by Craig Nelson
Observers in the tail of our ship saw a giant ball of fire rise as though from the bowels of the earth, belching forth enormous white smoke rings. Next they saw a giant pillar of purple fire, 10,000 feet high, shooting skyward with enormous speed.
By the time our ship had made another turn in the direction of the atomic explosion the pillar of purple fire had reached the level of our altitude. Only about 45 seconds had passed. Awestruck, we watched it shoot upward like a meteor coming from the earth instead of from outer space, becoming ever more alive as it climbed skyward through the white clouds. It was no longer smoke, or dust, or even a cloud of fire. It was a living thing, a new species of being, born right before our incredulous eyes.
At one stage of its evolution, covering millions of years in terms of seconds, the entity assumed the form of a giant square totem pole, with its base about three miles long, tapering off to about a mile at the top. Its bottom was brown, its center was amber, its top white. But it was a living totem pole, carved with many grotesque masks grimacing at the earth.
Then, just when it appeared as though the thing had settled down into a state of permanence, there came shooting out of the top a giant mushroom that increased the height of the pillar to a total of 45,000 feet. The mushroom top was even more alive than the pillar, seething and boiling in a white fury of creamy foam, sizzling upwards and then descending earthward, a thousand old faithful geysers rolled into one.
It kept struggling in an elemental fury, like a creature in the act of breaking the bonds that held it down. In a few seconds it had freed itself from its gigantic stem and floated upward with tremendous speed, its momentum carrying into the stratosphere to a height of about 60,000 feet.
But no sooner did this happen when another mushroom, smaller in size than the first one, began emerging out of the pillar. It was as though the decapitated monster was growing a new head.
As the first mushroom floated off into the blue it changed its shape into a flower-like form, its giant petal curving downward, creamy white outside, rose-colored inside. It still retained that shape when we last gazed at it from a distance of about 200 miles.
Nagasaki resident Sumiteru Taniguchi:
At night, the town, the mountain, and the factories were all on fire, and it was as light as day. Amidst it all, people still searched for families and relatives. I saw an American plane coming down low to shoot these people. When that plane went up again, one stray bullet hit a rock, making a sharp sound. That rock was next to where I was lying.
In the early hours, it started to rain, so I could swallow some water from the leaves. When the morning came, no one lying with me was still alive. And when the rescue team arrived, they thought I was dead like the others. I tried asking for help, but I couldn’t muster the strength, so I was left there for two more nights. . . .
Most victims of the A-bomb said that they became infested with maggots, but it took me over a year to have flies lay eggs on me. Even a small fly could not dare to come near my body. A professor of biochemistry said that maybe my body exerted a kind of smell that repelled the flies.
The Japanese would come up with a special term to describe those who survived the American attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki—hibakusha—“explosion-affected persons.” Shunned as filthy and contagious by the cleanliness-is-godliness culture of Japan, for over a decade the government did nothing to help these people.
The actual use of their creation would now split the paradise of Los Alamos into battling camps for the whole of the Cold War. Physicist Robert Wilson: “The day after Trinity. We had done our job, and now the questions had become ‘What had we done, and what did it mean?’ Most of us stopped the physics that we were doing and began to think hard about that meaning. Three weeks later, the bomb was used at Hiroshima, then we knew, existentially, I suppose, what we had done, and we knew that it should not happen again. We knew that we, also, had not done our job, as perhaps we had thought before. We knew that we, not the army, not the government, should do our best to bring about a general understanding of the mysteries and implications of nuclear energy. We began thinking anew, as social beings and as citizens. We had many arguments. The arguments became furious at times on the hill. Some were agonizing, some were furious, and the wives joined in, all the people on the hill joined in. Five hundred people were involved, and in another three weeks, we had organized the Association of Los Alamos Scientists to help us with what we had appointed ourselves to do: to tell other people about what we would do to have it not happen again.”
A few months later, Robert Oppenheimer remarked that the physicists involved in the Manhattan Project had “known sin.” Johnny von Neumann’s response: “Sometimes, someone confesses a sin in order to take credit for it.” Oppie then began his acceptance speech of the army-navy’s Excellence Award on November 16, 1945, with “It is with appreciation and gratefulness that I accept from you this scroll for the Los Alamos Laboratory, and for the men and women whose work and whose hearts have made it. It is our hope that in years to come we may look at the scroll and all that it signifies, with pride. Today that pride must be tempered by a profound concern. If atomic bombs are to be added as new weapons to the arsenals of a warring world, or to the arsenals of the nations preparing for war, then the time will come when mankind will curse the names of Los Alamos and Hiroshima.”
Ed Teller: “Oppenheimer seemed to lose his sense of balance, his perspective. After seeing the pictures from Hiroshima, he determined that Los Alamos, the unique and outstanding laboratory he’d created, should vanish. When asked about its future, he responded, ‘Give it back to the Indians.’ ” Robert Wilson: “I have to explain about Oppie: About every five years, he would have a personality crisis. He would change his personality. I mean, when I knew him at Berkeley, he was the romantic, radical-bohemian sort of person, a thorough scholar. Then at Los Alamos, he was the responsible, passionate person that we all knew so well there and who was so effective. Later on then, he had another metamorphosis, becoming the high-level statesman who could call [Secretary of State Dean] Acheson by his first name (and such other high-level people), but as a result of that was able to put forward the international plan for controlling atomic energy through the United Nations that we had all agreed was the necessary ingredient for continued survival.”
Ernest Lawrence, meanwhile, hosted a V-J day celebration for Rad Labbers at Trader Vic’s, where the bartender created an A-Bomb cocktail—rum, blue curaçao, and dry ice to make it bubble and smoke. Lawrence’s wife, Molly, remembered it well: ghastly.
In the autumn of 1946, Leo Szilard visited Albert Einstein, and they reminisced over the correspondence with Roosevelt that had started it all. Einstein insisted that this was a lesson to be learned: “You see now that the ancient Chinese were right. It is not possible to foresee the results of what you do. The only wise thing to do is to take no action—to take absolutely no action.” He later declared, “Had I known that the Germans would not succeed in producing an atomic bomb, I would not have lifted a finger.”
In the ensuing decades, Americans would ask themselves: Was the Bomb necessary? After Nagasaki and Japan’s surrender, 85 percent of the American public supported Truman’s decision for a simple reason: it had ended the war. In April 1945, the US Joint Chiefs had approved Operation Downfall, a November 1 invasion of Japan, beginning with 700,000 Americans landing on Kyushu and eventually an invasion force of 1,532,000 Allied soldiers—bigger than D-day. George Marshall estimated that forty thousand would die; Secretary of War Stimson thought the mortality would fall between half a million and a million. So in this telling, dropping two atomic bombs saved the lives of hundreds of thousands, and many believe to this day that a scientific breakthrough closed that chapter of human suffering. Luis Alvarez: “What would Harry Truman have told the nation in 1946 if we had invaded the Japanese home islands and defeated their tenacious, dedicated people and sustained most probably some hundreds of thousands of casualties and if the New York Times had broken the story
of a stockpile of powerful secret weapons that cost $2,000,000,000 to build but was not used, for whatever reasons of strategy or morality?”
Others did not see nuclear weapons as being any more immoral than other methods of slaughter. If not short-listed for nuclear war, Hiroshima and Nagasaki would have been firebombed by LeMay into oblivion just as had been done with every other Japanese metropolis of their size. Bombing civilians was a fact of this war, as anyone living in London or Dresden could attest. Philip Anderson: “The firebombing of Tokyo was so close to genocide, killed so many people, that it seemed to me much more of a horror than the atom bombs. Another thing I was conscious of, and I don’t know why so few Americans are conscious of it, is Nanking [where in 1937, the Japanese massacred three hundred thousand Chinese]. Nanking and the Japanese behavior in China and Korea was a horrible thing, unbelievably savage. I don’t think I have any complaint whatsoever about the atom bombs. And I’m not sympathetic to the Germans about Dresden. The old saying is absolutely right: ‘He that soweth the wind shall reap the whirlwind.’ ” Others at the time asked, what if Stalin or Hitler had been first with nuclear arms? The carnage would have been unimaginable.
Then it was revealed that before Hiroshima, the Army Air Forces chief, General Hap Arnold, said that conventional bombing would have ended the war without requiring an invasion, and Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Ernest King thought Japan could be forced to surrender through a naval blockade, while General Eisenhower called using nuclear weapons “completely unnecessary” and “no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives,” and George Marshall thought the Japanese should have been warned ahead of time with the Potsdam call for unconditional surrender. In a postwar analysis, the United States Strategic Bombing Command determined, “Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war, and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated.” Truman’s aide Admiral William Leahy told the British chiefs of staff that it was “because of the vast sums that had been spent on the project,” though it meant the United States “had adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages.” Yet in truth, even with both Hiroshima and Nagasaki devastated and much of their country in ruins from the napalm of Mr. B, the Japanese military chiefs still refused to surrender. They had lost sixty cities; Hiroshima and Nagasaki were just numbers sixty-one and sixty-two. If they hadn’t given up after losing Tokyo, after all, they certainly wouldn’t because of Nagasaki. It required the USSR’s declaring war against the country, and the sacred intervention of Emperor Hirohito, to change their minds to an unconditional surrender on September 2.
So a new theory arose, based on what the man who would become secretary of state, James Byrnes, mentioned in his conversation with Leo Szilard. Using an atomic bomb against Japan was a diplomatic signal to the USSR, an attempt to make “Russia more manageable in Europe.” British physicist Joseph Rotblat: “In March 1944, I experienced a disagreeable shock. [General] Groves said that, of course, the real purpose in making the bomb was to subdue the Soviets. . . . Remember, this was said at a time when thousands of Russians were dying every day on the Eastern Front, tying down the Germans and giving the Allies time to prepare for the landing on the continent of Europe. Until then I had thought that our work was to prevent a Nazi victory, and now I was told that the weapon we were preparing was intended for use against the people who were making extreme sacrifices for that very aim.”
With hindsight, Hiroshima and Nagasaki prove that nuclear bombs are ineffective as weapons of war and, with insight, that their place in history as the only nuclear attacks in the world to date did not signal the end of World War II.
They signaled the start of the Cold War.
9
How Do You Keep a Cold War Cold?
BEFORE they left Los Alamos, Fermi, Oppenheimer, Bohr, Lawrence, Groves, Chadwick, and Compton had dinner to discuss the future. Some were hopeful about fission-generated nuclear energy; Groves fretted about a decline in American military power with the end of the war. “And Fermi,” Oppenheimer remembered, “said, thoughtfully, ‘I think it would be nice if we could find a cure for the common cold.’ ”
Enrico and Laura went home on New Year’s Eve 1945, to the University of Chicago’s newly created Institute for Nuclear Studies, where Fermi hoped to re-create the intellectual paradise of Weimar Germany with eleven laureates and future laureates—including Urey, Franck, Mayer, Anderson, Segrè, Teller, Dyson, Garwin, and Agnew. As Valentine Telegdi said, “It was a place where you could be proud to be the dumbest one.”
Harold Agnew: “Just to show you what a straight shooter and a modest individual Fermi was: When Laura came back from Italy [after the war], she said she’d really like to have a dishwasher and a washing machine. Now, she had a Bendix washing machine, screwed to the floor, and it rotated parallel to the floor, and when it ran—there was no automatic balancing—the whole house sort of shook. It was quite a thing. But she wanted a new one. We were at dinner, and Enrico had just come back from Hanford, I guess. I asked him, wasn’t he working for General Electric? Didn’t he know the boss? And Laura said before that, that she had gone down to the local hardware store and put her name on a list to get a washing machine and a dishwasher, which was what you did after the war—it wasn’t like today, you had to get on a list and wait. And I said, ‘Enrico, gosh, you could call your friend, the president of General Electric, and they’d bring it by helicopter, and you’d get it for free, I bet!’ Laura was intrigued with this idea. Enrico would have no part of it. No way. He would not use his influence, or whatever you want to call it, to get ahead in line.”
Believing nuclear physics had become a mature field with little left to discover, Enrico turned his attention to subatomic particles composed of quarks and antiquarks—mesons. He explained this dramatic change by quoting Mussolini: “Either renew oneself, or perish.” Though a complete novice in the high-energy field, Fermi became so engrossed with it for the remaining years of his life that he coined the terms pion and muon.
In 1951, Chicago’s new cyclotron was inaugurated, and as at Oak Ridge, the lab workers had to be careful. One day, Herb Anderson picked up a piece of reinforced concrete, forgetting about the metal in its innards. The cyclotron’s magnet yanked it so hard that his hand was crushed.
Valentine Telegdi: “At the yearly Christmas parties, the physics students would compete with the faculty in various tests (always loaded in favor of the students!) and put on theatrical sketches. In some of these an electronic computer able to provide instantly order-of-magnitude estimates, aptly named the ENRIAC, was displayed. This computer consisted of a large box, complete with blinking lights, and contained a junior faculty member who could imitate Fermi’s voice and accent.”
Nella Fermi: “One day my father brought home a strange substance which was soft like well-chewed chewing gum, yet could be shattered like glass. He told Giulio and me that he had been given a sample of this new material so that he could suggest possible applications for it. We were fascinated. He showed us how we could pull it into a long, thin string like chewing gum if you pulled slowly, but as soon as you jerked, it cracked! You could shape it into a hump or scratch designs on it, but leave it alone, and it melted into a blob. A blow with a hammer shattered it like glass and sent it flying all over the room. My father wouldn’t demonstrate that one (I had to take it on faith), because if he did that it would be all over the room and we’d never get it back. I asked a lot of questions and got a physics lesson: this stuff was basically like glass, my father said, it was a liquid. Glass is not a liquid, I said. It is, said my father. I thought he was pulling my leg, but he convinced me. Glass had the molecular structure of a liquid and, given sufficient time, would melt into a blob, but it would take ages. I wouldn’t be around to see it, he wouldn’t be around to see it, none of us would be around to see it. We spent a happy afternoon with the odd material. My father was puzzling about possible applicat
ions but also taking boyish delight in the strange properties of the material. We thought about using it to patch up cracks on windows, but that would be no good, it would only drip down into a blob. He asked us for suggestions for possible uses, but we could come up with none, and neither could he. In spite of the fun that we had with it, we missed the obvious use. It was a great toy. Later it was marketed as Silly Putty.”
In the autumn of 1945, Curtis LeMay joined Eighth Air Force chief Jimmy Doolittle to lead a squadron of B-29s flying nonstop from Tokyo to Washington. The trip’s “only significance,” as reported in the Chicago Tribune, was “that it is going to be possible very soon to fly from here to Tokyo in 24 hours by commercial airliner.” That this operation had nothing whatsoever to do with the future of business travel became evident in an August 30, 1945, Army Air Forces memorandum, “A Strategic Chart of Certain Russian and Manchurian Urban Areas,” identifying the Soviet Union’s most important cities, their size, population, and industry, the number of nuclear bombs needed to destroy each, as well as the necessary B-29 flight paths over the north pole from Alaska, Germany, Norway, Italy, Crete, India, and Okinawa to their Red targets.
A more detailed AAF assessment of September 1945 decided that the Soviet Union would surrender after sixty-six “cities of strategic importance” were destroyed, with the field of combat narrowed by the atomic bombing of both the Suez Canal and the Dardanelles—the Middle East gateway to the Mediterranean and the Turkish gateway from the Black Sea to the Aegean—in sum requiring 466 Fat Men. Even Leslie Groves was taken aback: “My general conclusion would be that the number of bombs indicated as required, is excessive.” In fact, the B-29’s range wasn’t anywhere close to accomplishing this absurdly belligerent scheme; the United States did not have enough Fat Men on hand or enough Superfortress-capable airfields at these varied locations; and the necessary aerial refueling technique and technology were in their infancies. So these weren’t plans of attack for the moment they were written . . . but nightmares of the future.
