The Berlin Project

by Gregory Benford

  (2) The opinions of our scientific colleagues on the initial use of these weapons are not unanimous: they range from the proposal of a purely technical demonstration to that of the military application best designed to induce surrender. Those who advocate a purely technical demonstration would wish to outlaw the use of atomic weapons, and have feared that if we use the weapons now our position in future negotiations will be prejudiced. Others emphasize the opportunity of saving American lives by immediate military use, and believe that such use will improve the international prospects, in that they are more concerned with the prevention of war than with the elimination of this specific weapon. We find ourselves closer to these latter views; we can propose no technical demonstration likely to bring an end to the war; we see no acceptable alternative to direct military use.

  (3) With regard to these general aspects of the use of atomic energy, it is clear that we, as scientific men, have no proprietary rights. It is true that we are among the few citizens who have had occasion to give thoughtful consideration to these problems during the past few years. We have, however, no claim to special competence in solving the political, social, and military problems which are presented by the advent of atomic power.

  Karl said, “Good grief—‘no claim to special competence’ for sure! This is for politicians.”

  Groves shrugged. “And generals. Point is, this could be political trouble, if it gets out.”

  “Who would let it out?”

  “I dunno. These are your friends. Think they might leak?”

  “No. They wouldn’t.”

  “I don’t like this sort of idea getting out while we’re trying to win a war.”

  For the first time, Karl perceived pressures he had not sensed operating on Groves. The general tossed the papers on a desk already covered with them and pressed a button. “Got something else up my sleeve here.”

  With a knock, a slim army lieutenant came in, introduced himself as James Benford, and handed Groves a briefing summary folder. “You have to approve these, sir.”

  Karl saw the heading:

  OPERATION PEPPERMINT

  European Theater of Operations United States Army (ETOUSA)

  Portable Geiger radiation detection devices suitable for field use

  Provides for:

  • Centralization of all detection equipment and knowledge of its operation under ETOUSA;

  • Establishment of a means of detecting the use of radioactive substances; and

  • Channels for the reporting of such incidents to G-3 ETOUSA for immediate action.

  “I have one with me,” Benford said, bringing from a case a detector similar to those they used in the Manhattan Project, but more rugged. “We have a hundred Geigers and fifteen hundred packets of film that will be fogged by radiation.”

  Geiger counter

  “How about the exercises?” Groves asked.

  Benford was tall and lean and spoke with a soft drawl, his angular face betraying no emotion. “That report says full-scale rehearsals of Operation Peppermint were carried out to test the plan and the equipment. Ground and aerial surveys detected radioactive substances in trial concentration areas too.”

  “You’re”—Groves glanced at the man’s shoulder patches—“field artillery. Why’re you in this?”

  “The Geigers go in with the forward observers, sir. I’m one, going onto the beaches right after the infantry. To call in fire where needed. We’re close to the front lines and mobile.”

  “Ah, smart. Very well, Lieutenant, I’ll look over this report. That Geiger looks a lot like the ones we developed—right, Karl?”

  Karl had been checking the meter and switches. “Looks like a copy. So you really think that idea from the magazine, that ‘death dust,’ is a real threat?”

  Groves smiled. “I’d do it. Even if I had a bomb nearly done—which they might!—I’d be ready to salt our troops with the uranium we had. Oh—Benford, meet one of the men who got this ball rolling—Karl Cohen.” Karl shook the offered firm grip and said, “Staying overnight?”

  “Yes, sir—ah, I have to take back a written okay, General.”

  “You’ll get it in the morning,” Groves said, dismissing them both with a wave.

  “Let’s have a drink,” Karl said to Benford. “We’ve both got a big day coming up.”

  • • •

  The day before the big event, he was restless and had nothing to do. Realizing what might happen soon, he sat down and wrote to his mother, sister, friends, and lastly, ended his long letter to Marthe on onionskin paper with:

  I must reproach you (once again) for your manner of writing letters. You always fill up the space between your last factual sentence and the bottom of the last page with expressions of your undying love, devotion, etc. In mathematical terminology, the amount of your love is determined uniquely by that distance. This is how our lives are squeezed in this crazy war. If another event had occurred, such as the ceiling falling down in the kitchen, you would have one more factual sentence and you would love me one sentence less. Yet I know that cannot be.

  In the long night after, he dreamed of her breathing softly in sleep on her bed, of how her warm breath would come from lips parted just a bit, and her hair spread over the pillow. Her aroma swarmed up into his nostrils. When he awoke suddenly and reached for her, he found only the empty air beside his cot.

  PART IX

  * * *

  LITTLE BOY

  June 5, 1944

  Karl cut himself shaving, yawning after sleeping late into the day. In the mirror he was startled to see emerge from his wake-up fog a revelation: his similarity to his father. At a certain angle, a slanted cast of the dim light, the look of his mouth and jaw reminded him of a particular resolute manner, often seen as a boy—his father’s stern face, more savage as his disease grew. Dead now of a disease later named for the doctor who described the symptoms, as usual—mild old Dr. Crohn, affable and distant, focused more on his clinical research than on his patients. Dad’s been gone fourteen years. I wonder what he would make of where I am now.

  Then the hooting squadron meeting call sounded, and he went to the war.

  The landing fields buzzed at him as he made his way alongside them. The day before, a lesser aircraft had caught fire during takeoff, crashed, and exploded. Karl had seen the fireball while walking to a meeting. The pilot who survived had a concussion, a scalp wound, double vision, intermittent hearing in his left ear, a crushed vertebra, a ruptured liver, spleen, and kidney, and burns. The rest of the crew didn’t make it.

  Luis Alvarez had gotten off easy, then—just enough damage to keep him from today’s flight. Karl thought of this as he sat through the mission briefing, the endless details of maps and timing, detailed on displays for the pilots and navigators.

  Alvarez was there, standing outside on crutches, to see Karl off. They talked a bit about the parachuted detectors, how well they might work, the air cool and delicious as Karl savored it. Abruptly Luis said, “Afraid? I’d be.”

  Karl said, “Would it help if I were?”

  Luis laughed, and so did he.

  A private thrust a “bail-out kit” into his hands. Karl inspected it. On top were some five thousand dollars’ worth of currencies. The private said it was the best counterfeit that could possibly be made, “standard issue”—Dutch guilders, French francs, Belgian francs, Reichsmarks. He found a packet containing fishhooks, razors, rubberized silk maps, a compass. Another packet held “high energy” wafers and halazone tablets for purifying water and Benzedrine to keep awake. He put it all aside.

  He and the other scientists were aliens here, single-task people, on a one-shot mission. The real warriors ignored them. The scientists’ cover story was simple: this was some kind of special bomb, nothing to really pay attention to, so just help out the specialists; these science guys wouldn’t be around for long, anyway.

  Then, after some coffee to sustain the crew through the night, he suited up. In field boots he walked
toward his airplane, helping tug the gear on a weapons carrier. A silvery mist clung to the ground, ripe with woodland scents. He sucked the pleasant aromas in, thinking of his family and how alarmed they would be at what he was doing.

  Amid the hubbub of preparations for this comparatively minor but enormously important mission, nobody paid him any attention. He felt like something of a fraud among airmen, even though he was dressed for the role: a black leather bomber jacket, courtesy of the US Army Air Forces, though this was not really their mission. It was an Anglo-Saxon mission, uniting both powers who had started the whole bomb program, giving what they could. His khaki trousers would be warm at the high altitudes, and he even had a white scarf, given to him at the briefing by a Scot pilot. Some of them did know what was to fall on Berlin tonight, and they all wanted it more than they could say.

  The Lancaster bomber that loomed over him was the biggest working airplane ever. The USA had a bigger, newer Boeing B-29, but no one in England had even seen one. So it had to be the rugged Lancasters. In the months leading up to General Groves’s order, that Karl come help with the bombing preparation, he had heard rumors. They described a high-level fight over which nation would carry this new weapon to its first use. One afternoon Groves had told him he wanted a B-29 sent to do the job, slamming his fist on a desk in frustration. By now Karl had learned to ignore most such displays and ride them out.

  But the B-29 wasn’t fully tested yet, and crews weren’t familiar with it. So Groves bargained some US airmen onto both Lancasters that would make the run. Karl had spent a week of tedious training in how to release the pressure-gauge “bombs”—cylinders with noses and fins, which did indeed look like bombs, but just popped out parachuted instruments. They would fly with an outer screen of other Lancasters, a squadron to draw fighters, if any. The central two Lancasters were of Dyson’s stripped-down model, so if they got attacked, the Little Boy carrier would streak ahead, and so would Karl’s following plane.

  The Mustang fighters who would clear the way over Berlin for them were leaving from another airfield. Here, the runway was oddly calm and the sunset fading into ruby splendor. He sniffed sweet spring in the mellow air and wondered if this would be the last time he ever did.

  The Little Boy carrier, the “strike plane” as the flyboys called it, was named Northampton, just ahead. A team loaded Little Boy into a hydraulic lift and it whined up into the plane’s bomb bay. Karl watched the tense airmen standing around, regarding the ominous bomb on heavy racks go up into the guts of the Northampton. “Looks like a long trash can with fins,” someone muttered. It did, Karl realized. Over ten feet long, thirty inches wide, a tapered tail assembly that ended in a boxed frame of stabilizing baffle plates, weighing nearly ten thousand pounds—death in a box.

  It took a long, suspenseful while. The team jacked Little Boy carefully between the yawning bomb bay doors. Not a lot of clearance, the shackle slipping around it to hold the array firm. A loud clank came from above, and everyone jumped. “Dropped a flange!” someone called. Uneasy laughter.

  Now his turn. Amid the olive drab uniforms of the Americans and the stylish blues of the Brits, Karl got into the Lancaster trailing the Northampton. It was a long, black, four-engine murder machine named Cumberland. With its two big vertical stabilizers and huge bomb bay, the long, winged cylinder seemed to crouch down, ready to spring.

  Bomber Harris called the Lancaster the RAF Bomber Command’s “shining sword,” but the aircrews called these particular ones dirty buggers, because they were painted black for night raids. Before they ever heard of the Manhattan Project, the Brits’ thirty-two Lancasters had been adapted to take the new, bigger bombs, the superheavy Tallboy and Grand Slam. Uprated engines with paddle-blade propellers gave more power, with no gun turrets, to reduce weight and give smoother lines.

  Dyson’s impassioned speech in favor of ripping out the turrets had worked. The lead plane, Northampton, was ideal for the heavy gadget, Little Boy. Karl had let the Brits think the name was an obvious sardonic reference to the Brit Tallboy bomb. Few over here had read or seen The Maltese Falcon.

  A ladder led to the Cumberland’s hatches through the forward landing gear, and Karl worked through the narrow, thirty-three-foot tunnel that connected pilot, bomb area, and radar bay. Some curious British way of speech made them call bombs “cookies.” The weapons crew seats were steel, bolted to the deck, with a thin cushion. The steel was to cover their asses if flak came up through the floor.

  He fiddled to get his headphones and mike to work, then listened on the intercom to the barking British voices. He recalled how different their offhand talk was in the face of so much war, five years of it now. He had heard that a famous bomber pilot had radioed back his problem with a nonchalant, “Our engine has packed up and we’re going downstairs.” No one came back.

  Engines started, one by one, and the pulse of the propellers shook the plane’s deck. Acceleration suddenly pressed him back in his seat. The rumbling, bouncy takeoff in such a big, lumbering airplane was now routine to him. He recalled that the Brits had started off the fission work, though they had pushed against using centrifuges. They were still trying to find some membrane to use in the gaseous diffusion method. Nothing much worked. And now it came to this—they got to fly the bomb against Hitler.

  An airy, adrenaline lightness came to him as they lifted off. Landing gear thumped home and the pilot said over comm, “Berlin bastards, watch out!”

  • • •

  They flew fairly low to avoid high winds aloft. Karl knew the Little Boy weaponeer had been concerned about the possibility of an accidental detonation if the plane crashed at takeoff. So the weaponeer had decided not to load the four cordite powder bags into the gun breech until the aircraft was in flight. Fair enough. By now Little Boy was live though not armed, and would soon bring death.

  He settled in and even napped. Somehow, when Carlos shook him awake with a cup of coffee, he felt refreshed. No nerves, even. He had devoted every effort for five years to this. It was time.

  Idly he wondered what would happen if something went wrong and the bomb went off midflight, when they were following the lead plane. The fireball from the X-rays and gammas would be a hundred meters across at least. Anything near it—their Lancaster, its crew—would turn into not mere atoms. The heat would strip away all an atom’s electrons and turn the plane, and him, into a plasma—a swarm of nuclei and electrons, erasing all of Karl Cohen in a microsecond. Such were the energies he had spent years calculating, but until now, never imagining.

  The pilot took them up high as they entered German territory, and Karl watched their progress on radar. On went the oxygen masks, with their oily air. He checked the radio transmitters yet again and got reassuring signals on the oscilloscopes mounted on the rattling instrument racks. Karl had his own backup man named Carlos Amila, from New Mexico. He would take over if somehow Karl was disabled, most probably by some flak fire. He and the others were real aircrew with experience; Karl was useful American baggage, by order of General Groves. The drumming engine noise was not bad, because he wore earmuffs over his headphones. He asked Carlos to tell him if they got any talk from “up front,” which meant the pilot.

  The airplane had gotten cold, and he hugged into his flight jacket. Then he failed to sleep.

  The engines’ hard drone went on and his tension rose. A snap job, an airman had described it. Just let the ’chutes drop.

  Karl had time to think of the sleeping people their small formation was passing over. Their world would end in a profound way when they awoke next morning. Carlos nudged him and shouted, “Flak suit!”

  Karl got into his and located the polarized goggles everyone had gotten back in the flight briefing. They were to wear those while observing the blast. He watched Carlos struggle to put on a parachute, too.

  “Aren’t you going to?” Carlos pointed to the bulky parachute.

  “If we’re shot down, I don’t want to be captured.”

  �
��Hey, if this works, the war’s over, we go home soon.”

  “Not if you’re a Jew and some farmer has a handy pitchfork.”

  Karl gestured to his flight suit, which wasn’t a uniform but had stenciled above the breast pocket COHEN.

  This made Carlos blink. He gazed off into the distance, thinking, and then tapped Karl’s shoulder. “Put your phones on.”

  Karl did and heard the pilot say, “Approaching target zone.”

  Luis had prepared and tested the pressure gauges that the following plane would drop. They were bulky because of the parachutes, and he had to tumble them out in a brace, using a mechanical lever. He first rechecked the receiving antenna that would get the signals from the gauges. All normal. He watched the radar nearby intently as they approached Berlin from the north.

  The pilot said, “No flak, no Kraut fighters. The Mustang boys did their job. Looks mostly clear over target.”

  There had been comm talk Karl had missed from the fighters, evidently. He felt even more the amateur.

  In a chipper voice the pilot said, “Weather planes report some clouds. Nothing major. Partial visibility.”

  He and Carlos flipped the switches to open the small bomb bay. He could see a smattering of lights slipping by below patchy clouds. The moonlight helped him get a sense of perspective, and he tried to match that with the radar. He had memorized the flight path to the center of Berlin but could not make much of anything match up with his memory. No matter; his job was simple. Breaking the entire making and delivery of the gadget into compartments had a virtue: he could ignore the rest. He didn’t need to check much now, just follow orders.

  In Northampton just a few kilometers ahead, the bomb crew would be pulling the green battery plugs from the side of Little Boy, inserting the red ones to arm the detonator batteries. A last check of the release mechanism, just to be sure.