by Gregg Herken
Characteristically, Lawrence had already begun laying the groundwork for his postwar plan. Before returning to California, he and Cooksey stopped off at Groves’s Washington office to plead for construction of a new electromagnetic separation plant after the war.45 Lawrence wanted the army to look at abandoned smelters near Las Vegas, Nevada, and in Washington State as possible sites for a reborn Y-12.46 Another facility was urgently necessary, Ernest argued, because existing equipment was obsolete and the machinery breaking down: the copper liners of the Alpha Calutrons were already wearing out.47
To Lawrence’s great disappointment, Tolman’s report—given to Groves just after Christmas—failed to make a case for the new Calutrons.48 But even more disturbing to Ernest was a rumor that Oppenheimer had been one of those to speak out against his plans.49 When Lawrence had last raised the issue of plant expansion with his old friend, Oppie had seemed supportive.50
By February 1945, Lawrence was still anxiously awaiting a final decision by Groves on the fate of his proposal. In a telephone call at the end of the month, the verdict was relayed by Fidler: the Calutrons had served their purpose; the army would pay for no more following the conclusion of the war.51
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A few days earlier, the design of Little Boy had been frozen at Los Alamos. The uranium gun was expected to be ready for combat use by July.52 Groves tentatively scheduled a test of the implosion bomb for Independence Day, in the New Mexican desert near Alamogordo, 200 miles south of Los Alamos.53
For reasons that Oppenheimer decided to keep obscure, he had named the test site Trinity—a secret tribute to Jean Tatlock, who had committed suicide at her San Francisco apartment in January 1944.*54
At Oak Ridge, meanwhile, the gaseous diffusion plant known as K-25 was producing enriched uranium at nearly bomb-grade concentrations, making further processing by the Alpha Calutrons unnecessary. The end product from the cascades was now fed directly into the Beta machines. Because of these additional sources, another milestone was reached that spring: the output of U-235 in March again exceeded production for all previous months combined.55
The gathering momentum at both Y-12 and Los Alamos meant that Germany’s surrender in early May had little impact upon the Manhattan Project. Despite Robert Wilson’s attempt to raise the question of whether their efforts should continue, only one scientist at the lab—a member of the British delegation—elected to quit before the Japanese enemy was defeated. The thrumming of Lawrence’s Calutrons continued uninterrupted. As Pash’s Alsos mission had found that spring, the country where fission was discovered never came close to harnessing it for a bomb.
In another subtle sign that the drama was approaching its climax, Groves lifted the ban that had grounded laboratory directors. The army informed Tennessee Eastman of pending reductions in the workforce at Oak Ridge, while Lawrence was told to trim nonresearch personnel at the Rad Lab by 20 percent.56 The previous summer, Underhill had advised Oppenheimer that the university was preparing to “taper off” its commitment to run Los Alamos and hoped to be out of the bomb business altogether by the end of the war.57
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As the Manhattan Project picked up speed, so, too, did Soviet efforts to steal its secrets. Like the U-235 being churned out by the Calutrons, the copious flow of purloined information to Moscow threatened, at times, to swamp the receivers.58 Kurchatov’s April 1945 cables to Pervukhin reflected almost an embarrassment of riches. The bomb secrets coming in were of such “vast importance” and so far outstripped Soviet knowledge, wrote Kurchatov with his blue pencil, that it was “impossible to formulate pertinent questions that would require additional information.”59
In his messages to Pervukhin, Kurchatov also reflected that the greatest contribution of Soviet spies was “enabling us to bypass many labor consuming stages of the problem’s development.” Indeed, Russia’s Manhattan Project had already learned through espionage something that it had taken Los Alamos more than a year to find out: that Teller’s favored hydride bomb probably would not work.60
In San Francisco, Kharon’s successor, Kasparov, had meanwhile been transferred to the embassy in Mexico City. His replacement was thirty-five-year-old Stepan Apresyan, code-named May (Maj). Apresyan had served for less than a year as NKVD rezident at the New York consulate, his first overseas posting, and was plainly a rising star in the Soviet intelligence service.61 Word that the inaugural session of the United Nations would take place in San Francisco that spring had given the Bay Area consulate suddenly increased importance.
However, May’s youth and inexperience, coupled with Kasparov’s rapid departure, made for a rocky transition.
On April 3, 1945, May cabled Moscow in a near panic, requesting Map’s surname as well as Uncle’s “distinguishing features since there is no photograph here and there may be a misunderstanding owing to the rather unfortunate password.”62 He had a meeting with Uncle just three days hence, Apresyan explained.*63
Two weeks later, however, Apresyan had found his bearings. On April 16, May cabled Moscow to say that he had turned over to Map the task that Kheifets had originally assigned to Eltenton: luring prospective recruits with honorary membership in the Soviet Academy of Sciences.64 Shortly thereafter, Uncle relayed word from the local head of the Communist Party that Apresyan had a new agent to run: Harry Dexter White, code-named Richard. White was in San Francisco as the Treasury Department’s representative at the UN conference; he would report sensitive discussions within the U.S. delegation to Moscow.65
Also at the United Nations conference was Haakon Chevalier, who found temporary employment as a translator for the French delegation. Although Pieper by that spring had a total of eight agents shadowing Chevalier—five stationed outside the house at Stinson Beach, with three more listening in on a telephone tap—except for a single suspicious incident, the FBI was unable to find any evidence that the former professor was still involved in espionage.66 Similarly, the bug that the bureau had implanted near Bransten’s dining room was picking up only dinnertime conversations and bickering between Map and Chevalier over the wisdom of the party line.67
On June 4, 1945, Bransten and May cohosted a reception at the Soviet consulate that was organized and sponsored by the American-Russian Institute. The occasion was advertised as an opportunity to introduce American scientists to their Soviet counterparts at the UN conference. As FBI agents noted, both Ernest Lawrence and Frank Oppenheimer attended the reception.68
Soviet espionage had been very much on Groves’s mind when he and Secretary of War Stimson briefed the new president, Harry Truman, on the atomic bomb a few weeks earlier. (In office less than two weeks, Truman probably found jarring Groves’s forecast for the future: “Atomic energy, if controlled by the major peace-loving nations, should insure the peace of the world for decades to come. If misused it can lead our civilization to annihilation.”)
“A great deal of emphasis was placed on foreign relations and the Russian situation,” Groves wrote in notes of the meeting.69 Shortly thereafter, in a similar briefing to Secretary of State–designate James Byrnes, Groves chose to focus upon the Soviet spy ring at the University of California.70
But Groves also made it plain that he did not intend to make the Russians’ job any easier. When Lawrence, at the end of May, asked the general’s permission to attend an upcoming celebration in Moscow of the 220th anniversary of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Groves ordered him to decline. Reluctantly, Ernest sent his regrets.71
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Since the atomic bomb now seemed almost certain to be ready in time to be used in the war, Washington directed that further consideration be given to the circumstances of its use, including how the weapon might be employed, and against what sort of targets—issues that had been deliberately held in abeyance, awaiting assurances that the bomb would work.
In early May 1945, Stimson created a seven-man committee to consider these questions as well as the bomb’s postwar role. The secretary of war put himself at the h
ead of what he called the Interim Committee; Truman picked Byrnes as his personal representative. On May 9, the group held its first meeting, in Stimson’s office.72
At Conant’s urging, a Scientific Panel—consisting of Oppenheimer, Lawrence, Fermi, and Arthur Compton—was appointed to advise the committee on technical issues. Conant decided to introduce the panel to its subject with a memorandum that he and Bush had written the previous fall on the international implications of atomic energy.73
The Scientific Panel did not join the discussions until the committee’s fourth meeting, on the morning of May 31.74
Compton had just begun the meeting, summarizing the steps leading to the atomic bomb’s development, when Conant—mindful of what was lurking in the wings—interrupted to steer the discussion around to the Super. Under Conant’s prodding, Oppenheimer said that he now believed the superbomb would require a minimum of three more years to reach production. To the uninitiated, like Byrnes, the figures that Oppie cited—“an explosive force equal to 10,000,000–100,000,000 tons of TNT”—doubtless came as a stunning surprise.75
After a brief diversion onto the subject of postwar research—where Lawrence, predictably, made a pitch for “vigorously pursuing the necessary plant expansion” and “adequate government support,” while Oppenheimer advocated returning to a “leisurely and a more normal research situation”—the discussion turned to the Russians.76
Oppenheimer thought America’s moral position would be greatly strengthened if the nation were to release information on atomic energy’s peacetime applications, particularly before the bomb was used.77 Army chief of staff George Marshall went even further, suggesting that the United States invite a pair of prominent Russian scientists to the upcoming test of the gadget in New Mexico. Byrnes, however, quickly scotched that idea. Compton intervened hurriedly—and unsuccessfully—in an effort to find some common ground, but the morning ended tensely.
At lunch, the committee and its panel spread out among four tables. Lawrence, Oppenheimer, and Compton sat together with Byrnes, Stimson, and Groves. Prompted by Byrnes, Lawrence spoke up on an issue that had been left off the agenda, but that he had raised briefly during the morning’s discussion: how the bomb might be used against Japan. Lawrence proposed that the weapon be demonstrated to the Japanese “in some innocuous but striking manner, before it should be used in such a way as to kill many people.”78
The idea of a so-called demonstration of the bomb had been discussed earlier, at both Los Alamos and Washington.79 But Lawrence’s suggestion was the first time that it had been discussed at such a high level—or with such seriousness.80
Numerous practical objections to the scheme were immediately raised by others at the table. Stimson—who was suffering increasing anguish, his personal diary showed, from the daily destruction of Japan’s cities—doubted that casualties from the atomic bomb would be any worse than the masses of people killed by conventional bombing, including the recent B-29 fire raids upon Tokyo. Oppenheimer and Groves expressed similar skepticism that a demonstration could be “sufficiently spectacular” to compel Japan’s surrender.81 Byrnes himself worried that the Japanese, if warned of an impending atomic attack on their home islands, might move American prisoners of war into the target area. Cowed by this resistance, Lawrence did not argue the point. The entire lunchtime discussion had taken perhaps ten minutes.
Assembling afterward in Stimson’s office, the Interim Committee officially took up the question of the bomb’s use. Notes by Stimson aide Gordon Arneson left little doubt that, in Stimson’s mind at least, the issue was settled by meeting’s end:
After much discussion concerning various types of targets and the effects to be produced, the Secretary expressed the conclusion, on which there was general agreement, 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. At the suggestion of Dr. Conant the Secretary agreed that the most desirable target would be a vital war plant employing a large number of workers and closely surrounded by workers’ houses.82
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At Los Alamos that spring, Oppenheimer was becoming anxious to leave the lab. In a report to Groves on May 7, Oppie described the wartime laboratory as “singularly unsuited for peacetime perpetuation,” requiring a great change “in the way in which the Laboratory is set up and very probably an actual shift in its physical location.”83 Oppenheimer also let Groves know that he should start looking for a replacement: “In particular, the Director himself would very much like to know when he will be able to escape from these duties for which he is so ill qualified and which he has accepted only in an effort to serve the country during the war.”
The Scientific Panel gathered once again, at Los Alamos, on June 16. In the waning minutes of the last Interim Committee meeting, Stimson had asked the scientists to draft a memorandum on the future prospects for atomic research. The panel’s deliberations had just begun, however, when they were cut short by an urgent phone call from Stimson aide George Harrison, who asked for the scientists’ views on a more pressing issue: the use of the bomb against Japan.
Behind Harrison’s inquiry was a document that Compton and Chicago physicist James Franck had tried, unsuccessfully, to deliver to Stimson a few days before. The Franck report was a thirteen-page plea by Met Lab scientists for international control of the atomic bomb. Among its earnest recommendations was one which was highlighted, urging “a demonstration of the new weapon … before the eyes of representatives of all the United Nations, on the desert or a barren island.”84 Before Stimson responded to the Franck report, Harrison explained, he wanted the panel’s opinion. Hoping to do his own lobbying for the report within the panel, Compton had brought copies along with him on the train from Chicago.85
Lawrence led the reopened discussion of the demonstration. Although Fermi had remained mute on the subject before the Interim Committee, he evidently sided with Lawrence in this new debate.86 Ironically, Compton now spoke out against the demonstration—arguing that use of the bomb against a military target would result in a “probable net savings of lives.” Were the bomb not used, Compton asserted, “the world would have no adequate warning as to what was to be expected if war should break out again.”87 When Lawrence persisted, Compton hinted that Ernest’s views on the subject were unduly influenced by the latter’s fond memories of Japanese physics students at Berkeley.88
But it was Oppenheimer who made the final, telling argument against the demonstration. His objections were a reprise of the points he had raised at the meeting on May 31: The bomb was not certain to work, and a dud might even be used against us by the enemy; Japanese defenses would be alerted by a warning, and POWs possibly moved onto the target. Most important, no conceivable demonstration of the bomb could be as compelling as its actual combat use against what Groves and the army were calling “built-up areas”—that is, cities.89
This time, Lawrence appears to have remained resolute, refusing to back down.90 Thus the memorandum that Oppenheimer sent to Stimson from Los Alamos acknowledged that the views of the scientists on the use of the bomb were “not unanimous: they range from the proposal of a purely technical demonstration to that of the military application best designed to induce surrender.”91 On the question of the demonstration, Oppie used an artful word—closer—to bridge what seems to have been an unresolved difference of opinion: “We find ourselves closer to these latter views; we can propose no technical demonstration likely to bring an end to the war; we see no acceptable alternative to direct military use.”92
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Although he was not part of the Scientific Panel, Edward Teller, too, was looking ahead to the future after the war.93 At Chicago, Teller’s friend and colleague Leo Szilard, recognizing that the Franck report had failed to make a dent upon the mind of official Washington, decided upon making his own last-minute appeal: a petition, addressed to the president, wh
ich urged that the atomic bomb not be used without warning against Japan.94 Szilard circulated his petition at the Met Lab and also sent copies to Oak Ridge and Los Alamos, where Teller brought the document to Oppenheimer’s attention. Oppie’s immediate response, Teller recalled, was that it was not the job of scientists to decide how the weapon was used.95
In a letter he wrote to Szilard, setting out his reasons for not signing the petition, Teller failed to mention Oppie’s argument, but instead implied that the efforts of his fellow Hungarian were too little, too late:
The things we are working on are so terrible that no amount of protesting or fiddling with politics will save our souls.… I should like to have the advice of all of you whether you think it is a crime to continue to work. But I feel that I should do the wrong thing if I tried to say how to tie the little toe of the ghost to the bottle from which we just helped it escape.96
As Teller alluded in his letter to Szilard, he was already at work on an even more fearsome weapon than the atomic bomb—the Super. For almost a year, Edward had been importuning Oppie and others to promise that they would remain at the lab until the feasibility of the hydrogen bomb had been decided, one way or the other. Teller himself had postponed a decision on whether to return to academe until he was sure of Oppenheimer’s answer.
In May, Teller had once more pestered the army to allow Maria Mayer to visit Los Alamos so that she might report in person on the progress of her opacity calculations. But Lansdale had denied the request.97 Oppenheimer finally brokered a compromise: Mayer could come to Los Alamos, but Teller had to keep her in the dark regarding opacity’s application to the Super.98
At Y-12, Lawrence’s boys were tipped off to the approaching end of the war by an urgent order from Washington, instructing them to shut down the Calutrons and ship all the uranium that could be collected from the receivers and the innards of the machines to Los Alamos.99 For the first time, the precious cargo was flown from Knoxville, Tennessee, to the tiny airport at Santa Fe. By then, every gram of the U-235 that would go into Little Boy had gone through Lawrence’s Calutrons at least once.100
