109 East Palace

by Jennet Conant

  Otto Frisch was working in the Tech Area when he heard the sound of yelling and running feet. “Somebody opened my door and shouted, ‘Hiroshima has been destroyed.’” Years later, he still vividly remembered the moment and “the feeling of unease, indeed nausea” when he saw how many of his friends were “rushing to the telephone to book tables at the La Fonda hotel in Santa Fe, in order to celebrate.”

  But Little Boy did not end the war. The great fireball that incinerated the city of Hiroshima had not brought a quick capitulation. The U.S. Army prepared for a second raid, and millions of leaflets were dropped over Japan warning them what lay in store and urging them to petition their Emperor to sue for peace. Two days later Russia declared war on Japan. Robert Patterson, under secretary of war, sent a telegram “To the Men and Women of the Manhattan District,” lauding them for their help in developing “the most devastating military weapon that any country has ever been able to turn against its enemy.” It went on to remind them “to keep the secrets you have kept so well. The need for security and continued effort is fully as great now as it ever was.”

  On Thursday, August 9, the White House announced that another bomb, Fat Man, had been dropped on Nagasaki. To maximize the shock effect, it was delivered as soon after the first as possible. But the weather was not favorable over Japan, and the second mission did not go as smoothly. For many hours there was no word of the fate of the plane, the Bock’s Car, and its crew. Although it was a major seaport that contained several large industrial plants, Nagasaki had not been the intended target. The primary target was the large arsenal at Kokura on the northern coast of Kyushu. But because of poor visibility, Major Charles Sweeney, the pilot of Bock’s Car, was forced to keep circling, burning up fuel reserves and attracting the attention of Japanese fighter planes. Finally, he made a desperate run for Nagasaki. At the last minute a hole opened in the cloud cover, and he unloaded Fat Man, missing his target by two miles. It landed in a valley, in the middle of an industrial area, and a fiery yellow ball erupted, followed by a massive black mushroom cloud that billowed up to 20,000 feet.

  Later that same day, President Truman sent a cable to the Hill with his thanks from “a grateful nation.” At Los Alamos, there was nothing they could do but pray the Japanese military leaders would come to their senses and realize the utter hopelessness of their position. The scientists were in for yet another agonizing wait. They had lost control of their creation, and as the president had foretold, the force of the sun was being “loosed” on the world. “One of the things we learned was that once a machinery like Los Alamos is started, it takes on a life of its own,” said Rose Bethe. “We could no more have stopped it than we could have stopped a boulder from rolling downhill.”

  Two bombs proved sufficient. Fat Man, as predicted, was more powerful than Little Boy, with a yield of roughly 22 kilotons, yet did less damage, landing wide of the target and obliterating approximately a third of the city and half as many civilians. But it was enough to shock the Japanese into surrender. Twelve hours later, Nagasaki was still engulfed in flames. At 7:00 A.M. August 10, Tokyo time, Japan sent a cable to its minister in Switzerland agreeing to the Potsdam terms, but insisting on one condition—that Emperor Hirohito be allowed to retain his sovereignty. While Suzuki awaited an official response, a rogue faction of the military, unable to accept the Emperor’s shameful capitulation, attempted a coup, and it was quashed. After a day of confusion and wild speculation, during which the president negotiated the terms with the British, Chinese, and Russians, a compromise was struck: the Supreme Allied Military Commander, in all probability General Douglas Mac Arthur, would rule Japan through the authority of the Emperor. At noon on August 15, the Emperor ended his imperial silence and gave an unprecedented radio broadcast informing the Japanese public that he had no choice but to “order the acceptance of the provisions of the Joint Declaration of the Powers,” and blaming “a new and most cruel bomb.”

  Los Alamos residents reacted with a mixture of relief and sorrow, delight and profound distress. Their emotions were in such a tumultuous state it was hard to know how to feel or act. Only the GIs seemed to celebrate with total abandon, piling en masse onto army trucks and jeeps and riding around cheering wildly. George Kistiakowsky drunkenly saluted the long-awaited end of the war by firing off twenty-one boxes of Composition B in an empty field. Other celebrations followed, but there were fewer of them, and they were more subdued. There was something unseemly, almost “ghoulish,” as Frisch put it, “about celebrating the sudden death of so many people, even if they were ‘enemies.’”

  The conviction that Japan had been very far from surrender had maintained the emotional cohesion of the laboratory staff up to that point and had enabled most of them to rationalize the bombing of Hiroshima. But that same belief did not apply to Nagasaki. None of them could escape the thought that Nagasaki had served to prove beyond a question of a doubt that the new plutonium weapon was superior, automatically rendering the first bomb obsolete and putting the world on notice. It had been a political and strategic exercise of hideous proportions. “Few of us could see any moral reason for dropping a second bomb,” admitted Frisch. “Most of us thought the Japanese would have surrendered in a few days anyhow.”

  Oppenheimer attended the round of victory dinners, but recalled that as he left one gathering, he found one of his best group leaders vomiting in the bushes and told himself, “The reaction has begun.” Bob Wilson, who looked much younger than his thirty years, was, by his own admission, “ill, just sick”—he was so overwhelmed by what had happened. At the start of the project, he had been caught up in the patriotic fever of the war effort and had thrown himself into the weapons work, but now he felt only revulsion at his part in the holocaust. His wife, Jane, returned from a trip to San Francisco to find him “very depressed.” V-J Day, when it finally came, could not have differed more from V-E Day, when they had hosted a victory bash that ended with his merrily “throwing garbage cans around.” This time, she said, “We didn’t have a party.”

  They had known a second strike was a possibility, but it had still caught many of them by surprise. “It took me back. It just seemed like too much,” said Shirley Barnett. “The reasons for using the first bomb were valid. I didn’t have any doubts about it. But I did feel bad about Nagasaki. The biggest sadness of my life, and that of many others, was the dropping of the second bomb.”

  For many, the excitement that the war was over was supplanted by horror at what they had wrought. Oppenheimer organized a party of scientists to go to Japan and study the devastation caused by the bomb’s fireball—the gutted rail stations, bridges, and buildings, the burnt and blackened radius of the heat storm, and the radioactivity. It was a macabre task, but Serber, Bill Penney, and the two post doctors, Henry Barnett and Jim Nolan, among a handful of others, agreed to go and document the carnage. They started in Nagasaki, where Serber recorded his first impression: “Everything flattened and burnt over in the residential and business area.” He remembered following the line of charred telephone poles out beyond two miles from ground zero. They picked among the wreckage, measuring the pressure it took to squash a five-gallon gas can and, based on how things were blown out, calculating the wind velocity behind the blast front, and measuring the flash burns on the walls of the Hiroshima post office building to estimate the size of the fireball. “The ruins were hard enough to endure, but the really harrowing experience was a visit to the Nagasaki hospital with Henry,” Serber recalled. “This was five weeks after the bombing and the patients were mostly suffering from flash burn or radiation sickness.”

  As the horrifying statistics began to sink in—at Hiroshima alone, 100,000 were dead, 130,000 wounded, and as many as 8,000 missing—along with more information about the lingering effects of radiation, the soul-searching began. This was not the dawn of a better world. The magnitude of the tragedy that had befallen Hiroshima and Nagasaki was beyond their comprehension. They thought of themselves as physicists, quiet and
reflective intellectuals, and when they read the bombings described in a single issue of The New York Times as “mass murder,” “sheer terrorism,” and a “stain upon our national life,” they felt like pariahs. The Vatican registered its disapproval of the new weapon and harkened back to Leonardo da Vinci, who had suppressed his invention of the original submarine because of the harm it might cause. As Laura Fermi observed, in some ways the Los Alamos scientists had not foreseen the full consequences of their work. “Helped by the physical separation of Los Alamos from the world, they worked in certain isolation,” she wrote. “Perhaps they were not emotionally prepared for the absence of a time interval between scientific completion and the actual use of their discovery. I don’t believe they had visualized a destruction whose equivalent in tons of TNT they had calculated with utmost accuracy.” Wives watched in bewilderment as their dedicated husbands suddenly became riddled with guilt and remorse. Where they had once focused all their attention on their research, they now talked of nothing but the bomb. To Laura Fermi, it seemed that “they assumed for themselves the responsibility for Hiroshima and Nagasaki, for the evils that atomic power might cause anywhere, at any time.”

  Not all the physicists felt penitent. Alvarez, who had flown on the Hiroshima mission, returned from Tinian flush with victory only to find his colleagues mired in gloom. “Many of my friends felt responsible for killing Japanese civilians, and it upset them terribly,” he recalled. “I could muster very little sympathy for their point of view; few of them had any direct experience with war or the people who had to fight it.” He seriously doubted any technical demonstration would have convinced the Japanese high command the war was lost. Right to the end, the Japanese were trying to negotiate for the continued authority of the Emperor and, short of that, were determined to fight to the finish for the honor of their homeland. By that point in time, most Americans were hell-bent on unconditional surrender and considered Hirohito “a master war criminal who deserved to be hanged.” In such a bloodthirsty atmosphere, Alvarez noted, “Qualifying our demand for unconditional surrender was politically impossible.” Alvarez shared his fellow scientists’ regret over the loss of life on both sides, but neither their moral queasiness nor their second thoughts at the dropping of the two bombs that had brought the conflict to a swift conclusion. Among the smoldering ruins of Hiroshima, “almost directly under the point of explosion,” he noted with grim satisfaction, was the Mitsubishi factory that “had made the torpedoes that devastated Pearl Harbor.”

  Conant remained committed to the idea that the surprise attack was necessary not only to shorten the war but because it was the only way to alert the world to the need for international control of such an indiscriminate and barbaric weapon. This belief, which became his postwar credo, formed the underlying argument of the influential open letter, “The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb,” which was orchestrated by Conant, drafted with his supervision by McGeorge Bundy, and which ultimately appeared on the cover of Harper’s magazine in February 1947 under the name of the venerable former secretary of war Henry Stimson. Conceived by Conant as an authoritative defense of the bombing on military grounds—and justification of the human cost in the face of growing public doubts stirred, in part, by John Hersey’s moving report on the victims of the bomb in the New Yorker—the Stimson article strove to define the lesson of Hiroshima for history. Solemnly maintaining that the use of the bomb was the only way to end the war and save “over a million” American lives, the article concludes, “No man, in our position, and subject to our responsibilities, holding in his hands a weapon of such possibility for accomplishing this purpose and saving those lives, could have failed to use it and afterwards looked his countrymen in the face.”

  Dorothy, like almost every mother of a son, had wanted them to do whatever was necessary to bring American boys safely home. She had too many friends and relatives with sons, husbands, and brothers overseas to think otherwise. “They wouldn’t have hit Nagasaki unless the Japanese ruler had been so stubborn about it,” she said later. “They hadn’t wanted to do it.” For her part, she felt no guilt, only immense gratitude that the war was finally over.

  There were signs that the years of waging war had worked a change on Oppenheimer. After the surrender, he seemed overcome by weariness. In mid-August, he gave an interview in which he admitted to a local reporter that he felt “greatly relieved” after the Trinity test assured that the laboratory had accomplished its mission. “It has been an extremely tight and difficult program,” he said, “and I was aware of the many possibilities that one of the integral parts would not work out.” He made no apologies for his creation, saying, “We were at war and it was necessary and right for us to make bombs.” He even sounded a hopeful note, explaining that the peacetime possibilities of atomic power could be of lasting benefit. “If our discovery is wisely used politically, it may help to reduce the chances of future war. This is a matter for the statesmen—the statesmen supported by the peoples of the world.”

  Oppenheimer was no longer the same quiet, gentle physicist she had first met in the lobby of La Fonda, who talked to her of poetry, the mysteries of life, and unlocking the secrets of nature. He was now the “Father of the Atomic Bomb,” the most brilliant of the Manhattan Project’s brilliant men. He had become the leader his country needed him to be; he had made history and was a national hero. His life had changed completely and irrevocably. These were dangerous times, and he was being drawn onto the world’s stage. She knew he longed to get away to his ranch in the upper Pecos Valley for a few days of rest and solitary reflection. But he was expected back in Washington, where he would present the Scientific Panel’s report on postwar planning to the secretary of war. “He had done his job,” she said. “They had done what they had started out to do. But he smoked constantly, constantly, constantly.”

  On his return from Washington, Oppenheimer headed straight for Perro Caliente, and his first holiday in almost three years. Taking stock over the next few days, he took the time to answer the mountain of congratulatory letters, including one from his old teacher Herbert Smith. In his fond reply, Oppenheimer gave voice to his own doubts about the days ahead. “It seemed appropriate, & very sweet, that your good note should reach me on the Pecos,” he wrote, “like so many of the beautiful things of which I first learned from you, the love of it grows with the years.”

  Your words were good to have. 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. Thus the good which this work has perhaps contributed to make in the ending of the war looms very large to us, because it is there for sure.

  NINETEEN

  By Our Works We Are Committed

  AFTER HIROSHIMA, the army relaxed the strict security governing life on the post. Once freed from General Groves’ repressive rule, the scientists and their wives descended en masse on the tiny town, crowding the locale cafés, the Paris Theater, and Pasatiempo, the popular dance hall on Agua Fria Street. They were finally at liberty to come and go from their barbed-wire compound, and a recent edition of the Daily Bulletin had instructed them that they were even permitted to say they lived at Los Alamos. When they went down to Santa Fe, they found themselves the object of intense curiosity and were treated like local celebrities. People pointed and stared at the scientists as they stood in line at the telegraph office waiting send off dozens of messages to friends and family back home informing them at last of their whereabouts and what they had been doing for the past two years.

  Dorothy’s office was mobbed from morning to night with Santa Feans eager to know more about the “hidden city” that had sprung up outside of town, somewhere beyond the sleepy villages and pine-stippled ridges. How close could they get to the reservation by car? How much could be seen from the fences? Could she give them day passes to get by the guard station? Could she, by any chance, arrange a tour? At the end of on
e particularly hectic day, Mrs. Martha Field, the owner of the building at 109 East Palace, which Oppenheimer had rented under an assumed name, came roaring in the back door full of righteous indignation. “So that’s what you’ve been doing,” she said, confronting Dorothy and demanding a full explanation of what had been going on for two years on under her own roof.

  There was such a tremendous demand for information and access to the site that Dorothy and her small staff were deluged. Los Alamos had been the best-kept secret of the war, and it was immediately apparent that the project leaders had woefully underestimated the impact its sudden revelation would have on the public. In the days afterward, the army hastened to get its press operation up to speed, and on August 12, 1945, The Smyth Report, a comprehensive overview of the Manhattan Project, which had been written in advance by Henry DeWolf Smyth, chairman of the Princeton physics department, was released to the press and sold in book form. The first copies sold out in Santa Fe in one day. But The Smyth Report, far from satisfying the desire for information, only seemed to pique people’s curiosity further. The number of inquiries increased exponentially, and the chaos at 109 in the weeks after the war ended was almost enough to make Dorothy miss the days when G-2 chased nosey strangers down the street.