The Age of Radiance

by Craig Nelson

  McKibben: “Then an amazing thing: it was followed by echoes from the mountains. There was one echo after another. A real symphony of echoes. Too bad nobody had a recorder on that. It would have been played many times since then.” Brixner: “I was looking up, and I noticed there was a red haze up there, and it seemed to be coming down on us. Pretty soon the radiation monitors said, ‘The radiation is rising! We’ve got to evacuate!’ I said, ‘That’s fine, but not until I get all the film from my cameras.’ ”

  Hans Bethe remembered his first thought was “We’ve done it!” His second was “What a terrible weapon have we fashioned.”

  Joan Hinton: “It was like being at the bottom of an ocean of light. We were bathed in it from all directions. The light withdrew into the bomb as if the bomb sucked it up. Then it turned purple and blue and went up and up and up.”

  Frank Oppenheimer: “When one first looked up, one saw the fireball, and then almost immediately afterwards, this unearthly hovering cloud. It was very bright and very purple. . . . I think the most terrifying thing was this really brilliant purple cloud, black with radioactive dust, that hung there, and you had no feeling of whether it would go up or drift towards you.” About the conversation with his brother at the time: “I think we just said, ‘It worked.’ ”

  Soldier Val Fitch: “Apparently no one had told the military policeman, stationed at the door of the bunker to control access, what to expect. He was absolutely pale and a look of incredible alarm was on his face as he came away from the bunker door to stand beside me and view the sight. I simply said what was on my mind: ‘The war will soon be over.’ ”

  The yield confounded all cynics—twenty-one thousand tons of TNT—84,000,000,000,000 joules. The terrain below the tower was pounded down into a crater eleven hundred feet wide; sand melted into a light green glass. When the bomb exploded, its tower was vaporized, the iron staining the silicon of the melted desert sand a startling bloodred.

  The shock wave, traveling at the speed of sound, rattled windows at a distance of two hundred miles. It reached the observation point forty seconds after the light, literally rolling the ground under the observers’ feet. Kenneth Greisen: “A tremendous cloud of smoke was pouring upwards, some parts having brilliant red and yellow colors, like clouds at sunset. These parts kept folding over and over like dough in a mixing bowl. . . . At about this time I noticed a blue color surrounding the smoke cloud. Then someone shouted that we should observe the shock wave traveling along the ground. The appearance of this was a brightly lighted circular area, near the ground, slowly spreading out towards us. The color was yellow.”

  Hans Bethe: “Practically everybody at the Trinity test was a scientist except one person, a journalist with the New York Times by the name of William Laurence. We were quite far away, twenty kilometers on Compania Hill, so that long after the fireball, the shock wave followed and made a tremendous rumble. Laurence was terribly afraid and cried out, ‘WHAT WAS THAT?’ So I explained to him that sound takes some time to propagate as compared to light.” Actually there was one other nonscientist, nonmilitary of the 240 in attendance—the legendary J. E. Miera. He was there to make the cheeseburgers.

  William Laurence: “The big boom came about 100 seconds after the Great Flash—the first cry of a newborn world. It brought the silent, motionless silhouettes to life, gave them a voice. A loud cry filled the air. The little groups that hitherto had stood rooted to the earth like desert plants broke into dance.”

  To calm area residents, the army immediately notified local radio stations and newspapers that Alamogordo Air Base’s munitions dump had exploded, but that there were no fatalities. But many New Mexicans knew that this was no armory mishap. Rowena Baca: “My grandmother shoved me and my cousin under a bed because she thought it was the end of the world.” Jim Madrid: “We saw this huge, huge light coming in from the north. It rose from the heavens, so bright, so extremely bright. It was the biggest thing I had ever seen in my life. It was rolling, getting fatter and bigger and taller. My mother said, ‘The sun is coming close. The world is coming to an end.’ She told me to drop to my knees, but I kept looking. If it was the end of the world, I wanted to see it. I was waiting for God to come out from around the ball of fire.”

  William Wrye came across some soldiers on his property, twenty miles from Los Alamos: “I went out there and asked what they were doing, and they said they were looking for radioactivity. Well, we had no idea what radioactivity was back then. I told them we didn’t even have the radio on.” A few months later, Wrye noticed that half of his black cat’s fur had turned white.

  After the truth came out, a Santa Fe New Mexican article reported what locals had imagined was going on at Los Alamos—everything from a manufacturer of submarine windshield wipers to a home for the army’s unwed mothers.

  Emilio Segrè: “ About one hour after the explosion, Fermi donned a protective suit and carrying a radiation meter climbed into a specially shielded tank and cautiously proceeded to the site of the explosion to collect materials to be analyzed for fission products. He was much impressed when he found the sand under the detonation point melted to glass. The remainder of the day was spent collecting the records of the various instruments and other necessary work.”

  Scientists later discovered a downwind herd of cattle, their hides splotched in gray radiation burns. Soon, they would die.

  On the mesa there was joy, for about twenty-four hours—parties, parades, drinking, singing, dancing—a celebration of triumph. Oppenheimer’s assistant Anne Wilson: “Feynman got his bongo drums out and led a snake dance through the whole Tech Area.” But a number woke up the following morning with hangovers, from both liquor and remorse. When Robert Wilson asked Oppenheimer why he seemed distressed, he replied, “I just keep thinking about all those poor little people.” Richard Feynman: “One man I remember, Bob Wilson, was just sitting there moping.” Bob Wilson told Feynman, “It’s a terrible thing that we made.”

  8

  My God, What Have We Done?

  ON May 25, 1945—two weeks after Germany’s surrender—Leo Szilard had an appointment to discuss the future of nuclear weapons with President Harry Truman at the White House. Instead, he was redirected to meet with former South Carolina senator and Secretary of State–designate James Byrnes to have a conversation that would define the postwar, Cold War Atomic Age. Szilard explained to Byrnes how the political makeup of the postwar world needed to be taken into account before using this astonishing weapon. Byrnes explained to Szilard that Congress needed to be shown what it had spent so much money on, and that the Soviet Union, which had recently invaded Hungary and Romania, needed to be reminded of its place in the world. Szilard said afterward he was “flabbergasted by the assumption that rattling the bomb might make Russia more manageable” and “was rarely as depressed as when we left Byrnes’ house.” Byrnes said that Szilard’s “general demeanor and his desire to participate in policy-making made an unfavorable impression on me.”

  These points would be further discussed on May 31, 1945, when Henry Stimson called together a meeting of his Interim Committee—Oppenheimer, Fermi, Lawrence, Groves, Bush, Conant, and Compton, among others—to advise Truman on the use of the atomic bomb. Stimson began by saying that he believed what they had to consider was not “a new weapon merely but as a revolutionary change in the relations of man to the universe.” Oppenheimer suggested, “If we were to offer to exchange information before the bomb was actually used, our moral position would be greatly strengthened,” and none other than General George Marshall agreed. Marshall said that at least two Russian scientists should be invited to the Trinity test. Secretary of State to-be Jimmy Byrnes aligned with Ernest Lawrence, arguing that if the Soviets were brought aboard, they would insist on a full partnership, and that instead America needed to play two cards at once, “to push ahead as fast as possible in production and research to make certain that we stay ahead and at the same time make every effort to better our political relati
ons with Russia.” When asked what the difference was between atomic bombs and firebombs, Oppenheimer said that all living creatures within two-thirds of a mile would be irradiated, and that the look of the explosion—the immense flash of light and the shock wave; the ionized air and boiling flames; the mushroom cloud—was unforgettable. Leslie Groves’s sole contribution to the meeting was to insist that, after the weapon was proven a success, “steps should be taken to sever [certain] scientists of doubtful discretion and uncertain loyalty from the program,” by which he meant one scientist: Leo Szilard. Finally, Stimson and Conant decided, “The most desirable target would be a vital war plant employing a large number of workers and closely surrounded by workers’ houses”—the workers being civilians.

  The committee’s science panel had a month to offer its report. Back at Met Lab in Chicago, James Franck, Leo Szilard, and Glenn Seaborg submitted a letter suggesting the weapon be demonstrated before members of the United Nations, instead of being used for battle. But Stimson’s panel ignored this point, specifically noting that nuclear physicists “have no claim to special competence in solving the political, social, and military problems which are presented by the advent of atomic power.”

  By July 17, Szilard was able to get fifty-six of his Manhattan Project colleagues to sign “A Petition to the President of the United States,” which asked Truman to ponder his “moral responsibilities” in “opening the door to an era of devastation on an unimaginable scale.” If the USA cavalierly dropped atomic bombs, “our moral position would be weakened in the eyes of the world and in our own eyes. It would then be more difficult for us to live up to our responsibility of bringing the unloosened forces of destruction under control.” Oppenheimer, Compton, Fermi, and a number of others consulting for the Oval Office had been told that the United States could either invade Japan with a loss of hundreds of thousands of American lives or drop the Bomb. They did not sign Szilard’s petition. Another who did not sign was Szilard’s lifelong friend Ed Teller, who said, “The things we are working on are so terrible that no amount of protesting or fiddling with politics will save our souls. The accident that we worked out this dreadful thing should not give us the responsibility of having a voice in how it is to be used.”

  To avoid getting even higher on Leslie Groves’s enemies list than he already was, Leo submitted his petition through the chain of command. Groves, however, had it classified “secret” so it could not be made public and held on to it until he learned that Little Boy was ready to be dropped on August 1. The petition would not reach Stimson’s desk until a week after Fat Man exploded over Nagasaki.

  When, during the Potsdam Conference at the end of July, the Bomb was explained to General Eisenhower, he said that it wouldn’t be needed since the Japanese were about to surrender: “I was one of those who felt that there were a number of cogent reasons to question the wisdom of such an act.” Truman’s diary of July 17, 18, and 25 recorded his thoughts on the debate: “Even if the Japs are savages, ruthless, merciless and fanatic, we as the leader of the world for the common welfare cannot drop this terrible bomb on the old Capitol or the new. . . . The target will be a purely military one and we will issue a warning statement asking the Japs to surrender and save lives. I’m sure they will not do that, but we will have given them the chance. It is certainly a good thing for the world that Hitler’s crowd or Stalin’s did not discover this atomic bomb. It seems to be the most terrible thing ever discovered, but it can be made the most useful.”

  The great myth of nuclear arms is that they are different from conventional weapons in some magical way beyond their radioactive poisons. This was proved to be a fantasy at the dawn of the Atomic Age, both with Oppenheimer’s lunchtime comment at Stimson’s Interim Committee—that fission’s distinction rests solely with irradiating living creatures for two-thirds of a mile, and its detonation’s memorable beauty—and with the history of the B-29 Superfortress under the command of General Curtis Emerson LeMay. On the drawing boards since 1939 and manufactured by Boeing, North American, Bell Aviation, and General Motors’ Fisher Body Division, the state-of-the-art B-29 had four engines running a blazing 8,800 horsepower, a pressurized cabin, remote-controlled machine-gun turrets, propellers that could be reversed for a backup taxi, an eleven-man crew, a ceiling of over thirty-five thousand feet, a combat range of more than four thousand miles, pneumatic bomb-bay doors, and a carriage load of up to twenty thousand pounds—the only craft in the entire Army Air Corps with the strength to ferry nuclear bombs. For the Manhattan Project, the Pentagon spent $2 billion. Developing the B-29 cost $3 billion.

  Afflicted with Bell’s palsy, which turned his normal demeanor into a scowl and inspired the nickname Iron Ass, General Curtis LeMay loved his men, and they loved him back. “I’ll tell you what war is about,” LeMay said. “You’ve got to kill people, and when you’ve killed enough, they stop fighting.” A brilliant World War II innovator, LeMay oversaw the campaign of attacking Japan from the Marianas. He abandoned the Army Air Corps scripture of high altitude, precision bombing in daylight, since at the necessary heights the jet stream kept blowing his Superfortresses off course, while after studying flak and strike photos, LeMay’s staff determined that Japan had no night fighters, and no low-altitude defense.

  Thinking of how Japanese cities are made of paper and wood, LeMay was reminded of the great military innovation of 400 BCE, that mix of pitch, sulfur, granulated frankincense, and pine sawdust known as Greek fire. Stuffed into sacks, set alight, and thrown by catapults into enemy towns, Greek fire ignited everything it touched. Trying to stop its blaze with water only pushed the oil around, taking the fire with it, burning even more of the defender’s village. Then in 673 CE, the Byzantines, requiring a method of defending Constantinople from naval assault, developed a liquid form of Greek fire—petroleum mixed with lime, bones, and urine—which could be shot at wooden ships from a pump.

  LeMay ordered his B-29s to come in at night, at a mere five thousand feet, ferrying M-69 cluster bombs loaded with napalm, the modern liquid Greek fire that was a gelatin emulsion of gasoline developed by the chemists of Standard Oil, which stuck to anything it touched, and which could not be extinguished by conventional means. On March 9, 1945, 334 Superfortress flights dropped two thousand tons of incendiary bombs on Japan, crisscrossing their targets, creating a tidal wave of conflagration that became hurricanes of annihilating fire, slaughtering by suffocation and heat. Some residents even boiled to death trying to find shelter in ponds and canals.

  The Japanese called the planes B-san—“Mr. B”—and the attacks were known as the Raid of the Fire Wind and the Raid of the Dancing Flames. Tokyo’s Sophia University rector Father Gustav Bitter: “I heard the huzzle-huzzle of something falling, and I ducked and crouched in a corner. It struck beside me, with a noise like a house falling, and I leaped a fine leap into the air. I must have shut my eyes, for when I opened them again I was in a world of fairyland. On every tree in the garden below, and on every tree so far as the eyes could see, some sort of blazing oil had fallen, and it was dancing on the twigs and branches with a million little red and yellow candle-flames. On the ground in between the trees and in all the open spaces, white balls of fire had fallen, and these were bouncing like tennis balls. . . . [Watching the firebombs from a distance, it] was like a silver curtain falling, like . . . the silver tinsel we hung from Christmas trees in Germany long ago. And where these silver streamers would touch the earth, red fires would spring up . . . and the big fire in the center sent up a rising column of air which drew in toward the center the outer circle of flame, and a hot, swift wind began to blow from the rim toward the center, a twisting wind which spread the flames between all the ribs of the fan, very quickly. Thus, everywhere the people ran there was fire, in front of them and in back of them, and closing in on them from the sides. So that there were only a very few who escaped.”

  At midnight on March 11, 1945, reconnaissance photographs from the first Raid of the Dancing Flames wer
e finally available, and they shocked everyone in the Army Air Corps. Over sixteen square miles of Tokyo had been destroyed . . . more than Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined. According to Tokyo police records, one-quarter of the capital was gone, with 267,171 buildings demolished and over 1 million left homeless. It would take almost a month to excavate the dead—almost eighty-four thousand men, women, and children—more death than either atomic bomb would yield. On the twelfth, LeMay did the same to Nagoya, on the thirteenth to Osaka, on the sixteenth to Kobe; on the nineteenth, again on Nagoya. His team had run out of incendiaries and had to spend most of April helping in the invasion of Okinawa. Then in May it began again: Nagoya and Tokyo were hit twice and considered so destroyed they were taken off the target list. Osaka, Kobe, and Yokohama took five more raids, and by mid-June the industrial center of Japan had been completely annihilated. The summer meant “mopping up,” with certain key targets precision-bombed beyond recognition, sixty smaller cities firebombed into oblivion, and the Japanese coastal waters so extensively filled with mines dropped by LeMay’s B-29s that Japan’s naval traffic stopped entirely.

  One particularly ironic victim was the Riken Institute in Saitama, just north of Tokyo, where one of Bohr’s longtime associates, Yoshio Nishina, had a sixty-inch cyclotron, chaired meetings of the Committee on Research in the Application of Nuclear Physics, and was trying to produce fissile uranium with thermal diffusion. In April 1945, Japan’s own quest for nuclear power and atomic bombs came to an end when the Riken building was leveled.

  The firebombing of sixty-three cities, LeMay claimed, “scorched, boiled, and baked to death” over eight hundred thousand people. The heat was so immense that buildings, and people, would spontaneously erupt in flames. Radio Tokyo called it “slaughter bombing,” and Secretary of War Henry Stimson told Oppenheimer he thought it was appalling that no one in America protested this gruesome carnage. At the time of his Interim Committee, Stimson wrote in his diary, “I was a little fearful that before we could get ready the Air Force might have Japan so thoroughly bombed out that the new weapon would not have a fair background to show its strength.”