The Last Man Who Knew Everything

by David N. Schwartz

  How Oppenheimer crafted this “consensus” view is not exactly clear. Most accounts are based on Compton’s recollection, published in his 1956 memoir. Both Compton and Lawrence advocated demonstration, in opposition to Oppenheimer, at the May 1945 meeting in Washington. Compton returned to Chicago, where he faced active and increasingly frustrated lobbying by Franck and others who opposed using the bomb against Japan. Even Lawrence, a perennial hawk on defense issues, was somewhat fraught and continued to prefer a demonstration, as he argued at the Washington meeting. Oppenheimer was a forceful advocate of using the bomb, though, and skillfully drafted language that Compton and Lawrence could sign on to in spite of their reservations. Compton reports that Lawrence was the final holdout, but reluctantly went along with the consensus.

  Oppenheimer’s secretary, Anne Wilson Marks, was interviewed in 1983 and tells an entirely different story. Soon after the June 15, 1945, meeting, Oppenheimer revealed to her that Fermi was the last holdout of the four. According to Marks, Fermi leaned heavily in the direction of the Franck Report, arguing not only against demonstration but also that the bomb should simply not be used, that it should be kept secret for as long as possible. This accords with views expressed later in his life, as he considered the question of whether to proceed with work on the hydrogen bomb. In his view of human nature, warfare was a permanent aspect of human life. Eventually another war would be fought and men would use these terrible weapons against each other. The entire project should therefore be kept secret as long as possible. Oppenheimer reported to his secretary that it had taken Oppenheimer till five o’clock in the morning of Sunday, June 17, 1945, to persuade Fermi to agree to the “consensus” recommendation on use. There is no particular reason to doubt her memory of the conversation.

  Why did Fermi relent? We can only speculate. He maintained public solidarity with Oppenheimer and the others through the rest of his life. Oppenheimer was an effective, energetic spokesman for any position he promoted, and he was certainly in favor of military use of the weapon against the Japanese. It may be that he actually changed Fermi’s mind or perhaps Fermi felt it was more important for him to show solidarity with the man charged with running the project than it was for him to press his own perspective on the matter. This is generally consistent with Fermi’s view of himself as a scientist with only limited expertise in political matters. Finally, it may be that he was still sensitive to his position as a foreign-born national who only recently became a citizen of his adopted country. It might have been more important to underscore his loyalty to his country than to express any personal political or moral qualms.

  In the end we cannot know his private motivations, only that he came around to the consensus view. He never spoke or wrote about this decision, never indicated anything but solidarity with Oppenheimer on this issue. We would not even know about his reservations were it not for journalist Peter Wyden’s interview with Anne Wilson Marks some thirty-eight years after the event.

  Szilard, increasingly alarmed that the government might use the bomb militarily against Japanese targets without an initial demonstration, organized his own petition, signed by some seventy Met Lab scientists, and sent it off to Groves. Groves stamped it “secret” and placed it in a drawer.

  The irony in all of this, of course, is that the recommendations of the group led by Oppenheimer hardly mattered at all. Neither did the Franck Report. Nor did the Szilard petition. The president and those closest to him had already come to their decision, based on political and military considerations, to use the weapons against Japanese cities. The only issue was the selection of which cities to bomb. Stimson, who had traveled in Japan as a youth, struck the magnificent cultural capital Kyoto off the list of potential targets, but all other cities were fair game.

  Scientists have long fretted about their role in the decisions of July and August 1945. Could they have been more forceful? Could they have been more persuasive? They needn’t have worried. The decision makers in Washington were not listening to them, one way or the other.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  AN UNHOLY TRINITY

  HAVING SIGNED ON TO THE OPPENHEIMER RECOMMENDATION, Fermi now returned to the task at hand. The preparations for a test shot of the weapon began in March 1945 with a decision to halt all other work at Los Alamos and direct all scientific resources to the test, at a site about two hundred miles south of Los Alamos, in a flat, barren desert now part of the White Sands missile testing range. Oppenheimer created a new division to organize and conduct the test, the TR (Trinity) Division, headed by Kenneth Bainbridge, a physicist who had been working on studies related to high-explosive charges. Bainbridge’s new division eventually totaled some 250 men, with Fermi formally designated as a consultant.

  Work at Los Alamos had provided high confidence in the uranium gun-type configuration. Trinity would test the plutonium device with its more complicated, more problematic implosion configuration.

  Fermi arrived by car a few days before the scheduled test on July 16, 1945, joined by Allison and Baudino. The car they used was on its last legs. Fermi quipped to Allison that if they survived the drive to the site they would have survived a danger greater than anything the Trinity test might pose. As soon as he arrived, Fermi got himself into trouble. Several members of a military police unit assigned to Bainbridge at the test site heard Fermi taking odds on whether the earth’s atmosphere would burn up as a result of the test. They became sufficiently alarmed to report their concerns to Bainbridge, who had better things to do than deal with an outbreak of panic among the support crews. Justifiably furious, Bainbridge pulled Fermi into his makeshift office and delivered a chastening rebuke.

  Fermi and Anderson commandeered a couple of Army tanks and, working with welding crews and engineers, modified the tanks with lead linings to shield them from the radiation and outfitted them with a remote-controlled scooper to collect material from the test site for study at the lab after the blast. The activity grew increasingly frantic and stressful as young men clambered over the iron tower erected to hold the device, putting the final touches on it and wiring it up to the instruments that would record the event in fine detail.

  The VIPs at the test were given “front row” seats at a location on a small rise called Compania Hill. Oppenheimer, Groves, Rabi, and other notables viewed the test from atop the hill. Fermi, however, wanted to be out in the open, with as little as possible between him and the detonation. He chose a viewing site in the open desert some ten miles from the tower. Several other physicists joined him there, including two MIT-based physicists, Victor Weisskopf and Phillip Morrison, and Fermi’s water boiler colleague, L. D. P. King. Early on the morning of July 16, 1945, the weather was not cooperating. It rained on and off all night and serious consideration was given to postponing the test for a day. However, by four in the morning the rain had stopped and Bainbridge made the decision to go ahead with the test.

  The various observation sites were fitted out with intercoms, which Allison used for the final countdown as 5:30 a.m. approached. Music by Tchaikovsky serenaded those waiting during the hour or so before the detonation. Then Allison, watching the clock carefully, counted down to zero, at which point an electronically controlled process took over. An electric signal from the control unit passed down a cable across the desert and up the tower, where it was split into thirty-two pulses that arrived at the high-explosive fuses at exactly the same time. The high-explosive lenses detonated simultaneously, pushing the subcritical sphere of plutonium in on itself and smashing the urchin initiator nestled in the center of the device. The urchin emitted the requisite neutrons, leading to an explosive chain reaction of plutonium fission in less than a millisecond.

  FIGURE 20.1. Trinity test moments after the initiation of the explosion. Courtesy of Los Alamos National Laboratory.

  Fermi, King, Weisskopf, Morrison, and a few others had positioned themselves lying face down on the ground, heads away from the detonation as they had been instructed to do, with arc
welding dark glass in front of their eyes. For a period of a few seconds, the entire desert and mountains around them flashed bright white, brighter than anyone had ever seen, brighter than any light ever created on the planet. Fermi and his colleagues stood and turned toward the detonation, and as the white light passed over them, they were able to see the fireball of the bomb rise slowly off the ground, shifting in color from purple to pink and varying hues in between. Fermi began counting by seconds as soon as he saw the light and pulled some strips of paper out of his pocket. This was why he wanted to be out in the open, not in a bunker. He held the shreds of paper high above his head and when he counted off the seconds for the blast wave to arrive he began to drop the strips of paper. As the roar of the blast wave swept over them at a speed of about eleven hundred feet per second, he dropped the strips of paper into the wave and watched them blow along with it. They traveled about eight feet (2.5 meters). Fermi announced to those within earshot that the blast was the equivalent of about ten kilotons of TNT.

  He had prepared this little experiment the evening before. He had, after all, spent months thinking about pressure waves with Bethe and von Neumann, so the experiment almost suggested itself. It was classic Fermi—a simple experiment based on some back-of-the-envelope calculations that arrived at an answer that was impressively close. Instrumentation specialists later measured the blast at 18 KT, but Fermi got a reasonable answer faster than anyone else.

  Within an hour of the detonation, Fermi and Anderson jumped into their respective tanks and drove out to the explosion site. (Baudino presumably did not offer to drive Fermi on this occasion.) The crater was some five feet deep and thirty feet wide. The tower on which the device was perched had actually evaporated. The sand had been melted into radioactive glass. Sand in the engine block caused Fermi’s tank to break down before he could get close enough to the site, so it was Anderson who in the end scooped up the radioactive glass left behind by the intense heat of the blast, a substance we now call trinitite, which was taken to Los Alamos for complete analysis.

  The Trinity test left a lasting impression on everyone who witnessed it and many recounted their experience for the history books. Fermi’s water boiler assistant Joan Hinton had a particularly compelling account:

  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. We were still talking in whispers when the cloud reached the level where it was struck by the rising sunlight so it cleared out the natural clouds. We saw a cloud that was dark and red at the bottom and daylight at the top. Then suddenly the sound reached us. It was very sharp and rumbled and all the mountains were rumbling with it. We suddenly started talking out loud and felt exposed to the whole world.

  The light from the detonation could be seen several hundred miles away. At Los Alamos, some people had heard a rumor that a test would be conducted at dawn and that they might be able to see it even at that distance. Elsie McMillan, wife of physicist Edwin McMillan, saw the flash from the window of her Bathtub Row cottage. In Santa Fe, Dorothy McKibbin climbed a hill and saw a flicker in the direction of the test. Other citizens of Santa Fe also recalled seeing a flickering light on the horizon, but assumed it was a distant lightning storm.

  Fermi was so absorbed in his paper experiment that when Laura later asked him to describe the sound, he could not remember it at all.

  The scientists and officials who witnessed the detonation experienced a range of strong emotions immediately after the fact. Fermi remained outwardly placid and calm, in spite of his problems with the tank, but the stress of the day finally caught up with him. When he drove home with Sam Allison that night he asked his friend, most uncharacteristically, to take the wheel. “It had seemed to him as if the car were jumping from curve to curve, skipping the straight stretches in between,” recalled Laura years later. She also reported that he went to bed without a word.

  Allison later described the trip home. The two of them had a flat tire and Allison hitched a ride to the nearest garage, leaving Fermi to stay with the car. Before he could get a lift back to rescue Fermi, Fermi drove up in the car and explained that a passing physicist was traveling by with a canister of argon gas, with which Fermi had filled the tire. It may be the first and only time that a vehicle has driven on a tire filled with the safe but expensive gas.

  MANY YEARS LATER THE CENTERS FOR DISEASE CONTROL AND Prevention looked into the issue of radiation exposure of the indigenous groups living in the general area of the Trinity test. Some sixty-three ranches and three camps were within thirty miles of ground zero. Since groundwater in that part of the New Mexico desert has always been brackish, local residents have long relied on rainwater for their drinking needs. At Trinity it rained the next day, contaminating rainwater cisterns with radioactive debris from the test. Ranchers reported that fallout “snowed down” for days afterward. Although health radiation professionals understood the risks of exposure to radiation, residents in the surrounding area were neither informed of the risks nor evacuated. To quote the study, “Different standards of safety were applied to informed project workers than to uninformed members of the public.”

  Activists such as Tina Cordova, founder of the Tularosa Basin Downwinders Consortium, have worked to hold the US government accountable for the radiation exposure and subsequent health problems suffered by those in the area and their descendants. Her efforts and those of others in the area resulted in a CDC study published in 2009 that detailed the exposure and the possible consequences. Studies continue, but compensation has yet to be determined.

  ON JULY 24, 1945, AT A SUMMIT CONFERENCE IN POTSDAM, GERMANY, Truman told Stalin about his new weapon. He did this on his own, with neither a US translator nor any other official to witness it. He reported that Stalin showed no special interest, but the Soviet dictator congratulated the president and hoped that it would be used effectively against the Japanese. Stalin probably did not know beforehand that Trinity had been a success, but he certainly knew a great deal about the Manhattan Project, via information provided by Klaus Fuchs, Peierls’s colleague who had been keeping the Soviet Union abreast of the issues facing the project, providing Soviet scientists the news that plutonium, not uranium, was the material of choice in the construction of these new weapons. This information would save the Soviet Union years of work as they pursued their own project.

  The declaration issued by the Potsdam Conference on July 26, 1945, warned of devastating consequences if Japan did not surrender immediately. It made no mention of the new weapon. Over the next few days, the US Air Force dropped hundreds of thousands of leaflets on cities throughout Japan warning citizens of imminent catastrophic destruction, but again, no mention was made of a revolutionary new weapon.

  THE PARTLY ASSEMBLED COMPONENTS OF TWO BOMBS, ONE GUN-TYPE uranium bomb christened Little Boy and one implosion plutonium bomb known as Fat Man, were flown from Los Alamos to the South Pacific island of Tinian in the Northern Mariana island chain some 120 miles northeast of Guam, where a group from Los Alamos conducted the final assembly. On August 6, 1945, some ten days after the Potsdam declaration, a long-range bomber flew from the Tinian Island base and dropped Little Boy on the city of Hiroshima, killing some seventy thousand and leveling most of the city. Factions within the Japanese government frantically tried to contact US officials to negotiate surrender, but the senior Japanese military council decided to fight on, betting that there would be only one more bomb in the US arsenal. On August 9, 1945, Fat Man fell on the port city of Nagasaki, a secondary target chosen because the primary target, Kokura, was obscured by cloud cover, and leveled it. Some eighty thousand people died that day. Between the blasts, the Soviet Union declared war on Japan and Stalin’s troops crossed into Japanese-occupied Manchuria. It took another five days for the Japanese emperor, shaken by the calamity that had befallen his country, to broadcast an announcement that Japan would s
urrender without condition. It is clear that the Soviet attack played a role in the final Japanese deliberations over surrender, and perhaps even in the US decision to drop the bomb in the first place, but the bombs were seen by US leaders to have done what the key decision makers intended them to do: end the war quickly, thus avoiding a prolonged and bloody battle for the Japanese islands themselves.

  The residents of Los Alamos initially received the news with jubilation. The wives of those with white badges now knew what their husbands had been working on and the blue badge employees now knew the ultimate purpose of their labors. The nation absorbed the news about a secret installation in the mountains above Santa Fe and about secret towns near Knoxville and Richland. The men and women of Los Alamos and the Manhattan Project became heroes.

  On the day of the first bombing, Eugenia Peierls famously ran upstairs to the Fermis’ landing and shouted to a somewhat bewildered Laura Fermi, “Our stuff was dropped on Japan!” Laura had no idea what Eugenia was talking about. She writes that the first time she understood what her husband actually had been doing for the previous six years was when, shortly after the bombings, he handed her a copy of a book by Henry DeWolfe Smyth, in preparation since 1944, which informed the public about the Manhattan Project. To her amazement, her husband had a starring role in the book, which sold over a hundred thousand copies in its first eight months of publication. That best-seller and the public fascination engendered by the book made him a national figure. Fermi endured the attention with good humor.