The Pope of Physics

by Gino Segrè

  When the lab’s first radiation accident occurred there in August 1945, the young physicist Haroutune (Harry) Daghlian was rushed to the hospital unit where Laura was assigned. After an excruciating twenty-five days, the twenty-four-year-old died. Laura learned firsthand about the horrors of radiation poisoning.

  Enrico had never talked to Laura about such dangers in the workplace. Nor did she have any idea that these dangers would spread well beyond the boundaries of the Hill. Tragically, in the same month and year that the young Armenian American suffered from lethal radiation poisoning in New Mexico, tens of thousands of Japanese experienced similar fates.

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  “NO ACCEPTABLE ALTERNATIVE”

  The secrecy that enveloped the Manhattan Project seemed impenetrable. Billboards depicting the mythical monkeys that neither saw, heard, nor did evil, cautioned employees: “What you see here, what you do here, what you hear here, when you leave here, let it stay here!” This did not seem to deter one man, Klaus Fuchs, who as part of the British Mission had been recruited in August 1944 by the Los Alamos lab. He worked on the implosion of the Gadget. A valued member of the scientific team, he was considered polite and refined. Often he joined the Fermis and others for recreational and social gatherings. In the words of Laura, “we all trusted him and saw him frequently.” All the while, he was passing classified information about the bomb to the Russians.

  According to America’s popular Life magazine, prior to August 7, 1945, “no more than a few dozen men in the entire country knew the full meaning of the Manhattan Project, and perhaps only a thousand others even were aware that work on atoms was involved.” Whether Life considered Fuchs as one of the few dozen men who knew is unspecified, but it would have been correct to count America’s vice president among the clueless—that is, until April 12, 1945.

  That was the day when President Roosevelt suffered a massive cerebral hemorrhage. He died a few hours later. Harry Truman, a former U.S. senator from Missouri and vice president for little over a year, was sworn in as president that evening.

  In a cursory remark made after the swearing-in, Secretary of War Henry Stimson informed the newly minted president of “the development of new explosive of almost unbelievable destructive power.” Perplexed and startled, Truman had known nothing about it. As chairman of the Senate’s Committee to Investigate the National Defense Program, he had been aware of the Manhattan Project’s existence but had not been told what it was trying to achieve—nor about its progress.

  After detailed briefings, Truman added the bomb to an already full agenda. The war in Germany was ending, but the one with Japan was not. The relationship between the United States and the Soviet Union had become increasingly tense as arguments about the organization of postwar Europe rose to the surface. Given these circumstances, there was little sympathy in high government circles for Bohr’s advocacy of international cooperation about nuclear weapons research.

  The world picture shifted significantly on May 7, 1945, when Germany surrendered. Hitler had committed suicide the week before. The fiendish dictator was dead and Germany had not developed an atomic bomb, a fear motivating Los Alamos’s refugee scientists. The raison d’être for their relentless drive and herculean efforts had suddenly vanished. They were stunned, both elated and deflated: delighted the war in Europe was over and confused about further justification for their atom bomb work.

  Yet no one quit the project in May, or in the months that followed. At the end of 1944, Józef Rotblat, a Polish physicist with British citizenship, had done so. He left the lab on the basis of it becoming evident that Germany had abandoned its bomb project and “the whole purpose of my being in Los Alamos ceased to be.” Contemplating why others had not departed, he attributed it to a wide range of reasons, from sheer scientific curiosity about whether the bomb would work to the argument that its use would save American lives.

  But Los Alamos was a project under the aegis of the military, and the war against a stubborn enemy was not over. Martial strategies and discussions dominated the dialogue. Washington hoped this new weapon would bring the war to a swift conclusion. On the twenty-third of April, Groves, with his usual gruff manner, had updated his patrician boss, Stimson, on activities at the laboratories. He predicted that by early August, enough U-235 would have been produced at Oak Ridge for one bomb. Hanford’s plutonium output was proceeding at a rapid rate. Difficulties at Los Alamos with the implosion mechanism were being overcome. There was no assurance that the plutonium bomb would work, but if a test showed that it did, an implosion bomb would also be ready by early August. The report was positive on all counts.

  Two days later Stimson and Groves had a meeting with the president, briefing him thoroughly on the Manhattan Project and suggesting that a civilian committee be formed to provide recommendations to him about uses of the bomb, postwar research and development, international control, and release of information to the public. The president readily agreed.

  The first meeting of the Interim Committee, known as such because it expected to disband after the war ended, was held at the Pentagon on May 9. With Stimson as chairman, committee members included two high government officials, the president of MIT, and the two men most responsible for formulating science policy during the war, Vannevar Bush and James Conant. James Byrnes, about to be named secretary of state, was placed on the committee as President Truman’s direct representative. And though not a member, the Armed Forces chief of staff, General George Marshall, attended the meetings to gauge how its deliberations would affect the military.

  It was a tall agenda, especially when the topic of the bomb surfaced. This elite group would make judgments reverberating throughout the world in both the moral and military realms. There was no question within government circles that the bomb should be used. How to do so was still debated.

  The next meeting of the Interim Committee was a two-day session at the end of May, when they expected to have input from a specially constituted four-person Scientific Panel composed of J. Robert Oppenheimer, Enrico Fermi, Arthur Compton, and Ernest Lawrence.

  It is notable that Fermi was the only one on the panel whose mark on the Manhattan Project was not linked to major administrative responsibilities and heavy-duty policymaking. At Los Alamos, he had been able to focus on what he liked best: physics, pure and simple. Being named to the panel, with its somber political agenda, was not what Fermi sought. He was among those scientists “not bothered by moral scruples” as described by the disillusioned Rotblat, “quite content to leave it to others to decide how their work would be used.” Most probably, Fermi’s appointment was made precisely because he represented a neutral, dispassionate approach.

  In their May 31 meeting, the Interim Committee asked the Scientific Panel if the Japanese should be made aware that such a weapon existed. Or should the bomb be dropped on a Japanese city without warning, much as the Japanese had not warned about Pearl Harbor? Or would a demonstration on an uninhabited remote site be adequate to convince the Japanese of the futility of further fighting?

  These same questions were posed the following day to a group of four prominent industrialists. In addition, the committee addressed general questions such as whether the Russians should be informed about the bomb, what type of atomic energy buildup would be appropriate in the postwar period, and how research should then be organized.

  At the end of two days of meetings, Truman’s personally appointed representative, Byrnes, made a beeline straight to the president, telling him the Interim Committee had agreed that the bomb be used on a city “without prior warning.” In the eyes of this seasoned politician who had served thirty-two years in public life including a one-year stint as a Supreme Court justice, there was no other possible conclusion. How could one justify holding back in wartime a weapon that could prevent American lives from being lost? And how could one account for spending two billion dollars on a weapon and then not using it? And finally, how could one possibly obtain funding from Congress for cont
inued nuclear research in a postwar world if there was nothing to show for what had already been achieved?

  A more nuanced approach was offered by Secretary of War Stimson, considered by Truman “a man of great wisdom and foresight … as much concerned with the role of the atomic bomb in shaping of history as in its capacity to shorten this war.” While acknowledging that firebombings in Dresden (February 1945) and Tokyo (March 1945) had each killed approximately a hundred thousand people, Stimson was concerned that even if the Japanese death toll were no higher, this new weapon might be regarded as an atrocity of a different order. It would be the work of a single bomb whose destructive aftermath was branded by a new way of dying, the slow agony of radiation poisoning. In addition, if the Russians were not notified beforehand of the bomb’s existence, they might construe the action as saying that they were no longer considered U.S. allies.

  Believing that Byrnes was acting too impulsively, Stimson asked the Scientific Panel to meet again in mid-June and provide him with a written set of recommendations on the initial use of the new weapon. He urged them to consult with others in the scientific community who played a role in the Manhattan Project, but were not as invested in making the actual bomb as the Los Alamos group.

  During the May 31 meeting, Compton had shared with the Interim Committee the position advocated by physicist James Franck, his Chicago colleague. Franck, one of the many Jewish scientists who had fled Germany, was, as his grandson wrote, “sensitized to the ethical and political issues involved by his participation in World War I’s chemical weapons program” and was strongly against military use of the bomb. His agreement with Compton to act as the Met Lab’s chemistry division chair had been reached with the proviso that if a bomb was ready for use, Franck could express his opinion to someone at the highest policymaking level. Compton did not consider it an unreasonable request from the celebrated 1925 Nobel laureate. When he returned to Chicago from the Washington meetings, Compton asked Franck to head a six-man Met Lab Committee on Political and Social Problems that would write a report formalizing these ideas.

  The Franck report, a hastily prepared document, argued for a demonstration showing the world the power of a nuclear bomb detonation. The test, in an uninhabited area, could stimulate a broad national and international public discussion about use of the bomb. The twelve-page statement was personally delivered by Franck and Compton to Stimson’s office in Washington on June 11, its summary stating, “We believe that these considerations make the use of nuclear bombs for an early attack against Japan inadvisable. If the United States would be the first to release this new means of indiscriminate destruction upon mankind, she would sacrifice public support throughout the world, precipitate the race of armaments, and prejudice the possibility of reaching an international agreement on the future control of such weapons.” The report addressed head-on the probable political and ethical fallout from America dropping the bomb.

  On June 15 and 16, the Scientific Panel met in Los Alamos. They had been asked by the Interim Committee to prepare a report on whether any kind of demonstration could be devised that would seem likely to bring an end to the war without using the bomb against a live target. The panel stuck to its mandate, although conversations lasting until the wee hours occasionally veered into the realm of politics and ethics. On these, Fermi remained largely silent, in keeping with his aversion to offering advice on such matters. However, on technical issues Fermi easily and profusely shared his acumen and insights.

  The panel submitted its report posthaste to the Interim Committee, first presenting the different views about the atomic bomb held in their community, including those of the Franck report. Their conclusion contrasted sharply with the Franck report. Compton, Fermi, Lawrence, and Oppenheimer unanimously stated their finding that “we can propose no technical demonstration likely to bring an end to the war; we see no acceptable alternative to direct military use.” Although a bit circumspectly presented, the panel’s report helped pave the path to dropping an atomic bomb on Japan.

  At the conclusion of the report, in a paragraph that echoed Fermi’s belief that physicists lacked special insights into nontechnical matters, it equivocated:

  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.

  The panel’s disclaimer of “no special competence” did not impede them from recommending that there was “no acceptable alternative.”

  Whether the Interim Committee actually ever read the Franck report is unclear. When Franck and Compton delivered it to Stimson, he was out of town. Compton left a cover note expressing his own view that the report had not weighed sufficiently the number of American lives saved if the bomb was promptly used. Although not necessarily meaning to undercut the report’s contents, Compton’s comment may have effectively done so.

  The moral aspects of dropping the bomb continue to be debated, and are rendered more complex by whirling uncertainties of how close the war against Japan was to a conclusion and the prospects of Russia’s invasion of Manchuria. But an enduring question is how such momentous decisions can be reached. They bridge military, scientific, political, and ethical domains. Fermi and Szilard, one a member of the Scientific Panel and the other a signer of the Franck report, diverged in this respect as they did in others. Szilard was adamant that scientists should be prime decision makers. Fermi, on the other hand, adhered to the stance of “no special competence” and saw scientists not on top, but on tap to other experts.

  In the case of whether or not to drop a bomb on a civilian population, the decision-making framework spanned a little over two months. The answer was affirmative; the die was cast. But it had not yet been proved that the implosion mechanism would function. This was crucial because although the scientists were sure the U-235 bomb would work, only one bomb of this type would be ready in the next few months. Assuming that was so, the Japanese might deduce it was the only nuclear bomb the U.S. Army had at its disposal and continue to fight.

  Knowing that they would need to test a plutonium bomb, Oppenheimer had already set in motion the search for an uninhabited desert location to hold the trial. It had to be remote from populated areas for safety reasons, also far enough away for security reasons, close enough for material and personnel from Los Alamos to have access, and large enough for the actual test. The site eventually chosen, measuring eighteen by twenty-four miles, lay in the New Mexico desert two hundred miles south of Los Alamos and sixty miles northwest of the city of Alamogordo. Oppenheimer, inspired by a John Donne poem, gave both the site and the eventual test the code name Trinity.

  The first time they would have enough plutonium for the test was July; the sixteenth was the day eventually selected. On the seventeenth, Churchill, Stalin, and Truman would be meeting in Potsdam to discuss, among other matters, the fate of postwar Europe and the possible entry of Russia into the war against Japan. Knowing that they had this new weapon would allow the United States to take a tougher stance in their negotiations with the Russians.

  Fermi was one of the few physicists who seemed relaxed as day dawned at Trinity on the sixteenth. Groves remembered being annoyed the night before by hearing Fermi say in his usual somewhat sarcastic way that “after all, it wouldn’t make any difference whether the bomb went off or not because it still would have been a well-worthwhile scientific experiment. For if it did fail to go off, we would have proved that an atomic explosion was not possible.” Groves concluded afterward that this was simply Fermi’s way of easing tension in the camp.

  The Gadget at Trinity functioned without a hitch. Fermi’s calm calculation of the power of the detonation became legendary. The story also added to the perception that he wa
s always in control of his emotions. At some level, he was able to treat the bomb blast as just another physics experiment.

  Fermi later told Laura he had been concentrating so hard on this particular experiment that he had not even noticed the sound of the explosion. A mixture of relief, elation, and concern filled the hearts and minds of those who had witnessed the detonation.

  Phase one of the experiment was over. After examining in the lead-lined tank what remained at Ground Zero and completing several other tasks, Fermi set out on the return trip to Los Alamos. He had to admit that even his legendary endurance had its limits. When he reached home that evening, he was “so sleepy he went to bed without a word.” Laura had no inkling of what had happened. She commented on what he later told her about his return trip to Los Alamos, “For the first time in his life … he had felt that it was not safe for him to drive. It had seemed to him as if the car were jumping from curve to curve, skipping the straight stretches in between. He had asked a friend to drive, despite his strong aversion to being driven.” Was this due to fatigue, delayed emotional reaction, or both? The answer may be that while Fermi was seemingly infallible, he was also human.

  After the history-making explosion at Trinity, all efforts converged on preparing for the two types of atomic bombs, each one to be dropped on a Japanese city. Groves had already convened a Target Committee to decide where. He told its members to recommend no more than four prospective Japanese sites, with a “governing factor that the targets should be places which would most adversely affect the will of the Japanese people to continue the war.” He also stipulated, “To enable us to assess accurately the effects of the bomb, the targets should not have been previously damaged by air raids.” This ruled out Tokyo.