The Joint Chiefs of Staff direct the invasion of Kyushu (operation OLYMPIC) target date 1 November 1945, in order to:
(1) Intensify the blockade and aerial bombardment of Japan.
(2) Contain and destroy major enemy forces.
(3) Support further advances for the purpose of establishing the conditions favorable to the decisive invasion of the industrial heart of Japan.
Truman had not yet signed on for the Japanese invasion. One of his advisers favored a naval blockade to starve the Japanese to surrender. The President would soon tell the Joint Chiefs that he would judge among his options “with the purpose of economizing to the maximum extent possible the loss of American lives.”2340 Marshall, with MacArthur concurring from the field, estimated that casualties—killed, wounded and missing—in the first thirty days following an invasion of the southernmost Japanese home island would not exceed 31,000.2341 An invasion of the main island of Honshu across the plain of Tokyo would be proportionately more violent.
When Szilard returned to Washington from South Carolina he looked up Oppenheimer, just arrived in town for the Interim Committee meeting, to lobby him. So hard was the Los Alamos director working to complete the first atomic bombs that Groves had doubted two weeks earlier if he could break free for the May 31 meeting.2342 Oppenheimer would not for the world have missed the chance to advise at so high a level. But his candid vision of the future of the weapon he was building was as unromantic as his understanding of its immediate necessity was, in Szilard’s view, misinformed:
I told Oppenheimer that I thought it would be a very serious mistake to use the bomb against the cities of Japan. Oppenheimer didn’t share my view. He surprised me by starting the conversation by saying, “The atomic bomb is shit.” “What do you mean by that?” I asked him. He said, “Well, this is a weapon which has no military significance.2343 It will make a big bang—a very big bang—but it is not a weapon which is useful in war.” He thought that it would be important, however, to inform the Russians that we had an atomic bomb and that we intended to use it against the cities of Japan, rather than taking them by surprise. This seemed reasonable to me. . . . However, while this was necessary it was certainly not sufficient. “Well,” Oppenheimer said, “don’t you think that if we tell the Russians what we intend to do and then use the bomb in Japan, the Russians will understand it?” And I remember that I said, “They’ll understand it only too well.”
Stimson’s insomnia troubled him on the night of May 30 and he arrived at the Pentagon the next morning feeling miserable. His committee assembled at 10 A.M. Marshall, Groves, Harvey Bundy and another aide attended by invitation, but Stimson’s attention was focused on the four scientists, three of them Nobel laureates. The elderly Secretary of War welcomed them warmly, congratulated them on their accomplishments and was concerned to convince them that he and Marshall understood that the product of their labor would be more than simply an enlarged specimen of ordnance. The handwritten notes he prepared emphasize the awe in which he held the bomb; he was not normally a histrionic man:2344
S.l2345
Its size and character
We don’t think it mere new weapon
Revolutionary Discovery of Relation of man to universe
Great History Landmark like
Gravitation
Copernican Theory
But,
Bids fair [to be] infinitely greater, in respect to its Effect
—on the ordinary affairs of man’s life.
May destroy or perfect International Civilization
May [be] Frankenstein or means for World Peace
Oppenheimer was surprised and impressed. When Roosevelt died, he told an audience late in life, he had felt “a terrible bereavement . . . partly because we were not sure that anyone in Washington would be thinking of what needed to be done in the future.” Now he saw that “Colonel Stimson was thinking hard and seriously about the implications for mankind of the thing we had created and the wall into the future that we had breached.”2346 And though Oppenheimer knew Stimson had never sat down to talk with Niels Bohr, the Secretary seemed to be speaking in terms derived at some near remove from Bohr’s understanding of the complementarity of the bomb.
After Stimson’s introduction Arthur Compton offered a technical review of the nuclear business, concluding that a competitor would need perhaps six years to catch up with the United States. Conant mentioned the thermonuclear and asked Oppenheimer what gestation period that much more violent mechanism would require; Oppenheimer estimated a minimum of three years. The Los Alamos director took the floor then to review the explosive forces involved. First-stage bombs, he said, meaning crude bombs like Fat Man and Little Boy, might explode with blasts equivalent to 2,000 to 20,000 tons of TNT. That was an upward revision of the estimate Bethe had supplied the Target Committee at Los Alamos in mid-May. Second-stage weapons, Oppenheimer went on—meaning presumably advanced fission weapons with improved implosion systems—might be equal to 50,000 to 100,000 tons of TNT. Thermonuclear weapons might range from 10 million to 100 million tons TNT equivalent.
These were numbers most of the men in the room had seen before and were inured to. Apparently Byrnes had not; they worried him gravely: “As I heard these scientists . . . predict the destructive power of the weapon, I was thoroughly frightened.2347 I had sufficient imagination to visualize the danger to our country when some other country possessed such a weapon.” For now the President’s personal representative bided his time.
Entirely in energetic character, Ernest Lawrence spoke up for staying ahead of the rest of the world by knowing more and doing more than any other country. He made explicit a future course for the nation about which the previous record of all the meetings and deliberations is oddly silent, a course based on assumptions diametrically opposite to Oppenheimer’s profound insight that the atomic bomb was shit:
Dr. Lawrence recommended that a program of plant expansion be vigorously pursued and at the same time a sizable stock pile of bombs and material should be built up. . . . Only by vigorously pursuing the necessary plant expansion and fundamental research . . . could this nation stay out in front.
That was a prescription for an arms race as soon as the Soviet Union took up the challenge. Arthur Compton immediately signed on. So did his brother Karl. Oppenheimer contented himself with a footnote about materials allocation. Stimson eventually summarized the discussion:
1. Keep our industrial plant intact.
2. Build up sizeable stock piles of material for military use and for industrial and technical use.
3. Open the door to industrial development.
Oppenheimer demurred that the scientists should be released to return to their universities and get back to basic science; during the war, he said, they had been plucking the fruits of earlier research. Bush emphatically agreed.
The committee turned to the question of international control and Oppenheimer took the lead. His exact words do not survive, only their summary in the meeting notes kept by the young recording secretary, Gordon Arneson, but if that summary is accurate, then Oppenheimer’s emphasis was different from Bohr’s and misleading:
Dr. Oppenheimer pointed out that the immediate concern had been to shorten the war. The research that had led to this development had only opened the door to future discoveries. Fundamental knowledge of this subject was so widespread throughout the world that early steps should be taken to make our developments known to the world. He thought it might be wise for the United States to offer to the world free interchange of information with particular emphasis on the development of peace-time uses. The basic goal of all endeavors in the field should be the enlargement of human welfare. If we were to offer to exchange information before the bomb was actually used, our moral position would be greatly strengthened.
Where was Bohr’s understanding that the bomb was a source of terror but for that very reason also a source of hope, a means of welding together nations by their common dread of
a menacing nuclear standoff? The problem was not exchanging information to improve America’s moral standing; the problem was leaders sitting down and negotiating a way beyond the mutual danger the new weapons would otherwise install. The opening up would emerge out of those negotiations, necessarily, to guarantee safety; it could not in the real world of secrecy and suspicion realistically precede them. In 1963, lecturing on Bohr, Oppenheimer understood well enough the fundamental weakness of his proposal:
Bush and Compton and Conant were clear that the only future they could envisage with hope was one in which the whole development would be internationally controlled.2348 Stimson understood this; he understood that it meant a very great change in human life; and he understood that the central problem at that moment lay in our relations with Russia. . . . But there were differences: Bohr was for action, for timely and responsible action. He realized that it had to be taken by those who had the power to commit and to act. He wanted to change the whole framework in which this problem would appear, early enough so that the problem would be altered by it. He believed in statesmen; he used the word over and over again; he was not very much for committees. The Interim Committee was a committee, and proved itself by appointing another committee, the scientific panel.
No one should presume to judge these men as they struggled with a future that even a mind as fundamental as Niels Bohr’s could only barely imagine. But if Robert Oppenheimer ever had a chance to present Bohr’s case to those who had the power to commit and to act he had it that morning. He did not speak the Dane’s hard plain truths. He spoke instead as Aaron to Bohr’s Moses. And Bohr, though he waited nearby in Washington, had not been invited to appear in the star chamber of that darkly paneled room.
Even Stimson thought Oppenheimer’s proposals misguided. He asked immediately “what would be the position of democratic governments as against totalitarian regimes under such a program of international control coupled with scientific freedom”—as if opening up the world would leave either democratic or totalitarian nations unchanged, a confusion that Oppenheimer’s confusion inspired. Which led to further confusion: “The Secretary said . . . it was his own feeling that the democratic countries had fared pretty well in this war. Dr. Bush endorsed this view vigorously.” Bush then unwittingly outlined a domestic model of what Bohr’s larger open world might be: “He said that our tremendous advantage stemmed in large measure from our system of team work and free interchange of information.” And promptly lapsed back into Stimson’s extended status quo: “He expressed some doubt, however, of our ability to remain ahead permanently if we were to turn over completely to the Russians the results of our research under free competition with no reciprocal exchange.”
Odder and odder, and Byrnes sitting among them trying to imagine a weapon equivalent to 100 million tons of TNT, trying to imagine what it would mean to possess such a weapon and listening to these highly educated men, men almost entirely of the Eastern establishment, of Harvard and MIT and Princeton and Yale, blithely proposing, it seemed, to give away the knowledge of how to make such a weapon.
Stimson left to attend a White House ceremony and they went on to speak of Russia, which Byrnes knew as an advancing brutality currently devouring Poland, and Oppenheimer again took the lead:
Dr. Oppenheimer pointed out that Russia had always been very friendly to science and suggested that we might open up this subject with them in a tentative fashion and in the most general terms without giving them any details of our productive effort. He thought we might say that a great national effort had been put into this project and express hope for cooperation with them in this field. He felt strongly that we should not prejudge the Russian attitude in this matter.
Oppenheimer found an ally then in George Marshall, who “discussed at some length the story of charges and counter-charges that have been typical of our relations with the Russians, pointing out that most of these allegations have proven unfounded.” Marshall thought Russia’s reputation for being uncooperative “stemmed from the necessity of maintaining security.” He believed a way to begin was to forge “a combination among like-minded powers, thereby forcing Russia to fall in line by the very force of this coalition.” Such bulldozing had worked in the gunpowder days now almost past but it would not work in the days of the bomb; that power would be big enough, as Oppenheimer’s estimates clarified, to make one nation alone a match for the world.
The surprise of the morning was perhaps Marshall’s idea for an opening to Moscow: “He raised the question whether it might be desirable to invite two prominent Russian scientists to witness the [Trinity] test.” Groves must have winced; after the years of secrecy, after the thousands of numb man-hours of security work, that would be a renunciation worthy of Bohr himself.
Byrnes had heard enough. He had sat behind Franklin Roosevelt at Yalta making notes. In all but the formalities he outranked even Henry Stimson. He put his foot down and the seasoned committeemen moved smoothly into line:
Mr. Byrnes expressed a fear that if information were given to the Russians, even in general terms, Stalin would ask to be brought into the partnership. He felt this to be particularly likely in view of our commitments and pledges of cooperation with the British. In this connection Dr. Bush pointed out that even the British did not have any of our blue prints on plants. Mr. Byrnes expressed the view, which was generally agreed to by all present, that the most desirable program would be to push ahead as fast as possible in production and research to make certain that we stay ahead and at the same time make every effort to better our political relations with Russia.
When Stimson returned, Compton summed up the sense of the crucial discussion the Secretary of War had missed—“the need for maintaining ourselves in a position of superiority while at the same time working toward adequate political agreements.” Marshall left them for duty and the rest of the committee trooped off to lunch.
They sat at adjoining tables in a Pentagon dining room. They were a civilian committee; separate conversations converged on the same question, only briefly mentioned during the morning and not taken up: was there no way to let this cup pass from them? Must Little Boy be dropped on the Japanese in surprise? Could their stubborn enemy not be warned in advance or a demonstration arranged?2349
Stimson, at the focus of one conversation (Byrnes the center of the other), may have spoken then of his outrage at the mass murder of civilians and his complicity; Oppenheimer remembered such a statement at some time during the day and lunch was the only unstructured occasion:
[Stimson emphasized] the appalling lack of conscience and compassion that the war had brought about . . . the complacency, the indifference, and the silence with which we greeted the mass bombings in Europe and, above all, Japan. He was not exultant about the bombings of Hamburg, of Dresden, of Tokyo. . . . Colonel Stimson felt that, as far as degradation went, we had had it; that it would take a new life and a new breath to heal the harm.
The only recorded response to Stimson’s mea culpa is Oppenheimer’s admiration for it, but there were a number of responses to the question of warning the Japanese or demonstrating the atomic bomb. Oppenheimer could not think of a suitably convincing demonstration:2350
You ask yourself would the Japanese government as then constituted and with divisions between the peace party and the war party, would it have been influenced by an enormous nuclear firecracker detonated at a great height doing little damage and your answer is as good as mine. I don’t know.2351
Since the Secretary of State-designate had power to commit and to act, the significant responses to the question are Byrnes’. In a 1947 memoir he recalled several:
We feared that, if the Japanese were told that the bomb would be used on a given locality, they might bring our boys who were prisoners of war to that area. Also, the experts had warned us that the static test which was to take place in New Mexico, even if successful, would not be conclusive proof that a bomb would explode when dropped from an airplane. If we were to warn the
Japanese of the new highly destructive weapon in the hope of impressing them and if the bomb then failed to explode, certainly we would have given aid and comfort to the Japanese militarists.2352 Thereafter, the Japanese people probably would not be impressed by any statement we might make in the hope of inducing them to surrender.
In a later television interview he emphasized a more political concern: “The President would have had to take the responsibility of telling the world that we had this atomic bomb and how terrific it was . . . and if it didn’t prove out what would have happened to the way the war went God only knows.”2353
Someone among the assembled, Ernest Lawrence remembers, concluded that the “number of people that would be killed by the bomb would not be greater in general magnitude than the number already killed in fire raids,” making those slaughters a baseline, as indeed before the awful potential of the new weapon they were.2354
These troubled men returned to Stimson’s office and spent most of the afternoon considering the effect of the bombing on the Japanese and their will to fight. Someone unnamed chose to discredit the atomic bomb’s destructiveness, asserting it “would not be much different from the effect caused by any Air Corps strike of present dimensions.” Oppenheimer defended his creation’s pyrotechnics, citing the electromagnetic and nuclear radiation it would expel:
Dr. Oppenheimer stated that the visual effect of an atomic bombing would be tremendous. It would be accompanied by a brilliant luminescence which would rise to a height of 10,000 to 20,000 feet. The neutron effect of the explosion would be dangerous to life for a radius of at least two-thirds of a mile.2355
It was probably during this afternoon discussion that Oppenheimer reported an estimate prepared at Los Alamos of how many deaths an atomic bomb exploded over a city might cause. Arthur Compton remembers the number as 20,000, an estimate based on the assumption, he says, that the city’s occupants would seek shelter when the air raid began and before the bomb went off. He recalls Stimson bringing up Kyoto then, “a city that must not be bombed.” The Secretary still insisted passionately that “the objective was military damage . . . not civilian lives.”2356
Making of the Atomic Bomb Page 89
