Inside the Centre: The Life of J. Robert Oppenheimer

by Ray Monk

  ‘We have spent two billion dollars on the greatest scientific gamble in history,’ the statement continued, ‘and won.’ If the Japanese did not now accept the terms of the Potsdam ultimatum, they could ‘expect a rain of ruin from the air, the like of which has never been seen on this earth’.

  Much to his chagrin, listening to this statement on the radio – at what, for him in Los Alamos, would have been 9 a.m. on the morning of Monday 6 August – was the first confirmation Oppenheimer had that the bomb had gone off successfully. He had expected to be told before it was made public. Indeed, he had sent his assistant John Manley to Washington with the express purpose of phoning him as soon as the news reached Groves’s office. Just as Manley was about to phone, however, Groves stopped him, telling him that no one was to tell anybody about it until the President had announced it.

  There was, perhaps, some consolation for Oppenheimer in the fact that the statement emphasised the importance of what it called ‘the achievement of scientific brains in putting together infinitely complex pieces of knowledge held by many men in different fields of science into a workable plan’: ‘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.’

  At Los Alamos, the effect of the announcement was an emotional release every bit as powerful as that which had followed the Trinity test. On that occasion it had been centred on the demonstration that what they had been designing and building actually worked. On this occasion it was to do with the fact that, where previously they had worked in furtive secrecy, now the spotlight had been shone upon them. What they had achieved had been recognised – by the President no less – as a crucially important task. They were celebrities.

  That evening at Los Alamos there was a big assembly to celebrate their success. Oppenheimer made a dramatic entrance, walking from the back of the room to the stage and, once there, clasping his hands together like a prize-winning boxer. To ecstatic cheering, Oppenheimer told the crowd that it was too early to say what the results of the bombing had been, but that ‘the Japanese didn’t like it’. His only regret, he said, was that ‘we hadn’t developed the bomb in time to use it against the Germans’. This, according to the young physicist who later recalled the event, ‘practically raised the roof’.

  The following day, 7 August 1945, the front pages of newspapers all over the world were dominated by the extraordinary revelations contained in the statement made on Truman’s behalf, about the destruction of Hiroshima, the atomic-bomb project and about Oppenheimer. Overnight, Los Alamos changed from being a secret to being the most talked-about place in the world. Among those talking about it were the German physicists who had worked on the abortive Nazi bomb project, including Heisenberg, Weizsäcker and Otto Hahn, the last of whom had first announced the startling fact about nuclear fission back in January 1939. Those scientists had been captured by the Allies and at the time of the Hiroshima bombing were being held in a country house in Cambridgeshire called Farm Hall. Unknown to the scientists, microphones placed around the house were picking up almost every word they said to each other, so that a complete record exists of how they reacted to the news about Hiroshima.

  The officer in charge of Farm Hall, Major T.H. Ritter, reported in a memo that, shortly before dinner on the evening of 6 August, he told Hahn that the BBC had announced that an atomic bomb had been dropped.

  Hahn was completely shattered by the news and said he felt personally responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people, as it was his original discovery which had made the bomb possible. He told me that he had originally contemplated suicide when he realised the terrible potentialities of his discovery and he felt that now these had been realised and he was to blame. With the help of considerable alcoholic stimulant he was calmed down and we went down to dinner where he announced the news to the assembled guests.

  The news was greeted with incredulity, particularly by Heisenberg, who declared: ‘I don’t believe a word of the whole thing.’ The reason he gave for his scepticism reveals how little the German scientists knew about atomic-bomb physics. Such a bomb, Heisenberg declared, would require ‘ten tons of pure U-235’, which, understandably, he did not believe the Allies could possibly have acquired.

  Heisenberg’s scepticism, however, did not last long. At 9 p.m. that evening, the German scientists gathered around a radio set to listen to the BBC news. It began: ‘Here is the news: It’s dominated by a tremendous achievement of Allied scientists – the production of the atomic bomb.’ ‘The greatest destructive power devised by man,’ the report continued, ‘went into action this morning – the atomic bomb. British, American and Canadian scientists have succeeded, where Germans failed, in harnessing the basic power of the universe.’

  Some details in the report that captured the attention of the German scientists included: 1. that the cost of the project was £500 million (equivalent to $2 billion at the time); 2. that up to 125,000 people were employed in the factories that were built for the programme, few of whom knew what they were producing; and 3. that the material used to make the bomb was uranium.

  The report also included a statement prepared by Churchill before he left office, which emphasised the part played by Britain in the bomb programme, especially in its early stages. ‘By God’s mercy,’ Churchill said, somewhat rubbing it in for those listening at Farm Hall, ‘British and American science outpaced all German efforts. These were on a considerable scale, but far behind.’ ‘The whole burden of execution,’ he declared, ‘constitutes one of the greatest triumphs of American – or indeed human – genius of which there is a record.’

  Listening to the broadcast made the German scientists appreciate the colossal scale of the Manhattan Project. ‘We were unable to work on that scale,’ Hahn remarked to his colleagues, later adding: ‘I am thankful we didn’t succeed.’ Heisenberg recalled that about a year earlier he had been told by someone in the German Foreign Office that the Americans had threatened to drop a uranium bomb on Dresden if the Germans did not surrender soon. ‘I was asked whether I thought it possible, and with complete conviction, I replied “No.”’

  The next day, 7 August, the German scientists at Farm Hall – like millions of people all over the world – spent the entire morning poring over the newspaper reports of the Hiroshima bombing. Among the other impressed readers of the newspapers that day was Haakon Chevalier, who, on learning what his old friend had been up to, wrote him a note of congratulations, telling him: ‘You are probably the most famous man in the world today . . . I want you to know that we are very proud of you.’ It was three weeks before he received a reply.

  The delay was possibly partly to do with Oppenheimer’s difficulties in knowing what to say to a man whom he had named to the security services as the key go-between in what was regarded as one of the most serious attempts at atomic espionage of the entire war. However, even without that problem, Oppenheimer would have had little time for purely personal correspondence in the days immediately after the Hiroshima bombing. The scientific task was done, but much was happening – politically, militarily and socially.

  Truman finally returned to Washington from Potsdam on the evening of 7 August and was immediately caught up in a whirlwind of activity generated by Groves, who was determined to proceed as quickly as possible with a second atomic bombing of Japan. He and Admiral William Purnell, Groves writes in his autobiography, ‘had often discussed the importance of having the second blow follow the first one quickly, so that the Japanese would not have time to recover their balance’. This second bomb would have to be of the Fat Man type, there being no chance of assembling another uranium bomb at this stage (in fact, the Little Boy bomb remained one of a kind; the Fat Man design, despite its complicated assembly, being easier to manufacture, safer to transport and more powerful). After the success of the Trinity test, the only thing standing in the way of using a Fat Man bomb in Japan was th
e availability of plutonium. Groves had originally been advised that a plutonium bomb could be ready to use on 20 August. At the end of July, this was revised to 11 August. Groves, however, was too impatient to wait that long and, somewhat against the advice he was given by the scientists, saw to it that the bomb was assembled, loaded and ready to use by the evening of 8 August.

  At Tinian, therefore, there was little time to reflect on the Hiroshima bomb. Bernard O’Keefe, a young navy officer who was part of the assembly team, remembers: ‘With the success of the Hiroshima weapon, the pressure to be ready with the much more complex implosion device became excruciating.’

  Everyone felt that the sooner we could get off another mission, the more likely it was that the Japanese would feel that we had large quantities of the devices and would surrender sooner. We were certain that one day saved would mean that the war would be over one day sooner.

  While the bomb that would destroy Nagasaki was being hurriedly assembled, diplomatic manoeuvres were being pursued with equal urgency – the bombing of Hiroshima having accelerated both the Soviet Union’s plans for joining the war against Japan and the Japanese plans for negotiating peace. On 8 August, the Japanese Foreign Minister was hoping to secure Soviet mediation in the search for acceptable surrender terms. When, however, his ambassador in Moscow met the Soviet Foreign Minister, Vyacheslav Molotov, he was told that, far from brokering a peace, the Soviet Union was entering the war against Japan, with effect from the following day. Bearing in mind the time difference between Moscow and Japan, this meant that, within two hours of that meeting, at midnight local time, the 1.6 million Soviet troops that had massed on the Manchurian border received their orders to attack.

  Meanwhile, at Tinian the Fat Man bomb assembled by O’Keefe and his team was loaded into the bomb bay of a B-29 called Bock’s Car, named after its usual pilot, Frederick Bock. On this mission, however, the bomber would be piloted by Major Charles W. Sweeney, who had been told that his primary target was Kokura, one of Japan’s most important arsenals. The secondary target was the port of Nagasaki, an important centre of ship-building. Neither the President nor Oppenheimer and the rest of the Scientific Advisory Panel were involved in the decision to carry out this second atomic bombing. Indeed, no separate decision was made, or deemed necessary. The directive of 24 July had ordered General Spaatz to drop the first bomb ‘after about 3 August’ and subsequent bombs ‘as soon as made ready by the project staff’. He would therefore keep dropping whatever bombs were made available to him until he was ordered to stop.

  Just before dawn on 9 August, Bock’s Car took off from Tinian. Unlike the first mission, this second one was beset with problems. For one thing, the weather – squally showers and storms – was hardly ideal. Second, they discovered just before take-off that Bock’s Car had a defective fuel pump, which meant that 800 gallons of fuel could not be pumped into the engine from the bomb bay. This meant that the plane would have to fly to Japan and back with the extra weight of those gallons of fuel. Despite these problems, so keen were Groves and Purnell to get a second bomb off quickly that there was no question of delaying the flight. Immediately before taking off, Sweeney was approached by Purnell. ‘Young man,’ he said, ‘do you know how much that bomb cost?’ ‘About twenty-five million dollars,’ Sweeney replied. ‘See that we get our money’s worth,’ Purnell told him.

  Accompanied by just one observation plane (the other got separated in the bad weather), Bock’s Car arrived at Kokura at 10.44 a.m. local time to find that the target was obscured by cloud. Sweeney therefore decided to switch to Nagasaki. The sky above that city too was covered in cloud, but at about 11 a.m. a hole opened in the cloud cover long enough (twenty seconds) for the bombardier to see the target. The bomb was dropped and exploded with a force significantly greater than that of the Hiroshima Little Boy bomb: 22,000 rather than 12,500 tons of TNT. Because the hills around the city contained the blast, however, the casualties at Nagasaki were not quite so high. The best estimate seems to be that at the moment of impact around 40,000 people died and 60,000 were injured. It is thought that, by 1946, mainly because of the lingering effects of radiation, the number of deaths caused by the bomb had risen to about 70,000.

  Robert Serber was supposed to be on one of the observation planes for this second mission, but the pilot ordered him off the plane because he did not have a parachute. As Serber was the only one who knew how to operate the high-speed camera that was to have been used, no photographs of the raid were taken from the air. Even if he had been on board, no photographs would have been taken, since the plane in question was the one that got separated. When the bomb was being dropped on Nagasaki, that observation plane was still flying over Kokura. By the time the pilot realised what had happened and flew to Nagasaki, the bomb had been dropped and the mushroom cloud had already appeared. ‘The only picture we got,’ recalls Serber ruefully, ‘was taken by his tail gunner with a snapshot camera.’

  Moments before the bomb was dropped, the other observation plane dropped some instruments attached to parachutes that would enable the scientists to measure the force of the blast and some of its effects. Among those instruments was a pressure cylinder to which Serber, Alvarez and Morrison had attached a personal letter to the Japanese physicist Ryokichi Sagane, whom they had known at Berkeley and who was then a professor at the University of Tokyo. The point of the letter was to tell Sagane on good authority about the threat facing Japan:

  You have known for several years that an atomic bomb could be built if a nation were willing to pay the enormous cost of preparing the necessary material. Now that you have seen that we have constructed the production plants, there can be no doubt in your mind that all the output of those factories, working 24 hours a day, will be exploded on your homeland.

  . . . We implore you to confirm these facts to your leaders, and to do your utmost to stop the destruction and waste of life which can only result in the total annihilation of all your cities if continued. As scientists we deplore the use to which a beautiful discovery has been put, but we can assure you that unless Japan surrenders at once, this rain of atomic bombs will increase manifold in fury.

  To some extent, this threat of more bombs was a bluff. Immediately after the Nagasaki bombing the Allies did not possess any more atomic bombs. It is true that, as Groves puts it, ‘our entire organization both at Los Alamos and on Tinian was maintained in a state of complete readiness to prepare additional bombs’, but, as he himself reported to General Marshall, the earliest date at which the next bomb could be assembled for use was 17 August, and almost everybody expected the war to be over by then. Even Groves says that when he received reports indicating that the Nagasaki bomb had inflicted a smaller number of casualties than they had expected, he was relieved, ‘for by that time I was certain that Japan was through and that the war could not continue for more than a few days’.

  In fact, the very day after the bombing of Nagasaki, Washington received a message sent via Switzerland that the Japanese were ready to accept the terms of the Potsdam Declaration, except one: they would not accept ‘any demand which prejudices the prerogatives of His Majesty as a Sovereign Ruler’. At the same time the Japanese government issued an urgent plea to the United States to call a halt to the atomic bombing. This bomb, the Japanese declared, had ‘the most cruel effects humanity has ever known’. Its use in ‘massacring a great number of old people, women, children; destroying and burning down Shinto and Buddhist temples, schools, hospitals, living quarters, etc.’, the statement claimed, constituted a ‘new crime against humanity and civilization’.

  It was not just the Japanese who had had enough of the terrifying carnage of nuclear warfare. From the diary of Henry Wallace, who was at the time a member of Truman’s cabinet, we learn that on 10 August Truman gave the order to stop the atomic bombing. Truman, Wallace records, ‘said the thought of wiping out another 100,000 people was too horrible. He didn’t like the idea of killing, as he said, “all those kids”.’ The foll
owing day, James Byrnes, as Secretary of State, responded to the not-quite unconditional Japanese offer of surrender in a way that sought to nullify the one condition they had made, insisting:

  From the moment of surrender the authority of the Emperor and the Japanese Government to rule the state shall be subject to the Supreme Commander of the Allied powers who will take such steps as he deems proper to effectuate the surrender terms.

  Despite having people around him who were urging him to continue the fight, Emperor Hirohito realised there was no sane course of action left open to him other than the acceptance of these terms. ‘I cannot endure the thought of letting my people suffer any longer,’ he told his ministers and counsellors on the morning of 14 August. ‘A continuation of the war would bring death to tens, perhaps even hundreds, of thousands of persons. The whole nation would be reduced to ashes. How then could I carry on the wishes of my imperial ancestors?’

  Later that day, Truman announced that Japan had accepted the terms of surrender offered by the Allies. The war was over. The following day, the Emperor took the unprecedented step of broadcasting a message to his subjects, telling them that, partly because ‘the enemy has begun to employ a new and most cruel bomb, the power of which to do damage is indeed incalculable’, he had ordered the acceptance of the Potsdam Declaration.

  ‘Seldom, if ever,’ commented the journalist and broadcaster Edward Murrow, ‘has a war ended leaving the victors with such a sense of uncertainty and fear, with such a realization that the future is obscure and that survival is not assured.’ To be sure, ‘VJ Day’ was celebrated with parties and processions, both in the UK and in the US. Especially relieved and thankful that the war was over were the three million US servicemen poised to launch an invasion of Japan in October, few of whom had any doubt that what had saved them was the atomic bomb. ‘Let me tell you,’ writes Serber in his autobiography, ‘we were really heroes out there in the Pacific. There were an awful lot of guys who weren’t looking forward to landing on the Japanese beaches.’ One of those men awaiting orders to invade was Rossi Lomanitz, who wrote to his old teacher: ‘Hey, Oppie, you’re about the best loved man in these parts.’