.”
To Conant, the bomb “seemed the ideal weapon for giving exactly the shock to the Japanese which was required to bring about the surrender before the bitter fighting of invasion should commence.” He agreed with Compton that “nothing would be more disastrous than a prior warning followed by a dud.” America had a meager supply of bombs, and “a maximum effect had to be obtained with the few at our disposal.” It was a military necessity. The firebombing of their cities had not been enough to dissuade the Japanese from the dangerous course to which they had committed themselves. Dubbed “burn jobs” by Major General Curtis LeMay’s Twentieth Air Force, they had been making low-altitude incendiary raids on the Japanese mainland and home islands with powerful new jellied petroleum bombs. Developed by Louis Fieser and a team of Harvard chemists working on secret weaponry for Conant’s NDRC, they were designed to ignite white-hot conflagrations, spurting burning globs of a lava-like gel that stuck to the walls and roofs of the light wooden housing, consuming everything in its path. Over the course of a single night on March 9–10, 1945, the firebombing of Tokyo killed a hundred thousand, injured several times that many, and destroyed more than a quarter of the capital city. More than a million were left homeless.IV
Given the devastation wrought by LeMay’s B-29s, one committee member observed, “The number of people killed by the bomb would not be greater in general magnitude than the number already killed in fire raids.” Just as had been the case in the latter stages of the European war, they were all aware that the steady heightening of the saturation bombing of Japan in recent months—much of it directed against urban areas—had been done in hopes that it would weaken the will of the warlords and Premier Kantaro Suzuki’s government. The objective was a speedy victory, and civilian casualties had become a necessary evil, accepted by both the press and the public. Favorable articles about LeMay’s “precision” bombing had appeared in the New York Times, Time, and Newsweek. An unabashedly gung-ho series in the New Yorker quoted LeMay’s spokesman, St. Clair McKelway, explaining that the general’s purpose in conducting the raids was “shortening this war.” Bush, like Conant, felt sure the use of the atomic bomb would be “far less terrible than the fire raids on Tokyo, if it brought a quick end to the war, and would save more Japanese lives than it snuffed out.”
Groves, who shared this military rationale, maintained that a real target with built-up structures would be the most effective demonstration. He had already convened a Target Committee, composed of Los Alamos scientists and ordnance specialists, to study seventeen urban or industrial Japanese areas. Groves had set as a “governing factor” that the targets chosen would be places that would “most adversely affect” Japanese morale, be military in nature—being either arsenals or garrisons—and relatively undamaged so that afterward they could definitely gauge the power of the bomb. Only Groves and Oppenheimer were members of both the Interim and Target committees and participated in the hastily convened meetings on site selection. Groves particularly wanted Kyoto, which thus far had been spared but had been identified as one of the most important military targets in Japan. Stimson ruled it out, and Truman, on hearing his reasons, agreed on the grounds that “it had been the capital of Japan and was a shrine of Japanese art and culture.” The Target Committee would eventually settle on four cities, all major manufacturing centers: Hiroshima, Kokura, Nagasaki, and Niigata.
After considerable discussion of types of targets, the force of the explosion, and its desired effect, Stimson summed up the Interim Committee’s conclusions: “We could not give the Japanese any warning; that we could not concentrate on a civilian area; but that we shall seek to make a profound psychological impression on as many of the inhabitants as possible.” Conant suggested the “most desirable target” would be “a vital war plant employing a large number of workers and closely surrounded by workers’ homes.” There was no dissent, and Stimson took it as decided.
The following day, Friday, June 1, Stimson communicated the committee’s formal recommendations to the president: the bomb should be used as soon as possible, the target should be a war plant surrounded by workers’ homes, and it should be used without warning. The vote was unanimous.V
As Conant would observe years later, for all he and Bush had lobbied to become the president’s nuclear advisors, they never foresaw their involvement in the “most important matter” before the Interim Committee—indeed the decision that historians would come to regard as the “hallmark” of their deliberations—“the use of the bomb against the Japanese.” More tellingly, aware of its immense cost, awesome power, and profound military and diplomatic advantages, and assured of the wishes of the American public, they never questioned the basic assumption of whether it should be used at all.
* * *
While Truman and Stimson headed to Potsdam, Germany, for a meeting of the “Big Three” beginning July 17, 1945, Conant left for what he told his wife was a tour of West Coast facilities. Because of the uncertainty about the exact date of the Trinity test, the trip would put him in the geographical vicinity in the preceding days and allow him to be there at a moment’s notice. After a meeting with Bush and Groves at Hanford, he made a quick detour on July 10 to Portland, Oregon, to see his youngest son, Ted, who had insisted on dropping out of high school to “join up” and was back on a brief layover before returning to the Pacific. The scrawny eighteen-year-old, who had poor vision and was partly deaf in one ear, had flunked the physical exam—he was classified as 4F—but the merchant marines were so short of skilled radio operators, they took him anyway.
Conant had been of two minds about his enlisting, but, in the end, the psychiatrist who was currently treating Ted convinced him it might do him some good. Hovering over them for years had been the “great danger” that the odd, socially awkward boy would never “find a place for himself in the world of men,” as his dean at the Putney School had put it, and would end up in some kind of institution. According to Ted, who had been consigned briefly to Boston’s McLean Hospital for observation, one Harvard doctor had recommended that he undergo a prefrontal lobotomy—a procedure that was gaining credence as a cure for a wide range of mental disorders, from depression, to schizophrenia, to mild retardation. It was also being used to treat an array of intractable behaviors, including homosexuality and uncontrollable disobedience in children. “My father would have none of it,” recalled Ted, “and chose to send me off to war rather than cooking my brain.” The merchant marines would either make him or break him.
While Jimmy was doing well in the submarine service and had already been promoted to lieutenant, Conant had been frankly skeptical that his youngest would be able to adapt to a life of duty and danger. According to Groves, the merchant marines were the “lowest of the low,” and it would be hard going. Conant had not seen the rebellious youth for the better part of a year and had entertained few expectations for their reunion, but he wrote Patty that he was “pleased to report” that they managed to have a pleasant day:
I think for the first time, we got together on something approaching a mature and relatively unhampered basis. He has gained self-confidence to the degree necessary to allow him to drop his abnormal “bluff” and react essentially normally to situations. This makes discussion more profitable and interesting and much more realistic as to situations which involve him. He is still the same unusual kid, of course. Full of independence, energy, and projects. But his
feet are very near the earth if not always on it, and he has a lot of nerve. The latter gets him by in the tough going of the merchant marines.
In short, I can report great progress and think the prognosis for the immediate future is excellent. I’m so glad I saw him and in a sense so relieved at what I found.
On Friday, July 13, Conant flew to San Francisco, where he rejoined Bush and Groves—the latter breaking his moratorium on project leaders flying together—and they went on to pick up Ernest Lawrence in Berkeley. The time for the test was now set for four in the morning on July 16, when there would be few witnesses to the flash from the explosion. While on the general’s plane, Conant finished his letter about his visit with Ted, the heavy vibration of the plane making his handwriting more illegible than usual. Both boys were now on hazardous duty in the Pacific, which only added to his sense of urgency about completing the bomb. He and Groves would overnight in Pasadena and continue on to the Trinity site in the morning. Conant could say nothing of this to Patty, and simply closed the letter by apologizing for once again leaving her in the lurch, explaining, “This is an interesting trip, and I just had to take it, as you will see some day.” There is nothing out of the ordinary in his tone, though the letter is more personal than most, and is signed affectionately, “your adoring Jim.”
Their plane landed on the small Pasadena airstrip with a terrific thud, bringing everyone out of the operations office at a run. Among the group waiting to meet them was one of Conant’s security officers, who remarked later that, if not the first, at least the second thought that flashed through his mind was: “How am I going to explain the accidental death of Bush, Conant, and Groves without publicity to the project and resulting breaches of security?” To avoid the incoming fog, they left early the next morning from March Field in Riverside, and, after landing in Albuquerque, drove the last 125 miles along the Rio Grande to Alamogordo. They arrived at base camp, about 9 miles from point zero, at about five in the afternoon. The Project Trinity team had built a small desert laboratory, with its own administrative building, support facilities, and primitive living quarters for 125 military and scientific personnel. The test site consisted of a series of wood-and-concrete-slab bunkers covered by earth, which were built to protect the test instruments, generators, cameras, and personnel. The “gadget” had been raised to the top of the tower and was ready to go, a pile of mattresses stacked beneath it just in case the winch failed and it fell.
The mood at base camp was strained. Oppenheimer, looking drawn despite his tan, revealed that they might be in trouble. Bad news had come from Los Alamos. The test firing of the dummy rig, a twin for the Trinity explosive assembly except without the plutonium core, had not detonated properly. All indications were the Trinity bomb would be a dud. Stunned, Oppenheimer called an emergency meeting that quickly deteriorated into a shouting match. Kistiakowsky was identified as the “chief villain” and bore the brunt of their fury, with Oppie, Groves, and Bush taking turns grilling him for his incompetence and for jeopardizing months of hard work. “Everybody lectured me,” Kistiakowsky recalled. “Only Conant was reasonable.”
They spent a miserable night at the Albuquerque Hilton, all of them struggling to hide their dismay over the large number of generals and VIPs Groves had invited to observe the test. A call from Hans Bethe early the next morning revealed it was a false alarm. He had stayed up all night reviewing the data and discovered an error. The chances were good that the “gadget” would go off as planned.
Conant learned the Los Alamos physicists had set up a pool to take bets on the size of the explosion. “A few pessimists” wagered it would be a flop (0), with lowball bets by Oppenheimer (300 tons of TNT) and Kistiakowsky (1,400), all the way to a very optimistic Ed Teller, who believed the yield would be higher than 45,000 tons of TNT. Conant’s own conservative figure was 4,400, but he decided as a project leader it would be bad form to participate.
When they returned to base camp Sunday evening, Oppenheimer greeted them, looking grim—there was more bad news. The weather forecast was distinctly unfavorable. After dinner, the winds picked up to thirty miles an hour, and the air grew heavy. A thunderstorm was threatening. The hundred-foot tower stuck out on the flat plain like a giant lightning rod. Many of the scientists were urging Oppenheimer to postpone the test, and he was being bombarded with advice from all sides about what should or should not be done. Some argued there might be a “reversal,” with the swirling winds changing direction and blowing radioactive debris back onto the base camp. Others worried the rain might affect the electrical connections and increase the chances of a misfire.
Conant thought the atmosphere was “a bit tense, as might be expected,” but Groves did not like it and felt everyone was dangerously keyed up. He pulled Oppenheimer into an empty office and listed all the reasons why the test had to happen. If the gadget got soaked, it might take days to dry out. Every hour of delay increased the risk of sabotage, and he had already ordered Kistiakowsky and two others to stand guard overnight at the tower. People’s nerves had been pushed to the breaking point, and a delay would be unendurable. More to the point, the events at Potsdam prevented them from even considering calling it off. Conant and Bush, along with other leading scientists, had been pushing the president to advise the Russians that the United States was working on a bomb and expected to use it against Japan. Truman needed to know the results of Trinity to use in his negotiations with Stalin the next day. Oppenheimer said he understood, but spent the next few hours pacing and chain-smoking.
At around eleven o’clock, Groves told Oppie to go to bed and get some rest. Conant, who shared a tent with Bush and the general, found it impossible to sleep. “From 10:30 a.m. to 1 a.m. it blew very hard,” he wrote in his diary, the tension and flapping canvas tent sides keeping him awake. “Then it poured for about an hour!” At one in the morning, Groves got up and drove out to the forward barricade to review the situation with Oppenheimer. Just after the rain stopped at 3:15, Rabi stuck his head in their tent and reported there had been “much talk of postponement,” but after receiving the latest forecast, Groves had decided the test would take place at 5:00 a.m., by which point the storm would hopefully have passed. Conant and Bush threw on their clothes, gulped some coffee, and went outside. The sky was still overcast, but it was beginning to clear. Then word came that the test would be at 5:30 a.m.
At 5:10 a.m. Groves came back, and they prepared to view the shot from a trench carved into a slight rise near the camp, seventeen thousand yards from point zero. Fermi was at the same observation spot. He had irked Groves the night before by indulging in a bit of black-humored speculation about whether the bomb would “ignite the atmosphere” when detonated and blow them all to bits, a scenario first raised by Teller at the Berkeley conference and later laid to rest by Bethe. By bringing it up again only moments before the firing, Fermi was tempting fate in more ways than one. When the warning sirens blew, Conant and Bush took their positions on either side of the general. They had been instructed to lie belly down on the tarpaulin with their feet toward ground zero, and to look away at the start, and then look up, and to make sure to use the rectangle of dark green welder’s glass they had been given to shield their eyes.
Through the loudspeaker nearby, they could hear physicist Samuel Allison count down the final seconds: “minus forty-five, minus forty, minus thirty, minus twenty . . .” After minus ten, there was an eerie silence, and Conant whispered to Groves that he “never imagined seconds could be so long.” He kept his eyes open, staring at the horizon opposite the spot. “Then came a burst of white light that seemed to fill the sky and seemed to last for seconds. I had expected a relatively quick and bright flash. The enormity of the light and its length quite stunned me. My instantaneous reaction was that something had gone wrong and that the thermonuclear transformation of the atmosphere, once discussed as a possibility and only jokingly referred to a few minutes earlier, had actually occurred.”
Blinded for a second, Co
nant rolled onto his back and raised his head slightly, viewing the fireball through the dark glass. It looked like “an enormous pyrotechnic display with great boiling of luminous vapors.” Without thinking, he lowered his glass and watched the ball of gas turn into a large, expanding mushroom cloud, reddish purple against the predawn sky. After the initial roar, there was the deep rumbling sound of thunder as the blast reverberated in the distant hills. Then someone shouted, “Look out for the detonation wave!” but where they were, it only felt like a gust of hot wind forty seconds after zero. There were two secondary explosions, sending the cloud billowing upward. Conant turned to Groves and, at a loss for words, acknowledged their achievement with a silent handshake. Bush, who was on the general’s other side, did likewise. As they got to their feet, Conant heard Groves mutter, “Well, I guess there is something in nucleonics after all.” Then they heard the whole assembled group let out a spontaneous cheer.
Oppenheimer pulled up in his jeep, relief written all over his face. Groves congratulated him quietly. As they stood there, dazed but happy that their experiment had succeeded, the project leaders were mobbed by ecstatic scientists. The men came rushing in from the various shelters, hooting and hollering, slapping them on the back, and showering them with congratulations. The outburst was in its own way as violently intense as the eruption they had just witnessed. It was the sudden release of many months, even years, of pent-up emotions—of relief and hope, fear and exhaustion—a jubilant howl that the gadget had worked and their job was done.
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