Before the Fallout

by Diana Preston

  Most of the scientists who found refuge in the United States before the war made their permanent home there. Albert Einstein continued to live quietly in Princeton, walking slowly each morning to the Institute of Advanced Study, then under Oppenheimer's direction. Suggestions that his letter to President Roosevelt was the catalyst for the bomb troubled him. He told his secretary, "Had I known that the Germans would not succeed in producing an atomic bomb, I would never have lifted a finger. Not a single finger!" Einstein died in 1955.

  Hans Bethe returned from Los Alamos to the Cornell physics department. In 1967 he won the Nobel Prize for Physics for his work on energy production in stars.

  Leo Szilard focused his energies on trying to halt the arms race. He urged the sharing of technology as a way of fostering peace and devised methods for checking that nuclear arms control agreements were being honored. During the Cuban missile crisis in 1962 he fled to Geneva for safety. From there he typically tried to contact President Khrushchev to urge dialogue with the United States. Szilard died two years later.

  Of the British team that contributed to the bomb, James Chadwick was knighted in 1945 and returned to Liverpool University. Chadwick's role had been mentally and physically stressful. A perceptive colleague observed that he "had plumbed such depths of moral decision as more fortunate men are never called upon to peer into." In 1948 he moved back to Cambridge University as master of Gonville and Caius College. On his recommendation William Penney took charge of the British atomic weapons program—effectively his successor. The first British atomic bomb was exploded in 1952. Chadwick died in 1974.

  The authors of the catalytic Frisch-Peierls memorandum both returned to Britain to become university professors at Cambridge and Oxford respectively. Frisch's much-loved aunt, Lise Meitner, moved to Cambridge in old age to be near him. She died in 1968, just a few7 weeks after Otto Hahn and shortly before her ninetieth birthday. The inscription on her gravestone in an English country churchyard reads, "A physicist who never lost her humanity." In 1994 a new element—109 in the periodic table—was named "meit­nerium" in her honor.

  After the war Joseph Rotblat tried vainly to discover the fate of his wife in Warsaw and concluded she must have perished in the Holocaust; he never remarried. Rotblat returned to Liverpool University to wrork once more with James Chadwick before becoming professor of physics at St. Bartholomew's Hospital in London, studying nuclear medicine and campaigning for nuclear nonproliferation. He worked with Bertrand Russell, Albert Einstein, and others to found the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs, whose aim was to bring scientists of the rival nuclear powers closer together. In 1995, at the age of eighty-six, Rotblat was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, and he was knighted three years later.

  Niels Bohr went home to Copenhagen, where he resumed control of his institute. He continued to campaign for scientific openness and the peaceful applications of nuclear power and against the arms race, remaining, until his death in 1962, one of the most respected senior statesmen of the scientific community.

  Klaus Fuchs was finally arrested as a Soviet spy in 19C0. By then he was a senior scientist at the Harwell atomic research establishment near Oxford. He was unmasked following the FBI's cracking of the Soviet codes. For the first time they were able to decipher messages between the United States and the Soviet Union that they had intercepted during the war. One of these messages was a report on the Manhattan Project by Fuchs. This, in itself, did not mean Fuchs was a Soviet agent, but detailed correlations between Fuchs's movements and the passage of information revealed the truth. The evidence of Fuchs's spying thoroughly alarmed the U.S. authorities, who feared that he might have passed H-bomb technology to the Soviets. This evidence of espionage in the heart of Los Alamos fueled the suspicion that would fall on Oppenheimer, though no connection between Oppenheimer and Fuchs's spying was ever established by the FBI.* Alerted by the FBI, British counterintelligence coaxed a confession from Fuchs. And a confession was important; had Fuchs denied the charges at his trial, the British and Americans would have had to produce evidence revealing to the Russians that their codes had been broken.

  Colleagues and friends were shocked. Rudolf Peierls learned of Fuchs's arrest from a journalist. It seemed "quite unbelievable." He hurried to Brixton prison to ensure that Fuchs had proper legal representation. There Fuchs confessed to Peierls that he now regretted his actions as he had since "learned to appreciate [the British] way of life and values." When Peierls expressed surprise that Fuchs, "as a sceptical scientist. . . had been willing to accept the Marxist orthodoxy," Fuchs replied, "You must remember what I went through under the Nazis. Besides, it was always my intention, when I had helped the Russians to take over everything, to get up and tell them what is wrong with their system." Peierls was "shaken by the arrogance and naivete of this statement."

  Fuchs was sentenced to fourteen years in prison. With time off for good behavior, he served only two-thirds of that sentence. To his regret the British government revoked his citizenship, and on his release in 19 C9 Fuchs went to East Germany to become deputy director of a nuclear research laboratory. By a strange irony, his boss, Heinz Barwich, later defected to the West. Fuchs's powers of self-delusion remained undiminished. A visiting Western scientist wrote, "I have never before known a person who possesses such a marvellous ability to think in abstract terms who is at the same time so helpless when it comes to either observe or evaluate reality." Fuchs died in 1988.

  · · ·

  The interned German scientists were eventually returned to Germany in early 1946 and, soon after, released back to their scientific work. As he had hoped and anticipated, Werner Heisenberg became an influential figure in West German postwar science. He promoted the peaceful uses of nuclear power, opposed nuclear weapons, and helped launch CERN, the European center for nuclear research. From 1946 until his retirement in 1970 he headed the Max Planck Institute for Physics and Astrophysics.* Nevertheless, his wartime behavior—especially his visit to Niels Bohr in Copenhagen—dogged him, and he became involved in a heated dispute with Sam Goudsmit over allegations in the latter's book about the nature of Germany's wartime atomic program. He died in 1976.

  Heisenberg's close colleague Carl-Friedrich von Weizsacker also had a successful postwar career in physics and philosophy. His younger brother, Richard, who had defended their father at the Nuremberg war crimes trials—where he was convicted of war crimes and sentenced to prison—became president of Germany from 1984 to 1994.

  Otto Hahn, after rebutting unfounded allegations that he had been a Nazi, also helped shape West Germany's science policy, surviving an assassination attempt in 1951 by a frenzied, frustrated inventor. He remained in touch with Lise Meitner but, despite the changed political circumstances, never publicly acknowledged her contribution toward the discovery of fission—or Otto Frisch's. His Nobel Prize acceptance speech made no mention of either, and in his autobiography he gave himself the full credit for the discovery. Hans Bethe thought his attitude "very nasty." Meitner remained fond of Hahn and grateful to him for helping save her from the Nazis. However, she believed him guilty of "suppressing the past," recognizing with bleak clarity that "I am part of that suppressed past." Hahn died in 1968.

  Fritz Strassmann, who had always considered Lise Meitner the intellectual leader of their team, refused to accept Hahn's offer of 1 o percent of his Nobel Prize money made to him alone. He encouraged Lise Meitner to return to Berlin after the war but said he would understand if she refused. They remained friends until her death.

  Max Planck was the only German scientist invited to London in 1946 for the belated celebration of the tercentenary of Newton's birth. He died the following year, having never recovered from the execution of his last surviving son for plotting to assassinate Hitler in 1944.

  Of the French atomic scientists, Irene Joliot-Curie died in 1956 of leukemia at the age of fifty-eight. Her husband, Frederic, became high commissioner for atomic energy under Charles de Gaulle but was dismissed
for his connections with the French Communist Party and for his opposition to the military uses of nuclear science. He died in 1958, also aged fifty-eight, of cirrhosis of the liver induced, a doctor friend believed, by exposure to polonium.

  After the war Paul Tibbets served as a senior officer in the U.S. Air Force, including a tour of duty with NATO in France. He also worked with Boeing on the development of the B-47—the first successful jet bomber. He retired from the air force as a brigadier general to continue what he called his "love affair" with airplanes by running an aviation company. He repeatedly stated that he felt no personal guilt that, as a member of the armed forces, he had planned and carried out the mission assigned to him to the best of his ability. However, in his memoirs he wrote, "Let it be understood that I feel a sense of shame for the whole human race, which through all history has accepted the shedding of human blood as a means of settling disputes between nations." He added, "Let those who honestly desire peace among nations also condemn all forms of international terrorism that are meant, by their perpetrators, to set the stage for war." Tibbet's copilot, Robert Lewis, helped raise money for medical treatment of the so-called Hiroshima maidens—young girls disfigured by the atom blast. In 1971 he sold his "log" of the flight of the Enola Gay at auction for thirty-seven thousand dollars and used some of the money to buy marble to sculpt images with a religious theme. They include a phallic "mushroom statue" symbolically leaking blood. Lewis called it God's Wind.

  Hiroshima is again a vibrant city with a population more than three times as large as in August 1945, a symbol of the unquenchable human spirit. Citizens bustle to work over the many bridges that link the fingers of land separated by the river delta. Yet Hiroshima remembers. The area beneath the hypocenter of the bomb—the vanished district of Salugakucho—is now the site of the Peace Memorial Park. Memorials, like the bronze Statue of Mother and Child in the Storm, recall the lost people of Hiroshima. Another honors the Korean forced laborers, brought to Hiroshima against their will, who also perished. The dome of the former Hiroshima Prefec-tural Industrial Promotion Hall by the T-shaped Aioi Bridge has simply been left—a shattered icon. Every morning at 8: i g a.m. a bell rings by the dome, and, for just a moment, passersby pause and reflect.

  The Hiroshima Prefectural Industrial Promotion Hall circa the 1930s

  The A-bomb memorial dome as it appears today

  *Not all journalists were preoccupied with grim reflections. Within hours of the announcement of the bomb, the Washington Press Club bar was selling "atomic cocktails"—a blend of Pernod and gin.

  *FBI investigations also led to the unmasking of Fuchs's handler, Harry Gold, as well as David Green­glass and the Rosenbergs.

  *The Max Planck institutes were the postwar successors to the Kaiser Wilhelm institutes.

  EPILOGUE

  QUESTIONS OF "WHAT IF?" litter history. Answers to them can inherently never be certain, and therefore they attract historians like bees to honey. Nevertheless, they provide a useful way of analyzing some of the key facets of the fifty-year story beginning with Marie Curie's pioneering work on radium and culminating in the destruction of Hiroshima by Little Boy.

  The question What if Heisenberg, Bohr, and von Weizsacker had all died in the avalanche of 1933 that buried Heisenberg? leads easily into a discussion of how much a single individual's input advances the course of science. Shortly after his death Ernest Rutherford's colleagues debated how much difference it would have made if he had not lived. How much delay would there have been in understanding the nucleus? Some answered, "Ten years," others answered, "More likely only five." Even five is probably at the very top end of any realistic scale. Ideas have their time, and if not discovered by one person, they will be by another. Robert Hooke claimed that some of his ideas about natural science predated some of Isaac Newton's work. Charles Darwin and Alfred Wallace worked entirely independently and at the same time on theories of evolution, as did William Swann and Thomas Edison on the lightbulb. Erwin Schrodinger's wave theory was published within eighteen months of Heisenberg's quantum mechanics work and was equally illuminating on the movement of atomic particles.

  In the early 1930s Ernest Lawrence at Berkeley, not James Chadwick at the Cavendish, could easily have been first to discover the neutron and could also have beaten the Joliot-Curies to "artificial" radioactivity and Fermi to the production of radioactivity using neutrons. Insights into the atom were shared and built on the work of others, as can be seen by the usually high number of references in scientific papers. Good examples of cooperation are Rutherford's and Bohr's work on atomic structure and Bohr's debates with Heisenberg on uncertainty and complementarity. Perhaps a particularly gifted individual can make two or three years' difference. There are of course exceptions. Einstein's paper on the special theory of relativity, which "quietly amalgamated space, time and matter into one fundamental unity," has no references and cites no authorities. How long it would have taken for someone else with his genius to emerge can only be guessed.

  What if Britain had not cajoled America to become involved in a bomb project by divulging the secret Maud Report and its trigger—the Frisch-Peierls memorandum—and by sending high-level scientific missions such as that of Henry Tizard with his "black box" of secrets and committed advocates such as Mark Oliphant to the United States? What if Britain had not sent scientists to Los Alamos? Because even a few months' delay could have meant that the war was ended before Little Boy was ready, this question deserves investigation. The Anglophobic General Groves wrote privately in 1949, "The main British contribution wras in arousing and maintaining the interest and enthusiasm of President Roosevelt in the project. This was of real value. Among other things it was probably the major factor in our keeping top priority throughout the war." One American scientist suggested that the British saved a year in making the bomb. Hans Bethe thought the British contribution to his theoretical team's work "essential." Robert Oppenheimer agreed: "I think that the fact that the British wrere convinced very early by Simon and Peierls probably was the greatest single factor in getting the job done when it was. . . . If the British Government had not been committed we might have been very much slower in this country to put the necessary resources into it. . . . The British at Los Alamos were very valuable. If they hadn't been there it is hard to know who would have taken their place."

  Other historians have, like Groves, emphasized the Frisch-Peierls memorandum, the Maud Report, and Churchill's constant pressure on Roosevelt to work faster as more important than the British work on the ground. What is clear overall is that, without the British contribution, a bomb would not have been ready until at least very early 1946, after the planned invasion of Japan had gone ahead. It is also true that without Klaus Fuchs's involvement in the Los Alamos project as part of the British team and his transmission of key secrets to the Russians, the first Soviet test would have been delayed a year or two.

  A related and intriguing question is what if an experienced, eloquent, and charismatic British prime minister had tried to persuade a new American president, inexperienced in foreign affairs, to stay his hand rather than use the A-bomb as soon as it was available? Britain, as junior partner, had to give consent under the Quebec Agreement to the bomb's use. It would have been difficult politically for the United States to go it alone. This did not happen and, given Churchill's determined purpose and view7 that the Axis was "reaping the whirlwind," was virtually inconceivable. Britain and America had come too far together and had too many joint interests to pursue. Churchill gave his consent and throughout his life stuck to the position that the bomb was necessary to save Allied lives, both British and American, despite having privately suggested to Truman at Potsdam that the Japanese should have been given clarification of the terms for unconditional surrender.

  Another question is what if Churchill's old ally, President Roosevelt, had lived a little longer? Would history have followed the same course? This question presupposes that Roosevelt's health would not have deterior
ated further. (Ill health made him less politically adroit at Yalta than at previous great-power meetings.) He was the architect, along with Churchill, of the unconditional surrender policy, designed to show that victory was unequivocal and to give the victors the paradoxical ability to impose democratic institutions. He had not been swayed by his meeting with Bohr about the internationalization of knowledge about atomic energy. However, he was a more skilled diplomat than Truman and confident in his ability to manipulate both Churchill and Stalin, being more inclined to cajole Stalin into cooperation than to threaten him.

  Had Roosevelt lived, Edward Stettinius would have remained secretary of state, and James Byrnes, the most committed proponent of immediate action against Japan, and of the diplomatic power of the bomb against the Soviet Union, would not have been in a position of such influence. Therefore, Roosevelt may well have listened to those—including Churchill, Stimson, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff—arguing for the issue of clarification of what unconditional surrender might mean for the future of the Japanese dynasty. Roosevelt may have allowed more time than the inexperienced Truman to see the effect of Japanese diplomatic maneuvers through the Soviet Union.

  What if Roosevelt and Churchill had accepted the proposals from Bohr, Szilard, and others to internationalize the project? Would an arms race with Russia still have resulted? The answer is probably yes. Bohr's idealistic concept was essentially a free exchange of information internationally. All nations would pool scientific knowledge, rather than keep it secret. An international body consisting mainly of scientists would oversee its exploitation. These ideas harked back to the free flow of information about physics in the fifty years before the Second World War, a period Bohr regarded as a golden age. However, not only times but nuclear physics had changed. Nuclear physics was by then perceived as having not only massive military potential but real commercial value for power generation. Both these factors conferred great diplomatic, economic, and political power. For Stalin, possession of nuclear capability had immense importance, both symbolically and practically. Generation of electricity from nuclear power had the potential to achieve his long-stated aim to "catch up and overtake" the West in terms of industrialization. Nuclear weapons would give him the ability to rule securely over his increasing empire in eastern Europe, while allowing him to appear as, and to act as, the equal or better of the West elsewhere. Western lack of trust in a totalitarian regime made a race inevitable.