Anne never found out who had sent the roses.
RICHARD WAS AT LOS ALAMOS in May, and could not have escaped the growing tension and exhaustion among the scientists. General Groves pressed for a test of the Gadget before Truman's scheduled meeting with Stalin in mid-July; Robert hesitated, still wanting to make adjustments in the bomb design. Three months earlier, one of Air Force General Curtis Le May's B29 bombing raids on Tokyo had sent a storm of flames and gases that killed some 100,000 Japanese civilians. On Okinawa that spring there were just short of 50,000 American military casualties; kamikaze attacks alone killed more than 4,900 Americans. Japanese military and civilian casualties were reported to have been near 200,000. These obscene numbers splattered across the headlines of newspapers and on news programs nationwide. Americans were sick of war, sick of death, sick of the Japanese culture that seemed to prefer death over surrender. Robert finally agreed: they would test "the device" on July 17 in a desolate New Mexico desert site 239 miles south, in a valley called the Jornada del Muerto—Journey of the Dead. Robert named the test "Trinity." He would later say that he wasn't certain why he had chosen the name, recalling that it came from a Donne poem, "Batter my heart, three person'd God"—one he and Jean were likely to have shared. Could Robert remember her voice? Did he remember that she would have wanted nothing to do with what was about to happen?
KITTY RETURNED FROM HER PARENTS' home only weeks before the Trinity test. She collected seven-month-old Toni, healthy with big, sparkling baby smiles. Pat, seven months pregnant, was proud of the little girl, and yet relieved to turn her over to her mother. Kitty was obviously grateful, but managed to offend Pat by showering her with gifts, as if to pay for her help, until Pat had to ask her to stop.
ROBERT HAD ASKED FOR HIS brother to be with him for the first test, and General Groves obliged, bringing Frank out in May 1945 from the Oak Ridge, Tennessee facility where he had been working on extracting pure U235 (the uranium isotope that could sustain the fission chain reaction necessary for a bomb). Jackie and the children had not moved to Oak Ridge; Jackie could not stomach the people and politics of the South, especially segregation. As much as she wanted to be with her husband, she had stayed in Berkeley. In the summer of 1945, she and their two children came to Los Alamos for a visit. She was there when Kitty returned from her parents and resumed late afternoon cocktails. She included Jackie in the gathering upon her return. "It was known that we didn't get on too well," Jackie remembered, "and she seemed determined that we should be seen together . . . When I arrived, there was Kitty and just four or five other women—drinking companions—and we just sat there with little conversation, drinking. It was awful and I never went again."330 Jackie felt about Kitty much as she felt about the South, she simply couldn't take her.
AN ELECTRIC SUSPENSE HOVERED OVER Los Alamos that summer, an increasing feeling of anticipation. Most of the 5,000 residents did not know what was about to happen 239 miles to the south. The wives who did know weren't sure to whom they could talk freely; sometimes they seemed to be taking a breath between every syllable.
ON JULY 15, 1945, THE tension at the Trinity site was palpable. Most of the scientists had arrived; generals and VIPs began to fly into the Army Airfield nearby. In Santa Fe, Dorothy McKibbin got a phone call from a friend on the Hill, asking if she would like to join a small group that was planning an overnight camping trip to the Sandia Mountains, near Albuquerque. She understood immediately; the Sandias would offer the best view of Alamogordo and Trinity. She packed her gear.
Robert had made a pact with Kitty: if it worked, he would send her the prosaic message: "You can change the sheets." She gave him a four-leafed clover for luck.331
Scorpions and rattlesnakes, field mice and frogs populated the scrubby desert. A tall tower was ready, the Gadget in place for the 4:00 A.M. test. As darkness fell, the winds rose, then great flashes of lightning slashed the night sky and thunder echoed off the surrounding hills. The air seemed filled with portent. Frank would remember the frogs, how they seemed to migrate to a pond, and then filled the night with the sounds of wild copulating. He would remember, "The only living things around there [were] coming together."332 He joined his brother, lying outside the control bunker; they would see the thing through.
At Los Alamos in the first dark hours of that day, Jane Wilson, whose husband, Bob, was one of the first of the physicists to question the morality of the project, would remember, "the air seemed empty and bitter cold, although it was July." Those wives who knew kept vigil. Some watched from their porches.
A small group of wives gathered on Sawyer's Hill near the ski run, where the view to the south was wide. The pine trees stood black against a starless sky. Four o'clock came and went. They waited, scanning the sky, silent and afraid for their husbands at the test site. Jane would write: "Four thirty. The gray dawn rising in the east, and still no sign that the labor and the struggle of the past three years meant anything at all." They continued to wait.
At 5:30, Jane saw a "Blinding light like no other light one had ever seen. The trees, illuminated, leaping out at one. The mountains flashing into life." And then the slow, monstrous rumble that announced the birth of the atomic age.333
THE BROTHERS LAY FACE DOWN, 6.2 miles from ground zero, side by side, their eyes closed and arms covering heads. "But the light of the first flash penetrated and came up from the ground through one's lids," Frank said. Then there was the fireball, and very quickly "this unearthly hovering cloud. It was very bright, and very purple and very awesome . . . And all the time . . . the thunder of the blast was bouncing back and forth on the cliffs and hills."334 The brothers looked at each other and said simply, "It worked."335 This band of unlikely warriors in their jeans and porkpie hats, the men General Groves had called "the longhairs," had figured out how to unleash the fury of the universe. Bohr's question had an answer: It was big enough.
One of the generals rushed over to Groves and all but shouted, "The war is over." General Groves, solemn, answered: "Yes, after we drop two bombs on Japan."336
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NAT DISCOVERS THAT RUTH "SAW THE END WRITTEN LONG BEFORE MOST OF US KNEW EVEN THAT THE BEGINNING OF THE END HAD BEEN STARTED," ROBERT WANTS TO GO BACK TO CALIFORNIA FOR THE REST OF HIS DAYS, AND KITTY GLIMPSES THE HALLS OF POWER
On July 16, a few short hours after Richard Tolman witnessed the birth of the atomic age in the skies over New Mexico, Ruth arrived at her desk at the OSS for the last time. She had spent four years, one month, and twelve days in service to her country. That same afternoon Richard boarded an Army plane at Alamogordo Air Field bound for the nation's capital. With him was General Groves, his executive officer, Tom Farrell; James Conant, Vannevar Bush and Ernest Lawrence. The scientists, Conant wrote, were "still upset by what they had seen and could talk of little else, to the annoyance of Groves, whose thoughts were already grappling with the details of the 'upcoming climax' in Japan."337
When Richard arrived home, he was weary but excited, overwhelmed by what he had witnessed and eager to talk to his wife. Ruth understood the magnitude of the event described by their close friend Conant: "A cosmic phenomenon like an eclipse. The whole sky suddenly full of white light like the end of the world." Or Tom Farrell in his religious incantation of the detonation wave that had followed the flash as a "strong, sustained roar which warned of doomsday and made us feel that we puny things were blasphemous to dare tamper with the forces heretofore reserved to the Almighty."338
None of this could be revealed to the Tolmans' ubiquitous houseguests, who at that moment included Nat, just returned from three months in Germany with the Quartermaster's Corps, with a trove of new stories. Again at loose ends, she decided to set off, that first week of August, for California in a car in such poor repair that getting across the country was itself an adventure. Ruth reminded Nat to take notes about good places to spend the night; she was imagining her own imminent journey home.
Nat had chosen a fateful week in which to cross America.
On August 6, the question first asked in Berkeley in the summer of 1942—could an atomic bomb be delivered by an airplane?—was answered. The airplane was a Boeing B-29 Superfortress bomber named Enola Gay and its target was Hiroshima.
THE NEWS CAME OVER THE airwaves: The largest bomb ever used in the history of warfare had been dropped on a Japanese city. President Truman explained, "It is a harnessing of the basic power of the universe. The force from which the sun draws it power has been loosed against those who brought war to the Far East."339 Three days later, on August 9, another atomic bomb dropped from the bay of another Superfortress, obliterating Nagasaki.
ON SUNDAY, AUGUST 12, 1945, Nat wrote from Palos Verdes, California:
Ruth darling:
I was in the middle of Tennessee when I heard the exciting and awe-full news of the atomic bomb. It didn't take very great deduction to realize that Dicky's long absence must have been at the bomb testing site, especially when such familiar names as Conant, Oppenheimer, Bohr began to tumble from the newsprint. And I wondered whether the important occasion last week, when he dressed in his blue suit, had been to talk over our surrender ultimatum with the Sec. of War."340
Nat continued: "What an exciting life Dicky must have been living these past years!" She wanted details, especially whether, during the New Mexico test he had been his usual intent scientist self, or if "for one minute he relaxed and grinned and said, 'I hope the darned thing goes off.'"
Nat was close; most of the scientists at Trinity, including Robert and his brother, had said something like "it worked," followed soon after by a groundswell of doubt (Wilson would talk of the "terrible thing we made"). Now the job was done, and they were going to have to face the consequences of their success. Niels Bohr had warned them; it was the future use of the bomb that would trouble many of the men who had created it.
Nat had no qualms. She wrote: "Few people can have such a feeling of immediate contribution to the war's end. But it must be an anticlimax to you and to all those who have been engaged in this work and who saw the end written long before most of us knew even that the beginning of the end had been started."
Her letter burbled on, offering a glimpse of America in the last week of the war:
"And now surely you can come home. Even by the time you come, things will be so different. Gas will no longer be rationed, more traffic will be on the road, food will be easier, everything will have changed. I took careful notes as I went along, for your benefit—of food, gas, roads, mileage—but it is out of date already. But this will not be out of date—beware the housing problem. I was all right through Arkansas but didn't find a place to sleep west of that state. Every town seemed to be near an Army base or a large war construction of some kind, so the thousands of tourist cabins were filled long before I would be interested in stopping. . .
"I haven't driven these roads for ten years and therefore don't know how much of this change has resulted just from the war. All the tourist cabins, all the neon lights, all the beer joints, all the polluted and crowded West amazed and bewildered me. I came through to San Diego and the traffic in California was almost the most amazing part of the whole trip: the thousands of cars traveling fiercely over the highways at a minimum speed of 65. They seemed never to have heard of gas rationing, of tire shortage, of car shortage. I saw more fine cars, and saw more go whizzing past me, than in a year's driving in the East. California looked just like a fair ground filled with blue-uniformed sailors."
Nat ended the letter by sending her congratulations "On what you have done, both of you, in these years of crisis."
THREE DAYS LATER, JAPAN'S EMPEROR Hirohito broadcast an announcement to his "Good and Loyal Subjects" that he had ordered his Imperial Forces to surrender. General Groves' mission had been accomplished.
PHYSICISTS PHIL MORRISON AND BOB Serber had gone to Tinian Island in the Pacific to help prepare the bombs destined for Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In the aftermath, they were sent into the ravaged cities. The two returned to Los Alamos, stunned: the horror had begun to sink in. Of Hiroshima, Morrison said, "One bomber and one bomb had, in the time it takes a rifle bullet to cross the city, turned a city of three hundred thousand into a burning pyre." Jean Bacher, after listening to Morrison, said she finally understood it all—and wrote that she "shook all night—it never leaves you."341
As for Robert, though he would consistently defend the use of the bombs against Japan, he now seemed to express himself in terms of sorrow and terror. He would recall that after Trinity, a few people laughed, a few cried, most were silent, and that he had remembered the line from the Bhagavad Gita: "I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds." After Hiroshima and Nagasaki, he would speak of scientists having blood on their hands, of knowing sin, of being guilty of a complicated hubris in their creation of a new world. The gods were battering his heart. When Robert seemed dangerously close to a breaking point, physicists Bob Bacher and I. I. Rabi calmed him.
Kitty and Robert took off for Perro Caliente for a week, his first break in almost three years. Fall was approaching and the ranch offered the illusion of being removed from the madness. The two took long rides through the woods and into meadows scattered lavishly with penstemon and blue gilla and yarrow, through all the places that had given him pleasure and peace before the war. And for much of the time he sat on the porch and answered some of the letters that had poured in from old friends and from universities offering him faculty positions.
On August 7, Haakon Chevalier wrote from the San Francisco area, "Dear Opje, You are probably the most famous man in the world today . . . we are very proud of you." He continued in a more solemn tone: "There is a weight in such a venture which few men in history have had to bear. I know that with your love of men, it is no light thing to have had a part, and a great part, in a diabolical contrivance for destroying them. But in the possibilities of death are also the possibilities of life, and these I know have been uppermost in your mind . . . You have made history. We are happy for you."342 Robert answered obliquely, making excuses for not writing, speaking of the strain and fatigue of the last years, avoiding mention of the bomb, or of the fact that he had spoken Chevalier's name to military security.
Robert wrote letters to those institutions that approached him, sending his regrets to some because, as he would explain to Conant at Harvard, "I know now . . . that I would like to go back to California for the rest of my days; that I have a sense of belonging there."343 In a long letter responding to Charlie Lauritsen at Caltech, he wrote at length about his own requirements, then reminded him that he had twice proposed getting Rabi to Caltech. Robert pushed: "Has this fallen through? If so, is it lack of money, is it reluctance to add another Jew to the faculty?" Caltech's president had his doubts about Robert as well, reminding Richard Tolman that he could get two younger men for the price of one Oppenheimer, and that Caltech already had enough Jews on the faculty.344 (The war, the Holocaust, the number of Jewish physicists working on the atom bomb, had not changed attitudes about quotas for Jews in American universities.)
Robert's first choice was Berkeley, the place he felt most at home. But he knew that some there had reservations about him, and held his political views against him. Still, Ernest Lawrence wanted Robert. In the end, both Berkeley and Caltech offered Robert everything he asked; he would return to Caltech and requested an extended leave of absence from Berkeley.
When Robert and Kitty returned to Los Alamos from Perro Caliente, Kitty told Jean Bacher that Robert was in such a state that she didn't know how she could stand it.345 Robert left almost immediately for Washington for a two-week trip; there he would talk to Ruth and Richard about the struggle for control of nuclear arms that—as Neils Bohr had predicted—had already begun. Some Los Alamos scientists wanted to outlaw atomic weapons; another group, led by Edward Teller, was pushing to create thermonuclear "super" bombs, massively more destructive than those dropped on Japan. The majority of the Manhattan Project scientists believed the answer was in international co
ntrols and in an open exchange of information with all countries, including the Soviet Union—in effect, giving up any advantage the U.S. monopoly might offer in exchange for a chance to prevent an arms race. Other countries would, the scientists knew, build their own atom bombs. It was only a matter of time.
SUDDENLY ROBERT WAS CATAPULTED INTO a new and very public role. The American press presented him as a hero, the "Father of the Atomic Bomb," even as Robert told the American Philosophical Society that, "We have made a thing, a most terrible weapon that has altered abruptly and profoundly the nature of the world . . . an evil thing."346
What Robert didn't yet know was that FBI director J. Edgar Hoover had decided he still warranted being watched. Hoover alerted his agents that Robert obviously would be valuable to the Soviets.
THE TOLMANS RETURNED TO PASADENA, Frank and Jackie to Berkeley with the Serbers, Val and Ruth Benedict to the apartment on Central Park West in New York City, with trips to Val's house in Pasadena. Most of the senior scientists— after three remarkable years in the mountains together—went back to their old schools. Robert, Kitty and the children headed first for Pasadena, then north to Berkeley. Rabi ended up at Columbia, not Caltech. Anne Wilson went home to Washington, D.C.
In November of 1945, Robert and Kitty and the children settled back into One Eagle Hill, above the bay in Berkeley. Robert had agreed to return to Caltech to teach one course a term, which meant he again would be staying at the Tolmans' guesthouse once a month. Although he was living in Berkeley, he continued to put off a decision about teaching there. During the war he had come to know and admire such scientist-statesmen as Conant and Bush. Now, in his frequent trips to Washington as a scientific advisor, he was discovering the exhilaration of shaping government policy. Robert had begun to believe that his only chance for absolution from what he would describe as "the scientists' sin of pride" came with the power to influence.347 Kitty was more than ready to become his executive officer.
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