by American Prometheus: The Triumph;Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer
No official records were kept of these sensitive discussions. So memories prevail. Robert Wilson’s account is the most vivid—and those who knew Wilson always thought him a man of singular integrity. Victor Weisskopf later recalled having political discussions about the bomb at various times with Willy Higinbotham, Robert Wilson, Hans Bethe, David Hawkins, Phil Morrison and William Woodward, among others. Weisskopf recalled that the expected end of the war in Europe “caused us to think more about the future of the world after the war.” At first, they simply met in their apartments, and pondered questions such as “What will this terrible weapon do to this world? Are we doing something good, something bad? Should we not worry about how it will be applied?” Gradually, these informal discussions became formal meetings. “We tried to organize meetings in some of the lecture rooms,” Weisskopf said, “and then we ran into opposition. Oppenheimer was against that. He said that’s not our task, and this is politics, and we should not do this.” Weisskopf recalled a meeting in March 1945, attended by forty scientists, to discuss “the atomic bomb in world politics.” Oppenheimer again tried to discourage people from attending. “He thought we should not get involved in questions about the use of the bomb. . . .” But, contrary to Wilson’s memory, Weisskopf later wrote that “the thought of quitting did not even cross my mind.”
Wilson believed it would have reflected badly on Oppenheimer if he had chosen not to appear. “You know, you’re the director, a little bit like a general. Sometimes you have got to be in front of your troops, sometimes you’ve got to be in back of them. Anyway, he came and he had very cogent arguments that convinced me.” Wilson wanted to be convinced. Now that it seemed so clear that the gadget would not be used on the Germans, he and many others in the room had doubts but no answers. “I thought we were fighting the Nazis,” Wilson said, “not the Japanese particularly.” No one thought the Japanese had a bomb program.
When Oppenheimer took the floor and began speaking in his soft voice, everyone listened in absolute silence. Wilson recalled that Oppenheimer “dominated” the discussion. His main argument essentially drew on Niels Bohr’s vision of “openness.” The war, he argued, should not end without the world knowing about this primordial new weapon. The worst outcome would be if the gadget remained a military secret. If that happened, then the next war would almost certainly be fought with atomic weapons. They had to forge ahead, he explained, to the point where the gadget could be tested. He pointed out that the new United Nations was scheduled to hold its inaugural meeting in April 1945—and that it was important that the delegates begin their deliberations on the postwar world with the knowledge that mankind had invented these weapons of mass destruction.
“I thought that was a very good argument,” said Wilson. For some time now, Bohr and Oppenheimer himself had talked about how the gadget was going to change the world. The scientists knew that the gadget was going to force a redefinition of the whole notion of national sovereignty. They had faith in Franklin Roosevelt and believed that he was setting up the United Nations precisely to address this conundrum. As Wilson put it, “There would be areas in which there would be no sovereignty, the sovereignty would exist in the United Nations. It was to be the end of war as we knew it, and this was a promise that was made. That is why I could continue on that project.”
Oppenheimer had prevailed, to no one’s surprise, by articulating the argument that the war could not end without the world knowing the terrible secret of Los Alamos. It was a defining moment for everyone. The logic— Bohr’s logic—was particularly compelling to Oppenheimer’s fellow scientists. But so too was the charismatic man who stood before them. As Wilson recalled that moment, “My feeling about Oppenheimer was, at that time, that this was a man who is angelic, true and honest and he could do no wrong. . . . I believed in him.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
“Now We’re All Sons-of-Bitches”
Well, Roosevelt was a great architect, perhaps Truman will be a good carpenter.
ROBERT OPPENHEIMER
ON THURSDAY AFTERNOON, April 12, 1945—just two years after the lab’s opening—word suddenly spread of Franklin Roosevelt’s death. Work was suspended and Oppenheimer notified everyone to assemble at the flagpole near the administrative building for a formal announcement. He then scheduled a memorial service for that Sunday. “Sunday morning found the mesa deep in snow,” Phil Morrison later wrote. “A night’s fall had covered the rude textures of the town, silenced its business, and unified the view in a soft whiteness, over which the bright sun shone, casting deep blue shadows behind every wall. It was no costume for mourning, but it seemed recognition of something we needed, a gesture of consolation. Everybody came to the theater, where Opje spoke very quietly for two or three minutes out of his heart and ours.”
Oppenheimer had drafted a eulogy of three short paragraphs. “We have been living through years of great evil,” he said, “and great terror.” And during this time Franklin Roosevelt had been, “in an old and unperverted sense, our leader.” Characteristically, Oppenheimer turned to the Bhagavad-Gita: “Man is a creature whose substance is faith. What his faith is, he is.” Roosevelt had inspired millions around the globe to have faith that the terrible sacrifices of this war would result in “a world more fit for human habitation.” For this reason, Oppenheimer concluded, “we should dedicate ourselves to the hope, that his good works will not have ended with his death.”
Oppenheimer still nurtured the hope that Roosevelt and his men had learned from Bohr that the formidable new weapon they were building would require a radical new openness. “Well,” he told David Hawkins afterwards, “Roosevelt was a great architect, perhaps Truman will be a good carpenter.”
AS HARRY TRUMAN moved into the White House, the war in Europe was nearly won. But the war in the Pacific was coming to its bloodiest climax. On the evening of March 9–10, 1945, 334 B-29 aircraft dropped tons of jellied gasoline—napalm—and high explosives on Tokyo. The resulting firestorm killed an estimated 100,000 people and completely burned out 15.8 square miles of the city. The fire-bombing raids continued and by July 1945, all but five of Japan’s major cities had been razed and hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians had been killed. This was total warfare, an attack aimed at the destruction of a nation, not just its military targets.
The fire bombings were no secret. Ordinary Americans read about the raids in their newspapers. Thoughtful people understood that strategic bombing of cities raised profound ethical questions. “I remember Mr. Stimson [the secretary of war] saying to me,” Oppenheimer later remarked, “that he thought it appalling that there should be no protest over the air raids which we were conducting against Japan, which in the case of Tokyo led to such extraordinarily heavy loss of life. He didn’t say that the air strikes shouldn’t be carried on, but he did think there was something wrong with a country where no one questioned that. . . .”
On April 30, 1945, Adolf Hitler committed suicide, and eight days later Germany surrendered. When Emilio Segrè heard the news, his first reaction was, “We have been too late.” Like almost everyone at Los Alamos, Segrè thought that defeating Hitler was the sole justification for working on the “gadget.” “Now that the bomb could not be used against the Nazis, doubts arose,” he wrote in his memoirs. “Those doubts, even if they do not appear in official reports, were discussed in many private discussions.”
AT THE UNIVERSITY of Chicago’s Met Lab, Leo Szilard was frantic. The peripatetic physicist knew time was running out. Atomic bombs would soon be ready, and he expected that they would be used on Japanese cities. Having been the first to urge President Roosevelt to initiate a program to build atomic weapons, he now made repeated attempts to prevent their use. First, he drafted a memorandum to President Roosevelt—introduced by another letter from Einstein—in which he warned the president that “our ‘demonstration’ of atomic bombs will precipitate” an arms race with the Soviets. But when Roosevelt died before Szilard could see him, he managed to get an app
ointment to see the new president, Harry Truman, on May 25. In the meantime, he decided to write Oppenheimer, warning him “that if a race in the production of atomic bombs should become unavoidable, the prospects of this country cannot be expected to be good.” In the absence of a clear policy to avoid such an arms race, Szilard wrote, “I doubt whether it is wise to show our hand by using atomic bombs against Japan.” He had listened to the proponents of using the bomb, and he felt their arguments “were not strong enough to dispel my doubts.” Oppie did not reply.
On May 25, Szilard and two colleagues—Walter Bartky of the University of Chicago and Harold Urey of Columbia University—appeared at the White House, only to be told that Truman had referred them to James F. Byrnes, soon to be designated secretary of state. Dutifully, they traveled to Byrnes’ home in Spartanburg, South Carolina, for a meeting that concluded, to say the least, unproductively. When Szilard explained that the use of the atomic bomb against Japan risked turning the Soviet Union into an atomic power, Byrnes interrupted, “General Groves tells me there is no uranium in Russia.” No, Szilard replied, the Soviet Union has plenty of uranium.
Byrnes then suggested that the use of the atomic bomb on Japan would help persuade Russia to withdraw its troops from Eastern Europe after the war. Szilard was “flabbergasted by the assumption that rattling the bomb might make Russia more manageable.” “Well,” Byrnes said, “you come from Hungary—you would not want Russia to stay in Hungary indefinitely.” This only incensed Szilard, who later wrote, “I was concerned at this point that . . . we might start an arms race between America and Russia which might end with the destruction of both countries. I was not disposed at this point to worry about what would happen to Hungary.” Szilard left in a somber mood. “I was rarely,” he wrote, “as depressed as when we left Byrnes’ house and walked toward the station.”
Back in Washington, Szilard made another attempt to block the use of the bomb. On May 30, hearing that Oppenheimer was in the capital for a meeting with Secretary of War Stimson, Szilard phoned General Groves’ office and made an appointment to see Oppenheimer that morning. Oppenheimer considered Szilard a meddler, but decided he had to hear him out.
“The atomic bomb is shit,” Oppenheimer said after listening to Szilard’s arguments.
“What do you mean by that?” Szilard asked.
“Well,” Oppenheimer replied, “this is a weapon which has no military significance. It will make a big bang—a very big bang—but it is not a weapon which is useful in war.” At the same time, Oppie told Szilard that if the weapon was used, he thought it important that the Russians be informed of this in advance. Szilard argued that merely telling Stalin about the new weapon would not by itself prevent an arms race after the war.
“Well,” Oppenheimer insisted, “don’t you think that if we tell the Russians what we intend to do and then use the bomb on Japan, the Russians will understand it?”
“They’ll understand it only too well,” Szilard replied.
Szilard left the meeting once again disheartened, knowing that this, his third attempt to stop the bomb, had failed. Over the next few weeks, he worked feverishly to establish a public record that would show that at least a vocal minority of the scientists involved in the Manhattan Project had opposed the use of the bomb on a civilian target.
The next day, May 31, Oppenheimer attended a critical meeting of Stimson’s so-called Interim Committee, an ad hoc group of government officials brought together to advise the secretary of war on the future of atomic policy. Members of the Committee included Stimson, Assistant Secretary of the Navy Ralph A. Bard, Dr. Vannevar Bush, James F. Byrnes, William L. Clayton, Dr. Karl T. Compton, Dr. James B. Conant and George L. Harrison, an aide to Stimson. Four scientists were present, having been invited to serve the Committee as a panel of scientific consultants: Oppenheimer, Enrico Fermi, Arthur Compton and Ernest Lawrence. Also in attendance that day were Gen. George C. Marshall, General Groves and two Stimson assistants, Harvey H. Bundy and Arthur Page.
Stimson controlled the agenda—and it did not include a decision on whether the bomb should be used against Japan. That was more or less a foregone conclusion. As if to emphasize this point, Stimson began the meeting with a general explanation of his responsibilities to the president on military matters. No one could escape the implication that decisions on the military use of the bomb would be controlled exclusively by the White House, with no input from the scientists who over the past two years had been building the bomb. But Stimson was a wise man who had paid careful attention to all discussions regarding the implications of nuclear weapons. Oppenheimer and the other scientists thus were reassured to hear him say that he and the other members of the Interim Committee did not regard the bomb “as a new weapon merely but as a revolutionary change in the relations of man to the universe.” The atomic bomb might become “a Frankenstein which would eat us up,” or it could secure the global peace. Its import, in either case, “went far beyond the needs of the present war.”
Stimson then quickly turned the discussion to the future development of atomic weapons. Oppenheimer reported that within three years it might be possible to produce a bomb with an explosive force of 10 million to 100 million tons of TNT. Lawrence jumped in with the recommendation that “a sizable stockpile of bombs and material should be built up”; more money had to be spent on nuclear plant expansion if Washington wanted the country to “stay out in front.” Initially, the official minutes of the meeting have Stimson declaring that everyone agrees with Lawrence’s proposal to build up stockpiles of both weapons and industrial plants. But then the minutes begin to reflect Oppenheimer’s seeming ambivalence. He observed that the Manhattan Project had merely “plucked the fruits of earlier research.” He strongly urged Stimson to allow most scientists, once the war was over, to go back to their universities and research laboratories, “to avoid the sterility” of wartime work.
Unlike Lawrence, Oppenheimer did not want the Manhattan Project to continue to dominate scientific inquiry after the war. As he addressed the meeting in his characteristically hushed tones, Oppie’s words were persuasive to many in the room. Vannevar Bush interrupted to say that he “agreed with Dr. Oppenheimer that only a nucleus of the present staff should be retained and that as many as possible should be released for broader and freer inquiry.” Compton and Fermi—but not Lawrence—chimed in with their approval. Although he had not made the point explicitly, Oppenheimer had staked out an argument for refocusing the work of the weapons labs after the war.
When Stimson asked about the nonmilitary potential of the project, Oppenheimer again dominated the discussion. He pointed out that up until then their “immediate concern had been to shorten the war.” But it should be understood, he said, that “fundamental knowledge” about atomic physics was “so widespread throughout the world” that he thought it wise for the United States to offer a “free interchange of information” on the development of peacetime uses of the atom. Echoing his discussion of the previous day with Szilard, Oppenheimer said, “If we were to offer to exchange information before the bomb was actually used, our moral position would be greatly strengthened.”
Picking up on this cue, Stimson began discussing the prospects for “a policy of self-restraint.” He referred to the possibility that an international organization should be established to guarantee “complete scientific freedom.” Perhaps the bomb could be controlled in the postwar world by an “international control body” armed with the right of inspection. While the scientists in the room nodded their heads, a heretofore silent General Marshall suddenly cautioned against putting too much faith in the effectiveness of any inspection mechanism. Russia was obviously the “paramount concern.”
Marshall’s stature was such that not many men challenged his judgment. But Oppenheimer had an agenda—Bohr’s—and he now quietly and forcefully brought the revered general around to his point of view. Who knew, he admitted, what the Russians were doing in this field of atomic weapons? But he nev
ertheless “expressed the hope that the fraternity of interest among scientists would aid in the solution.” He pointed out that “Russia had always been friendly to science.” Perhaps, he suggested, we should open discussions with them in a tentative fashion, and explain what we had developed “without giving them any details of our productive effort.”
“We might say that a great national effort had been put into this project,” he said, “and express a hope for cooperation with them in this field.” Oppenheimer finished by saying that he “felt strongly that we should not prejudge the Russian attitude in this matter.”
Somewhat surprisingly, Oppenheimer’s statement now roused Marshall into a detailed defense of the Russians. Relations between Moscow and Washington had been marked, he said, by a long history of charges and countercharges. But “most of these allegations have proven unfounded.” On the question of the atomic bomb, Marshall said he was “certain that we need have no fear that the Russians, if they had knowledge of the project, would disclose this information to the Japanese.” Far from trying to keep the bomb secret from the Russians, Marshall “raised the question whether it might be desirable to invite two prominent Russian scientists to witness the test.”
Oppenheimer must have been pleased to hear such words coming from the country’s top military officer. And he must have been quickly disheartened to hear James Byrnes, Truman’s personal representative to the Interim Committee, protest vigorously that if such a thing happened, he feared Stalin would then ask to be brought into the atomic project. Between the lines of the dry and unemotional official record, a careful reader can discern a debate. Vannevar Bush pointed out that even the British “do not have any of our blueprints on plants,” and clearly, the Russians could be told a lot more about the project without giving them the engineering designs for the bomb. Indeed, Oppenheimer and all of the scientists in the room understood that such information could not remain secret for very long. Inevitably, the physics of the bomb was soon to be known to most physicists.
