The Making of the Atomic Bomb: 25th Anniversary Edition

by Richard Rhodes

But if no one knew how long the work would last, most of them came to believe it transcendently important: “There is a statement of rather common currency around here and Berkeley that goes something like this: ‘No matter what you do with the rest of your life, nothing will be as important to the future of the World as your work on this Project right now.’ ”

The hydrogen bomb was thus under development in the United States onward from July 1942.

For some time we had known that we were about to unlock a giant; still, we could not escape an eerie feeling when we knew we had actually done it. We felt as, I presume, everyone feels who has done something that he knows will have very far-reaching consequences which he cannot foresee.

The Japanese physics colloquium in Tokyo had decided in March 1943 that an atomic bomb was possible but not practically attainable by any of the belligerents in time to be of use in the present war.

Like Bohr’s assessment in 1939, it overestimated the difficulty of isotope separation and underestimated U.S. industrial capacity. It also, as the Japanese government had before Pearl Harbor, underestimated American dedication. Collective dedication was a pattern of Japanese culture more than of American. But Americans could summon it when challenged, and couple it with resources of talent and capital unmatched anywhere else in the world.

Science—a fragile, nascent political system of limited but increasing franchise—would have to wait until the war was won. Or so it seemed. But a few among the men and women gathered at Los Alamos—certainly Robert Oppenheimer—sniffed a paradox. They proposed in fact to win the war with an application of their science. They dreamed further that by that same application they might forestall the next war, might even end war as a means of settling differences between nations.

Extend war by attrition to include civilians behind the lines and war becomes total.

The bombing of Hamburg marked a significant step in the evolution of death technology itself, massed bombers deliberately churning conflagration.

With personal intervention on behalf of the principle of openness, which exposes crime as well as error to public view, Niels Bohr played a decisive part in the rescue of the Danish Jews.

Late in life Bohr explained the starting point of his revelation in a single phrase. “We are in a completely new situation that cannot be resolved by war,” he confided to a friend.

“I don’t think I shall ever again live in a community where so many brains were,” comments Edwin McMillan’s wife Elsie, Ernest Lawrence’s sister-in-law, “nor shall I ever live in a community so confined that visitors expected us to fight with each other. We didn’t have telephones, we didn’t have the bright lights, but I don’t think I shall ever live in a community that had such deep roots of cooperation and friendship.”

Oppenheimer did not doubt that he would be remembered to some degree, and reviled, as the man who led the work of bringing to mankind for the first time in its history the means of its own destruction.2154 He cherished the complementary compensation of knowing that the hard riddle the bomb would pose had two answers, two outcomes, one of them transcendent.

Harriman added that he feared Truman “could not have had time to catch up with all the recent cables.” The self-educated Missourian prided himself on how many pages of documents he could chew through per day—he was a champion reader—and

The world “in its present state of moral advancement compared with its technical development,” the Secretary of War continued quaintly, “would be eventually at the mercy of such a weapon. In other words, modern civilization might be completely destroyed.”

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.

But men saw what theoretical physics cannot notice and what cameras cannot record, saw pity and terror. Rabi at Base Camp felt menaced:

A new thing had just been born; a new control; a new understanding of man, which man had acquired over nature.

Oppenheimer looked again into the Gita for a model sufficiently scaled: We waited until the blast had passed, walked out of the shelter and then it was extremely solemn. We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, a few people cried. Most people were silent.

I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad-Gita: Vishnu is trying to persuade the Prince that he should do his duty and to impress him he takes on his multiarmed form and says, “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” I suppose we all thought that, one way or another.

The theoretical physicist who was also a poet, who found physics, as Bethe says, “the best way to do philosophy,” had staked his claim on history.2466 It was a larger claim, but more ambivalent, than any Nobel Prize.

I thought of Carthage, Baalbec, Jerusalem, Rome, Atlantis; Peking, Babylon, Nineveh; Scipio, Rameses II, Titus, Hermann, Sherman, Jenghis Khan, Alexander, Darius the Great. But Hitler only destroyed Stalingrad—and Berlin. I hope for some sort of peace—but I fear that machines are ahead of morals by some centuries and when morals catch up perhaps there’ll be no reason for any of it. I hope not. But we are only termites on a planet and maybe when we bore too deeply into the planet there’ll be a reckoning—who knows?

People exposed within half a mile of the Little Boy fireball,

were seared to bundles of smoking black char in a fraction of a second as their internal organs boiled away.

At the same instant birds ignited in midair. Mosquitoes and flies, squirrels, family pets crackled and were gone. The fireball flashed an enormous photograph of the city at the instant of its immolation fixed on the mineral, vegetable and animal surfaces of the city itself. A spiral ladder left its shadow in unburned paint on the surface of a steel storage tank. Leaves shielded reverse silhouettes on charred telephone poles.

The sky was red with flames. It was burning as if scorching heaven.

Not human beings alone died at Hiroshima. Something else was destroyed as well, the Japanese study explains—that shared life Hannah Arendt calls the common world:

In the case of an atomic bombing . . . a community does not merely receive an impact; the community itself is destroyed.

In Japan the impasse persisted between civilian and military leaders. To the civilians the atomic bomb looked like a golden opportunity to surrender without shame, but the admirals and the generals still despised unconditional surrender and refused to concur.

Truman said he had given orders to stop the atomic bombing. He said the thought of wiping out another 100,000 people was too horrible. He didn’t like the idea of killing, as he said, “all those kids.”

“The experience of these two cities,” the Japanese study emphasizes, “was the opening chapter to the possible annihilation of mankind.”

“I awakened short of breath and with my heart pounding,” Michihiko Hachiya remembers. So do we all.

“It was a way of saving countless lives,” Otto Hahn remembers Fritz Haber arguing of poison gas, “ . . . if it meant that the war could be brought to an end sooner.”

“We are in a completely new situation that cannot be resolved by war.”