Making of the Atomic Bomb

by Richard Rhodes

  This question [i.e., whether or not to tell the Russians about the atomic bomb before using it on Japan] led to the review of the Quebec Agreement which was shown once more to Mr. Byrnes. He asked the General what we had got in exchange, and the General replied only the arrangements controlling the Belgium-Congo [sic]. . . . Mr. Byrnes made short work of this line of argument.2316

  The Quebec Agreement of 1943 renewed the partnership of the United States and Great Britain in the nuclear enterprise; Groves was justifying it as an exchange for British help in securing the Union Minière’s agreement to sell the two nations all its uranium ore. The British-American relation was built on deeper foundations than that, and Conant moved quickly to limit the damage of Groves’ blunder:

  Some of us then pointed out the historic background and [that] our connection with England flowed from the original agreement as to the complete exchange of scientific information. . . . I can foresee a great deal of trouble on this front. It was interesting that Mr. Byrnes felt that Congress would be most curious about this phase of the matter.2317

  If Byrnes had begun his service on the Interim Committee respecting the men who had carried the Manhattan Project forward, he must have conceived less respect for them now. Both Stimson and Bush, Conant told Byrnes, had talked to Churchill in Quebec.2318 If, as it seemed, they could be conned by the British into giving away the secrets of the bomb—whatever Byrnes imagined those might be—for the price of a few tons of uranium ore, how much was their judgment worth? Why give away something so stupendous as the bomb unless you got something equally stupendous in return? Byrnes believed international relations worked like domestic politics. The bomb was power, newly minted, and power was to politics as money was to banking, a medium of enriching exchange. Only naïfs and fools gave it away.

  Enter Leo Szilard.

  As the man who had thought longer and harder than anyone else about the consequences of the chain reaction, Szilard had chafed at his continuing exile from the high councils of government. Another politically active Met Lab scientist, Eugene Rabinowitch, a younger man, confirms “the feeling which was certainly shared . . . by others that we were surrounded by a kind of soundproof wall so that you could write to Washington or go to Washington and talk to somebody but you never got any reaction back.”2319 With the successful operation of the production reactors and separation plants at Hanford the work of the Met Lab had slowed; Compton’s people, Szilard particularly, found time to think about the future. Szilard says he began to examine “the wisdom of testing bombs and using bombs.”2320 Rabinowitch remembers “many hours spent walking up and down the Midway [the wide World’s Fair sward south of the University of Chicago main campus] with Leo Szilard and arguing about these questions and about what can be done. I remember sleepless nights.”2321

  There was no point in talking to Groves, Szilard reasoned in March 1945, nor to Bush or Conant for that matter. Secrecy barred discussion with middle-level authorities. “The only man with whom we were sure we would be entitled to communicate,” Szilard recalls, “was the President.”2322 He prepared a memorandum for Franklin Roosevelt and traveled to Princeton to enlist once again the durable services of Albert Einstein.

  Except for some minor theoretical calculations for the Navy, Einstein had been excluded from wartime nuclear development. Bush explained why to the director of the Institute for Advanced Study early in the war:

  I am not at all sure that if I place Einstein in entire contact with his subject he would not discuss it in a way that it should not be discussed. . . . I wish very much that I could place the whole thing before him . . . but this is utterly impossible in view of the attitude of people here in Washington who have studied into his whole history.2323

  The great theoretician whose letter to Roosevelt helped alert the United States government to the possibility of an atomic bomb was thus spared by concern for security and by hostility to his earlier outspoken politics—his pacifism and probably also his Zionism—from contributing to that weapon’s development. Szilard could not show Einstein his memorandum. He told his old friend simply that there was trouble ahead and asked for a letter of introduction to the President. Einstein complied.

  From Chicago Szilard approached Roosevelt through his wife. Eleanor Roosevelt agreed to see him on May 8 to pursue the matter. Thus fortified, he wandered to Arthur Compton’s office to confess his out-of-channel sins. Compton surprised him by cheering him on. “Elated by finding no resistance where I expected resistance,” Szilard reports, “I went back to my office.2324 I hadn’t been in my office for five minutes when there was a knock on the door and Compton’s assistant came in, telling me that he had just heard over the radio that President Roosevelt had died. . . .

  “So for a number of days I was at a complete loss for what to do,” Szilard goes on. He needed a new avenue of approach. Eventually it occurred to him that a project as large as the Met Lab probably employed someone from Kansas City, Missouri, Harry Truman’s original political base. He found a young mathematician named Albert Cahn who had worked for Kansas City boss Tom Pendergast’s political machine to earn money for graduate school. Cahn and Szilard traveled to Kansas City later that month, dazzled Pendergast’s hoodlum elite with who knows what Szilardian tale “and three days later we had an appointment at the White House.”

  Truman’s appointments secretary, Matthew Connelly, barred the door. After he read the Einstein letter and the memorandum he relaxed. “I see now,” Szilard remembers him saying, “this is a serious matter. At first I was a little suspicious, because the appointment came through Kansas City.”2325 Truman had guessed the subject of Szilard’s concern. At the President’s direction Connelly sent the wandering Hungarian to Spartansburg, South Carolina, to talk to a private citizen named Jimmy Byrnes.

  A University of Chicago dean, a scientist named Walter Bartky, had accompanied Szilard to Washington. For added authority Szilard enlisted Nobel laureate Harold Urey and the three men boarded the overnight train south. Compartmentalization was working: “We did not quite understand why we were sent by the President to see James Byrnes. . . . Was he to . . . be the man in charge of the uranium work after the war, or what? We did not know.”2326 Truman had alerted Byrnes that the delegation was on its way. The South Carolinian received it warily at his home. He read the letter from Einstein first—“I have much confidence in [Szilard’s] judgment,” the theoretician of relativity testified—then turned to the memorandum.2327, 2328

  It was a prescient document. It argued that in preparing to test and then use atomic bombs the United States was “moving along a road leading to the destruction of the strong position [the nation] hitherto occupied in the world.” Szilard was referring not to a moral advantage but to an industrial: as he wrote elsewhere that spring, U.S. military strength was “essentially due to the fact that the United States could outproduce every other country in heavy armaments.”2329 When other countries acquired nuclear weapons, as they would in “just a few years,” that advantage would be lost: “Perhaps the greatest immediate danger which faces us is the probability that our ‘demonstration’ of atomic bombs will precipitate a race in the production of these devices between the United States and Russia.”

  Much of the rest of the memorandum asked the sort of questions the Interim Committee was also asking about international controls versus attempting to maintain an American monopoly. But Szilard echoed Bohr in pleading for what no one among the national leaders concerned with the problem seemed able to grasp, that “these decisions ought to be based not on the present evidence relating to atomic bombs, but rather on the situation which can be expected to confront us in this respect a few years from now.” By present evidence the bombs were modest and the United States held them in monopoly; the difficulty was deciding what the future would bring. Szilard first offended Byrnes in his memorandum by concluding that “this situation can be evaluated only by men who have first-hand knowledge of the facts involved, that is, by the small group of scie
ntists who are actively engaged in this work.” Having thus informed Byrnes that he thought him unqualified, Szilard then proceeded to tell him how his inadequacies might be corrected:

  If there were in existence a small subcommittee of the Cabinet (having as its members the Secretary of War, either the Secretary of Commerce or the Secretary of the Interior, a representative of the State Department, and a representative of the President, acting as the secretary of the Committee), the scientists could then submit to such a committee their recommendations.

  It was H. G. Wells’ Open Conspiracy emerging again into the light; it amused Byrnes, a man who had climbed to the top across forty-five years of hard political service, not at all:

  Szilard complained that he and some of his associates did not know enough about the policy of the government with regard to the use of the bomb. He felt that scientists, including himself, should discuss the matter with the Cabinet, which I did not feel desirable. His general demeanor and his desire to participate in policy making made an unfavorable impression on me.2330

  Byrnes proceeded to demonstrate the dangers of a lack of firsthand knowledge, Szilard remembers:

  When I spoke of my concern that Russia might become an atomic power, and might become an atomic power soon, if we demonstrated the power of the bomb and if we used it against Japan, his reply was, “General Groves tells me there is no uranium in Russia.”2331

  So Szilard explained to Byrnes what Groves, busy buying up the world supply of high-grade ore, apparently did not understand: that high-grade deposits are necessary for the extraction of so rare an element as radium but that low-grade ores, which undoubtedly existed in the Soviet Union, were entirely satisfactory where so abundant an element as uranium was concerned.

  To Szilard’s argument that using the atomic bomb, even testing the atomic bomb, would be unwise because it would disclose that the weapon existed, Byrnes took a turn at teaching the physicist a lesson in domestic politics:

  He said we had spent two billion dollars on developing the bomb, and Congress would want to know what we had got for the money spent. He said, “How would you get Congress to appropriate money for atomic energy research if you do not show results for the money which has been spent already?”2332

  But Byrnes’ most dangerous misunderstanding from Szilard’s point of view was his reading of the Soviet Union:

  Byrnes thought that the war would be over in about six months. . . . He was concerned about Russia’s postwar behavior. Russian troops had moved into Hungary and Rumania, and Byrnes thought it would be very difficult to persuade Russia to withdraw her troops from these countries, that Russia might be more manageable if impressed by American military might, and that a demonstration of the bomb might impress Russia. I shared Byrnes’ concern about Russia’s throwing around her weight in the postwar period, but I was completely flabbergasted by the assumption that rattling the bomb might make Russia more manageable.2333

  Shadowed by one of Groves’ ubiquitous security agents, the three discouraged men caught the next train back to Washington.

  There on the same day the Target Committee was meeting, this time with Paul Tibbets as well as Tolman and Parsons on hand.2334 Much of the discussion concerned Tibbets’ training program for the 509th Composite Group. He had sent his best crews to Cuba for six weeks to give them radar experience and flying time over water. “On load and distance tests,” the committee minutes report, “Col. Tibbets stated crews had taken off at 135,000 lbs. gross load, flown 4300 miles with 10,000 lb. bomb load, bombed from 32,000 ft. and returned to base with 900 gallons of fuel. This is in excess of the expected target run and further tests will reduce the loading to reach the S.O.P. [standard operating procedure] of 500 gallons of fuel on return.” The 509th was in the process of staging out to Tinian. Pumpkin production was increasing; nineteen had been shipped to Wendover and some of them dropped.

  LeMay was also keeping busy. “The 3 reserved targets for the first unit of this project were announced. With current and prospective rate of [Twentieth Air Force] H.E. bombing, it is expected to complete strategic bombing of Japan by 1 Jan 46 so availability of future targets will be a problem.” If the Manhattan Project did not hurry, that is, there would be no cities left in Japan to bomb.

  Kyoto, Hiroshima and Niigata were the three targets reserved. The committee completed its review by abandoning any pretension that its objectives there were military:

  The following conclusions were reached:

  (1) not to specify aiming points, this is to be left to later determination at base when weather conditions are known.

  (2) to neglect location of industrial areas as pin point target, since on these three targets such areas are small, spread on fringes of cities and quite dispersed.

  (3) to endeavor to place first gadget in center of selected city; that is, not to allow for later 1 or 2 gadgets for complete destruction.

  And that was that; the Target Committee would schedule no more meetings but would remain on call.

  Stimson abhorred bombing cities. As he wrote in his third-person memoir after the war, “for thirty years Stimson had been a champion of international law and morality. As soldier and Cabinet officer he had repeatedly argued that war itself must be restrained within the bounds of humanity. . . . Perhaps, as he later said, he was misled by the constant talk of ‘precision bombing,’ but he had believed that even air power could be limited in its use by the old concept of ‘legitimate military targets.’ ” Firebombing was “a kind of total war he had always hated.”2335 He seems to have conceived the idea that even the atomic bomb could be somehow humanely applied, as he discussed with Truman on May 16:

  I am anxious to hold our Air Force, so far as possible, to the “precision” bombing which it has done so well in Europe. I am told that it is possible and adequate. The reputation of the United States for fair play and humanitarianism is the world’s biggest asset for peace in the coming decades. I believe the same rule of sparing the civilian population should be applied, as far as possible, to the use of any new weapons.2336

  But the Secretary of War had less control over the military forces he was delegated to administer than he would have liked, and nine days later, on May 25, 464 of LeMay’s B-29’s—nearly twice as many as flew the first low-level March 9 incendiary raid—once again successfully burned out nearly sixteen square miles of Tokyo, although the Strategic Bombing Survey asserts that only a few thousand Japanese were killed compared to the 86,000 it totals for the earlier conflagration. The newspapers made much of the late-May fire raid; Stimson was appalled.

  On May 30 Groves crossed the river from his Virginia Avenue offices and hove into view.2337 Stimson’s frustration at the bombing of Japanese cities ignited a fateful exchange, as the general later told an interviewer:

  I was over in Mr. Stimson’s office talking to him about some matter in connection with the bomb when he asked me if I had selected the targets yet. I replied that I had that report all ready and I expected to take it over to General Marshall the following morning for his approval. Mr. Stimson then said: “Well, your report is all finished, isn’t it?” I said: “I haven’t gone over it yet, Mr. Stimson. I want to be sure that I’ve got it just right.” He said: “Well, I would like to see it” and I said: “Well, it’s across the river and it would take a long time to get it.” He said: “I have all day and I know how fast your office operates. Here’s a phone on this desk. You pick it up and you call your office and have them bring that report over.” Well, it took about fifteen or twenty minutes to get that report there and all the time I was stewing and fretting internally over the fact that I was shortcutting General Marshall. . . . But there was nothing I could do and when I protested slightly that I thought it was something that General Marshall should pass on first, Mr. Stimson said: “This is one time I’m going to be the final deciding authority. Nobody’s going to tell me what to do on this. On this matter I am the kingpin and you might just as well get that report over here.” Well in
the meantime he asked me what cities I was planning to bomb, or what targets. I informed him and told him that Kyoto was the preferred target.2338 It was the first one because it was of such size that we would have no question about the effects of the bomb. . . . He immediately said: “I don’t want Kyoto bombed.” And he went on to tell me about its long history as a cultural center of Japan, the former ancient capital, and a great many reasons why he did not want to see it bombed. When the report came over and I handed it to him, his mind was made up. There’s no question about that. He read it over and he walked to the door separating his office from General Marshall’s, opened it and said: “General Marshall, if you’re not busy I wish you’d come in.” And then the Secretary really double-crossed me because without any explanation he said to General Marshall: “Marshall, Groves has just brought me his report on the proposed targets.” He said: “I don’t like it. I don’t like the use of Kyoto.”

  So Kyoto at least, the Rome of Japan, founded in 793, famous for silk and cloisonné, a center of the Buddhist and Shinto religions with hundreds of historic temples and shrines, would be spared, though Groves would continue to test his superior’s resolve in the weeks to come. The Imperial Palace in Tokyo had been similarly spared even as Tokyo was laid waste around it. There were still limits to the destructiveness of war: the weapons were still modest enough to allow such fine discriminations.

  The Interim Committee was to meet in full dress with its Scientific Panel on Thursday, May 31, and on Friday, June 1, with its industrial advisers. The Joint Chiefs of Staff prepared the ground for those meetings on May 25 when they issued a formal directive to the Pacific commanders and to Hap Arnold defining U.S. military policy toward Japan in the months to come:2339