Brotherhood of the Bomb

by Gregg Herken

  A similar edict to Hanford signaled the impending test of the Fat Man device. Operators of the DuPont reactors at Hanford were also instructed to send the next shipment of “product” by air rather than overland.101 To Groves’s disappointment, problems with the molds for the explosive lenses had made it necessary to postpone the test of the implosion bomb; mid-July was now the expected date.102

  Having finally embarked on a long-deferred vacation, Robert Underhill and his wife were just checking into Yosemite’s Awahnee Hotel when he received a priority telephone call at the reception desk from the army. The regents’ representative was on a train to Los Angeles the following day to sign a two-word amendment to Contract 36, approving the shipment of men “and materiel” to the Pacific. The change allowed the first bomb to be sent to Tinian, the island that would be the launching point for the atomic raids against Japan.103

  In Berkeley on July 6, Lawrence received a cable from Oppenheimer at Clear Creek, the code name for telegrams originating in Los Alamos:

  Any time after the 15th would be a good time for our fishing trip. Because we are not certain of the weather we may be delayed several days. As we do not have enough sleeping bags to go around we ask you please not to bring any friends with you. Let us know where in Albuquerque you can be reached.104

  * * *

  Groves, Bush, and Conant flew west in the general’s C-47 five days later, for a last inspection of the laboratories and facilities that manufactured components of the bomb.105 The delegation arrived in Berkeley on the late afternoon of July 13, whereupon Lawrence took his guests out to dinner at Trader Vic’s. (The group ordered Ernest’s favorites: barbequed spareribs, fried rice, and several rounds of Mai Tais. Ernest paid the bill—$65.15—from the Loomis fund.)106

  Later that evening, Ernest handed Groves a four-page letter that the general had requested at their previous meeting. It outlined Ernest’s postwar plans for the Rad Lab.107

  From Oakland, Groves, Lawrence, and the rest of the entourage flew south to the Naval Ordnance Station at Inyokern in the California desert—where the explosive lenses for Fat Man were tested—and then on to Los Angeles, where the group visited Caltech. Arriving in Albuquerque on Sunday afternoon, July 15, Groves worried that spies might notice the number of world-renowned scientists gathering in the lobby of the Hilton hotel, and so ordered them dispersed to other lodgings.

  Following dinner with Alvarez, in the early morning hours of Monday, July 16, Lawrence, Monsanto executive Charles Thomas, and New York Times reporter William Laurence crowded into an olive-drab Plymouth for the three-hour drive to Trinity site. Groves had made Laurence a kind of semiofficial chronicler of the bomb’s development.108

  At Trinity, Ernest joined a clump of scientists gathering on Compania Hill, the VIP viewpoint located twenty miles northwest of the bomb on its tower. The group included McMillan, Teller, Serber, and British physicist James Chadwick. Gusty winds and driving rain that had lashed the desert all night finally abated.109 Standing next to Lawrence, Teller unnerved onlookers by smearing suntan lotion on his face, donning heavy gloves and welder’s glasses as the countdown approached zero.110 (“He scared the hell out of me,” admitted physicist Willie Higinbotham.)111 Ernest hopped nervously in and out of the Plymouth’s front seat, figuring that the car’s windshield would filter out the bomb’s ultraviolet rays.

  Lawrence was bent down, just getting out of the car, when the bomb exploded. “I was enveloped with a warm brilliant yellow-white light—from darkness to brilliant sunshine in an instant, and as I remember I momentarily was stunned by the surprise,” he later wrote in the report that Groves demanded of eyewitnesses.112

  Teller had just begun to lift the heavy goggles from his eyes to get a better look when he realized that the light outside was as bright as the sun at midday and the heat from the bomb palpable.

  Against all advice, Serber had been looking directly at the bomb with unshielded eyes when it exploded; he was momentarily blinded.113 Alvarez’s was a unique perspective: kneeling between the pilot and copilot in the cockpit of a B-29 some twenty miles from ground zero, he saw the bomb as a brilliant light diffused through thick cloud cover. In an artist’s pad balanced on his knees, Luis sketched the bulbous top of the roiling mushroom cloud pushing through the undercast.114

  Lying facedown next to his brother outside the control bunker 10,000 yards south of the tower, Robert Oppenheimer waited for the deep, low rumbling sound of the bomb to subside before he stood up. Oppie then turned to Frank with a smile that mixed pride with relief and said, simply, “It worked.”115

  Later, Bush and Conant walked down to the road that led to the control bunker and waited. As an army car drove by trailing a cloud of dust, Groves and Oppenheimer visible in the backseat, the two men theatrically snapped to attention and, grinning, doffed their hats.116

  8

  A STONE’S THROW FROM DESPAIR

  THE MOOD IN GROVES’S plane on the flight back to Washington was triumphant. In the euphoria that followed Trinity, all talk of a demonstration was forgotten.1 From Washington, Lawrence traveled on to Oak Ridge, where U-235 was already being scraped from the Calutrons for a second uranium bomb.2 From New Mexico, Serber and Alvarez headed west across the Pacific to Tinian Island, where B-29s would launch the atomic raids against Japan.

  Oppenheimer returned to Los Alamos to find the latest report concerning the Super on his desk. The most recent calculations suggested that a thermonuclear reaction in tritium and deuterium could indeed be triggered by an atomic bomb.3 Having just had a glimpse into the abyss, Oppie now saw before him the yawning chasm.

  On July 27, 1945, Groves felt it proper to warn Stimson and Marshall where the future could be headed. It might be possible to create a weapon far more powerful than that just tested in New Mexico, Groves reported, using a Little Boy–type bomb as the detonator, a few hundred grams of tritium as a booster, and 1 cubic meter of liquid deuterium as the fuel. The specter that Teller had raised at Berkeley three years earlier returned to haunt those pondering the Super anew: “Such a bomb might introduce the possibility of world destruction if the theories of some scientists are correct that the explosion could ignite the entire world’s atmosphere. Further study of this possibility would have to be made.”4

  * * *

  But the immediate focus, of course, was upon Japan. Sitting out a vigil, Groves got word of the atomic attack on Hiroshima shortly before midnight on August 5 at his Washington office. News of the bombing came to Los Alamos in the stilted, staccato language of a telegram that was garbled in transmission. Manley passed the word along to Oppenheimer, who, if not yet knowing of the bomb’s effects, at least understood its significance.5

  As an observer in a B-29 that accompanied the Enola Gay over the Japanese city, Alvarez had been the closest witness to the lab’s handiwork. Luie was onboard to monitor the performance of parachute-rigged detectors he had designed for measuring the explosive force of the atomic bombs.6 After dropping the detectors, the chase plane had climbed and turned sharply to escape the shock wave from Little Boy. Alvarez missed seeing the actual explosion but, peering out a porthole a moment later, witnessed the aftermath: “I looked out and all I could see was a black, roiling cloud over what looked like a forest. My first thought to myself was that Ernest Lawrence would be furious when he learned that they had wasted all his uranium on a forest. I didn’t see any sign of a city.”7

  Teller did not learn of the destruction of Hiroshima until midmorning, while he was walking to work. “One down!”—the greeting shouted out by the driver of a speeding jeep—remained incomprehensible until Edward joined his colleagues at the Tech Area.8

  In Berkeley, Lawrence heard the news of the bombing at home over the radio. After predicting to Molly that the war would soon be over, Ernest looked to the future. “Now we will have no more war and the most backward countries will be able to start catching up,” he told his wife.9

  On campus later in the day, Lawrence roamed the lab
oratories, shops, and offices of the Rad Lab, shaking hands and receiving congratulations. Groves telephoned Ernest shortly after noon to thank him and the Rad Lab for their role in the project.10

  But doubts, second-guesses, and even regrets were not long in coming. Berkeley astronomer Donald Shane, the head of scientific personnel at Los Alamos, remembered Oppenheimer as “excited and elated” during dinner the night after Hiroshima was bombed.11 Yet as details of that attack and of the second atomic raid—on Nagasaki, three days later—drifted back to the lab, the confident mood and “high-noon strut” that Rabi recalled of Oppie just after the Trinity test gradually faded, to be replaced by signs of obvious emotional distress.12 An FBI report on August 9 described Oppie as a “nervous wreck.” A bureau informant who saw the physicist on the City of San Francisco a few days later reported that “Oppenheimer kept looking under the table and all around.”13

  When Lawrence flew to Los Alamos for a meeting of the Scientific Panel on August 10, he found Oppenheimer anxious, distracted, and depressed by the casualty reports from Nagasaki.14 Discussions that were supposed to take place on the subject of postwar research were sidetracked by the news, and by Lawrence’s insistence that Oppenheimer make up his mind whether he was going to return to Berkeley.15 Repeated entreaties from Birge had gone unanswered, Ernest chided, and plans had to be made for classes that fall.

  Instead, Oppenheimer complained bitterly to Lawrence about how he had been treated by Underhill and the University of California. Rival offers, Oppie said, had come from Columbia University, Harvard, and the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton.16

  As the discussion turned to the bomb casualties in Japan, Lawrence pointed out, perhaps unkindly, that it was he who had championed the demonstration and Oppie who had opposed it. Stung, in turn, by Oppenheimer’s claim that he respected only those who were victorious in life—generals, rich businessmen, and the like—Ernest observed, somewhat plaintively, that both he and Oppie had achieved great success. Oppenheimer hinted that Lawrence was jealous of his achievements and eager to make him a mere subordinate once more at the Rad Lab.

  Like the spat over Oppenheimer’s leftwandering before the war, this fight between friends ended without resolution. Ernest returned home angry and embittered at Oppie, who, in a final gesture of defiance, had refused to say whether he would return to Berkeley.

  Two weeks later, when tempers had cooled, Oppenheimer wrote Lawrence a long letter. Although meant as an attempt at reconciliation, it actually showed how much their differences and simmering resentments remained.

  I have very mixed and sad feelings about our discussions on Berkeley. I meant them in a far more friendly, tentative and considerate spirit than they appeared to you; and was aware and tried to make you aware at the time that fatigue and confusion gave them a false emphasis and color. It may seem odd and wrong to you that the lack of sympathy between us at Y and the California administration over the operation of the project could make me consider not coming back: I think it would not have seemed so odd if you had lived through the history as we did, nor so hard to understand if you remembered how much more of an underdogger I have always been than you. That is a part of me that is unlikely to change, for I am not ashamed of it; it is responsible for such difference as we have had in the past, I think; I should have thought that after the long years it would not be new to you.17

  * * *

  Oppenheimer, in his letter to Lawrence, confessed to feeling “a profound grief, and a profound perplexity about the course we should be following.” Oppie’s mixed mood was attributable, in part, to his anxiety over what would be done with the bomb after the war. Stimson’s Interim Committee had focused on the military problems at hand and offered little or no guidance for the future.

  Japan’s surrender in mid-August was announced just as Oppenheimer arrived in Washington to deliver to Stimson a two-page memorandum that the Scientific Panel had drafted at Los Alamos. Oppie had persuaded the panel that its recommendations on postwar research should be postponed pending completion of a more urgent task: a plea for the international control of atomic energy. As his memo noted, the opportunity for international control might soon disappear—particularly given “the quite favorable technical prospects of the realization of the super bomb.”18

  As with the demonstration, members of the Scientific Panel had disagreed over what should go into the memo to Stimson.19 Lawrence wanted a statement that would acknowledge the need to “stockpile and continue intensive development of atomic weapons” for several years. But he had finally deferred to Oppenheimer, who included this impassioned appeal in the final version:

  We believe that the safety of this nation—as opposed to its ability to inflict damage on an enemy power—cannot lie wholly or even primarily in its scientific or technical prowess. It can be based only on making future wars impossible. It is our unanimous and urgent recommendation to you that … all steps be taken, all necessary international arrangements be made, to this one end.20

  Unable to deliver the document to Stimson—who was on a long-deferred vacation in the Adirondacks, having returned exhausted from the Potsdam summit—Oppenheimer instead briefed Vannevar Bush and George Harrison on its contents.21 Harrison, who showed the memo to James Byrnes the following day, recorded the latter’s reaction: “Secretary Byrnes felt so strongly about all of this that he requested me to tell Dr. Oppenheimer for the time being his proposal about an international agreement was not practical and that he and the rest of the gang should pursue their work full force.”22

  Harrison relayed Byrnes’s message to Oppenheimer, who was at his hotel packing for the return to Los Alamos. Oppie had heard that things had gone badly at Potsdam, and so believed the prospects “gloomy” for approaching the Russians on any kind of collaborative control of the bomb.23 Harrison’s news further darkened the physicist’s mood.

  Retreating a few days later to the sanctuary of Perro Caliente, Oppenheimer wrote to a friend that his feelings about the future were “only a stone’s throw from despair.”24 Oppie’s letter to Chevalier seemed an attempt to persuade himself that what he wrote was true: “The thing had to be done, Haakon. It had to be brought to an open public fruition at a time when all over the world men craved peace as never before, were committed as never before both to technology as a way of life and thought and to the idea that no man is an island.”25

  * * *

  By the end of the month that saw the destruction of two cities by nuclear weapons, the future that Oppenheimer despaired of was already taking shape. A week after Japan’s surrender, Groves apprised Marshall of the postwar production schedule for atomic bombs. The head of the Manhattan Project anticipated that by year’s end there would be twenty Fat Man plutonium bombs in the nation’s nuclear arsenal.26

  Groves’s colleagues in the Army Air Force had already identified new targets for America’s nascent nuclear stockpile. Less than two weeks after Japan’s surrender, the AAF sent Groves its draft of a plan for a possible future war with the Soviet Union. The plan identified fifteen cities—including Moscow and Leningrad—as aiming points for atomic weapons.27

  * * *

  For Teller, too, the future seemed full of foreboding—but for reasons altogether different from Oppenheimer’s. Having decided, upon Oppie’s urging, not to sign Szilard’s petition, Edward appeared eager to distance himself from the consequences in a letter he wrote to Maria Mayer: “The week in which we waited whether we have to drop a third baby and go on with this nasty business was horrible. Now I am very happy (even having had little to do with all this). But the confusion is still as great as it ever was.”28

  Teller urged Mayer to continue her work on opacity until the army contract lapsed at the end of the year. But he also warned her not to share the results with anyone: “I think you should not show it to the boys. It is better not to disturb them while there are no decisions.”29

  For Teller, as for Groves and Oppenheimer, a great unknown was the Soviet Union. A
childhood spent in Hungary, in part under the short-lived regime of Béla Kun, had left Edward with a profound distrust of communism—an impression reinforced by the experiences of his Russian physicist friends. (During his first few weeks at Los Alamos, Teller had read Arthur Koestler’s antiauthoritarian novel, Darkness at Noon. “That really settled my mind.”)30

  Barely a week after Japan’s surrender, a friend from Princeton, physicist John Wheeler, wrote to Teller from Hanford with a grim inquiry: now that Japan was defeated, should they not begin preparing for a war with the new enemy, the Soviet Union?31

  His own plans, Teller informed Wheeler, depended largely upon the still-unresolved question of whether Oppenheimer and Los Alamos would decide to pursue the Super. Edward hoped to convince Wheeler to come to the lab to work on the new bomb, and likewise to persuade Hans Bethe to stay at Los Alamos.32 Bethe was surprised at Teller’s dark vision of the future—and particularly the latter’s “terribly anticommunist, terribly anti-Russian” views.33

  But Edward’s recruiting efforts had met with little success; most of his colleagues were simply eager to return home.34 Concerning Oppie’s plans for the future, the Los Alamos director had thus far remained silent in Teller’s presence.35

  * * *

  For Lawrence, on the other hand, the postwar world seemed suddenly bright with possibilities.36 The only dark cloud on the horizon that he forecast—in an impromptu speech to the regents on the morning after V-J day—was competition from Berkeley’s archrival, the University of Chicago.37 To preempt that threat, he asked Sproul for faculty salary increases across the board in the physics and chemistry departments, as well as a $250,000 boost in the annual Rad Lab budget.38