American Prometheus

by Kai Bird

in San

“Well,” he told David Hawkins afterwards, “Roosevelt was a great architect, perhaps Truman will be a good carpenter.”

He didn’t say that the air strikes shouldn’t be carried on, but he did think there was something wrong with a country where no one questioned that. . . .”

Stimson said he agreed with James Conant’s suggestion “that the most desirable target would be a vital war plant employing a large number of workers and closely surrounded by workers’ houses.” Thus, with such delicate euphemisms, did the president of Harvard University select civilians as the target of the world’s first atomic bomb.

“[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.

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.” For good luck, she gave him a four-leaf clover from their garden.

he saw a white light changing into yellow and then orange: “A big ball of orange, the center that was so bright, becomes a ball of orange that starts to rise and billow a little bit and get a little black around the edges, and then you see it’s a big ball of smoke with flashes on the inside of the fire going out, the heat.” A full minute and a half after the explosion, Feynman finally heard an enormous bang, followed by the rumble of man-made thunder.

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 rising to 20,000 or 30,000 feet. “I could feel the heat on my face a full twenty miles away.”

“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.”

Wilson was not alone. “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.”

The Hiroshima bomb, he said, was used “against an essentially defeated enemy. . . . it is a weapon for aggressors, and the elements of surprise and of terror are as intrinsic to it as are the fissionable nuclei.”

“Today that pride must be tempered with a profound concern. 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.”

Afterwards, the President was heard to mutter, “Blood on his hands, dammit, he hasn’t half as much blood on his hands as I have. You just don’t go around bellyaching about it.” He later told Dean Acheson, “I don’t want to see that son-of-a-bitch in this office ever again.”

However confident Americans might be that their views and ideas will prevail, the absolute “denial of the views and ideas of other people, cannot be the basis of any kind of agreement.”

“I invited Eliot here,” he told Freeman Dyson, “in the hope that he would produce another masterpiece, and all he did here was to work on The Cocktail Party, the worst thing he ever wrote.”