After the Victorians

by A. N. Wilson

  Roosevelt grasped the significance of what had happened in that first conversation. ‘Alex,’ he said to Sachs, ‘what you’re after is to see that the Nazis don’t blow us up.’8 Einstein’s letter still envisaged an enormous lump of uranium, too large to fit into an aeroplane, being used as an offensive weapon. ‘This new phenomenon,’ he wrote, ‘could also lead to the construction of bombs, and it is conceivable – though much less certain – that extremely powerful bombs of a new type may thus be constructed. A single bomb of this type, carried by boat and exploded in a port, might well destroy the whole port together with some of the surrounding territory. However, such bombs might very well prove to be too heavy for transportation by air.’9

  So it was that the Americans set up the Uranium Advisory Committee, eventually subsumed by the National Defense Research Committee.10 After America entered the war, the President of Harvard, Professor James B. Conant, arrived in London to set up a London office of this committee. The Tizard Mission had already established the principle that the British would hand over to the Americans all their scientific insights. It was only a matter of time before British scientists were revealing how far they had advanced towards the potential creation of a nuclear bomb. Under the anodyne name of Tube Alloys, the British were very close to possessing their own Ring of Power. As the theoretical work at Birmingham and Liverpool continued, industrial plants were being constructed. An isotope separation plant was built near Mold in North Wales at Rhydymwyn to refine pure uranium. Similar work was being done at the Clarendon Lab in Oxford. Niels Bohr had escaped from Denmark and was having conversations with Lord Cherwell (as Lindemann had become) and Churchill not only about the technical progress which had been made, but about its moral and political significance. He wrote to Roosevelt in July 1944: ‘The fact of immediate preponderance is, however, that a weapon of unparalleled power is being created which will completely change all future conditions of warfare.’11 It was only a matter of time before Bohr was lured across the Atlantic by the ‘damned American millionaires’. Thanks to the agreement made in Quebec in September 1944, Churchill handed over to the Americans all the results of British nuclear research, and most of the scientists who had been involved in the project. Under the directorship of Robert Oppenheimer, a boys’ school thirty-five miles northwest of Sante Fe on the western slope of the Jemez Mountains was selected as the ideal site for the secret laboratory. It was here that the nuclear bomb would eventually be built and perfected. The name of the school was Los Alamos.

  Oppenheimer, professor of Physics at Berkeley, was in his late thirties when he took over the directorship of Los Alamos. A thin, chain-smoking, tormented man, he was a strange mixture of social confidence and self-doubt. His father, who had left Hanau in Germany in 1898, made a fortune in ready-made suits. He and his delicate wife Ella, whose unformed right hand was always hidden in a prosthetic glove, were clever people, and Robert, who was born on 22 April 1904, grew up in a spacious apartment on Riverside Drive, with a summer house at Bay Shore in Long Island. His parents were liberals, artistic in their interests. The Oppen-heimers frequently took summer vacations in Europe. Robert was a widely cultivated man, feeling, when he went to Harvard as an undergraduate, like a ‘Goth coming to Rome’. He looted the place intellectually. He majored in chemistry but also took classes in physics, French literature, philosophy, mathematics and other languages. He also found time to sail a 27-foot sloop his father had given him.

  Later he went to England and worked at the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge. He was intensely miserable, and visited a psychiatrist in London. A friend at the time recalled Oppenheimer saying that this ‘guy was too stupid to follow him and that he knew more about his troubles than [the doctor] did’. The psychiatrist diagnosed dementia praecox, today called schizophrenia.

  Oppenheimer arrived at Los Alamos in 1943, and he spent the next year assembling literally thousands of scientists to work on the project. At some stage in the next two years almost all the big names in the nuclear project would pass through Los Alamos: Edward Teller, George Kistiakowsky, Rudolf Peierls, the British hydrodynamicist Geoffrey Taylor, Leo Szilard. Oppenheimer was a driven force overseeing every aspect of work at this immense and highly complex factory of human destructiveness. ‘Oppie knew in detail what was going on in every part of the laboratory,’ Teller fondly recalled.12

  Throughout 1944, while the Americans fought their slow and bloody war in the Pacific, with huge casualties on both sides, and while British, American, Australian and other Allied troops suffered terrible maltreatment in the Japanese prison camps, and on the Burmese railway, the scientists at Los Alamos continued their work. By 26 September 1944 the largest atomic pile yet assembled on Earth was ready.13

  The crude cylinders, packed with deadly five-kilogram loads of plutonium, were being made to a number of rival designs, each with crudely whimsical nicknames – Fat Man for the implosion bomb, Little Boy and Thin Man. While the engineers were constructing these world-changing engines of obliteration, the politicians were too distracted by the fast-moving events of the war, and by their own personal illness, to give more than cursory attention to the seriousness of what was happening in New Mexico. For example, when Niels Bohr tried to alert Churchill to the extreme dangers of making or using nuclear bombs, it was three months before he even had an answer to his letter. This was not surprising, since he wrote in May 1944, on the eve of the D-Day landings, the occupation of France and the conquest of Germany on European soil – the event to which the Americans and Russians had been urging Churchill since they entered the war. Bohr’s speculations about what might happen if nuclear weapons were to proliferate simply did not register with Churchill; in so far as they did, he, in common with the Americans, felt that any aggressive threat against Japan was to be welcomed. ‘It has just come in time to save the world’ was his view.14

  Churchill was by now seventy years old. He was drinking heavily. He had suffered, since the war began, a minor heart attack and three bouts of pneumonia. Roosevelt, though much younger – sixty-two – was mortally sick, had weakened dramatically during 1944 and was doomed to die in April 1945. Almost as worrying to him as the progress of the D-Day landings, and the conquest of Europe under the overall command of General Eisenhower, was the persistent briefing that he received from his ambassador in Moscow, W. Averell Harriman, that Stalin was not to be trusted, and intended to keep none of the agreements he made with Britain and America with regard to Eastern Europe. On 12 April, while sitting for his portrait, the President suffered a cerebral haemorrhage from which he died at 3.35 pm that day. Two days afterwards, Otto Frisch delivered to Robert Oppenheimer his report on the first experimental determination of the critical mass of pure U235. On 16 July 1945 at Alamogordo, New Mexico, the first atomic bomb was exploded.

  Oppenheimer said:

  When it went off, in the New Mexico dawn, that first atomic bomb, we thought of Alfred Nobel, and his hope, his vain hope, that dynamite would put an end to wars. We thought of the legend of Prometheus, of that deep sense of guilt in man’s new powers, that reflects his recognition of evil, and his long knowledge of it. We knew that it was a new world, but even more we knew that novelty itself was a very old thing in human life, that all our ways are rooted in it.15

  Whether or not it changed the human perception of evil, the bomb certainly put a spring in the step of the newly promoted Vice President, now President, Harry S. Truman. Negotiations with the Russians took a suddenly aggressive turn. The conference at Yalta in the Crimea between the Big Three in February 1945 had airily agreed that after the war there would be a ‘new Government’ in Poland. The bespectacled lawyer from Missouri was something of an unknown quantity on the international stage. Molotov, upon meeting him in April 1945, was astounded by his aggressiveness when talking of such questions as Eastern Europe, and the Russian attempts to muscle in on the war with Japan. ‘I have never been talked to like that in my life,’ declared the thunderstruck Soviet Foreign Minister
. ‘Carry out your agreements and you won’t get talked to like that,’ said the man from Independence, Missouri. Something had given him new confidence in dealing with the United States’ only serious rival for world domination.16

  Roosevelt’s death in April 1945 coincided with crucial turning points in Europe, in the Far East and in Los Alamos. America now had the Bomb. Russia was advancing into Manchuria. Germany was on the point of surrender. These were the crucial political facts of the world as President Harry S. Truman took office and – perhaps even more importantly – James Byrnes succeeded Edward R. Stettinius as secretary of state.

  Opinion is divided about Roosevelt’s views on the deployment of nuclear weapons. There is some spotty evidence that Roosevelt was mulling the possibility of using the bomb only as a warning, or as a demonstration in territory from which human and animal life, after prior warning, had been moved. There is very definite evidence that Stettinius favoured a negotiated peace with the Japanese, giving them assurances that they would not lose their emperor if they laid down their arms. After Byrnes took over as Secretary of State, things altered. Byrnes was determined, before the Allies met at the Potsdam Conference, that America should already have tried out the nuclear bomb. For this reason, unbeknown to the Russians, the conference was postponed. Byrnes and Truman wanted to use the bomb as a demonstration to the Russians: a demonstration of what? Of their own ruthlessness. A demonstration that they would, if necessary, use this weapon – at that stage of history uniquely the weapon of the United States – on civilian targets if they did not get their way.

  Many theories have been advanced as to why Truman should have been prepared to bomb not one, but two, Japanese cities, at so brief an interval. After all, over a quarter of a million Japanese civilians had already been killed by aerial bombardment from conventional explosives. We now know that Japan, for all its fighting rhetoric, was on the verge of surrender; and had Britain, Russia and America guaranteed the safety of the emperor, the war might have well ended before July 1945. In May, the first of the war crimes tribunals had begun in Germany, and there was talk of hanging the Japanese emperor. This rumour undoubtedly encouraged many Japanese troops to continue fighting. It was Byrnes, at the Potsdam Conference of 17 July to 2 August 1945, who insisted upon removing any assurance about the future of the emperor. After the Russians invaded Manchuria, the Japanese knew that their war was over, and they privately approached the Russians, asking for a negotiated peace. This was rejected by America. Byrnes was effectually the architect of the Cold War. He wanted no cooperation with Russia. And he did not want a messy negotiation with Japan which could lead to Versailles-style repercussions. An outright Japanese surrender, without condition; a Russian government left in no doubt that America was if necessary prepared to kill tens, hundreds of thousands of civilians if it did not get its way. This was the lure for Truman and Byrnes as they reached their decision.17

  In the light of all that we now know about the decision, we can safely lay aside the myth fed to, and believed in by, generations of Americans and British: namely that the Bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in order to shorten the war (it was more or less over anyway); to save the lives of American troops; or to force the Japanese warriors to lay down their arms. (If that argument is used, why was it necessary to bomb two cities, and add the incinerated and radiated corpses of 70,00018 more people, those of the citizens of Nagasaki, to the obscene death figures of the Second World War?)

  There is a strong element of racialism in the beliefs of many of those involved in the decision-making process, a sense that the Japanese were somehow ‘different’ from Americans or Europeans; or that their culture made them impermeable to reason. This perhaps flavoured the atmosphere of the crucial meeting at the Pentagon on 31 May 1945 when Secretary of State Byrnes – did ever a politician have a more horribly apt ‘Happy Families’ nomenclature? – met Robert Oppenheimer, James B. Conant and Secretary for War Henry Stimson, and they all agreed, having heard the scientific evidence, that ‘we could not give the Japanese any warning’.19

  Albert Einstein, as early as 1946, stated the true reason for dropping the Bomb, namely that it was ‘precipitated by a desire to end the war in the Pacific by any means before Russia’s participation. I am sure that if President Roosevelt had still been there, none of that would have been possible.’20

  Many of the scientists who had been pioneers of nuclear weaponry were disgusted by the use to which it had been put. After the demonstration in Alamogordo, there was no need, as far as the war with Japan was concerned, to use the bombs at all. Honourable old Secretary of War Stimson expressed horror at the ‘appalling lack of conscience that the war had brought about … the complacency, the indifference, and the silence with which we greeted the mass bombings in Europe and above all, Japan’.21 Oppenheimer remembered the old man saying it, but such sentiments did not get into Stimson’s published memoirs, and he died of heart failure not long after the war. Leo Szilard was vociferously opposed to the use of the bomb other than as a threat.

  I told Oppenheimer that I thought it would be a very serious mistake to use the bomb against the cities of Japan. Oppenheimer didn’t share my view. He surprised me by saying ‘The atomic bomb is shit’. ‘What do you mean by that?’ I asked him. He said, ‘Well, 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’. He thought it would be important however, to inform the Russians that we had an atomic bomb and that we intended to use it against the cities of Japan rather than taking them by surprise.22

  Oppenheimer, diagnosed as a schizophrenic by that ‘stupid’ psychiatrist in his youth, moved from two quite extreme positions about the Bomb. Asked by a Time journalist if the atomic bomb had any limitations, he quipped: ‘The limitations lie in the fact that you don’t want to be on the receiving end of one. If you ask, “Can we make them more terrible?” the answer is yes. If you ask, “Can we make a lot of them?” the answer is yes. “Can we make them terribly more terrible?” the answer is probably.’ But after the war he suffered agonies of remorse, and was even investigated, when he had gone back to academic life, for un-American thoughts and activities such as wanting to de-escalate the Cold War and to make peace with the Russians.23

  Of course the overwhelming view of those who actually knew about the atomic bomb, and its effects upon human lives, was that its use was an obscenity. Niels Bohr, Albert Einstein, Szilard were all utterly opposed. It took tremendous lies, of a Goebbelsesque scale of magnitude, to persuade two or three generations that instead of being acts of gratuitous mass murder, the bombardments of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were almost benign – first, because they avoided the supposed deaths of half a million American troops (the estimated numbers of casualties had America conquered Japan by an invasion of infantry – a pretext utterly ruled out by the brevity of the time lapse between the dropping of the two weapons); and second, because it was better the weapon should be in the hands of Good Guys rather than truly wicked people such as Hitler or Stalin. Both these views, enlivened with a dash of Bible Christianity, helped to put the President’s mind at rest as he meditated upon it all in his diary. ‘We have discovered the most terrible bomb in the history of the world. It may be the fire destruction prophesied in the Euphrates Valley Era, after Noah and his fabulous Ark …’ Truman then states, for his own peace of mind, or for that of posterity, that it is not (early August 1945) intended to drop the Bomb on Tokyo.

  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 Capital or the new. He (that is Stalin) and I are in accord. 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 the atomic bomb. It seems to be
the most terrible thing to have discovered, but it can be made the most useful.24

  Little Boy, weighing in at 9,700 pounds, resembled ‘an elongated trash can with fins’.25 He was finally complete by the end of July, and it was now agreed that they should drop him on 6 August, the Feast of the Transfiguration, when Jesus went up the mountain with his disciples, and was transformed, his whole being filled with blinding light and his clothes becoming ‘white and glistering’.26 The crew of the B29 bomber Enola Gay (named for the 509th commander’s mother) ate a breakfast of ham and eggs and pineapple fritters. As they loaded Little Boy into the plane, the Protestant pastor prayed to the Almighty Father ‘to be with those who brave the heights of Thy heaven and who carry the battle to our enemies’.

  And then they were off. By 0552 they approached Iwo Jima and could see below the green islands of the Japanese archipelago. At 0730, Deke Parsons, the officer who had been working on radar development since the beginning of the war, bald as an egg, entered the unheated bomb bay with Morris Jephson, an ordnance expert, and they inserted four sections of cordite one at a time into Little Boy. They monitored the circuitry. Everything was going according to plan. The plane crossed the Ota River in central Hiroshima. The bomb-bay doors were opened, and the bomb dropped. The plane bounced. There was a noise like a piece of sheet metal snapping. As Enola Gay turned, dived, circled and made for home they could see smoke and fire climbing all over the city, a natural amphitheatre. One man on board said it looked like a pot of boiling black oil.

  The prewar population of Hiroshima was something like 400,000 but it had sunk to 290,000. Thousands of soldiers, bare to the waist, were exercising in the parade ground at Hiroshima Castle. Eight thousand schoolgirls were already up, at 7.30 their time, clearing rubble and debris from bombsites wrecked by conventional weapons. The blinding flash of light in the sky was accompanied by instantaneous scorching heat. Within 4,000 yards of the hypercentre of the fallen bomb, flammable objects spontaneously combusted. The people who ran through the streets were already scarcely recognizable as human beings. A child, its face swollen like a purple balloon, uttered inchoate groans as it moved between the flames with curious jerking motions. An old man muttered prayers as the skin on his face unpeeled like that of an over-baked potato. A woman with her jaw missing and her tongue dangling staggered through what seemed to be raining pitch. A policeman stood rooted to the spot, stark naked save for a few shreds of trouser-uniform clinging to his scorched body. The seven rivers of the city were soon drifting with scorched pieces of human flesh, dismembered people. Those on the banks who watched had burned skin hanging off them like loose kimonos. The lucky ones had died instantly, like the charcoaled figure of a man, glimpsed sitting bolt upright on a bicycle leaning against an all but molten railing. Those who survived all felt the effect of the blast, even if they were not actually turned, like those near the centre, into flayed red torture-victims. Boils, ulcerated throats and extreme skin discomfort were felt even by those miles away, or those who had the unlucky experience of surviving and feeling themselves, as one fifth-grade schoolboy said afterwards, ‘left behind in an uncanny world of the dead’. In 1986, the number of identified victims was given on the Cenotaph at Hiroshima as 138,890, but people were still suffering horribly, and dying, from the effects of radiation for decades to come.