American Prometheus

by Kai Bird

The atomic bomb might become “a Frankenstein which would eat us up,” or it could secure the global peace. Its import, in either case, “went far beyond the needs of the present war.”

“the visual effect of an atomic bombing would be tremendous. It would be accompanied by a brilliant luminescence which would rise to a height of 10,000 to 20,000 feet. The neutron effect of the explosion would be dangerous to life for a radius of at least two-thirds of a mile.”

Franck Report,

a surprise atomic attack on Japan was inadvisable from any point of view: “It may be very difficult to persuade the world that a nation which was capable of secretly preparing and suddenly releasing a weapon as indiscriminate as the [German] rocket bomb and a million times more destructive, is to be trusted in its proclaimed desire of having such weapons abolished by international agreement.”

“[I]t is clear that we, as scientific men, have no proprietary rights . . . no claim to special competence in solving the political, social, and military problems which are presented by the advent of atomic power.” It was an odd conclusion—and one that Oppenheimer would soon abandon.

Among other things, he was unaware that military intelligence in Washington had intercepted and decoded messages from Japan indicating that the Japanese government understood the war was lost and was seeking acceptable surrender terms.

Isolated in Los Alamos, Oppenheimer had no knowledge of the “Magic” intelligence intercepts, no knowledge of the vigorous debate going on among Washington insiders over the surrender terms, and no idea that the president and his secretary of state were hoping that the atomic bomb would allow them to end the war without a clarification of the terms of unconditional surrender, and without Soviet intervention.

The gadget was indeed a “terrible” weapon, but Teller thought the only hope for humanity was to “convince everybody that the next war would be fatal. For this purpose actual combat use might even be the best thing.”

in the spring of 1944, Oppenheimer had spent three days and nights bouncing around the barren, dry valleys of southern New Mexico in a three-quarter-ton Army truck, searching for a suitably isolated stretch of wilderness where the bomb could be safely tested.

finally selected a desert site sixty miles northwest of Alamogordo. The Spanish had called the area the Jornada del Muerto—the “Journey of Death.”

Oppenheimer dubbed the test site “Trinity”—though years later, he wasn’t quite sure why he chose such a name.

“Batter my heart, three-person’d God . . .” But this suggests that he may also have once again been drawing from the Bhagavad-Gita; Hinduism, after all, has its trinity in Brahma the creator, Vishnu the preserver, and Shiva the destroyer.

On the evening of July 11, 1945, Robert Oppenheimer walked home and said goodbye to Kitty. He told her that if the test was successful, he would get a message to her saying, “You can change the sheets.”

“Funny how the mountains always inspire our work.”

RICHARD FEYNMAN was standing twenty miles from the Trinity

A full minute and a half after the explosion, Feynman finally heard an enormous bang, followed by the rumble of man-made thunder.

James Conant had expected a relatively quick flash of light. But the white light so filled the sky that for a moment he thought “something had gone wrong” and the “whole world has gone up in flames.”

Bob Serber was also twenty miles away, lying face down and holding a piece of welder’s glass to his eyes. “Of course,” he wrote later, “just at the moment my arm got tired and I lowered the glass for a second, the bomb went off. I was completely blinded by the flash.” When his vision returned thirty seconds later, he saw a bright violet column ri...

“All of a sudden, the night turned into day, and it was tremendously bright, the chill turned into warmth; the fireball gradually turned from white to yellow to red as it grew in size and climbed into the sky; after about five seconds the darkness returned but with the sky and the air filled with a purple glow, just as though we were surrounded by an aurora borealis.

“But I think the most terrifying thing,” Frank recalled, “was this really brilliant purple cloud, black with radioactive dust, that hung there, and you had no feeling of whether it would go up or would drift towards you.”

‘Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.’

One of Robert’s friends, Abraham Pais, once suggested that the quote sounded like one of Oppie’s “priestly exaggerations.”

“The big boom came about 100 seconds after the Great Flash—the first cry of a new-born world. It brought the silent, motionless silhouettes to life, gave them a voice. A loud cry filled the air. The little groups that hitherto had stood rooted to the earth like desert plants broke into dance.”

“It’s a terrible thing that we made,”

“Robert got very still and ruminative, during that two-week period,” Wilson recalled, “partly because he knew what was about to happen, and partly because he knew what it meant.”

“On July 24,” Truman wrote in his memoirs, “I casually mentioned to Stalin that we had a new weapon of unusual destructive force. The Russian premier showed no special interest. All he said was that he was glad to hear it and hoped we would make ‘good use of it against the Japanese.’ ” This fell far short of what Oppenheimer had expected. As the historian Alice Kimball Smith later wrote, “what actually occurred at Potsdam was a sheer travesty. . . .”

“Apparently it went with a tremendous bang. . . .”

“Attention please, attention please. One of our units has just been successfully dropped on Japan.”

“One suddenly got this horror of all the people that had been killed.”

“As the days passed,” wrote Alice Kimball Smith, the wife of the Los Alamos metallurgist Cyril Smith, “the revulsion grew, bringing with it—even for those who believed that the end of the war justified the bombing—an intensely personal experience of the reality of evil.”

“. . . it is our firm opinion that no military countermeasures will be found which will be adequately effective in preventing the delivery of atomic weapons.”

We believe that the safety of this nation—as opposed to its ability to inflict damage on an enemy power—cannot lie wholly or even primarily in its scientific or technical prowess. It can be based only on making future wars impossible.”

“You will believe that this undertaking has not been without its misgivings; they are heavy on us today, when the future, which has so many elements of high promise, is yet only a stone’s throw from despair.”

“Circumstances are heavy with misgiving, and far, far more difficult than they should be, had we power to re-make the world to be as we think it.”

The enormity of what had happened in Hiroshima and Nagasaki had affected him profoundly.

One bomber and one bomb, had, in the time it takes a rifle bullet to cross the city, turned a city of three hundred thousand into a burning pyre. That was the new thing.”

“The scientists know,”

“that they cannot go back to the laboratories leaving atomic energy in the hands of the armed forces or the statesmen.”

the Manhattan Project had achieved exactly what Rabi had feared it would achieve—it had made a weapon of mass destruction “the culmination of three centuries of physics.”

“Modern Prometheans have raided Mount Olympus again and have brought back for man the very thunderbolts of Zeus.” Life magazine observed that physicists now seemed to wear “the tunic of Superman.”

“We have made a thing, a most terrible weapon,” he told an audience of the American Philosophical Society, “that has altered abruptly and profoundly the nature of the world . . . a thing that by all the standards of the world we grew up in is an evil thing. And by so doing . . . we have raised again the question of whether science is good for man. . . .”

“From the moment he began to speak until the end, not a whisper in the whole place. This was the kind of magic that he exercised.”

“The ability to speak in public like that is a poison—it’s very dangerous for the person who has it.”

To some of his colleagues, it appeared that the more time Oppie spent in Washington, D.C., the more compliant he became.

Oppenheimer was, in fact, doing his best to reflect the deep concern his fellow scientists held for the future. Late in September, he told Under Secretary of State Dean Acheson that most Manhattan Project scientists were strongly disinclined to work any longer on weapons—and “not merely a super bomb, but any bomb.” After Hiroshima and the end of the war, such work, he said, was felt to be “against the dictates of their hearts and spirits.”

If atomic bombs are to be added as new weapons to the arsenals of a warring world, or to the arsenals of nations preparing for war, then the time will come when mankind will curse the names of Los Alamos and Hiroshima.”

“I never saw a man in such an extremely nervous state as Oppenheimer. He seemed to feel that the destruction of the entire human race was imminent.”

“The guilt consciousness of the atomic bomb scientists is one of the most astounding things I have ever seen.”

an enormous change in spirit is involved.”

“If you approach the problem and say, ‘We know what is right and we would like to use the atomic bomb to persuade you to agree with us,’ then you are in a very weak position and you will not succeed . . . you will find yourselves attempting by force of arms to prevent a disaster.”