by American Prometheus: The Triumph;Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer
Whatever flashed through Oppenheimer’s mind, it is certain that the men around him felt unvarnished euphoria. Laurence described their mood in his dispatch: “The big boom came about 100 seconds after the Great Flash—the first cry of a new-born 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.” The dancing lasted but a few seconds and then the men began shaking hands, Laurence reported, “slapping each other on the back, laughing like happy children.” Kistiakowsky, who had been thrown to the ground by the blast, threw his arms around Oppie and gleefully demanded his ten dollars. Oppie pulled out his empty wallet, and told Kisty he’d have to wait. (Later, back in Los Alamos, Oppie made a ceremony of presenting Kistiakowsky with an autographed ten-dollar bill.)
As Oppenheimer left the control center, he turned to shake hands with Ken Bainbridge, who looked him in the eye and muttered, “Now we’re all sons-of-bitches.” Back at Base Camp, Oppie shared a brandy with his brother and General Farrell. Then, according to one historian, he phoned Los Alamos and asked his secretary to pass a message to Kitty: “Tell her she can change the sheets.”
PART FOUR
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
“Those Poor Little People”
A stone’s throw from despair.
ROBERT OPPENHEIMER
AFTER THE RETURN to Los Alamos, everybody seemed to be partying. With his usual exuberance, Richard Feynman was sitting on the hood of a jeep beating his bongo drums. “But one man, I remember, Bob Wilson, was just sitting there moping,” Feynman wrote later.
“What are you moping about?” asked Feynman.
“It’s a terrible thing that we made,” replied Wilson.
“But you started it,” Feynman said, remembering that it had been Wilson who had recruited him to Los Alamos from Princeton. “You got us into it.”
Wilson aside, euphoria was only to be expected. Everyone who had come to Los Alamos had come for a good reason. Everyone had worked hard to accomplish a difficult task. The work itself became satisfying, and the stunning accomplishment at Alamogordo infected everyone with an overwhelming feeling of excitement. In the process, even someone with as lively a mind as Feynman’s was elated. But later he said of that moment, “You stop thinking, you know; you just stop.” Bob Wilson seemed to Feynman “[the] only one who was still thinking about it, at that moment.”
But Feynman was wrong. Oppenheimer was thinking about it too. In the days after the Trinity test, his mood began to change. Everyone at Los Alamos eased off on the long hours spent in the lab. They knew that after Trinity, the gadget had become a weapon, and weapons were controlled by the military. Anne Wilson, Oppenheimer’s secretary, remembered a series of meetings with Army Air Force officers: “They were picking targets.” Oppenheimer knew the names of the Japanese cities on the list of potential targets—and the knowledge was clearly sobering. “Robert got very still and ruminative, during that two-week period,” Wilson recalled, “partly because he knew what was about to happen, and partly because he knew what it meant.”
One day soon after the Trinity test, Oppenheimer startled Wilson with a sad, even morose remark. “He was beginning to feel very down,” Wilson said. “I didn’t know of other people who were quite in the mood he was in, but he used to come from his house walking over to the Technical Area, and I used to come from the nurses’ quarters and somewhere along the way we often bumped into each other. That morning, he’s puffing on his pipe and he’s saying, ‘Those poor little people, those poor little people’—referring to the Japanese.” He said it with an air of resignation. And deadly knowledge.
That very week, however, Oppenheimer was working hard to make sure that the bomb exploded efficiently over those “poor little people.” On the evening of July 23, 1945, he met with Gen. Thomas Farrell and his aide, Lt. Col. John F. Moynahan, two senior officers designated to supervise the bombing run over Hiroshima from the island of Tinian. It was a clear, cool, starry night. Pacing nervously in his office, chain-smoking, Oppenheimer wanted to make sure that they understood his precise instructions for delivering the weapon on target. Lieutenant Colonel Moynahan, a former newspaperman, published a vivid account of the evening in a 1946 pamphlet: “ ‘Don’t let them bomb through clouds or through an overcast,’ [Oppenheimer said.] He was emphatic, tense, his nerves talking. ‘Got to see the target. No radar bombing; it must be dropped visually.’ Long strides, feet turned out, another cigarette. ‘Of course, it doesn’t matter if they check the drop with radar, but it must be a visual drop.’ More strides. ‘If they drop it at night there should be a moon; that would be best. Of course, they must not drop it in rain or fog. . . . Don’t let them detonate it too high. The figure fixed on is just right. Don’t let it go up [higher] or the target won’t get as much damage.’ ”
The atomic bombs that Oppenheimer had organized into existence were going to be used. But he told himself that they were going to be used in a manner that would not spark a postwar arms race with the Soviets. Shortly after the Trinity test, he had been relieved to hear from Vannevar Bush that the Interim Committee had unanimously accepted his recommendation that the Russians be clearly informed of the bomb and its impending use against Japan. He assumed that such forthright discussions were taking place at that very moment in Potsdam, where President Truman was meeting with Churchill and Stalin. He was later appalled to learn what actually happened at that final Big Three conference. Instead of an open and frank discussion of the nature of the weapon, Truman coyly confined himself to a cryptic reference: “On July 24,” Truman wrote in his memoirs, “I casually mentioned to Stalin that we had a new weapon of unusual destructive force. The Russian premier showed no special interest. All he said was that he was glad to hear it and hoped we would make ‘good use of it against the Japanese.’ ” This fell far short of what Oppenheimer had expected. As the historian Alice Kimball Smith later wrote, “what actually occurred at Potsdam was a sheer travesty. . . .”
ON AUGUST 6, 1945, at exactly 8:14 a.m., a B-29 aircraft, the Enola Gay, named after pilot Paul Tibbets’ mother, dropped the untested, gun-type uranium bomb over Hiroshima. John Manley was in Washington that day, waiting anxiously to hear the news. Oppenheimer had sent him there with one assignment—to report to him on the bombing. After a five-hour delay in communications from the aircraft, Manley finally received a teletype from Captain Parsons—who was the “arming” officer on the Enola Gay—that “the visible effects were greater than the New Mexico test.” But just as Manley was about to call Oppenheimer in Los Alamos, Groves stopped him. No one was to disseminate any information about the atomic bombing until the president himself announced it. Frustrated, Manley went for a midnight walk in Lafayette Park, across from the White House. Early the next morning, he was told that Truman would make an announcement at 11:00 a.m. Manley finally got Oppie on the phone just as the president’s statement was released on nationwide radio. Although they had agreed to use a prearranged code for conveying the news over the phone, Oppenheimer’s first words to Manley were: “Why the hell did you think I sent you to Washington in the first place?”
That same day, at 2:00 p.m., General Groves picked up the phone in Washington and called Oppenheimer in Los Alamos. Groves was in a congratulatory mood. “I’m proud of you and all of your people,” Groves said.
“It went all right?” Oppie asked.
“Apparently it went with a tremendous bang. . . .”
“Everybody is feeling reasonably good about it,” Oppie said, “and I extend my heartiest congratulations. It’s been a long road.”
“Yes,” Groves replied, “it has been a long road and I think one of the wisest things I ever did was when I selected the director of Los Alamos.”
“Well,” replied Oppenheimer diffidently, “I have my doubts, General Groves.”
Groves replied, “Well, you know I’ve never concurred with those doubts at any
time.”
Later in the day, the news was announced over the Los Alamos public address system: “Attention please, attention please. One of our units has just been successfully dropped on Japan.” Frank Oppenheimer was standing in the hallway right outside his brother’s office when he heard the news. His first reaction was “Thank God, it wasn’t a dud.” But within seconds, he recalled, “One suddenly got this horror of all the people that had been killed.”
A soldier, Ed Doty, described the scene for his parents in a letter he wrote the next day: “This last 24 hours has been quite exciting. Everyone has been keyed up to a pitch higher than anything I have ever seen on such a mass scale before. . . . People came out into the hallways of the building and milled around like a Times Square New Year’s crowd. Everyone was looking for a radio.” That evening a crowd gathered in an auditorium. One of the younger physicists, Sam Cohen, remembers a cheering, foot-stamping audience waiting for Oppenheimer to appear. Everyone expected him to come onstage from the auditorium wings, as was his custom. But Oppenheimer chose to make a more dramatic entrance from the rear, making his way up the center aisle. Once onstage, according to Cohen, he clasped his hands together and pumped them over his head like a prizefighter. Cohen remembers Oppie telling the cheering crowd that it was “too early to determine what the results of the bombing might have been, but he was sure that the Japanese didn’t like it.” The crowd cheered and then roared its approval when Oppie said he was “proud” of what they had accomplished. By Cohen’s account, “his [Oppenheimer’s] only regret was that we hadn’t developed the bomb in time to have used it against the Germans. This practically raised the roof.”
It was as if he had been called upon to act out a stage role, one to which he was truly not suited. Scientists are not meant to be conquering generals. And yet, he was only human and so must have felt the thrill of pure success; he had grabbed a metaphorical gold ring and he was happily waving it aloft. Besides, the audience expected him to appear flushed and triumphant. But the moment was short-lived.
For some who had just seen and felt the blinding light and blasting wind of the explosion at Alamogordo, the expected news from the Pacific was something of an anticlimax. It was almost as if Alamogordo had drained their capacity for astonishment. Others were merely sobered by the news. Phil Morrison heard the news on Tinian, where he had helped to prepare the bomb and load it aboard the Enola Gay. “That night we from Los Alamos had a party,” Morrison recalled. “It was war and victory in war, and we had a right to our celebration. But I remember sitting . . . on the edge of a cot . . . wondering what it was like on the other side, what was going on in Hiroshima that night.”
Alice Kimball Smith later insisted that “certainly no one [at Los Alamos] celebrated Hiroshima.” But then she admitted that “a few people” tried to assemble a party in the men’s dormitories. It turned into a “memorable fiasco. People either stayed away or beat a hasty retreat.” Smith, to be sure, was referring only to the scientists, who appear to have had a decidedly muted—and different—reaction than the military enlisted men. Doty wrote home: “There were parties galore. Invited to three of them, I managed to get to only one. . . . It lasted until three.” He reported that people were “happy, very happy. We listened to the radio and danced and listened to the radio again . . . and laughed and laughed at all that was said.” Oppenheimer attended one party, but upon leaving he saw a clearly distraught physicist retching his guts out in the bushes. The sight made him realize that an accounting had begun.
Robert Wilson had been horrified by the news from Hiroshima. He had never wanted the weapon to be used, and thought he had grounds for believing it would not be. In January, Oppenheimer had persuaded him to continue his work—but only so that the bomb could be demonstrated. And Oppenheimer, he knew, had participated in the Interim Committee’s deliberations. Rationally, he understood that Oppie had been in no position to make him any firm promises—that this was a decision for the generals, Secretary of War Stimson and, ultimately, the president. But he nevertheless felt his trust had been abused. “I felt betrayed,” Wilson wrote in 1958, “when the bomb was exploded over Japan without discussion or some peaceful demonstration of its power to the Japanese.”
Wilson’s wife, Jane, happened to be visiting San Francisco when she heard the news about Hiroshima. Rushing back to Los Alamos, she greeted her husband with congratulatory smiles, only to find him “very depressed,” she said. And then, three days later, another bomb devastated Nagasaki. “People were going around banging garbage can covers and so on,” Jane Wilson recalled, “and he wouldn’t join in, he was sulking and unhappy.” Bob Wilson recalled, “I remember being just ill . . . sick . . . to the point that I thought I would be—you know, vomit.”
Wilson was not alone. “As the days passed,” wrote Alice Kimball Smith, the wife of the Los Alamos metallurgist Cyril Smith, “the revulsion grew, bringing with it—even for those who believed that the end of the war justified the bombing—an intensely personal experience of the reality of evil.” After Hiroshima, most people on the mesa understandably felt at least a moment of exhilaration. But after the news from Nagasaki, Charlotte Serber observed, a palpable sense of gloom settled over the laboratory. Word soon spread that “Oppie says that the atomic bomb is so terrible a weapon that war is now impossible.” An FBI informant reported on August 9 that Oppie was a “nervous wreck.”
On August 8, 1945, as Stalin had promised Roosevelt at the Yalta Conference and confirmed to Truman at Potsdam, the Soviet Union declared war on Japan. It was a devastating event for the emperor’s hawkish advisers, who had argued that the Soviet Union could be induced to help Japan obtain more lenient surrender terms than the American doctrine of “unconditional surrender implied.” Two days later—a day after Nagasaki was devastated by the plutonium bomb—the Japanese government sent an offer of surrender, with one condition: that the status of Japan’s emperor be guaranteed. The next day, the Allies agreed to alter the terms of unconditional surrender: The authority of the emperor to rule would be “subject to the Supreme Commander of the Allied powers. . . .” On August 14, Radio Tokyo announced the government’s acceptance of this clarification and, therewith, its surrender. The war was over—and within weeks, journalists and historians began to debate whether it might have ended on similar terms and around the same time without the bomb.
The weekend after the Nagasaki bombing, Ernest Lawrence arrived in Los Alamos. He found Oppenheimer weary, morose and consumed with qualms about what had happened. The two old friends fell to arguing about the bomb. Reminded that it had been Lawrence who had argued for a demonstration and Oppie who had blocked it, Oppie stung Lawrence with a biting remark about how Lawrence cared only for the rich and powerful. Lawrence tried to reassure his old friend that precisely because the bomb was so terrible, it would never be used again.
Hardly reassured, Oppie spent much of his time that weekend drafting a final report on behalf of the Scientific Panel to Secretary Stimson. His conclusions were pessimistic: “. . . it is our firm opinion that no military countermeasures will be found which will be adequately effective in preventing the delivery of atomic weapons.” In the future these devices, already vastly destructive, would become only bigger and more lethal. Only three days after America’s victory, Oppenheimer was telling Stimson and the president that the nation had no defense against these new weapons: “We are not only unable to outline a program that would assure to this nation for the next decades hegemony in the field of atomic weapons; we are equally unable to insure that such hegemony, if achieved, could protect us from the most terrible destruction. . . . 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.”
That week he personally hand-carried the letter to Washington, D.C., where he met with Vannevar Bush and George Harrison, Stimson’s aide in the War De
partment. “It was a bad time,” he reported to Lawrence at the end of August, “too early for clarity.” He had tried to explain the futility scientists felt concerning any further work on the atomic bomb. He implied that the bomb should be made illegal, “just like poison gases after the last war.” But he found no encouragement from the people he saw in Washington. “I had the fairly clear impression from the talks that things had gone most badly at Potsdam, and that little or no progress had been made in interesting the Russians in collaboration or control.”
In fact, he doubted that any serious effort in this direction had been made. Before Oppie left Washington, he gloomily noted that the president had issued a gag order on any further disclosures about the atomic bomb— and Secretary of State Byrnes sent word, after reading Oppie’s letter to Truman, that in the present international situation there was “no alternative to pushing the Med [Manhattan Engineer District] program full steam ahead.” Oppie returned to New Mexico even more depressed than when he had left.
A few days later, Robert and Kitty went alone to Perro Caliente, their cabin near Los Pinos, and spent a week trying to sort out the consequences of the incredibly intense last two years. It was the first time they had spent any real time alone in three years. Robert took the opportunity to catch up on some of his personal correspondence, replying to letters from old friends, many of whom had only recently learned from the newspapers what he had been doing during the war. He wrote his former teacher Herbert Smith: “You will believe that this undertaking has not been without its misgivings; they are heavy on us today, when the future, which has so many elements of high promise, is yet only a stone’s throw from despair.” Similarly, he wrote his Harvard roommate Frederick Bernheim: “We are at the ranch now, in an earnest but not too sanguine search for sanity. . . . There would seem to be some great headaches ahead.”
