The Making of the Atomic Bomb: 25th Anniversary Edition

by Richard Rhodes

“Knowledge,” Niels Bohr once noted, “is itself the basis for civilization.” You cannot have the one without the other; the one depends upon the other. Nor can you have only benevolent knowledge; the scientific method doesn’t filter for benevolence. Knowledge has consequences, not always intended, not always comfortable, not always welcome. The earth revolves around the sun, not the sun around the earth. “It is a profound and necessary truth,” Robert Oppenheimer would say, “that the deep things in science are not found because they are useful; they are found because it was possible to find them.”

Bohr proposed once that the goal of science is not universal truth. Rather, he argued, the modest but relentless goal of science is “the gradual removal of prejudices.” The discovery that the earth revolves around the sun has gradually removed the prejudice that the earth is the center of the universe. The discovery of microbes is gradually removing the prejudice that disease is a punishment from God. The discovery of evolution is gradually removing the prejudice that Homo sapiens is a separate and special creation.

In 2008, some of the scientists who modeled the original 1983 nuclear winter scenario investigated the likely result of a theoretical regional nuclear war between India and Pakistan, a war they postulated to involve only 100 Hiroshima-scale nuclear weapons, yielding a total of only 1.5 megatons—no more than the yield of some single warheads in the U.S. and Russian arsenals. They were shocked to discover that because such an exchange would inevitably be targeted on cities filled with combustible materials, the resulting firestorms would inject massive volumes of black smoke into the upper atmosphere which would spread around the world, cooling the earth long enough and sufficiently to produce worldwide agricultural collapse. Twenty million prompt deaths from blast, fire, and radiation, Alan Robock and Owen Brian Toon projected, and another billion deaths in the months that followed from mass starvation—from a mere 1.5-megaton regional nuclear war.

Not that every scientist was competent to judge every contribution. The network solved that problem too. Suppose Scientist M announces a new result. He knows his highly specialized subject better than anyone in the world; who is competent to judge him? But next to Scientist M are Scientists L and N. Their subjects overlap M’s, so they understand his work well enough to assess its quality and reliability and to understand where it fits into science. Next to L and N are other scientists, K and O and J and P, who know L and N well enough to decide whether to trust their judgment about M. On out to Scientists A and Z, whose subjects are almost completely removed from M’s.

He said, ‘There is nothing I want for myself.’ ‘But is there nothing we can do as a recognition of your valuable assistance to the country?’ I asked. He replied: ‘Yes, I would like you to do something for my people.’ . . . That was the fount and origin of the famous declaration about the National Home for Jews in Palestine.”332

In 1519 coins were first struck from its silver at his command. Joachimsthaler, the name for the new coins, shortened to thaler, became “dollar” in English before 1600. Thereby the U.S. dollar descends from the silver of Joachimsthal.

Before it is science and career, before it is livelihood, before even it is family or love, freedom is sound sleep and safety to notice the play of morning sun.

They had discovered the reason no elements beyond uranium exist naturally in the world: the two forces working against each other in the nucleus eventually cancel each other out.

Later that day Frisch looked me up and said, “You work in a microbiology lab. What do you call the process in which one bacterium divides into two?” And I answered, “binary fission.” He wanted to know if you could call it “fission” alone, and I said you could. Frisch the sketch artist, good at visualizing as his aunt was not, had metamorphosed his liquid drop into a dividing living cell.1016 Thereby the name for a multiplication of life became the name for a violent process of destruction.

Openness was its fragile, essential charter, an operational necessity, as freedom of speech is an operational necessity to a democracy. Complete openness enforced absolute honesty: the scientist reported all his results, favorable and unfavorable, where all could read them, making possible the ongoing correction of error. Secrecy would revoke that charter and subordinate science as a political system—Polanyi’s “republic”—to the anarchic competition of the nation-states.

Dr. L. Onsager of Yale University described, however, a new apparatus in which, according to his calculations, the isotopes of elements can be separated in gaseous form in tubes which are cooled on one side and heated to high temperatures on the other.

We realized that, should atomic weapons be developed, no two nations would be able to live in peace with each other unless their military forces were controlled by a common higher authority. We expected that these controls, if they were effective enough to abolish atomic warfare, would be effective enough to abolish also all other forms of war. This hope was almost as strong a spur to our endeavors as was our fear of becoming the victims of the enemy’s atomic bombings.

George de Hevesy devised an effective solution—literally: he dissolved the medals separately in acid. As solutions of black liquid in unmarked jars they sat out the war innocently on a laboratory shelf. Afterward the Nobel Foundation recast them and returned them to their owners.

I did not see in 1917, and do not see in 1968, why tearing a man’s guts out by a high-explosive shell is to be preferred to maiming him by attacking his lungs or skin. All war is immoral. Logically, the 100 percent pacifist has the only impregnable position.

Thus at the outset of the U.S. atomic energy program scientists were summarily denied a voice in deciding the political and military uses of the weapons they were proposing to build.

An hour later a second wave of 167 more attack aircraft deployed to further destruction. The two raids accounted for eight battleships, three light cruisers, three destroyers and four other ships sunk, capsized or damaged and 292 aircraft damaged or wrecked, including 117 bombers. And 2,403 Americans, military and civilian, killed, 1,178 wounded, in unprovoked assaults that lasted only minutes.

I was interested in man and his experience; I was deeply interested in my science; but I had no understanding of the relations of man to his society. . . .

Oppenheimer

“The chief lesson I have learned in a long life,” he wrote at the end of his career, “is that the only way you can make a man trustworthy is to trust him; and the surest way to make him untrustworthy is to distrust him and show your distrust.”2272