A Scientific Advisory Panel to the Interim Committee was also created, composed of Compton, Lawrence, Oppenheimer, and Fermi, the first three chosen because they were directors of the Chicago, Berkeley, and Los Alamos laboratories; Fermi, because of his unrivaled knowledge of nuclear physics. The Scientific Advisory Panel reflected policy makers’ desire for expert advice, but it was also an attempt to preempt discontent among scientists if decisions were made about how to use the bomb without consulting those who had made it.
Somewhat like Szilard, Oppenheimer, after much soul-searching, had concluded that the bomb he and others at Los Alamos were making had to be used because that was the only way to awaken the world to the necessity of abolishing war altogether. No demonstration—even if it was possible under wartime conditions, which he doubted—could take the place of actual combat use, with its horrible and sobering results. Moreover, Oppenheimer thought it would be very difficult if not impossible to get political action on international control unless the bomb’s immensely destructive power deeply penetrated the popular mind. “My own view,” he asserted later, “is that the development of atomic weapons can make the problem more hopeful because it intensifies the urgency of our hopes—in frank words, because we are scared.” 17 He hoped that a military demonstration of the bomb would compel a general recognition that pre-atomic age calculations had to give way to new realities.
Oppenheimer privately worried to Szilard, however, that Washington officials had inadequately pondered these sobering new realities. Oppenheimer’s worry intensified Szilard’s own fears. Referring to the prospects of a “superbomb” infinitely more powerful even than an atomic bomb, he asked Oppenheimer “what men like Stimson and Wallace would think if they were fully advised of the turn which the technical development can be expected to take within a few years.”
Using the bomb did not necessarily mean using it on a civilian target. Szilard knew, however, that he faced an uphill battle persuading Oppenheimer to oppose dropping the bomb on a Japanese city. “I expect that you who have been so strenuously working at [Los Alamos] on getting these devices ready will naturally lean towards wanting that they should be used,” he told him. 18 In this, Szilard was perceptive. Work on the atomic bomb had begun in the spring of 1939 out of fear that the Nazis were building one of their own, but the surrender of Germany in the spring of 1945 brought the resignation of only two scientists at Los Alamos. If others thought of leaving—or debating use of the bomb—a meeting that Oppenheimer called a few days after Germany’s surrender stopped them in their tracks. Oppenheimer told them they should finish their task and leave the politics to policy makers in Washington. “He was very uncompromising and very sharp,” remembered one who attended the meeting. “He indicated that he would not tolerate that kind of discussion and he implicitly invited those who felt that way to get out.” 19 No one else left.
The project had long ago assumed a momentum and a life of its own. It had become a monumental scientific and engineering endeavor, involving prodigious effort and expense and labor. It was now a hurtling train moving forward—like the Pacific War itself—with awesome, almost unstoppable force. Most scientists were too involved in their work and too committed to achieving their goal to stop and reflect. “Most people just didn’t think too much about what would happen,” recalled a physicist on the Hill that spring—“No, that was somebody else’s problem.” 20 What had begun as a fearful race with Nazi Germany had become an end in itself. “I don’t think there was any time where we worked harder at the speed-up than in the period after the German surrender and the actual combat use of the bomb,” Oppenheimer recalled after the war. 21
Ethical and moral concerns had been eclipsed by their emotional and psychological investment and the intensity they brought to problem solving. The physics existed; it simply waited to be revealed. They believed the bomb was going to be built by someone, and they wanted it to be them. The intensity of collaborative work with extraordinarily gifted people also had enormous appeal. That camaraderie, shared in the exploration of an arcane and forbidden realm, provided a rare sense of intimacy, a sense of transcendence that combined strong creative satisfaction with feelings of individual power—how many people could resist that? And like most Americans in 1945, they found it hard to empathize with the fate of a people whose soldiers had committed atrocities against Americans and who were so physically and culturally different. There was not a single Asian American among the Manhattan Project staff, and it was easy for the scientists to think of the Japanese as “the other.” There was some private debate about the morality of dropping the bomb on a city, but most felt it was no worse than the fire raids then devastating Japan and that it was justified if it ended the war. In addition, most scientists believed—or wanted to believe—that once this horrible weapon was used, there could never be another war. This made the idea of using the bomb to kill large numbers of civilians emotionally easier for those who were building it.
Szilard was determined to do all he could to prevent this. On May twenty-eighth, he and two fellow scientists that he persuaded to come along traveled to South Carolina to see James Byrnes, who was now secretary of state designate. Szilard was directed there by the president’s appointments secretary after an unsuccessful attempt to speak personally with Truman. Szilard and his two companions traveled by train to Spartanburg, a small town nestled in the piney foothills of western South Carolina, and walked from the red brick railroad station to Byrnes’s house nearby.
The meeting between Szilard and Byrnes echoed the one between Bohr and Churchill the year before. It was a tense, unsatisfactory exchange between different men with different assumptions and perspectives. A purse-lipped man with a wiry frame, beaklike nose, and sharp eyes that peered at others with steely geniality, Byrnes was a savvy politician thoroughly schooled in the practicalities of power. He had grown up in the 1880s, when the southern up-country still had a tough frontier ethos. Byrnes was brought up to believe that when you fought, you fought with everything you had. He had little patience, or sympathy, for the moral arguments of a physicist with a foreign accent, though he concealed his lack of interest beneath the mask of amiability that politicians always have on call. 22
Szilard gave the secretary of state designate a copy of the memo he had prepared for Roosevelt shortly before the president’s death. Even before Byrnes got halfway through the memo, Szilard started to warn him against dropping the bomb on Japan as a way to impress Russia. Byrnes replied that demonstrating the bomb would make Russia more manageable in Europe. “You come from Hungary,” he said—“you would not want Russia to stay in Hungary indefinitely.” 23 But Szilard did not share Byrnes’s assumption that the bomb would make Russia more manageable and he countered that the “interests of peace might best be served and an arms race avoided by not using the bomb against Japan, keeping it secret, and letting the Russians think that our work on it had not succeeded.” 24 Byrnes was appalled and incredulous. The nation had spent more than $2 billion on the bomb’s development, he said—Congress would demand to see results. As he had told FDR shortly before the president’s death, the administration might well avoid embarrassment during the war if the bomb remained in doubt, but afterward, “If the project proves a failure, it will then be subjected to relentless investigation and criticism.” 25
Szilard left Spartanburg acutely frustrated. How could he communicate with politicians insensitive to the bomb’s revolutionary power and implications? “I thought to myself,” he later wrote, “how much better off the world might be had I been born in America and become influential in American politics, and had Byrnes been born in Hungary and studied physics. In all probability there would have been no atomic bomb, and no danger of an arms race between America and Russia.” Szilard was convinced that Byrnes, and by implication President Truman, were inclined toward a shortsighted policy that would make a postwar atomic arms race inevitable. 26
On the way back to Chicago, Szilard stopped in Washington to se
e Oppenheimer, who was in the capital for an upcoming meeting of the Interim Committee. Szilard told Oppenheimer about his unsuccessful meeting with Byrnes and stressed how important it was to persuade policy makers to inform the Russians about the bomb before it was used against Japan. “Don’t you think if we tell the Russians what we intend to do and then use the bomb in Japan, the Russians will understand it?” Oppenheimer asked. “They’ll understand it only too well,” Szilard answered. 27
Three days after the Spartanburg meeting, on May 31, 1945, the Interim Committee and its Scientific Advisory Panel met in Stimson’s Pentagon office to work out a recommendation for President Truman on the use of the atomic bomb. Nazi Germany had surrendered only three weeks earlier. Fighting for Okinawa had entered its bloodiest phase. Japan’s militarists seemed unwavering in their determination to fight to the finish. It would be another seven weeks before the first atomic bomb would be tested.
In preparation for the meeting, Arthur Compton drafted a memorandum for the other participants. In it, he stressed that the use of the atomic bomb on Japan was “more a political than a military question because it introduces the question of mass slaughter, really for the first time in history. Essentially, the question of the use to be made of the new weapon carries much more serious implications than the introduction of poison gas.” He called the question of the bomb’s use “first in point of urgency.” “This whole question,” Compton wrote skeptically, “may well have received the broad study it demands. I merely mention it as one of the urgent problems that have bothered our men because of its many ramifications and humanitarian implications.” 28
Those gathered in Stimson’s office that morning shared two unstated assumptions: that the atomic bomb would have a decisive impact on Japan’s leaders; and that the American public, if they knew of its existence, would demand that it be used to save the lives of American servicemen. The expenditure of billions of dollars; mounting U.S. casualties in the face of tenacious Japanese resistance; the bomb’s expected salutary effect on postwar relations with the Soviet Union—all these factors bolstered a predisposition toward use. “Throughout the morning’s discussion,” Compton later wrote, “it seemed to be a foregone conclusion that the bomb would be used. It was regarding only the details of strategy and tactics that differing views were expressed.” 29
NINE PHYSICISTS
Leo Szilard (1898–1964), Hungarian-born American physicist who helped initiate the Manhattan Project in 1939 yet vigorously opposed dropping the atomic bomb on Japan’s cities in the summer of 1945. After the war, he became an ardent promoter of international control of nuclear weapons. (Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, courtesy AIP Emilio Segrè Visual Archives)
Enrico Fermi (1901–1954), Italian-born American physicist who conducted early neutron experiments and directed the first controlled nuclear chain reaction in December 1942. He reluctantly supported use of the atomic bomb against Japan and development of the superbomb after the war. (AIP Emilio Segrè Visual Archives, Segrè Collection)
I. I. Rabi (1898–1988), American physicist who consulted at Los Alamos during the war, where he acted as an adviser and consultant to his close friend, Robert Oppenheimer. He served in many government advisory posts after the war and vigorously defended Oppenheimer against charges of being a security risk. (© AP/Wide World Photos)
Niels Bohr (1885–1962), Danish theoretical physicist whose concern about the terrifying prospects for humanity posed by atomic weapons led him to lobby British prime minister Winston Churchill and American president Franklin Roosevelt during the war in favor of international control. He was unsuccessful. (National Archives and Records Administration, courtesy AIP Emilio Segrè Visual Archives)
Edward Teller (1908–2003), Hungarian-born American physicist who helped convince the U.S. government to build an atomic bomb and later pushed for development of the superbomb. A staunch anticommunist, he sought American nuclear superiority over the Soviet Union during the Cold War. (© CORBIS)
Ernest Lawrence (1901–1958), American experimental physicist who invented the first high-energy particle accelerator, the cyclotron, and founded the Berkeley and Livermore National Laboratories. An early advocate of government support for atomic research in 1941, he opposed development of the superbomb immediately after the war but later changed his mind. (Ernest Orlando Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, courtesy AIP Emilio Segrè Visual Archives)
Arthur Compton (1892–1962), American physicist who chaired the governmental advisory committee in 1941 that assessed fission’s military potential. He later directed the Metallurgical Laboratory at the University of Chicago, where scientists researched plutonium and the nuclear chain reaction. He abandoned weapons work after the war. (AIP Emilio Segrè Visual Archives, W. F Meggers Gallery of Nobel Laureates)
Robert Oppenheimer (1904–1967), American theoretical physicist who led development of the atomic bomb as director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory from 1943–1945. After the war, he sought to resolve the political and moral problems arising from nuclear weapons but fell victim to an anticommunist witch-hunt. (AIP Emilio Segrè Visual Archives)
Hans Bethe (1906–2005), German-born American physicist who led the Theoretical Division at Los Alamos during the war and reluctantly participated in development of the superbomb after the war. He later became a leading critic of the nuclear arms race and the policy of nuclear superiority championed by Edward Teller. (© CORBIS)
THE NETWORK
Niels Bohr (second from left) stood at the center of a close-knit network of European and American physicists in the 1920s and 1930s. Here he meets with younger colleagues, including Edward Teller (second from right) and Otto Frisch (far right). (AIP Emilio Segrè Visual Archives, Wheeler Collection)
Robert Oppenheimer (wearing hat) and I. I. Rabi (holding sheet), two American postgraduates in Zurich, summer 1930, with Wolfgang Pauli (far right). In Europe, Oppenheimer and Rabi learned the latest physics, witnessed the rise of Nazism, and watched war clouds gather over the Continent. (AIP Emilio Segrè Visual Archives)
Robert Oppenheimer and Ernest Lawrence summering at Oppenheimer’s New Mexico ranch, 1931. They were very different, but they complemented each other professionally and liked each other personally—until political differences after the war sundered their friendship. (Molly B. Lawrence, courtesy AIP Emilio Segrè Visual Archives)
Robert Oppenheimer, Enrico Fermi, and Ernest Lawrence at the Rad Lab, Berkeley, in the summer of 1937. Fermi was visiting America from Italy, which he would leave the following year to escape Fascist persecution of his Jewish wife and children. (Ernest Orlando Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, courtesy AIP Emilio Segrè Visual Archives, Physics Today Collection)
Participants at the Washington Conference on Theoretical Physics, January 1937. The annual conference attracted talented physicists from both sides of the Atlantic. Those attending in 1937 included Hans Bethe (front row, fourth from left), I. I. Rabi (above Bethe’s left shoulder), Niels Bohr (front row, second from right, wearing scarf), and Edward Teller (partially obscured, standing directly behind Bethe, two rows up). (AIP Emilio Segrè Visual Archives, Gamow and Physics Today Collections)
THE MANHATTAN PROJECT
Leslie Groves (1896–1970), U.S. army general who directed the Manhattan Project during the war. He oversaw all aspects of the project: scientific, production, security, and planning for use of the bomb. Under his direction, project plants were built at Oak Ridge, Tennessee; Hanford, Washington; and Los Alamos, New Mexico. (© CORBIS)
A weekend hiking excursion in the Jemez Mountains near Los Alamos, winter 1944–1945. Such outings offered one of the few opportunities for scientists such as Enrico Fermi and Hans Bethe (first and second on left) to relieve the stress of working on the bomb. (AIP Emilio Segrè Visual Archives, Segrè Collection)
Niels Bohr on the ski hill above Los Alamos, January 1945. Bohr used such occasions to listen to other physicists’ anxieties about the bomb and to share his own v
iews about the bomb’s revolutionary implications. (AIP Emilio Segrè Visual Archives, Segrè Collection)
Robert Oppenheimer and Leslie Groves at the Trinity Site near Alamogordo, New Mexico, two months after the July 16, 1945, test. Intense heat generated by the world’s first atomic explosion vaporized the hundred-foot steel tower holding the bomb, gouged an enormous crater in the ground, and fused the surrounding sand into jadelike crystals. (© Bettmann/CORBIS)
Hiroshima, Japan, after the atomic bomb attack on August 6, 1945. The explosion caused widespread destruction, vividly illustrated by this photograph taken shortly after the attack. Civilians outnumbered soldiers in Hiroshima more than six to one. Over 75,000 inhabitants of the city perished that day, and tens of thousands more afterward due to burns, radiation, and other sicknesses. (© Bettmann/CORBIS)
AFTER THE WAR
Robert Oppenheimer’s signature porkpie hat on the cover of the May 1948 issue of Physics Today eloquently conveyed his fame after the war. Until his downfall in 1954, Oppenheimer remained America’s most celebrated and influential physicist. (Ernest Orlando Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, courtesy AIP Emilio Segrè Visual Archives, Physics Today Collection)
Ernest Lawrence and Robert Oppenheimer together at Berkeley, 1946. Growing political differences between them after the war—over the superbomb in particular—eroded their storied friendship, which had been weakened when Oppenheimer left Berkeley for Princeton in 1947 and ended as a result of Oppenheimer’s security hearing in 1954. (© AP/Wide World Photos)
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