Enola Gay

by Gordon Thomas

  Hashimoto was not a superstitious man. But he liked to believe that “anything which begins so badly must only improve.”

  It was a comforting and very necessary philosophy for a commander who knew that every day the odds of his surviving were lessening. His great hope was that before he succumbed, he would have a chance to sink an enemy ship.

  7

  The drab, olive-green sedan stopped on the outskirts of Santa Fe, New Mexico. Lansdale told Tibbets and Beser to remove their air force insignia. He handed them corps of engineers’ emblems. In explanation, although it was hardly necessary, he said, “Security.”

  The security chief was glad to be dealing with Tibbets and Beser. They were used to military discipline—not like the scientists who tormented his agents with their childish games. Lansdale was still smarting from the latest prank. A physicist had somehow opened the secret steel safe in the Los Alamos records office and placed a piece of paper on top of the priceless atomic secrets it contained. Printed on the paper were the words “Guess who?”

  Beser was too overwhelmed by events to play any games. Yesterday he had been called to Tibbets’s office. The radar officer had immediately recognized by name the “important visitors”; Norman Ramsey and Robert Brode were physicists whose papers he had read as a student. They had questioned him for an hour on his academic background and radar qualifications. Finally Brode had told Beser he could do the job—on the understanding that his life was expendable.

  Nobody had yet told Beser what the job was, but Beser knew better than to ask.

  Early this morning, September 19, he and Tibbets had flown south from Wendover to Albuquerque, New Mexico. Lansdale was driving them on to Santa Fe. He cautioned them again. “You have nothing to do with the air force. You have never heard of Wendover. Don’t volunteer anything you know.”

  They drove into town, stopping before a wrought-iron gate, centuries old, through which they entered a small, Spanish-style courtyard.

  For two years this patio had been the receiving point for some of the world’s most distinguished scientists. Here, those men and women were given coffee, doughnuts, and comforting words from motherly Dorothy McKibben, who acted as “front-office receptionist” for the Manhattan Project’s most secret center—Site Y, Los Alamos.

  Norman Ramsey was waiting on the patio to escort Tibbets and Beser there. He enjoined them never to address anybody they would meet as “doctor” or “professor.”

  “Security,” Beser said solemnly.

  Two considerations had influenced the choice of Los Alamos as an atomic laboratory. It was remote enough for security purposes; if one of the experiments conducted there resulted in a premature explosion, there was no sizable civilian population nearby to be imperiled by the release of radioactivity.

  Tibbets’s first impression was disappointing. He felt “the birthplace of the actual bomb should look more factorylike.”

  What he saw were clusters of buildings set out on a flat tableland, part of the plateau of the Jemez Mountains. Six thousand scientists, technicians, their wives and children now lived within the high wire fences. Beser thought the place looked like a concentration camp. Inside, this unhappy image persisted. Many of the buildings were of rough construction; speed, not comfort, had been the rule. As at Wendover, there were areas marked RESTRICTED and MOST RESTRICTED.

  Waiting for Tibbets and Beser in his office was J. Robert Oppenheimer, the shy, frail theoretical physicist who was the scientific director of the Manhattan Project. He greeted them warmly but was less effusive toward Lansdale.

  For months now, the security chief had been playing cat-and-mouse with Oppenheimer because of the scientist’s former association with various Communist organizations, his financial contributions to left-wing groups, his friendship with “fellow travelers.” He had beer under surveillance since March 15, 1943. He was followed, his mail opened, his telephone tapped, and, in Lansdale’s later admission, “All sorts of nasty things were done to keep a watch on him.”

  Groves himself had questioned Oppenheimer and was satisfied that his “closest, most indispensable collaborator” had severed all connections with his offending past. He had ordered the watch lifted on his scientific director.

  Lansdale had ignored the order. His agents continued to harass Oppenheimer.

  They were watching the wrong man.

  This morning, after Beser and Lansdale had left for Ramsey’s laboratory, Oppenheimer said to Tibbets, “You had better know everything.”

  Pandora’s box was finally opening for the flier.

  Here at Los Alamos, Oppenheimer began, men were delving into the unknown world, asking such questions as “What is matter?” and “How short can a ‘short time’ be?” Here they spoke of thousands of tons of energy as if energy could be weighed. They talked of a thousandth and then a millionth of a second as they devised ways to reduce time itself almost to nothing. They argued over the relative merits of the gaseous-diffusion and electromagnetic processes for separating uranium 235 from uranium 238; the uranium 235 produced could be measured in thimblefuls.

  These men were also discovering the special nature of a chain reaction and studying the unique problem of critical mass: how to bring together two lumps of uranium 235 of the right potency to cause an atomic explosion at the right time.

  Oppenheimer reduced the problem to a few words. “Time. That’s the problem, Colonel. Getting the timing right. If we are successful in solving that, then your problems will begin.”

  The scientist looked benignly at Tibbets. “There will probably be problems right up until the moment when the bomb explodes.”

  Oppenheimer explained how they intended to build the uranium bomb. A suitable mechanism had to be devised to bring two hemispheres of uranium 235 into contact quickly so that their combined mass reached the critical point and detonated. The amount of uranium 235 to be used, the size of the two spheres, the speed with which they must collide, the scattering angle, the range of the neutrons projected by the chain reaction—those, Oppenheimer said, were just some of the questions to be answered.

  He rose to his feet and told Tibbets to follow him. They went into a nearby building, unmarked except for a sign:

  POSITIVELY

  NO

  ADMITTANCE

  This was where Captain Parsons and his team were dealing with how to ensure that the bomb would explode at a predetermined height above the target.

  Oppenheimer said that Parsons would probably be going along on the first mission.

  “Good. Then if anything goes wrong, Captain, I can blame you,” Tibbets said.

  “If anything goes wrong, Colonel, neither of us will be around to be blamed,” Parsons replied.

  He described to Tibbets one of the experimental machines they had built to test the theory of critical mass. It had been nicknamed “The Guillotine.” A piece of doughnut-shaped uranium was placed in the machine. Then another piece of uranium was dropped through the hole in the doughnut. For a split second, the extra uranium plunging through the gap brought both pieces close to critical mass. It was a dangerous game to play. They called it “twisting the dragon’s tail.”

  Parsons explained more about the bomb’s mechanism to Tibbets. “It is designed to ensure that the bringing together of the two ‘subcritical’ pieces occurs for the first time at the moment of planned detonation over the target. The pieces will then combine in a critical mass, causing the chain-reaction explosion. That’s the theory. Until that moment, we cannot know for sure whether the bomb will work.”

  Parsons described how the heart of the bomb was really just “a good old gun, a five-inch cannon with a six-foot-long barrel. After the bomb has left the plane and is on its way, a piece of uranium two-three-five about the size of a soup can will be fired down the barrel into a second piece of uranium fixed to the muzzle.”

  “And if it doesn’t work?” persisted Tibbets.

  “We will just make a nice big dent in the target area and go back to
the drawing board,” said Parsons.

  To avoid that dismal prospect, explained Oppenheimer, in the coming months Tibbets’s unit would drop test bombs. These would help the scientists develop the final shape of the atomic-bomb casing as well as prove the proximity fuzes, which governed the height at which the bomb would explode.

  So far, the proximity fuzes were proving troublesome.

  Tibbets continued to be astonished by Oppenheimer during his conducted tour of Los Alamos. Late in the afternoon, they were walking down another corridor, past identical rooms whose inner walls were lined with blackboards covered with formulas and whose occupants pored over slide rules and logarithm tables.

  Suddenly, Oppenheimer halted in midstride. His head was cocked like a dog scenting game. He turned and stalked back to an office.

  Inside, a man sat slumped on a straight-backed wooden chair, staring fixedly at a blackboard. He was unshaven and disheveled.

  Tibbets wondered if he “might be the building janitor taking an unauthorized rest after a night out.”

  Oppenheimer stood silently behind the man. Together they stared at the blackboard with its jumble of equations.

  Oppenheimer moved to the blackboard and rubbed out part of an equation. Still, the man on the chair did not move.

  Oppenheimer quickly wrote a new set of symbols in the space he had erased.

  The man remained transfixed.

  Oppenheimer added a final symbol.

  The man rose from his chair, galvanized, shouting, “I’ve been looking for that mistake for two days!”

  Oppenheimer smiled and walked out of Enrico Fermi’s office, leaving one of the founders and greatest geniuses of nuclear physics happily restarting work.

  Beser was enjoying “the most fantastic day in my life.” He had met and talked to a dozen renowned scientists who were his teenage heroes.

  Hans Bethe and Ernest O. Lawrence were among those who gave Beser a glimpse of their work. The scientists told him about the strange kinds of guns they had devised that used atomic bullets. When fired at each other, on impact the bullets devoured one another. They described how they hoped this phenomenon would be used to produce an atomic explosion. They spoke of temperatures they hoped to create which would make a light “brighter than a thousand suns.”

  Ramsey outlined the role the radar officer would play on the mission. Beser would be taught how to monitor enemy radar to see if it was trying to jam or detonate the intricate mechanism of the bomb. To understand how this could happen, Beser must learn what few of the scientists involved knew—the minute details of the bomb’s firing mechanism, including its built-in mini-radar system.

  On this first day, nobody seemed concerned about how much they should tell Beser. They poured information over him, “leaving me sinking in a scientific whirlpool.”

  Late in the evening, Beser was introduced to a dour young technician, David Greenglass. Nobody yet suspected Greenglass had just stolen the first of many blueprints. His haul would eventually include schematic drawings of a special lens crucial to detonating the plutonium bomb which was being developed in parallel with the uranium bomb. The drawings would be spirited to Russia through the highly professional espionage ring the Soviets had been able to set up from inside Los Alamos. Greenglass would receive a few hundred dollars for his treachery.

  Later, Beser would believe that, on this very evening, he had interrupted Greenglass in his espionage activities.

  When the radar officer left Greenglass, it was dark. With difficulty, he reached the small guesthouse assigned to visitors. He opened the front door and stopped dead in his tracks. Sprawled on a couch, sipping a drink, was an attractive brunette, stark naked. She carefully lowered her glass and rose to her feet.

  “Can I help you?” The voice had just a trace of a German accent.

  It was Katherine Oppenheimer, wife of the scientific director. She had left Germany when fourteen; her relatives included Nazi Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel.

  “Ma’am, I’m sorry. …”

  Blushing furiously, Beser stammered into silence. He had never seen a naked woman before.

  “Are you looking for someone?”

  “Yes, ma’am … No, ma’am … My … bed … I mean, the guest quarters, ma’am.”

  “They are in the back of the house. You have come in the wrong door, but you can go through here.” Mrs. Oppenheimer sat down and resumed sipping her cocktail.

  Averting his eyes, the bashful Beser stumbled past the languid first lady of Los Alamos.

  Her husband was startling Paul Tibbets. The two men were alone in Oppenheimer’s office, reviewing what Tibbets had been shown. The flier felt that in a few hours he had received “a better scientific education than all my years in school.”

  Now Oppenheimer began to question him. Apart from enemy interference, the scientist wanted to know what other risks were involved in a bombing mission. Tibbets explained there was always the chance of bombs jamming in their bays, or a faulty mechanism detonating them prematurely. Oppenheimer was confident such risks could be eliminated in the atomic bomb.

  Then he stared intently at Tibbets. “Colonel, your biggest problem may be after the bomb has left your aircraft. The shock waves from the detonation could crush your plane. I am afraid that I can give you no guarantee that you will survive.”

  8

  The scraping against the stone floor of his geta, the Japanese wooden clogs he favored, was the only sound in the Osaka University laboratory of Dr. Tsunesaburo Asada, possibly Japan’s most imaginative scientist. His staff had come to recognize that this habit of shuffling his feet was a signal that Asada was content.

  Putting his weight first on one foot, and then on the other, the white-coated scientist studied his latest creation, a proximity fuze. It was similar in design and purpose to those being perfected at Los Alamos.

  Months of work had gone into the fuze’s development in Asada’s well-equipped laboratory. He rarely left the campus now, working well into the night, catnapping on a couch in a corner of the laboratory, impatient of any interruptions.

  He was still, as he had been when the war began, chairman of the physics department. But since late 1941, he had done no teaching. His brilliance made him one of the scientists crucial to Japan’s war effort.

  Since 1937, Asada had regularly lectured at the Naval Technical Research Institute in Tokyo and at the Naval Aeronautical Research Institute in Yokosuka. Besides lecturing, Asada had worked closely with the military authorities before Japan entered the war. And on December 17, 1941, he was one of the scientists selected to work on Project A.

  This was the code name for Japan’s atomic research. Eleven days after President Roosevelt had authorized the go-ahead for the Manhattan Project, the Japanese had entered the field, determined to develop an atomic bomb.

  Asada would always remember the mood of blind patriotism which had gripped the first meeting after Pearl Harbor at the Naval Club in Tokyo. There had been promises of generous funding for the atomic research. His caution about the vast technical problems to be overcome had been brushed aside. Those were the days when the Japanese appeared invincible. A naval officer had said that perhaps their new allies, the Germans, could help. Asada had pointed out that many of Germany’s leading atomic scientists were Jewish, and if they had not been expelled from the country, they were probably dead. Some, he added, might be in the United States. He had expressed the opinion that it was likely America had the potential to develop atomic weapons.

  The naval officer had reprimanded him. “America—and Japan.”

  For a year he and the other scientists involved had studied the question. In December 1942, they had presented their conclusions.

  It would take them ten years to produce “some atomic weapons.” Even that was optimistic, as Japan did not have the essential raw uranium.

  Project A was quietly shelved by the navy, although development work by the army on Japan’s atomic bomb would continue in a desultory fashion until
well into 1945.

  Project B was then initiated by the navy. Asada immediately recognized its potential. It was concerned with developing radar, navigation techniques, and the proximity fuze.

  In the past eighteen months, astonishing progress had been made on all three. Two famous British warships—the Prince of Wales and the Repulse—had been of great help in the development of Japan’s radar. The ships had been sunk off Singapore in the high days of 1941. Japanese divers had located them on the seabed and performed the herculean feat of dismantling the radar apparatus from both ships. It had been shipped to Japan, reassembled, and provided invaluable information to research workers.

  Asada himself had developed the proximity fuze. Soon it would go into full-scale production. His contribution on that aspect of Project B completed, he had joined a small and select band of scientists working on the most staggering of all weapons.

  They were building a death ray.

  It was a machine from the pages of science fiction. It was designed to project an invisible beam that would pluck an aircraft out of the sky either by shattering its propellers or killing its crew.

  With such a weapon, Asada knew that Japan could snatch a stunning victory. No plane would be safe against the deadly ray. Carefully placed batteries of death rays could guarantee all Japanese cities immunity from air attack. Other batteries could be deployed against hostile craft approaching by sea. Later, the navy could have death rays mounted on its ships to destroy the enemy far away from the home islands.