The Making of the Atomic Bomb: 25th Anniversary Edition

by Richard Rhodes

Text reads: “Jan 19—V.B. OK—returned—I think you had best keep this in your own safe FDR”1522

according to Speer, “on the suggestion of the nuclear physicists we scuttled the project to develop an atom bomb . . . after I had again queried them about deadlines and been told that we could not count on anything for three or four years.” Work on what Speer calls “an energy-producing uranium motor for propelling machinery”—the heavy-water pile—would continue.1575 “In the upshot,” Heisenberg wrote in Nature in 1947, summarizing the war years, German physicists “were spared the decision as to whether or not they should aim at producing atomic bombs.1576 The circumstances shaping policy in the critical year of 1942 guided their work automatically toward the problem of the utilization of nuclear energy in prime movers.” But the Allies had not yet been informed.

A formal status report went off immediately from the Executive Committee to Bush. It predicted enough fissionable material for a test in eighteen months—by March 1944. It estimated that a 30-kilogram bomb of U235 “should have a destructive effect equivalent to the explosion of over 100,000 tons of TNT,” much more than the mere 2,000 tons estimated earlier. And it dramatically announced the Super: If this [U235] unit is used to detonate a surrounding mass of 400 kg of liquid deuterium, the destructiveness should be equivalent to that of more than 10,000,000 tons of TNT. This should devastate an area of more than 100 square miles. The committee—Briggs, Compton, Lawrence, Urey, Eger Murphree and Conant—concluded by judging the bomb project important beyond all previous estimates: “We have become convinced that success in this program before the enemy can succeed is necessary for victory. We also believe that success of this program will win the war if it has not previously been terminated.” On August 29 Bush bumped the status report up to the Secretary of War, noting that “the physicists of the Executive Committee are unanimous in believing that this large added factor [i.e., the Super] can be obtained. . . . The ultimate potential possibilities are now considered to be very much greater than at the time of the [last] report.”1637 The hydrogen bomb was thus under development in the United States onward from July 1942.

Fermi had originally designed his first full-scale pile as a 76-layer sphere. Some 250 tons of better graphite from National Carbon now promised to reduce neutron absorption below previous estimates; more than 6 tons of high-purity uranium metal in the form of 2¼-inch cylinders began arriving from Iowa State College at Ames, where one of the Met Lab’s chemistry group leaders, Frank Spedding, had converted a laboratory to backyard mass production. “Spedding’s eggs,” dropped in place of oxide pseudospheres into drilled graphite blocks that were then stacked in spherical configuration close to the center of the CP-1 lattice, significantly increased the value of k.

The pile as it waited in the dark cold of Chicago winter to be released to the breeding of neutrons and plutonium contained 771,000 pounds of graphite, 80,590 pounds of uranium oxide and 12,400 pounds of uranium metal. It cost about $1 million to produce and build. Its only visible moving parts were its various control rods. If Fermi had planned it for power production he would have shielded it behind concrete or steel and pumped away the heat of fission with helium or water or bismuth to drive turbines to generate electricity. But CP-1 was simply and entirely a physics experiment designed to prove the chain reaction, unshielded and uncooled, and Fermi intended, assuming he could control it, to run it no hotter than half a watt, hardly enough energy to light a flashlight bulb. He had controlled it day by day for the seventeen days of its building as its k approached 1.0, matching its responses with his estimates, and he was confident he could control it when its chain reaction finally diverged. What would he do if he was wrong? one of his young colleagues asked him. He thought of the damping effect of delayed neutrons. “I will walk away—leisurely,” he answered.1691

Herbert Anderson was an eyewitness: At first you could hear the sound of the neutron counter, clickety-clack, clickety-clack. Then the clicks came more and more rapidly, and after a while they began to merge into a roar; the counter couldn’t follow anymore. That was the moment to switch to the chart recorder. But when the switch was made, everyone watched in the sudden silence the mounting deflection of the recorder’s pen. It was an awesome silence. Everyone realized the significance of that switch; we were in the high intensity regime and the counters were unable to cope with the situation anymore. Again and again, the scale of the recorder had to be changed to accommodate the neutron intensity which was increasing more and more rapidly. Suddenly Fermi raised his hand. “The pile has gone critical,” he announced. No one present had any doubt about it.1699 Fermi allowed himself a grin. He would tell the technical council the next day that the pile achieved a k of 1.0006.1700 Its neutron intensity was then doubling every two minutes. Left uncontrolled for an hour and a half, that rate of increase would have carried it to a million kilowatts. Long before so extreme a runaway it would have killed anyone left in the room and melted down.

Nothing very spectacular had happened. Nothing had moved and the pile itself had given no sound. Nevertheless, when the rods were pushed back in and the clicking died down, we suddenly experienced a let-down feeling, for all of us understood the language of the counter. Even though we had anticipated the success of the experiment, its accomplishment had a deep impact on us. 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.1702

Most of those with whom I talked came to Los Alamos. One of the most tough-minded, I. I. Rabi, did not. His reasons are revealing. He continued developing radar at the Radiation Laboratory at MIT. “Oppenheimer wanted me to be the associate director,” he told an interviewer many years later. “I thought it over and turned him down. I said, ‘I’m very serious about this war. We could lose it with insufficient radar.’ ”1757 The Columbia physicist thought radar more immediately important to the defense of his country than the distant prospect of an atomic bomb. Nor did he choose to work full time, he told Oppenheimer, to make “the culmination of three centuries of physics” a weapon of mass destruction.1758 Oppenheimer responded that he would take “a different stand” if he thought the atomic bomb would serve as such a culmination. “To me it is primarily the development in time of war of a military weapon of some consequence.”1759 Either Oppenheimer had not yet thought his way through to a more millenarian view of the new weapon’s implications or he chose to avoid discussing those implications with Rabi.

Between December 1942 and March 1943 the Navy committee organized a ten-session physics colloquium to work through to a decision. By then it was understood that a bomb would necessitate locating, mining and processing hundreds of tons of uranium ore and that U235 separation would require a tenth of the annual Japanese electrical capacity and half the nation’s copper output. The colloquium concluded that while an atomic bomb was certainly possible, Japan might need ten years to build one. The scientists believed that neither Germany nor the United States had sufficient spare industrial capacity to produce atomic bombs in time to be of use in the war. After the final March 6 meeting the Navy representative at the colloquium reported discouragement: “The best minds of Japan, studying the subject from the point of view of their respective fields of endeavor as well as from that of national defense, came to a conclusion that can only be regarded as correct. The more they considered and discussed the problem, the more pessimistic became the atmosphere of the meeting.”1781 As a result the Navy dissolved the committee and asked its members to devote themselves to more immediately valuable research, particularly radar.

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. Robert Serber’s lectures at Los Alamos in early April asserted to the contrary that for the United States an atomic bomb was both possible and probably attainable within two years. The Japanese assessment was essentially technological. 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.

The slide from precision bombing attacks on industry to general attacks on cities followed less from political decisions than from inadequate technology. Bomber Command had attempted long-distance daylight precision bombing early in the war but had been unable to defend its aircraft against German fighters and flak so far from home. It therefore switched to night bombing, which reduced losses but severely impaired accuracy. If it was logical to bomb factories and other strategic targets to reduce the enemy’s ability to wage war, it began to seem equally logical to bomb the blocks of workers’ housing that surrounded those targets; the workers, after all, made the factories run. Sir Arthur Harris, who became chief of Bomber Command in early 1942, notes in his war memoirs of this transitional period in the summer of 1941 that “the targets chosen were in congested industrial areas and were carefully picked so that bombs which overshot or undershot the actual railway centers under attack [in this instance] should fall on these areas, thereby affecting morale. This programme amounted to a halfway stage between area and precision bombing.”1818 “Morale” is here and elsewhere in the literature of air power a euphemism for the bombing of civilians. Another sign of halfway status at this stage was permission to dump bombs before exiting Germany if crews had missed their targets. Churchill says he authorized a study of bombing accuracy at Frederick Lindemann’s suggestion which discove...

Hitler’s terror bombing taught Britain not terror but forceful imitation. Harris certainly despised the Germans for starting and perpetuating two world wars. But he seems to have thought less about killing civilians than about solving the problem of making Bomber Command a measurably effective force. If night bombing and area bombing were the only tactics that paid a reasonable return in destruction at a reasonable price in lost aircraft and aircrew lives, then he would dedicate Bomber Command to perfecting those tactics and measure success not in factories rendered inoperative but in acres of cities flattened. Which is to say, area bombing was invented to give bombers targets they could hit.

The British and the Americans would be enraged to learn of Japanese brutality and Nazi torture, of the Bataan Death March and the fathomless horror of the death camps. By a reflex so mindlessly unimaginative it may be merely mammalian, the bombing of distant cities, out of sight and sound and smell, was generally approved, although neither the United States nor Great Britain admitted publicly that it deliberately bombed civilians.1833 In Churchill’s phrase, the enemy was to be “de-housed.” The Jap and the Nazi in any case had started the war. “We must face the fact that modern warfare as conducted in the Nazi manner is a dirty business,” Franklin Roosevelt told his countrymen. “We don’t like it—we didn’t want to get in it—but we are in it and we’re going to fight it with everything we’ve got.”1834

Groves in any case had already decided, the day before the January meeting, to switch over to the new barrier; the British review then simply ratified his decision. By changing barriers rather than abandoning gaseous diffusion he confirmed what many Manhattan Project scientists had not yet realized: that the commitment of the United States to nuclear weapons development had enlarged from the seemingly urgent but narrow goal of beating the Germans to the bomb. Building a gaseous-diffusion plant that would interfere with conventional war production, would eventually cost half a billion dollars but would almost certainly not contribute significantly to shortening the war meant that nuclear weapons were thenceforth to be counted a permanent addition to the U.S. arsenal. Urey saw the point and withdrew; “from that time forward,” write his colleague biographers, “his energies were directed to the control of atomic energy, not its applications.”1892 * * *

The work proceeded slowly, dogged by recruiting problems. The nation at war had moved beyond full employment to severe labor shortages and men and women willing to camp out on godforsaken scrubland far from any major city were hard to find. Frequent sandstorms plagued the area, writes Leona Woods, now Leona Marshall after marrying fellow physicist John Marshall of Fermi’s staff. “Local storms were caused by tearing up the desert floor for roads, and construction sites were suffocating. Wind-blown sand covered faces, hair, and hands and got into eyes and teeth. . . . After each storm, the number of people quitting might be as much as twice the average. When the storms were at their worst, buses and other traffic came to a stop until the roads were visible through the greyblack clouds of dust.”1900 Stoics who stayed on called the dust “termination powder.” “The most essential thing to bring with you is a padlock,” a project recruiting pamphlet ominously announced. “The next important things are towels, coat hangers and a thermos bottle. Don’t bring cameras or guns.”1901 Hanford, says Marshall, “was a tough town. There was nothing to do after work except fight, with the result that occasionally bodies were found in garbage cans the next morning.”1902 Du Pont built saloons with windows hinged for easy tear-gas lobbing. Eventually some 5,000 construction workers struggled in the desert dust and Du Pont built more than two hundred barracks to house them. Meat rationing stopped a...

In this letter for the first time Szilard emphasized a purpose to his urgency beyond beating the Germans to the bomb: that the bomb might be used and become grimly known. If peace is organized before it has penetrated the public’s mind that the potentialities of atomic bombs are a reality, it will be impossible to have a peace that is based on reality. . . . Making some allowances for the further development of the atomic bomb in the next few years . . . this weapon will be so powerful that there can be no peace if it is simultaneously in the possession of any two powers unless these two powers are bound by an indissoluble political union . . . . It will hardly be possible to get political action along that line unless high efficiency atomic bombs have actually been used in this war and the fact of their destructive power has deeply penetrated the mind of the public. Which was the explanation Szilard now gave for challenging the Army and Du Pont: “This for me personally is perhaps the main reason for being distressed by what I see happening around me.”

Haukelid radioed London for permission, emphasizing that his engineer compatriots had questioned if the results were worth the reprisals: The fact that the Germans were using heavy water for atomic experiments, and that an atomic explosion might possibly be brought about, was a thing we now talked of openly. At Rjukan they doubted very much whether the Germans had come in sight of a solution. They also doubted whether an explosion of the kind could be brought about at all.1952 The British begged to differ: The answer came from London the same day:1953 “Matter has been considered. It is thought very important that the heavy water shall be destroyed. Hope it can be done without too disastrous results. Send our best wishes for success in the work. Greetings.”

Kurt Diebner of German Army Ordnance counted the full effect on German fission research of the Vemork bombing and the sinking of the Hydro in a postwar interview: When one considers that right up to the end of the war, in 1945, there was virtually no increase in our heavy-water stocks in Germany . . . it will be seen that it was the elimination of German heavy-water production in Norway that was the main factor in our failure to achieve a self-sustaining atomic reactor before the war ended.1961 The race to the bomb, such as it was, ended for Germany on a mountain lake in Norway on a cold Sunday morning in February 1944.

A seasoned journalist who had traveled in Japan before the war, Henry C. Wolfe, called in Harper’s for the firebombing of Japan’s “inflammable,” “matchbox” cities. “It seems brutal to be talking about burning homes,” Wolfe explained. “But we are engaged in a life-and-death struggle for national survival, and we are therefore justified in taking any action that will save the lives of American soldiers and sailors. We must strike hard with everything we have at the spot where it will do the most damage to the enemy.”1975 The month Wolfe’s call to aerial battle appeared in Harper’s—January 1943—Franklin Roosevelt met with Winston Churchill at Casablanca. In the course of the meeting the two leaders discussed what terms of surrender they would eventually insist upon; the word “unconditional” was discussed but not included in the official joint statement to be read at the final press conference. Then, on January 24, to Churchill’s surprise, Roosevelt inserted the word ad lib: “Peace can come to the world,” the President read out to the assembled journalists and newsreel cameras, “only by the total elimination of German and Japanese war power. . . . The elimination of German, Japanese and Italian war power means the unconditional surrender of Germany, Italy, and Japan.”1976 Roosevelt later told Harry Hopkins that the surprising and fateful insertion was a consequence of the confusion attending his effort to convince French General Henri Girard to sit down with Free French leader...

They were Churchill’s flying wedge. The bomb had been theirs to begin with as much as anybody’s, but more immediate urgencies had demanded their attention and now they were couriers sent along to help build it and then to bring it home. America was giving the bomb away to another sovereign state, proliferating. Churchill had negotiated the renewed collaboration at Quebec in August: It is agreed between us First, that we will never use this agency against each other. Secondly, that we will not use it against third parties without each other’s consent. Thirdly, that we will not either of us communicate any information about Tube Alloys to third parties except by mutual consent.

Bohr worked and reworked his memorandum to maximum generality of expression, a political analysis as reserved as any scientific paper.2022 It says all that he had seen up to that time, which was almost everything essential. 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.2023 He had already grasped that fundamental point when he arrived at Los Alamos in 1943 and told Oppenheimer that nothing like Hitler’s attempt to enslave Europe would ever happen again. “First of all,” Oppenheimer confirms, “[Bohr] was clear that if it worked, this development was going to bring an enormous change in the situation of the world, in the whole situation of war and the tolerability of war.”2024 The weapon devised as an instrument of major war would end major war. It was hardly a weapon at all, the memorandum Bohr was writing in sweltering Washington emphasized; it was “a far deeper interference with the natural course of events than anything ever before attempted” and it would “completely change all future conditions of warfare.”2025 When nuclear weapons spread to other countries, as they certainly would, no one would be able any longer to win. A spasm of mutual destruction would be possible. But not war.

Bohr had searched the forbidding territory of the atom when he was young and discovered multiple structures of paradox; now he searched it again by the dark light of the energy it released and discovered profound political change. Nations existed in a condition of international anarchy. No hierarchical authority defined their relations with one another. They negotiated voluntarily as self-interest moved them and took what they could get. War had been their final negotiation, brutally resolving their worst disputes. Now an ultimate power had appeared. If Churchill failed to recognize it he did so because it was not a battle cry or a treaty or a committee of men. It was more like a god descending to the stage in a gilded car. It was a mechanism that nations could build and multiply that harnessed unlimited energy, a mechanism that many nations would build in self-defense as soon as they learned of its existence and acquired the technical means. It would seem to confer security upon its builders, but because there would be no sure protection against so powerful and portable a mechanism, in the course of time each additional unit added to the stockpiles would decrease security by adding to the general threat until insecurity finally revealed itself to be total at every hand. By the necessity, commonly understood, to avoid triggering a nuclear holocaust, the deus ex machina would have accomplished then what men and nations had been unable to accomplish by negotiation or by conq...

Bohr saw that far ahead—all the way to the present, when menacing standoff has been achieved and maintained for decades without formal agreement but at the price of smaller client wars and holocaustal nightmare and a good share of the wealth of nations—and stepped back.

“It appeared to me,” Bohr wrote in 1950 of his lonely wartime initiative, “that the very necessity of a concerted effort to forestall such ominous threats to civilization would offer quite unique opportunities to bridge international divergencies.”2026 That, in a single sentence, was the revelation of the complementarity of the bomb.

The great and deep difficulty that contained within itself its own solution was not, finally, the bomb. It was the inequality of men and nations. The bomb in its ultimate manifestation, nuclear holocaust, would eliminate that inequality by destroying rich and poor, democratic and totalitarian alike in one final apocalypse. It followed complementarily that the opening up of the world necessary to prevent (or reverse) an arms race would also progressively expose and alleviate inequality, but in the direction of life, not death: Within any community it is only possible for the citizens to strive together for common welfare on the basis of public knowledge of the general conditions of the country. Likewise, real co-operation between nations on problems of common concern presupposes free access to all information of importance for their relations. Any argument for upholding barriers of information and intercourse, based on concern for national ideals or interests, must be weighed against the beneficial effects of common enlightenment and the relieved tension resulting from such openness.2031

The Danish laureate was not confined. But neither was he invited to meet again with the President of the United States. There would be no exploratory mission to the USSR. How much the world lost that September is immeasurable. The complementarity of the bomb, its mingled promise and threat, would not be canceled by the decisions of heads of state; their frail authority extends not nearly so far. Nuclear fission and thermonuclear fusion are not acts of Parliament; they are levers embedded deeply in the physical world, discovered because it was possible to discover them, beyond the power of men to patent or to hoard.

Robert Oppenheimer oversaw all this activity with self-evident competence and an outward composure that almost everyone came to depend upon. “Oppenheimer was probably the best lab director I have ever seen,” Teller repeats, “because of the great mobility of his mind, because of his successful effort to know about practically everything important invented in the laboratory, and also because of his unusual psychological insight into other people which, in the company of physicists, was very much the exception.”2143 “He knew and understood everything that went on in the laboratory,” Bethe concurs, “whether it was chemistry or theoretical physics or machine shop. He could keep it all in his head and coordinate it. It was clear also at Los Alamos that he was intellectually superior to us.”2144 The Theoretical Division leader elaborates: He understood immediately when he heard anything, and fitted it into the general scheme of things and drew the right conclusions. There was just nobody else in that laboratory who came even close to him. In his knowledge. There was human warmth as well. Everybody certainly had the impression that Oppenheimer cared what each particular person was doing. In talking to someone he made it clear that that person’s work was important for the success of the whole project. I don’t remember any occasion at Los Alamos in which he was nasty to any person, whereas before and after the war he was often that way. At Los Alamos he didn’t make anybody feel infe...

Kistiakowsky would apologize after the war for a research program “too frequently reduced to guesswork and empirical shortcuts” because the field had been grossly neglected.2159 “Prior to this war the subject of explosives attracted very little scientific interest,” he wrote in an introduction to a technical history of X Division’s work, “these materials being looked upon as blind destructive agents rather than precision instruments; the level of fundamental knowledge concerning detonation waves—and strong shock waves induced by them in the adjacent non-explosive media—was distressingly low.”

Late in August Henry H. (“Hap”) Arnold, the commanding general of the U.S. Army Air Forces, approved the assignment of an Illinois-born lieutenant colonel, Paul W. Tibbets, twenty-nine years old, to be group commander. Tibbets may well have been the best bomber pilot in the Air Force. He had led the first B-17 bombing mission from England into Europe, had carried Dwight Eisenhower to his Gibraltar command post before the invasion of North Africa and had led the first bomber strike of that invasion. More recently he had been test-piloting the B-29, which in 1944 was just beginning to come on line, working with the physics department of the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque to determine how well the new bomber could defend itself against fighter attack at high altitude. He was a man of medium height and stocky build with dark, wavy hair and a widow’s peak, full-faced and square-jawed, a pipe smoker. His father was a candy wholesaler in Florida and a disciplinarian from whom Tibbets probably acquired his reserved perfectionism; he was closer to his mother, the former Enola Gay Haggard of Glidden, Iowa.

reaction. “The fact that the German atom bomb was not an immediate threat,” Boris Pash writes with justifiable pride, “was probably the most significant single piece of military intelligence developed throughout the war. Alone, that information was enough to justify Alsos.”2260 But Alsos managed more: it prevented the Soviet Union from capturing the leading German atomic scientists and acquiring a significant volume of high-quality uranium ore. The Belgian ore confiscated at Toulouse was already being processed through the Oak Ridge calutrons for Little Boy.

Frisch wanted to work with full critical masses to determine by experiment what Los Alamos had so far been able to determine only theoretically: how much uranium Little Boy would need. Hence his daring proposal: The idea was that the compound of uranium-235, which by then had arrived on the site, enough to make an explosive device, should indeed be assembled to make one, but leaving a big hole so that the central portion was missing; that would allow enough neutrons to escape so that no chain reaction could develop.2263 But the missing portion was to be made, ready to be dropped through the hole so that for a split second there was the condition for an atomic explosion, although only barely so. Brilliant young Richard Feynman laughed when he heard Frisch’s plan and named it: he said it would be like tickling the tail of a sleeping dragon.2264 The Dragon experiment it became. At a remote laboratory site in Omega Canyon that Fermi also used, Frisch’s group built a ten-foot iron frame, the “guillotine,” that supported upright aluminum guides. The experimenters surrounded the guides at table level with blocks of uranium hydride. To the top of the guillotine they raised a hydride core slug about two by six inches in size. It would fall under the influence of gravity, accelerating at 32 feet per second/per second. When it passed between the blocks it would momentarily form a critical mass. Mixed with hydride, the U235 would react much more slowly than pure metal would react late...

The official Los Alamos history measures the significance of Frisch’s Dragon-tickling: These experiments gave direct evidence of an explosive chain reaction. They gave an energy production of up to twenty million watts, with a temperature rise in the hydride up to 2°C per millisecond. The strongest burst obtained produced 1015 neutrons. The dragon is of historical importance. It was the first controlled nuclear reaction which was supercritical with prompt neutrons alone.2266

Stimson was seventy-seven years old when Truman assumed the Presidency. He could remember stories his great-grandmother told him of her childhood talks with George Washington. He had attended Phillips Andover when the tuition at that distinguished New England preparatory school was sixty dollars a year and students cut their own firewood. He had graduated from Yale College and Harvard Law School, had served as Secretary of War under William Howard Taft, as Governor General of the Philippines under Calvin Coolidge, as Secretary of State under Herbert Hoover. Roosevelt had called him back to active service in 1940 and with able assistance especially from George Marshall and despite insomnia and migraines that frequently laid him low he had built and administered the most powerful military organization in the history of the world. He was a man of duty and of rectitude. “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

James Francis Byrnes,

A politician’s politician, Byrnes had managed in his thirty-two years of public life to serve with distinction in all three branches of the federal government. He was self-made from the ground up. His father died before he was born. His mother learned dressmaking to survive. Young Jimmy found work at fourteen, his last year of formal education, in a law office, but in lieu of classroom study one of the law partners kindly guided him through a comprehensive reading list. His mother in the meantime taught him shorthand and in 1900, at twenty-one, he earned appointment as a court reporter. He read for the law under the judge whose circuit he reported and passed the bar in 1904. He ran first, in 1908, for solicitor, the South Carolina equivalent of district attorney, and made himself known prosecuting murderers. More than forty-six stump debates won him election to Congress in 1910; in 1930, after fourteen years in the House and five years out of office, he was elected to the Senate. By then he was already actively promoting Franklin Roosevelt’s approaching presidential bid. Byrnes served as one of the candidate’s speechwriters during the 1932 campaign and afterward worked hard as Roosevelt’s man in the Senate to push through the New Deal. His reward, in 1941, was a seat on the United States Supreme Court, which he resigned in 1942 to move to the White House to take over operating the complicated wartime emergency program of wage and price controls, the assistant Presidency of...

Bohr’s ideas, variously diluted, floated by that time in the Washington air. Bohr had sought to convince the American government that only early discussion with the Soviet Union of the mutual dangers of a nuclear arms race could forestall such an arms race once the bomb became known. (He would try again in April to see Roosevelt; Felix Frankfurter and Lord Halifax, the British ambassador, would be strolling in a Washington park discussing Bohr’s best avenue of approach when the bells of the city’s churches began tolling the news of the President’s death.) Apparently no one within the executive branch was sufficiently convinced of the inevitability of Bohr’s vision. Stimson was as wise as any man in government, but late in December he cautioned Roosevelt that the Russians should earn the right to hear the baleful news:

Stimson emphasized what John Anderson had emphasized to Churchill the year before: that founding a “world peace organization” while the bomb was still a secret “would seem to be unrealistic”: No system of control heretofore considered would be adequate to control this menace. Both inside any particular country and between the nations of the world, the control of this weapon will undoubtedly be a matter of the greatest difficulty and would involve such thorough-going rights of inspection and internal controls as we have never heretofore contemplated. That brought Stimson to the crucial point: Furthermore, in the light of our present position with reference to this weapon, the question of sharing it with other nations and, if so shared, upon what terms, becomes a primary question of our foreign relations. Bohr had proposed to inform other nations of the common dangers of a nuclear arms race. At the hands of Stimson and his advisers that sensible proposal had drifted to the notion that the issue was sharing the weapon itself. As Commander in Chief, as a veteran of the First World War, as a man of common sense, Truman must have wondered what on earth his Secretary of War was talking about, especially when Stimson added that “a certain moral responsibility” followed from American leadership in nuclear technology which the nation could not shirk “without very serious responsibility for any disaster to civilization which it would further.” Was the United States morally obligated ...

It was a prescient document. It argued that in preparing to test and then use atomic bombs the United States was “moving along a road leading to the destruction of the strong position [the nation] hitherto occupied in the world.” Szilard was referring not to a moral advantage but to an industrial: as he wrote elsewhere that spring, U.S. military strength was “essentially due to the fact that the United States could outproduce every other country in heavy armaments.”2329 When other countries acquired nuclear weapons, as they would in “just a few years,” that advantage would be lost: “Perhaps the greatest immediate danger which faces us is the probability that our ‘demonstration’ of atomic bombs will precipitate a race in the production of these devices between the United States and Russia.” Much of the rest of the memorandum asked the sort of questions the Interim Committee was also asking about international controls versus attempting to maintain an American monopoly. But Szilard echoed Bohr in pleading for what no one among the national leaders concerned with the problem seemed able to grasp, that “these decisions ought to be based not on the present evidence relating to atomic bombs, but rather on the situation which can be expected to confront us in this respect a few years from now.” By present evidence the bombs were modest and the United States held them in monopoly; the difficulty was deciding what the future would bring. Szilard first offended Byrnes in his memoran...

Leo Szilard memorandum

Byrnes proceeded to demonstrate the dangers of a lack of firsthand knowledge, Szilard remembers: When I spoke of my concern that Russia might become an atomic power, and might become an atomic power soon, if we demonstrated the power of the bomb and if we used it against Japan, his reply was, “General Groves tells me there is no uranium in Russia.”2331 So Szilard explained to Byrnes what Groves, busy buying up the world supply of high-grade ore, apparently did not understand: that high-grade deposits are necessary for the extraction of so rare an element as radium but that low-grade ores, which undoubtedly existed in the Soviet Union, were entirely satisfactory where so abundant an element as uranium was concerned. To Szilard’s argument that using the atomic bomb, even testing the atomic bomb, would be unwise because it would disclose that the weapon existed, Byrnes took a turn at teaching the physicist a lesson in domestic politics: He said we had spent two billion dollars on developing the bomb, and Congress would want to know what we had got for the money spent. He said, “How would you get Congress to appropriate money for atomic energy research if you do not show results for the money which has been spent already?”2332 But Byrnes’ most dangerous misunderstanding from Szilard’s point of view was his reading of the Soviet Union: Byrnes thought that the war would be over in about six months. . . . He was concerned about Russia’s postwar behavior. Russian troops had moved ...

On May 30 Groves crossed the river from his Virginia Avenue offices and hove into view.2337 Stimson’s frustration at the bombing of Japanese cities ignited a fateful exchange, as the general later told an interviewer: I was over in Mr. Stimson’s office talking to him about some matter in connection with the bomb when he asked me if I had selected the targets yet. I replied that I had that report all ready and I expected to take it over to General Marshall the following morning for his approval. Mr. Stimson then said: “Well, your report is all finished, isn’t it?” I said: “I haven’t gone over it yet, Mr. Stimson. I want to be sure that I’ve got it just right.” He said: “Well, I would like to see it” and I said: “Well, it’s across the river and it would take a long time to get it.” He said: “I have all day and I know how fast your office operates. Here’s a phone on this desk. You pick it up and you call your office and have them bring that report over.” Well, it took about fifteen or twenty minutes to get that report there and all the time I was stewing and fretting internally over the fact that I was shortcutting General Marshall. . . . But there was nothing I could do and when I protested slightly that I thought it was something that General Marshall should pass on first, Mr. Stimson said: “This is one time I’m going to be the final deciding authority. Nobody’s going to tell me what to do on this. On this matter I am the kingpin and you might just as well get that report o...

When Szilard returned to Washington from South Carolina he looked up Oppenheimer, just arrived in town for the Interim Committee meeting, to lobby him. So hard was the Los Alamos director working to complete the first atomic bombs that Groves had doubted two weeks earlier if he could break free for the May 31 meeting.2342 Oppenheimer would not for the world have missed the chance to advise at so high a level. But his candid vision of the future of the weapon he was building was as unromantic as his understanding of its immediate necessity was, in Szilard’s view, misinformed: I told Oppenheimer that I thought it would be a very serious mistake to use the bomb against the cities of Japan. Oppenheimer didn’t share my view. He surprised me by starting the conversation by saying, “The atomic bomb is shit.” “What do you mean by that?” I asked him. He said, “Well, this is a weapon which has no military significance.2343 It will make a big bang—a very big bang—but it is not a weapon which is useful in war.” He thought that it would be important, however, to inform the Russians that we had an atomic bomb and that we intended to use it against the cities of Japan, rather than taking them by surprise. This seemed reasonable to me. . . . However, while this was necessary it was certainly not sufficient. “Well,” Oppenheimer said, “don’t you think that if we tell the Russians what we intend to do and then use the bomb in Japan, the Russians will understand it?” And I remember that I sai...

Ernest Lawrence spoke up for staying ahead of the rest of the world by knowing more and doing more than any other country. He made explicit a future course for the nation about which the previous record of all the meetings and deliberations is oddly silent, a course based on assumptions diametrically opposite to Oppenheimer’s profound insight that the atomic bomb was shit: Dr. Lawrence recommended that a program of plant expansion be vigorously pursued and at the same time a sizable stock pile of bombs and material should be built up. . . . Only by vigorously pursuing the necessary plant expansion and fundamental research . . . could this nation stay out in front. That was a prescription for an arms race as soon as the Soviet Union took up the challenge.

The President met the next day to discuss Groves’ results with Byrnes, Stimson and the Joint Chiefs, including Marshall and Hap Arnold. Arnold had long maintained that conventional strategic bombing by itself could compel the Japanese to surrender. In late June, when invasion was being decided, he had rushed LeMay to Washington to work the numbers. LeMay figured he could complete the destruction of the Japanese war machine by October 1.2505 “In order to do this,” writes Arnold, “he had to take care of some 30 to 60 large and small cities.”2506 Between May and August LeMay took care of fifty-eight.2507 But Marshall disagreed with the Air Force assessment. The situation in the Pacific, he had told Truman in June, was “practically identical” to the situation in Europe after Normandy. “Airpower alone was not sufficient to put the Japanese out of the war.2508 It was unable alone to put the Germans out.” He explained his reasoning at Potsdam to an interviewer after the war: We regarded the matter of dropping the [atomic] bomb as exceedingly important.2509 We had just gone through a bitter experience at Okinawa [the last major island campaign, when the Americans lost more than 12,500 men killed and missing and the Japanese more than 100,000 killed in eighty-two days of fighting]. This had been preceded by a number of similar experiences in other Pacific islands, north of Australia. The Japanese had demonstrated in each case they would not surrender and they would fight to the dea...

“To avert a vast, indefinite butchery,” Winston Churchill summarizes in his history of the Second World War, “to bring the war to an end, to give peace to the world, to lay healing hands upon its tortured peoples by a manifestation of overwhelming power at the cost of a few explosions, seemed, after all our toils and perils, a miracle of deliverance.”2544 The few explosions did not seem a miracle of deliverance to the civilians of the enemy cities upon whom the bombs would be dropped. In their behalf—surely they have claim—something more might be said about reasons. The bombs were authorized not because the Japanese refused to surrender but because they refused to surrender unconditionally. The debacle of conditional peace following the First World War led to the demand for unconditional surrender in the Second, the earlier conflict casting its dark shadow down the years. “It was the insistence on unconditional surrender that was the root of all evil,” writes the Oxford moralist G. E. M. Anscombe in a 1957 pamphlet opposing the awarding of an honorary degree to Harry Truman.2545 “The connection between such a demand and the need to use the most ferocious methods of warfare will be obvious. And in itself the proposal of an unlimited objective in war is stupid and barbarous.”

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.2697 Within 2 kilometers of the atomic bomb’s hypocenter all life and property were shattered, burned, and buried under ashes. The visible forms of the city where people once carried on their daily lives vanished without a trace. The destruction was sudden and thorough; there was virtually no chance to escape. . . . Citizens who had lost no family members in the holocaust were as rare as stars at sunrise. . . . The atomic bomb had blasted and burned hospitals, schools, city offices, police stations, and every other kind of human organization. . . . Family, relatives, neighbors, and friends relied on a broad range of interdependent organizations for everything from birth, marriage, and funerals to firefighting, productive work, and daily living. These traditional communities were completely demolished in an instant. Destroyed, that is, were not only men, women and thousands of children but also restaurants and inns, laundries, theater groups, sports clubs, sewing clubs, boys’ clubs, girls’ clubs, love affairs, trees and gardens, grass, gates, gravestones, temples and shrines, family heirlooms, radios, classmates, books, courts of law, clothes, pets, groceries and markets, telephones, personal let...

“An atomic bomb,” the Japanese study of Hiroshima and Nagasaki emphasizes, “ . . . is a weapon of mass slaughter.”2746 A nuclear weapon is in fact a total-death machine, compact and efficient, as a simple graph prepared from Hiroshima statistics demonstrates: The percentage of people killed depends simply on distance from the hypocenter; the relation between death percentage and distance is inversely proportional and the killing, as Gil Elliot emphasizes, is no longer selective: By the time we reach the atom bomb, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the ease of access to target and the instant nature of macro-impact mean that both the choice of city and the identity of the victim has become completely randomized, and human technology has reached the final platform of self-destructiveness.2747 The great cities of the dead, in numbers, remain Verdun, Leningrad and Auschwitz. But at Hiroshima and Nagasaki the “city of the dead” is finally transformed from a metaphor into a literal reality. The city of the dead of the future is our city and its victims are—not French and German soldiers, nor Russian citizens, nor Jews—but all of us without reference to specific identity.