Pandora's Keepers Read online

  CHAPTER 6

  The Decision to Use the Bomb

  BETWEEN HIS MEETING with Churchill in September 1944 and his death in April 1945, Roosevelt underwent no change in his attitude toward the bomb. But in the laboratories of the Manhattan Project, particularly the Met Lab, scientists became increasingly concerned during late 1944 and early 1945 about the implications of their work. To their earlier anxiety about military control was now added the dawning fear that they might succeed in making a weapon of mass destruction. This was especially true of Leo Szilard. The big question in his mind shifted from “Can an atomic bomb be made?” to “What will happen once it is?”

  This question increasingly consumed Szilard’s thinking as his workload decreased. With a chain-reacting pile achieved and plutonium production underway at Hanford, the Met Lab had essentially completed its task. The focus of effort had shifted to Los Alamos. This gave Szilard more time to reflect, and the more he reflected the less enamored he became of the bomb. Sitting in his room—the space practically bare except for an old traveling bag which served as a closet—at the Quadrangle Club of the University of Chicago or strolling the green expanse of the Midway south of the university on evenings and weekends, he turned his far-reaching mind to a host of questions: Should Russia be told about the bomb? If Germany was defeated before the bomb was ready—as seemed increasingly likely—should it be used against Japan? Could international control be achieved, and if so, what form should it take?

  Szilard first addressed these questions in January 1944, when he sent Vannevar Bush a memorandum emphasizing for the first time not the urgency of beating Nazi Germany to the bomb but what it would mean to the world once the bomb was made. “If peace is organized before it has penetrated the public’s mind that the potentialities of atomic bombs are a reality,” he wrote, “it will be impossible to have a peace that is based on reality.” And yet he acknowledged a stark dilemma: “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.” 1

  Other Met Lab scientists also began contemplating the bomb’s implications. The most sophisticated and far-reaching study was conducted by a group that included Fermi. The report, formally titled “Prospectus on Nucleonics,” and known as the Jeffries Report after its chairman, physicist Zay Jeffries, called for a general statement to the American public revealing the existence of the Manhattan Project, the destructive potential of the bomb, and the fact that it would inevitably affect relations between nations in the future. The report owed its inspiration to Compton, who had asked Met Lab scientists for their ideas the year before. From then on, with Compton’s encouragement, the group devoted serious thought to postwar problems. 2

  The Jeffries Report, submitted to Compton in November 1944, reflected a broad spectrum of scientific opinion. The quality and quantity of viewpoints—the report was sixty-five typewritten pages in length—showed that the implications of the new weapon had been discussed in considerable detail. Its assessment was presented in the form of a warning, coupled with a set of recommendations. A world armed with atomic bombs was analogous to two people armed with machine guns locked in a room, the report said. Since the person who shoots first kills his rival, it is likely that one of them will do so to remove the fear of being attacked. The prospect of this kind of preventive warfare would become a grim reality—as America’s war against the specter of a nuclear-armed Iraq under Saddam Hussein half a century later attested—unless mutual understanding were achieved and the production of atomic bombs were either prevented entirely or limited to a carefully controlled pool for checking any potential disturbance of the peace. The report also noted that “it would be surprising if the Russians are not also diligently engaged in such work.” A peace based on uncontrolled and perhaps clandestine development of nuclear weapons was little more than an armistice and was bound to end, sooner or later, in catastrophe. A central authority for the control of atomic energy was necessary if the world was to avoid disaster. Compton submitted the Jeffries Report to Groves, who chose not to pass it along to policy makers. 3

  Bohr decided to make one last approach to policy makers himself. In early April 1945, he prepared a detailed memorandum on the bomb’s postwar implications for Roosevelt. The memo included many farsighted proposals later adopted by the U.S. government for the international control of atomic energy: technical inspection, an international inspection agency, and a distinction between “safe” and “dangerous” activities in the realm of nuclear research. Bohr believed humanity’s survival in the long run required far-sighted statesmanship in the short run. 4 Bohr asked British Ambassador Lord Halifax and Felix Frankfurter to get it to the president. Halifax and Frankfurter discussed Bohr’s request on a stroll through Rock Creek Park on the afternoon of April twelfth. It was a beautiful spring day in Washington, the sun bright and warm and the leaves and grass emerald green. Suddenly church bells began to toll until the air filled with their sound. Halifax and Frankfurter saw people hurrying to speak to others. Roosevelt had died of a cerebral hemorrhage in Warm Springs, Georgia. With that, Szilard’s initiative was halted.

  Several weeks before, Szilard had also prepared a memorandum for FDR. Remarkably perceptive, the memo addressed a number of central problems: the escalation of nuclear weapons technology from atomic to thermonuclear bombs, the vulnerability of an urbanized nation like the United States to nuclear attack, and challenges involving control of raw materials and on-site inspections. Szilard predicted that America faced a fundamental choice: negotiate an accord with the Soviets or compete with them in an atomic arms race after the war. 5 The great danger of such a race was “the possibility of the outbreak of a preventive war. Such a war might be the outcome of the fear that the other country might strike first, and no amount of good will on the part of both nations might be sufficient to prevent the outbreak of a war if such an explosive situation were allowed to develop.” Only international control could avert this danger. The U.S. government was about to arrive at decisions, he warned, that would control the course of events after the war. Those decisions ought to be based on careful estimates of future possibilities, not simply “on the present evidence relating to atomic bombs.” 6

  Szilard had discussed his memo with Lawrence. They met at the Chicago rail station, Lawrence reading and commenting on the memo as he waited to change trains. 7 Lawrence encouraged Szilard to forward the memo to the president through First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, who agreed to see him. With a White House appointment thus set, Szilard went to Compton’s office armed with his memorandum. He was nervous as Compton slowly read the memo, expecting to be scolded for again going outside official channels. To Szilard’s astonishment, Compton cheered him on, saying, “I hope that you will get the President to read this.” “Elated by finding no resistance where I expected resistance,” Szilard recalled, “I went back to my office. I hadn’t been in my office for five minutes when there was a knock on the door and Compton’s assistant came in, telling me that he had just: heard over the radio that President Roosevelt had died.” 8

  FDR’s death shocked Szilard and the entire nation. Vice President Harry S Truman now assumed the burdens of commander in chief in a war that—especially against Japan—was growing fierce and pitiless. Between February and March 1945, three Marine divisions had slugged their way across Iwo Jima, a western Pacific island of volcanic ash, rock, and stinking sulfur fumes. The island’s 21,000 Japanese defenders meant to make its conquest so costly that Americans would recoil from invading their homeland. The battle for Iwo Jima became a nightmare of relentless attacks and swarms of flies feeding on dead flesh. One Marine despaired, “They send you to a place and you get shot to hell and maybe they pull you back. But then they send you right up again and then you get murdered. God, you stay there until you get killed or until you can’t stand it any more.” 9 Five weeks of fighting on Iwo Jima
cost the Marine Corps nearly 7,000 dead and 22,000 wounded out of 60,000 committed—the highest casualty rate in Marine Corps history. Its three divisions had to be rebuilt with teenage replacements. The Japanese on Iwo Jima perished almost to a man, having inflicted more casualties in killed and wounded than they suffered for the first time in the war.

  Things would be even worse during the Battle of Okinawa between April and June, when Americans encountered the most savage Japanese resistance of the war. Kamikaze suicide bombers slammed into navy ships offshore, turning destroyers into flaming junk heaps manned by bloody remnants of their crews. The kamikaze attacks were alien and terrifying; they confirmed for Americans the extent of Japanese doggedness and desperation even as the United States ground down Japan’s war machine. The navy suffered 10,000 casualties, half of them killed. Fighting on the island was a slaughter. Before it was over, more than 100,000 Japanese soldiers and another 100,000 native Okinawans had perished. The U.S. army lost 40,000 men, a fourth of them killed in action. Thousands of Americans and Japanese were being killed on the beaches and in the jungles of the Pacific every week.

  In the skies over Japan, giant American B-29 bombers were running massive raids against cities, wiping them off the map, one after another, like the wrath of God. The results were devastating and appalling. Twenty-two million Japanese—30 percent of the country’s entire population—were rendered homeless by fire raids that razed 178 square miles of densely populated urban areas. The fire raids inflicted 2,200,000 civilian casualties, including approximately 900,000 killed. The number of Japan’s civilians killed exceeded its combat casualties of approximately 780,000.

  Nothing illustrated the escalating violence of the Pacific War—and the declining restraint of its combatants—more vividly than the B-29 fire raid against Tokyo in March 1945. At the start of the war, Roosevelt had entreated all combatants to refrain from bombing civilians and recalled with pride that “the United States consistently has taken the lead in urging that this inhuman practice be prohibited.” 10 Now America launched a thousand-plane bombing raid deliberately designed to burn Japan’s capital city—and its civilian inhabitants who lived there, crowded in wood-and-paper houses—to ashes.

  Shortly after midnight on March tenth, residents of Tokyo peered out of their air-raid shelters and saw an eerie sight above the city. Reflecting spectral colors from searchlights, hundreds of B-29s descended slowly, their bomb bays filled with six-pound incendiary bomblets that spewed burning gelatinized gasoline that stuck to its targets and was inextinguishable. The bomblets were intended to set the city afire and they did, splashing a flaming dew across wooden roofs and spreading fire everywhere. Wind whipped scattered fires into furnaces of flame, a thermal hurricane that jumped streets, firebreaks, and canals at dizzying speed. It acted like an enormous bellows, superheating the air to eighteen hundred degrees Fahrenheit. B-29s in later attack waves spotted the growing cauldron while still far out at sea. As they flew over the boiling city, they bounced violently as thermal updrafts from the vast and intense conflagration below knocked them about like paper airplanes. At six thousand feet the heat was so intense that crews had to don oxygen masks to breathe. Even at this altitude, American airmen could smell the soot and the burning flesh and vomited. A bombadier who flew above Tokyo that night remembered it as “the most terrifying thing I’ve ever known.” 11

  Fire was not the only danger to Japanese civilians below. Superheated vapors rushing ahead of the flames killed or knocked victims unconscious even before the fires reached them. Death came in many agonizing ways: oxygen deficiency, carbon-monoxide poisoning, radiant heat, direct flames, and crushing stampedes. Canals and ponds through the city offered no relief; luckless bathers were boiled alive or drowned as frantic crowds pushed them down in the superheated water. When the raid was over, sixteen square miles had been burned out, one million people were homeless, and upward of 100,000 had perished. Only a few sounds could be heard across the smoking moonscape of vast desolation the next morning: the groaning of victims with burned lungs, the desperate calls for missing loved ones.

  In an eerie—almost unbelievable—irony, on the same night as the massive B-29 fire raid on Tokyo, a high-altitude Japanese balloon dangling two small incendiary bombs, after drifting across the Pacific Ocean on the jet stream, flukishly fell on the Hanford nuclear reservation in remote south central Washington state. Ropes dangling from the balloon became entangled in the electrical line feeding power to the building housing a nuclear pile. The pile had to be shut down at once, though the power was restored a few hours later. It was this plant that was producing the plutonium that would devastate Nagasaki.

  The Manhattan Project, like the war itself, was nearing its climax in the spring of 1945. The project had proceeded with Roosevelt’s steadfast support, and although the responsibility was now Truman’s, the new president was constrained by the choices of his prestigious predecessor. FDR had refused to broach the subject of international control with Stalin and had indicated his intention to use the bomb to help win the war. Such policies molded the outlook of his successor, who was uninformed, unprepared, and unsure of himself. Truman had met with FDR only twice between his inauguration as vice president on January twentieth and Roosevelt’s death on April twelfth—both times on trivial matters. He was unaware of the agreement FDR and Churchill had reached at Hyde Park. Nor did Truman’s experience as chairman of the Senate Committee to Investigate the National Defense Program prepare him to deal with the Manhattan Project, because the secret had been withheld from him. In a subtle but important respect, the new president was at the mercy of decisions already made and events rapidly unfolding. 12

  To compensate for his inexperience, his ignorance, and his anxiety to do well the job suddenly thrust upon him, Truman relied heavily on his inherited advisers, particularly Secretary of War Henry Stimson and James F. Byrnes, a close confidante of Truman who had been his mentor in the Senate, a Supreme Court justice, and war mobilization director under Roosevelt. The race for the atomic bomb was consuming an increasing amount of Stimson’s time by April 1945, even as the war in the Pacific grew fierce and the weight of his seventy-seven years left him in need of rest every afternoon; and as he became more deeply involved with atomic matters, he began to ponder and reflect.

  Stimson inclined toward the bomb’s wartime use and to hold the secret of the bomb as a reward to induce Stalin’s cooperation. Although he knew the Soviets were spying on the project, he did not believe they had acquired any crucial information; and while he was troubled about the possible effect of continuing to keep them officially uninformed about the enterprise, he believed that it was essential, as he wrote in his diary at the end of 1944, “not to take them into our confidence until we were sure to get a real quid pro quo from our frankness.” Stimson had no illusions about the possibility of keeping such a secret permanently, but he did not think “it was yet time to share it with Russia.” 13 Stimson did not intend to threaten the Soviet Union with the new weapon, but he expected that once its power was demonstrated, the Soviets would be more cooperative about postwar issues. 14

  At the end of Truman’s first Cabinet meeting, hastily convened after he was sworn in on April twelfth, Stimson stayed behind. He would spell out the details later, he said, but before departing he wanted to inform the new president of “a new explosive of almost unbelievable destructive power.” 15 Two weeks later, on April twenty-fifth, Stimson and Groves briefed Truman on the details of the Manhattan Project. They told him scientists would soon complete “the most terrible weapon ever known in human history,” one of which “could destroy a whole city.” They were confident the weapon would bring the bloody war to a rapid conclusion, thereby justifying the years of effort, the vast expenditures, and the judgment of officials responsible for the project. A serious and thoughtful man, Stimson also reflected on the bomb’s larger meaning in an accompanying memo. The world, “in its present state of moral advancement compared with its technical develo
pment[,] would be eventually at the mercy of such a weapon,” he warned the new president, adding: “Modern civilization might be completely destroyed.” Stimson asserted that “a certain moral responsibility” flowed from U.S. leadership in this field that the nation could not shirk “without very serious responsibility for any disaster to civilization which it would further.” 16

  To address this serious challenge, Stimson proposed the establishment of a committee to consider the proper use of the bomb once it was finished and the postwar problems related to its development. Truman agreed, and the Interim Committee, as the advisory group came to be known, was created on May 1, 1945. * Stimson sought to keep the Interim Committee small enough to conduct meaningful discussions but varied enough in its membership to represent diverse viewpoints. More than a year after Bohr had urged policy makers to begin looking ahead, machinery was finally established to consider the most momentous and dangerous development of the war. Stimson’s charge to the committee asked for advice about how, but not whether, the bomb should be used against Japan. That the bomb would be used once it was ready seems to have been a foregone conclusion.