Factors beyond our control prevent us from considering any decision, other than to proceed according to the existing schedule for the time being.
By the time the gadget was detonated at Trinity, detailed arrangements were already in place for the use of a subsequent bomb as soon as enough material had been produced, and a carefully planned sequence of events began to unfold in quick succession. Just hours after Trinity, the cruiser USS Indianapolis sailed out of San Francisco Bay with Little Boy, the uranium bomb assembly, en route to Tinian, near Guam in the western Pacific and less than 1,500 air miles from Tokyo. A second shipment, containing the last necessary piece of uranium, soon followed by air. Fat Man would be ready around the first week in August and, once the Japanese submarine threat became obvious, would travel by plane. A second plutonium weapon would be ready two weeks after that, with more in production, as needs dictated.
In the hours immediately after the test explosion, Groves worked out with Oppenheimer what he would report by cable to Secretary of War Stimson, who was with the president at Potsdam. At 7:30 A.M. Washington time, Groves phoned his secretary in the War Department and dictated, with “guarded brevity,” the pertinent facts, making use of a special code sheet, the only other copy of which was in her possession. He left base camp as soon as it was established that radioactive fallout in the area did not pose a problem and no one would have to be evacuated. Groves headed straight back to D.C. on the afternoon of July 16, accompanied by Bush, Conant, Lawrence, and Tolman, whom he observed were “still upset by what they had seen and could talk of little else.” As for himself, Groves noted, “my thoughts were now completely wrapped up with the preparations for the coming climax in Japan.”
Two days later, Groves followed up his first cable with an expanded account of the Trinity test that was not, as he advised Stimson, “a concise, formal military report, but an attempt to recite what I would have told you if you had been here on my return from New Mexico.” Groves’ report was sent by courier and reached Potsdam on July 21. Stimson read it to President Truman and Secretary of State James Byrnes that afternoon and later brought it to a meeting with Churchill and Lord Cherwell. It was “an immensely powerful document,” Stimson noted in his diary that day. “It gave a pretty full and eloquent report of the tremendous success of the test and revealed far greater destructive power than we expected in S-I.” His diary records Trinity’s immediate impact on history:
Churchill read Groves’ report in full. He told me that he had noticed at the meeting of the Three yesterday that Truman was much fortified by something that had happened, that he had stood up to the Russians in a most emphatic and decisive manner, telling them as to certain demands that they could not have and that the United States was entirely against them. He said, “Now I know what happened to Truman yesterday. I couldn’t understand it. When he got to the meeting after having read this report, he was a changed man. He told the Russians just where they got on and off and generally bossed the whole meeting.” Churchill said he now understood how this pepping up had taken place and he felt the same way.
Assured two more bombs would be ready by the end of the month, Churchill and Truman finalized their plans for action against Japan. On July 24, they approved the November 1 deadline for the invasion of Kyushu. Before the session was over, Truman, according to the Interim Committee’s recommendation, was supposed to inform Stalin of their atomic progress. But the new president was in no mood to tip his hand to the Russians and instead made only a passing comment to the effect that the United States possessed “a new weapon of unusual destructive force.” Exactly what Stalin made of the cryptic comment was unclear, as his reply was elaborately casual. All he said, according to Truman, was that “he was glad to hear it and hoped we would make ‘good use of it against the Japanese.’” It is unlikely, however, that he was surprised, given the Soviets access to atomic secrets through Klaus Fuchs and other sources.
The following day, Churchill and Truman gave Stimson and Marshall approval to move ahead with the operational orders to use the first atomic bomb as soon after August 3 as weather permitted. The Target Committee, together with Stimson’s military staff, had drawn up a final list of suggested target cities. Stimson had struck Kyoto from the list, even though it was deemed a strategic military target, because it had been an ancient Japanese capital and was considered a sacred shrine. He had approved four other targets, including Hiroshima, Kokura, Niigata, and Nagasaki. The order had been given to spare these cities from the continuing saturation bombing so the effects of the atomic bomb could be clearly seen. As Stimson would later argue in an open letter to Harper’s Magazine, entitled “The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb,” all four were active working parts of the Japanese war effort. In particular, “Hiroshima was the headquarters of the Japanese Army defending southern Japan and was a major military storage and assembly point,” he wrote. They would strike where it hurt the Japanese military the most.
On July 26, Churchill and Truman issued the Potsdam Declaration. At Los Alamos, people listened to the ominous terms of the ultimatum being broadcast on the radio. It called for the Japanese government to proclaim “unconditional surrender” of all their armed forces and to provide proper and adequate assurances of their good faith, and it warned that the alternative was “prompt and utter destruction.” Two days later, the premier of Japan, Baron Kantaro Suzuki, rejected the Potsdam Declaration and called it “unworthy of public notice.”
After that, Dorothy left her kitchen radio on all the time. She did not know when or where it was going to happen, but like everyone at Los Alamos, she sensed something was going to happen soon. Security remained very tight, and MPs patrolled outside the office. G-2 returned several times to question her about the suspicious phone call on the day of the test shot, but she stuck to her story. Incredibly, life returned to normal. The Daily Bulletin was full of the usual scolding notices—unless customers return their empty bottles immediately, there will be an inadequate supply of Coca-Cola for sale; unless crutches and canes are returned to the hospital ASAP, a shortage will ensue—and banal news about Scout hikes, picnics, and Saturday night dances. There was no mention of Trinity, the bomb, or the impending assault. Life took on a slightly unreal quality. “We just followed the same routine, taking care of the children and playing cards with our friends,” said Marge Schreiber. The war might continue for many months, or it might end in an hour. One friend who could not stand the interminable anxiety complained that the problem with life on the Hill was that “it was so daily,” recalled Shreiber: “I always thought that pretty much summed it up.”
They were all supposed to go on about their business while they waited to see if the Japanese would surrender, knowing all the while that the deadliest weapon in the world’s history was waiting in the wings on some small Pacific island, only striking distance away. Of course, it was forbidden to talk about the bomb, but people did anyway. A contingent of sixty to seventy people from Los Alamos had been assigned the task of assembling the bomb components and preparing Little Boy for airlift. They had been sent to Tinian, a B-29 base in the Mariana Islands that was the staging area for the bomb operation. The post grapevine, efficient as ever, buzzed with the names of the men who had left the mesa: Deke Parsons, Luis Alvarez, Phil Morrison, Harold Agnew, Bob Serber, Bill Penney, and Norman Ramsey, among many others.
Work in the laboratory had slowed considerably, and those left behind had little to do but document what they had done and debate the pros and cons of using the weapon. Wouldn’t it be better if the Japanese were invited to watch a demonstration on an uninhabited island? But what display could convince such an ancient, honor-bound people to agree to the Allied demand for unconditional surrender? On the other hand, wasn’t it better to destroy one Japanese city if it served to save the lives of many more Americans, as well as Japanese, who would die in the invasion slaughter, which, in the absence of the atom bomb, was the only way to terminate the war?
Others, like Kist
iakowsky, felt the bomb was “no worse than the fire raids.” The Japanese had lost a hundred thousand civilians in just one night of the war, during the firebombing of Tokyo on March 9, 1945. More than a million people had been wounded in that demonstration of might, and yet the Japanese, with their ancient tradition of honor that made unconditional surrender unthinkable, had fought on. How many lives would have to be sacrificed in battle before the Japanese military leaders, who had attacked and sunk the U.S. Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor, were humbled? As proof of their defiance, on July 30, a Japanese submarine sank the Indianapolis on her way to the Philippines. It was the single greatest loss in the history of the U.S. Navy, but at the time, few people knew how close to disaster the country had really come—only four days earlier, the cruiser had delivered the uranium bomb to Tinian. The scientists argued the issue endlessly, with some insisting that they should take a moral stand like Szilard and Franck, while others took the view it was out of their hands, and that “the cobbler should stick to his last.” Dorothy heard enough of these discussions to know they could get pretty lively.
For Oppenheimer, who was intimately involved with the final preparations for the bomb delivery, it was not a happy time. In the days after the Trinity test, the momentum propelling the combat use of the bomb accelerated. At the same time, Oppenheimer was not immune to the inner turmoil afflicting many of the mesa scientists. He, too, dreaded the fearsome demonstration offeree to come. But at no time did he, or any of the presidents chief advisors—including Stimson, General Marshall, Groves, Bush, and Conant—recommend calling a halt to the operation. “After Trinity, there was no slowing down,” said Anne Wilson. “If anything, it speeded up. They were selecting targets for bombing. It was a very busy time. We even had some of the pilots come up to the Hill, maps were brought in, and there were discussions of the whole business.” One day, as they walked together to the Tech Area office, Wilson noticed that Oppie appeared “very distressed.” When she asked him about it, he just shook his head and said, “I just keep thinking about all those poor little people.”
On the morning of Monday, August 6, Dorothy received word “to bring a radio along to work.” She asked no questions, but brought her small radio from home, put it on her desk, and kept it turned on very low. “It was a typical New Mexico day of summer,” she recalled. “Sunshine of golden brilliance, sky bluer than paint….” At 11:00 A.M., there was a news flash from the White House, and Harry Truman’s voice came over the radio:
Sixteen hours ago an American airplane dropped one bomb on Hiroshima, an important Japanese Army base. That bomb had more power than 20,000 tons of T.N.T. It had more than two thousand times the blast power of the British “Grand Slam” which is the largest bomb ever yet used in the history of warfare….
It is an atomic bomb. It is a harnessing of the basic power of the universe. The force from which the sun draws its power has been loosed against those who brought war to the Far East.
The president explained that the Germans had been working feverishly on ways to add atomic energy to their other “engines of war,” with which they “hoped to enslave the world.” By pooling their knowledge and resources, the greatest American and British scientific brains were able to beat the Germans in “the race of discovery.” Employment in the bomb project, at several secret plants, during peak construction, numbered 125,000, and more than 65,000 were presently employed at the plants. His reference to “the many who had been working for two and a half years,” while “few knew what they have been producing,” was not lost on Dorothy. “We have spent two billion dollars on the greatest scientific gamble in history—and won,” he said. “The battle of the laboratories held fateful risks for us as well as the battles of the air, land and sea, and we have now won the battle of the laboratories as we have won the other battles.”
There was more. If the Japanese did not accept the terms of the Potsdam ultimatum, the president promised, “They may expect a rain of ruin from the air, the like of which has never been seen on this earth.” Dorothy sat and listened to his speech, scarcely breathing. She listened to all the radio broadcasts that followed, the announcers so excited they could hardly control their voices. Colonel Paul Tibbets, the boyish-looking air force officer she had allowed up to the Hill, had piloted the Enola Gay over Hiroshima, and the bomb had been dropped at 7:15 P.M. on August 5. While she had been eating dinner, the port city had been wiped out, and more than 100,000 Japanese were thought to have been instantly killed. It had been morning in Hiroshima, and they had awoken to death and destruction on a scale no one had ever seen before. Four square miles of the city had been disemboweled. A news bulletin interrupted to report that when Tibbets landed, he was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross for his daring strike on Hiroshima, for “carrying for the first time a bomb totally new to modern warfare.” He had safely turned his plane away from a “monstrous” column of smoke that had erupted from the ground while aerial shocks, like bursts of flak, rocked his plane…. Dorothy listened to report after report until she could not stand to listen anymore.
At noon, she made a beeline back to the house, where she knew Kevin would be returning from his summer job for lunch. They both worked only five minutes from home and usually ate together. She sat down and, struggling to appear calmer than she felt, faced him across the dining room table. She had never told him anything more than that the laboratory was connected to the war effort and he could never mention its existence or his visits there. “Keep your mouth shut,” she had told him a hundred times. Now at fourteen, he was tall and gangly, a boy in a man’s body, but old enough to be told the truth. The words came out in a rush: “Kevvy the President of the United States announced this morning to the whole world that the bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima was manufactured in the hills up in northern New Mexico.”
His eyes quickly met hers. For a moment, neither of them said anything. Then she spoke again, adding quietly, “That’s our bomb.”
A long silence followed between them. Then, as she recorded in her memoir, she was gripped by panic. No sooner had the words left her lips than she wanted to call them back, as “the realization of what she had said, she, conditioned for more than two years not to so much as whisper the name of Los Alamos.” Her hand shot across the table and caught his wrist. This time when she spoke, her voice was full of alarm: “But don’t tell anyone!”
It did not take long for Dorothy to realize that the secret was out. Her phone was ringing off the hook with friends and family demanding to know if this was the same “government project” she had been working for all along. Had she been up to the Los Alamos laboratory? Had she known from the beginning that they were building a bomb? Had she witnessed the Trinity test? How could she not have told anyone? So many people called with so many questions that she felt overwhelmed by it all.
The president’s announcement had lifted the veil on their mysterious encampment, and the army propaganda office was busy working overtime distributing a general history of the project, complete with quaint details of life behind barbed wire, to the press. The late editions of Mondays New Mexican ran front-page stories under the banner headlines: “LOS ALAMOS SECRET DISCLOSED BY TRUMAN; ATOMIC BOMBS [sic] DROP ON JAPAN.” The first line in the local story about the laboratory was: “Santa Fe learned officially today of a city of 6,000 in its own front yard.” Dorothy read with fascination as the classified bomb project that had been her life for the past twenty-seven months was demystified in a series of cold facts and statistics. Most of the reporting about the bomb’s development and test detonation was new to her, as was the great potential promised by the “Atomic Age” and the “tool to end wars.” Groves was heralded as the head of the atomic bomb project, and Oppenheimer credited with “achieving the implementation of atomic power for military purposes.”
It was a very strange and unsettling feeling to see the name “J. Robert Oppenheimer” staring out at her in inky black type in the newspaper. His name, his very presence in Santa Fe, ha
d been her most closely guarded secret for more than two years. And now the whole world knew. After being turned inward for so long, and trained to keep every detail of her work and association with the laboratory locked up inside her, it was stunning to have everything suddenly exposed to the light of day. It was as if the heavy door of secrecy that had shut behind her in the spring of 1943 had been thrown open, and she found herself surprised and confused to be the center of so much flattering attention. It had all worked out better than she had dared to believe when, those many months ago, she had signed on to work for Oppenheimer in hope and ignorance. She took great pride in the scientists’ achievement and, to a lesser degree, her own small part in the projects success. They had brought the war to an early end. It would all be over in a matter of days, as much as six months to a year earlier than expected, and they had saved the lives of innumerable American and British soldiers. “She was thrilled and proud about the whole thing,” said Kevin. “The local papers were full it. Just to think of all the people that might have been killed by the Japanese.”
Up on the Hill, one big party was in progress. The town was delirious, and there was dancing in the streets. There were even bigger, noisier parades than after Trinity, and children ran in and out of the apartment complexes beating pots and pans and applauding their suddenly famous fathers. Parsons, Alvarez, Agnew—the whole bomb crew—were on the way home and being hailed as conquering heroes. There was a big assembly that night at Fuller Lodge, and when Oppenheimer strode in, they all rose and applauded. As he stepped up to the podium, he clasped his hands above his head in triumph. But even in the midst of the euphoria, many of the scientists experienced a rising anguish, and the bilious aftertaste stayed with them. Frank Oppenheimer had been standing just outside his brothers office when the Hiroshima announcement came over the loudspeaker. “The first reaction was thank God it wasn’t a dud,” he recalled. “But before the whole sentence of the broadcast was finished one suddenly got this horror of all the people who had been killed. I don’t know why up to then we—I—hadn’t really thought of all those flattened people.” He had no doubt his brothers reaction was the same. “The image of all those people was really pretty awful.”
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