Also in Washington that busy Saturday, in the U.S. Navy Cryptographers' Department, a young woman translated a decoded secret Japanese telegram sent four days previously from Tokyo, asking the Japanese consul in Hawaii to report on U.S. berthing positions, ship movements, and torpedo netting at Pearl Harbor. Concerned, she took the message plus some related ones to the head of her department, who told her that he would get back to it on Monday.
Just over twenty-four hours later, in Hiroshima Bay, the commander in chief of the Japanese fleet was piped aboard his flagship, moored among other battleships, to hear the first messages coming in about the success of the surprise attack on the anchored U.S. fleet in Pearl Harbor by planes from his carrier fleet. That afternoon, Congress declared war on Japan. On Thursday 11 December, Hitler declared war on the United States. Winston Churchill's reaction was "So we had won the war after all." Only a few weeks later, Enrico and Laura Fermi heard their five-year-old son, Giulio, cheerily singing a verse he had picked up from other little boys:
We'll wipe thefaps
Out of the maps
· · ·
The people of Hiroshima welcomed the massive extension of the war, which for them had been under way since the invasion of Manchuria more than ten years previously. They rejoiced at the continuing success of their forces as they conquered Hong Kong, Malaya, the Philippines, Singapore, Borneo, the Dutch East Indies (today's Indonesia), and many Pacific islands such as Guam. They shared their emperor's view that "the fruits of war are tumbling into our mouth almost too quickly." They hummed patriotic songs such as "Divine Soldiers of the Sky" about Japanese paratroopers descending on the foe like "pure white roses" from heaven. They read cleverly drawn and widely circulated comic strips showing the victorious Japanese forces "saving the country from foreigners" by cutting "the iron chain with which the Anglo-Americans had surrounded Japan."
The comic strips showed how Japan was heading a greater East Asia co-prosperity sphere, eliminating pernicious Western influence throughout the region and replacing it with Japan's own "imperial way." People flocked to Hiroshima's cinemas, where newsreels showed advancing Japanese troops welcomed by smiling local people. Propaganda features followed, such as Suicide Troops of the Watchtower, about a Korean guerrilla who came to appreciate the justice of the Japanese cause and slew his own comrades.
At the same time Hiroshima geared up for the expanding war. A new industrial port and an army airport were swiftly constructed. Extra workers were recruited for the naval dockyard established on reclaimed land in the southwest of the city in 1939 by Mitsubishi Heavy Industries. Small workshops sprang up in houses all over the city to produce parts or simple military equipment. Among the new workers were many young women. They dressed not in kimonos but in more practical tunics and work pants and cheerfully attended the mandatory military drills. Other women—members of the Defense Women's Association—donned their purple-and-white sashes to stand outside Hiroshima's department stores, soliciting help with their sennimbari—strips of white cloth decorated with one thousand red stitches, each sewn by a different woman. The sennimbari were presented to soldiers going off to the war to wish them good luck and long life.
Japanese propaganda cartoon showing caricatures of Roosevelt and Churchill huddled on the deck of an aircraft carrier
Many of the city's male inhabitants had been conscripted and boarded transports in Hiroshima Bay for duty overseas. Their wives and families could not help but worry. The situation of the family of the tailor Isawa Nakamura was not unusual. His wife, Hatsuyo, heard no news from him for a long time. Then, in March 1942, came a brief telegram: "Isawa died an honourable death at Singapore." Promoted to corporal, he had been killed on 1 5 February, the day Singapore fell. Army payments to Mrs. Nakamura ceased on his death, and she had no alternative but to use her husband's sole legacy—his sewing machine—to get work to sustain herself and her three children, Toshio, Yaeko, and Myeko.
Government information was cascaded down to the people through a series of organizations stretching from the prefecture to town associations and then to neighborhood associations. The latter might consist of only ten or twenty households, while a town association might have seventy neighborhood associations within it. The neighborhood associations were already implementing food rationing, which had begun in the largest cities in 1940 and a little later in Hiroshima. Now they redoubled their efforts to eliminate the black market and, aided by dramatic posters captioned "Donate to Win," encouraged the collection of metals for the war effort. Families piled their cooking pots up with the iron railings from their verandas to be melted down for weapons. One Hiroshima resident recalled how much she "missed the sound of the temple bells" since even they were demounted and fed to the furnaces.
A Japanese sennimbari of one thousand red stitches
The expansion of the war also gave a fillip to Japan's nuclear program. A week after the attack on Pearl Harbor, the Imperial Navy—traditionally a fierce rival of the Imperial Army and resentful of the atomic bomb project that Lieutenant General Takeo Yasuda had asked Yoshio Nishina to initiate—convened a meeting of scientists and technicians. Captain Yoji Ito of the Navy Technology Research Institute announced to the gathering that the navy too wished to develop a nuclear weapon. He asked Nishina, who was present, to get involved in this project also.
Nishina agreed. Although he personally believed the attack on Pearl Harbor to have been insane, he was a patriot. Also, the army's interest in atomic research was waning as a result of his predictions of the long timescales involved. The navy had more money and, he hoped, perhaps more patience. Although Nishina was not enthusiastic about building a bomb, he recognized that naval support would enable him to continue his own nuclear research. He was joined on the naval project by the elderly Hantaro Nagaoka, who, in gentler days, had known Ernest Rutherford.
· · ·
In Germany the atomic bomb program was about to fall victim to a military and political situation that, by the end of 1941, had changed dramatically, with German troops bogged down outside Moscow and with Hitler's declaration of war against the United States in the aftermath of Pearl Harbor. Hitler ordered the total mobilization of the German economy to focus on an all-out pursuit of "total war" to secure the victory that at the time of Heisenberg's visit to Copenhagen had seemed so nearly his. One consequence was that Army Ordnance ordered a review of all its research programs, and Erich Schumann told the Uranium Club that fission research could continue "only if a certainty exists of attaining an application in the foreseeable future."
In February 1942 Army Ordnance called a conference on fission, to which the scientists submitted a cautiously optimistic 144-page report. Provided that the army supplied them with appropriate materials, a successful working reactor to generate atomic energy could be expected shortly and would have the potential to power submarines and other warships. The prospects for nuclear weapons depended on developing techniques for separating uranium, but, the scientists reminded the army, there was another option for producing weapons material: generating plutonium in a reactor.
This conditional optimism was not enough. To many in the army, the fission project had only ever been Atomkakarei—"atomic babble." The army cut its funding, abandoned research at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics, and restricted its program henceforth to a modest reactor project in a Berlin suburb under Kurt Diebner. This left a vacuum, which the minister for education, Bernhard Rust, the virulent anti-Semite who had taken great pride in expelling Jewish academics from their posts in 1933, w a s eager to fill. He wanted the Reich Research Council, pushed out of fission research by the army at the start of the war, to take control. On the day that the Army Ordnance conference started, Rust organized a series of nontechnical lectures, and several senior scientists, including Heisenberg, attended.
Heisenberg gave a lecture on the potential of nuclear power, into which he interpolated occasional allusions to possible weapons uses. "Pure uranium-234;," he announced, w
as "an explosive of quite unimaginable force," although separating it was a problem. He then spoke of plutonium, explaining that the construction of a viable reactor was key: "Through the transmutation of uranium inside the pile [reactor], a new element is created wrhich is in all probability as explosive as pure uranium-235, with the same colossal force." Rust was impressed, but his attempt to put the Reich Research Council in charge of fission research sparked a battle with the Kaiser Wilhelm Society, sponsoring organization of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics. Delighted to have got rid of the army, the society was hoping to regain control of its own programs.
This power struggle would continue for many months, but in April 1942 the German government sanctioned Heisenberg's appointment as director of the institute and professor of theoretical physics at Berlin University. No longer regarded with suspicion by the Nazis as a "white Jew," he was being welcomed into the fold, despite his continuing refusal to join the Nazi Party. According to his wife, he regarded it as a victory for "modern physics"—what his critics had tried to dismiss as "Jewish physics"—over "German physics."
In early June Heisenberg was summoned to brief Albert Speer, the young and newly appointed reichsminister for armaments and munitions, and military heads of weapon production on the seemingly encouraging prospects for the bomb. The subject had also caught the attention of Joseph Goebbels, who a few weeks earlier had noted in his diary, "I received a report about the latest developments in German science. Research in the realm of atomic destruction has now proceeded to a point where . . . tremendous destruction, it is claimed, can be wrought with a minimum of effort. . . . It is essential that we should keep ahead of everybody."
No formal record of the meeting survives, but according to Heisenberg he reported definite proof that atomic energy could be created in a reactor. He also said that it was theoretically possible to produce a powerful explosive in a reactor and that, though many uncertainties remained, a single bomb could blow up a city the size of London. Afterward Speer, although by profession an architect, not a scientist, perhaps scented some contradictions, for he questioned Heisenberg carefully about the real prospects for nuclear weapons. According to Speer, Heisenberg's answer was "by no means encouraging." He replied that "the technical prerequisites for production would take years to develop, two years at the earliest, even provided that the programme was given maximum support."
Speer was sufficiently intrigued to invite Heisenberg to go for a walk with him after the meeting so that he could quiz him over what level of resources constituted such support. Heisenberg asked for only a surprisingly modest increase in funding to cover the construction of a radiation-proof bunker and a cyclotron. He also asked for high-priority ratings for acquiring materials. A few days later he submitted an estimate of 350,000 marks for the coming year, a sum Speer found "ridiculously tiny" compared to Heisenberg's aspirations.* The meeting, his private walk with Heisenberg, and the subsequent funding request apparently convinced Speer that German scientists were not serious about building a bomb. At a meeting with Hitler a few days later he reported only briefly on splitting the atom. Projects like Wern-her von Braun's V-2 rocket program—now awarded top-priority status—seemed more deserving to Speer of the fiihrer's attention and the Reich's diminishing resources.
This may have been what Heisenberg intended. If he genuinely believed the technical problems implicit in building a bomb to be insurmountable, at least while the war was in progress, then he must have believed Germany, whose fission program might even be ahead, to be safe from Allied atom bombs. If that was the case, he presumably did not want the Nazi high command pressuring him to deliver the impossible. It was far safer and more comfortable for Heisenberg if the Nazi bomb project was officially on the back burner and he was absolved from pursuing it and confronting in acute form the moral dilemmas involved. He was free to concentrate on the construction of a working reactor using uranium and heavy water, the two key constituents of the German atomic program.
Heisenberg's memoirs, written nearly thirty years later, convey his relief that "no orders were given to build atom bombs, and none of us had cause to call for a different decision." "As a result," Heisenberg wrote comfortably, "our work helped to pave the way for a peaceful atomic technology in the postwar period." With this neat explanation Heisenberg brought down the curtain on a period of his life riddled with ambiguity and which, in later years, he would repeatedly be asked to justify.
But this was not—as he implied—the end of the German atomic bomb program.
*At that time 350,000 marks was roughly equated to £17,000 or $82,000.
FOURTEEN
"V. B. OK"
IN THE UNITED STATES the bomb project was gathering momentum. On 19 January 1942, six weeks after the attack on Pearl Harbor, President Roosevelt returned the "martial" National Academy of Science report submitted to him by Vannevar Bush the previous November under a short cover note on which he simply scrawled "V. B. OK," adding, "I think you had best keep this in your own safe." As Bush knew, these brief words were the sanction to build the bomb.
The S-i Project under its program chiefs made swift progress. In May, James Conant, having reviewed the entire nuclear program, reported to Bush the scientists' latest views that there were five basic ways to produce bomb fuel. U-235 could be separated by the centrifuge, diffusion, and electromagnetic processes. Plutonium could be manufactured from uranium in reactors moderated by either graphite or heavy water. All five methods were sufficiently advanced for the building of pilot plants and possibly for the preliminary design of production plants.
A key question was how to control this work and, given its sensitivity, how to camouflage the expenditure. It was essential to prevent sharp-eyed congressmen from spotting something unusual about government budgets and asking awkward questions. As early as 6 December—the day before the Pearl Harbor attack—Vannevar Bush and James Conant had discussed the desirability of placing the project under the army, whose huge budget could easily conceal the S-i Project. Now, Bush told President Roosevelt that the project might well determine the course of the war and recommended that "the whole matter should be turned over to the War Department." The president had no objection, providing Bush was absolutely certain that the War Department could guarantee absolute secrecy. Three months later he gave his formal approval to the army taking over the project. As a result, the majority of the project's funding would be hidden for the duration of the war in the army's huge Corps of Engineers budget under such bland entries as "procurement of new materials" and "expediting production."
Leslie Groves (right) and James Chadwick (left)
In June 1942 the army appointed Colonel James Marshall of the Corps of Engineers to head the project and instructed him to form a new "district"—the unit of organization used by the corps. Marshall discussed his new role with fellow officers, including Colonel Leslie Groves, the corps' deputy chief of construction, who had helped supervise the building of the Pentagon. Marshall set up his headquarters in lower Manhattan, sparking a debate on what the project should be called. One suggestion was the "Laboratory for the Development of Substitute Materials." Groves wisely objected that this would only attract attention. He suggested, instead, that the project be named "Manhattan," after the convention of naming new engineer districts after the city in which they were based. Groves also advised Marshall on how to seek approval for the purchase of a large site in Tennessee.
Groves was about to become far more closely involved with the Manhattan Project than he either guessed or desired. Marshall was competent, but Bush and Conant worried that he lacked suficient driving force. They suggested to Secretary of War Henry Stimson the appointment of a more energetic officer, and Stimson agreed. In September 1942 the forty-six-year-old Leslie Groves was confidently expecting a transfer to what he anticipated would be "an extremely attractive assignment overseas" in command of combat troops. All he needed was the approval of his commanding officer, General Brehon Somervell. Instead, S
omervell told Groves that he could not leave Washington: "The Secretary of War has selected you for a very important assignment, and the President has approved the selection." When Groves objected that he did not want to stay in Washington, Somervell replied, "If you do the job right it will win the war." Groves's spirits did not improve when he learned the nature of his assignment—"Oh, that thing," he said.
Groves was by his own admission extremely disappointed, writing, "I did not know the details of America's atomic development program. . . . what little I knew of the project had not particularly impressed me, and if I had known the complete picture I would have been still less impressed." Groves's pill was sweetened by the promise of promotion to brigadier-general, although, as Groves later observed, "It often seemed to me that the prerogatives of rank were more important in the academic world than they are among soldiers."
If Groves doubted whether he was the right man for the job, so did Bush. Bush had wanted Somervell, but, as a three-star general, he was too senior. Somervell, meanwhile, had decided that Groves possessed the ideal qualities for the task and had not waited for Bush's formal agreement before telling the disgruntled Groves of his selection. Unaware that Groves had already been appointed and anxious to appraise him as a candidate, Bush summoned him. The details of their uneasy encounter have become part of the folklore of the bomb. When Bush realized what had happened, he reacted angrily. His interview with Groves convinced him that Groves was tactless, aggressive, and unlikely to be able to deal with scientists. Furthermore, he felt he had been outmaneuvered by the army into accepting him. In a terse note to one of Stimson's aides he wrote, "I fear we are in the soup."
Before the Fallout Page 24
