“I am become Shiva, Destroyer of Worlds:”
An Anthology of Readings for the Honors Students
of Roslyn High School
Summer 2015
Contents
1. Letter from Albert Einstein to President Roosevelt (1939)
2. US Government Leaflet Warning the Japanese about the Atomic Bomb (1945)
3. “Surviving the Attack on Hiroshima” from Witness to History Website (1946)
4. Chapter II, “The Fire” from Hiroshima, by John Hersey (1946)
5. “If the Atomic Bomb Had Not Been Used” by Karl T. Compton (1946)
6. “Original Child Bomb” by Thomas Merton (1961)
7. Studs Turkel Interviews Paul Tibbets, the Pilot of the Enola Gay (2002)
8. On Albert Einstein” by J. Robert Oppenheimer (1966)
9. “The Agony of Atomic Genius” by Algis Valiunas (2006)
10. Links to Videos about Hiroshima
11. A Collection of Political Cartoons
Primary Resources: Letter from Albert Einstein to FDR, 8/2/39
Source: National Archives
Letter from Albert Einstein to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt about the possible construction of nuclear bombs.
Sir:
Some recent work by E. Fermi and L. Szilard, which has been communicated to me in manuscript, leads me to expect that the element uranium may be turned into a new and important source of energy in the immediate future. Certain aspects of the situation which has arisen seem to call for watchfulness and, if necessary, quick action on the part of the administration. I believe therefore that it is my duty to bring to your attention the following facts and recommendations:
In the course of the last four months it has been made probable -- through the work of Joliot in France as well as Fermi and Szilard in America -- that it may become possible to set up a nuclear chain reaction in a large mass of uranium, by which vast amounts of power and large quantities of new radium like elements would be generated. Now it appears almost certain that this could be achieved in the immediate future.
This new phenomenon would also lead to the construction of bombs, and it is conceivable -- though much less certain -- that extremely powerful bombs of a new type may thus be constructed. A single bomb of this type, carried by boat and exploded in a port, might very well destroy the whole port together with some of the surrounding territory. However, such bombs might very well prove to be too heavy for transportation by air.
The United States has only very poor [illegible] of uranium in moderate quantities. There is some good ore in Canada and the former Czechoslovakia, while the most important source of Uranium is Belgian Congo.
In view of this situation you may think it desirable to have some permanent contact maintained between the Administration and the group of physicists working on chain reactions in America. One possible way of achieving this might be for you to entrust with this task a person who has your confidence and who could perhaps serve in an unofficial capacity. His task might comprise the following: a) To approach Government Departments, keep them informed of the further development, and out forward recommendations for Government action, giving particular attention to the problem of uranium ore for the United States; b) To speed up the experimental work, which is at present being carried on within the limits of the budgets of University laboratories, by providing funds, if such funds be required, through his contacts with private persons who are willing to make a contribution for this cause, and perhaps also by obtaining the co-operation of industrial laboratories which have the necessary equipment.
I understand that Germany has actually stopped the sale of uranium from the Czechoslovakian mines, which she has taken over. That she should have taken such early action might perhaps be understood on the ground that the son of the German Under-Secretary of State, Von Weishlicker [sic], is attached to the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin where some of the American work on uranium is now being repeated.
Yours very truly,
Albert Einstein
Primary Resources: Leaflets Warning Japanese of Atomic Bomb, 1945
Leaflets dropped on cities in Japan warning civilians about the atomic bomb, dropped c. August 6, 1945
TO THE JAPANESE PEOPLE: America asks that you take immediate heed of what we say on this leaflet.
We are in possession of the most destructive explosive ever devised by man. A single one of our newly developed atomic bombs is actually the equivalent in explosive power to what 2000 of our giant B-29s can carry on a single mission. This awful fact is one for you to ponder and we solemnly assure you it is grimly accurate.
We have just begun to use this weapon against your homeland. If you still have any doubt, make inquiry as to what happened to Hiroshima when just one atomic bomb fell on that city.
Before using this bomb to destroy every resource of the military by which they are prolonging this useless war, we ask that you now petition the Emperor to end the war. Our president has outlined for you the thirteen consequences of an honorable surrender. We urge that you accept these consequences and begin the work of building a new, better and peace-loving Japan.
You should take steps now to cease military resistance. Otherwise, we shall resolutely employ this bomb and all our other superior weapons to promptly and forcefully end the war.
EVACUATE YOUR CITIES.
ATTENTION JAPANESE PEOPLE. EVACUATE YOUR CITIES. Because your military leaders have rejected the thirteen part surrender declaration, two momentous events have occurred in the last few days.
The Soviet Union, because of this rejection on the part of the military has notified your Ambassador Sato that it has declared war on your nation. Thus, all powerful countries of the world are now at war with you. Also, because of your leaders' refusal to accept the surrender declaration that would enable Japan to honorably end this useless war, we have employed our atomic bomb.
A single one of our newly developed atomic bombs is actually the equivalent in explosive power to what 2000 of our giant B-29s could have carried on a single mission. Radio Tokyo has told you that with the first use of this weapon of total destruction, Hiroshima was virtually destroyed.
Before we use this bomb again and again to destroy every resource of the military by which they are prolonging this useless war, petition the emperor now to end the war. Our president has outlined for you the thirteen consequences of an honorable surrender. We urge that you accept these consequences and begin the work of building a new, better, and peace-loving Japan.
Act at once or we shall resolutely employ this bomb and all our other superior weapons to promptly and forcefully end the war.
EVACUATE YOUR CITIES.
Source: Harry S. Truman Library, Miscellaneous historical document file, no. 258.
The Bombing of Hiroshima, 1945
August 6, 1945 - the sun rose into a clear blue sky over the city of Hiroshima, Japan promising a warm and pleasant day. Nothing in the day's dawning indicated that this day would be any different from its predecessors. But this day would be different, very different. This day would change the world. On this day a single bomb dropped by a single airplane destroyed the city, leading to the end of World War II and introducing mankind to the Atomic Age.
Dr. Michihiko Hachiya lived thorough that day and kept a diary of his experience. He served as Director of the Hiroshima Communications Hospital and lived near the hospital approximately a mile from the explosion's epicenter. His diary was published in English in 1955
Suddenly, a strong flash of light...
"The hour was early; the morning still, warm, and beautiful. Shimmering leaves, reflecting sunlight from a cloudless sky, made a pleasant contrast with shadows in my garden as I gazed absently through wide-flung doors opening to the south.
Clad in drawers and undershirt, I was sprawled on the living room floor exhausted because I had just spent a sleepless night on duty as an air warden in my hospital.
Suddenly, a strong flash of light startled me - and then another. So well does one recall little things that I remember vividly how a stone lantern in the garden became brilliantly lit and I debated whether this light was caused by a magnesium flare or sparks from a passing trolley.
Garden shadows disappeared. The view where a moment before had been so bright and sunny was now dark and hazy. Through swirling dust I could barely discern a wooden column that had supported one comer of my house. It was leaning crazily and the roof sagged dangerously.
Moving instinctively, I tried to escape, but rubble and fallen timbers barred the way. By picking my way cautiously I managed to reach the roka [an outside hallway] and stepped down into my garden. A profound weakness overcame me, so I stopped to regain my strength. To my surprise I discovered that I was completely naked How odd! Where were my drawers and undershirt?
What had happened?
All over the right side of my body I was cut and bleeding. A large splinter was protruding from a mangled wound in my thigh, and something warm trickled into my mouth. My check was torn, I discovered as I felt it gingerly, with the lower lip laid wide open. Embedded in my neck was a sizable fragment of glass which I matter-of-factly dislodged, and with the detachment of one stunned and shocked I studied it and my blood-stained hand.
Where was my wife?
Suddenly thoroughly alarmed, I began to yell for her: 'Yaeko-san! Yaeko-san! Where are you?' Blood began to spurt. Had my carotid artery been cut? Would I bleed to death? Frightened and irrational, I called out again 'It's a five-hundred-ton bomb! Yaeko-san, where are you? A five- hundred-ton bomb has fallen!'
Yaeko-san, pale and frightened, her clothes torn and blood stained, emerged from the ruins of our house holding her elbow. Seeing her, I was reassured. My own panic assuaged, I tried to reassure her.
'We'll be all right,' I exclaimed. 'Only let's get out of here as fast as we can.'
She nodded, and I motioned for her to follow me."
It was all a nightmare...
Dr. Hachiya and his wife make their way to the street. As the homes around them collapse, they realize they must move on, and begin their journey to the hospital a few hundred yards away.
"We started out, but after twenty or thirty steps I had to stop. My breath became short, my heart pounded, and my legs gave way under me. An overpowering thirst seized me and I begged Yaeko-san to find me some water. But there was no water to be found. After a little my strength somewhat returned and we were able to go on.
I was still naked, and although I did not feel the least bit of shame, I was disturbed to realize that modesty had deserted me. On rounding a corner we came upon a soldier standing idly in the street. He had a towel draped across his shoulder, and I asked if he would give it to me to cover my nakedness. The soldier surrendered the towel quite willingly but said not a word. A little later I lost the towel, and Yaeko-san took off her apron and tied it around my loins.
Our progress towards the hospital was interminably slow, until finally, my legs, stiff from drying blood, refused to carry me farther. The strength, even the will, to go on deserted me, so I told my wife, who was almost as badly hurt as I, to go on alone. This she objected to, but there was no choice. She had to go ahead and try to find someone to come back for me.
Yaeko-san looked into my face for a moment, and then, without saying a word, turned away and began running towards the hospital. Once, she looked back and waved and in a moment she was swallowed up in the gloom. It was quite dark now, and with my wife gone, a feeling of dreadful loneliness overcame me.
I must have gone out of my head lying there in the road because the next thing I recall was discovering that the clot on my thigh had been dislodged and blood was again spurting from the wound.
I pressed my hand to the bleeding area and after a while the bleeding stopped and I felt better
Could I go on?
I tried. It was all a nightmare - my wounds, the darkness, the road ahead. My movements were ever so slow; only my mind was running at top speed.
In time I came to an open space where the houses had been removed to make a fire lane. Through the dim light I could make out ahead of me the hazy outlines of the Communications Bureau's big concrete building, and beyond it the hospital. My spirits rose because I knew that now someone would find me; and if I should die, at least my body would be found. I paused to rest. Gradually things around me came into focus. There were the shadowy forms of people, some of whom looked like walking ghosts. Others moved as though in pain, like scarecrows, their arms held out from their bodies with forearms and hands dangling. These people puzzled me until I suddenly realized that they had been burned and were holding their arms out to prevent the painful friction of raw surfaces rubbing together. A naked woman carrying a naked baby came into view. I averted my gaze. Perhaps they had been in the bath. But then I saw a naked man, and it occurred to me that, like myself, some strange thing had deprived them of their clothes. An old woman lay near me with an expression of suffering on her face; but she made no sound. Indeed, one thing was common to everyone I saw - complete silence.
All who could were moving in the direction of the hospital. I joined in the dismal parade when my strength was somewhat recovered, and at last reached the gates of the Communications Bureau."
References: Hachiya, Michihiko, Hiroshima Diary (1955);
Hersey, John, Hiroshima (1963).
"Surviving the Atomic Attack on Hiroshima, 1945," EyeWitness to History, www.eyewitnesstohistory.com (2001)
From Hiroshima, by John Hersey This text first appeared as part of a larger article in the New Yorker in August of 1946 The full text is available at: https://archive.org/stream/hiroshima035082mbp/hiroshima035082mbp_djvu.txt
II. THE FIRE IMMEDIATELY after the explosion, the Reverend Mr. Kiyoshi Tanimoto, having run wildly out of the Matsui estate and having looked in wonderment at the bloody soldiers at the mouth of the dugout they had been digging, attached himself sympathetically to an old lady who was walking along in a daze, holding her hat with her left hand, supporting a small boy of three or four on her back with her right, and crying, "I'm hurt! I'm hurt! I'm hurt!" Mr. Tanimoto transferred the child to his own back and led the woman by the hand down the street, which was darkened by what seemed to be a local column of dust. He took the woman to a grammar school not far away that had previously been designated for use as a temporary hospital in case of emergency. By this solicitous behavior, Mr. Tanimoto at once got rid of his terror. At the school, he was much surprised to see glass all over the floor and fifty or sixty injured people already waiting to be treated. He reflected that, although the all-clear had sounded and he had heard no planes, several bombs must have been dropped. He thought of a hillock in the rayon man's garden from which he could get a view of the whole of Koi of the whole of Hiroshima, for that matter, and he ran back up to the estate.
From the mound, Mr. Tanimoto saw an astonishing panorama. Not just a patch of Koi, as he had expected, but as much of Hiroshima as he could see through the clouded air was giving off a thick, dreadful miasma. Clumps of smoke, near and tar, had begun to push up through the general dust. He wondered how such extensive damage could have been dealt out of a silent sky ; even a few planes, far up, would have been audible. Houses nearby were burning, and when huge drops of water 'the size of marbles began to fall, he half thought that they must be coming from the hoses of firemen fighting the blazes. (They were actually drops of condensed moisture falling from the turbulent tower of dust, heat, and fission fragments, that had already risen miles into the sky above Hiroshima.)
Mr. Tanimoto turned away from the sight when he heard Mr. Matsuo call out to ask whether he was all right. Mr. Matsuo had been safely cushioned within the falling house by the bedding stored in the front hall and had worked his way out. Mr. Tanimoto scarcely answered. He had thought of his wife and baby, his church, his home, his parishioners, all of them down in that awful murk. Once more he began to run in fear toward the city.
Mrs. Hatsuyo Nakamura, the tailor's widow, having struggled up from under the ruins of her house after the explosion, and seeing Myeko, the youngest of her three children, buried breast-deep and unable to move, crawled across the debris, hauled at timbers, and flung tiles aside, in a hurried effort to free the child. Then, from what seemed to be caverns far below, she heard two small voices crying, "Tasukete ! Tasukete!”"Help! Help! “She called the names of her ten-year-old son and eight-year-old daughter: "Toshio! Yaeko!"
The voices from below answered.
Mrs. Nakamura abandoned Myeko, who at least could breathe, and in a frenzy made the wreckage fly above the crying voices. The children had been sleeping nearly ten feet apart, but now their voices seemed to come from the same place. Toshio, the boy, apparently had some freedom to move, because she could feel him undermining the pile of wood and tiles as she worked from above. At last she saw his head, and she hastily pulled him out by it. A mosquito net was wound intricately, as if it had been carefully wrapped, around his feet. He said he had been blown right across the room and had been on top of his sister, Yaeko under the wreckage. She now said, from under- neath, that she could not move, because there was something on her legs. With a bit more digging, Mrs. Nakamura cleared a hole above the child and began to pull her arm. "Itai! It hurts !" Yaeko cried. Mrs. Nakamura shouted, "There's no time now to say whether it hurts or not," and yanked her whimpering daughter up. Then she freed Myeko. The children were filthy and bruised, but none of them had a single cut or scratch.
Mrs. Nakamura took the children out into the street. They had nothing on but underpants, and although the day was very hot, she worried rather confusedly about their being cold, so she went back into the wreckage and burrowed underneath and found a bundle of clothes she had packed for an emergency, and she dressed them in pants, blouses, shoes a padded-cotton air-raid helmets called bokuzuki, and even, irrationally, overcoats. The children were silent except for the five-year-old, Myeko, who kept asking questions :
"Why is it night already? Why did our house fall down ? What happened?" Mrs. Nakamura, who did not know what had happened (had not the all-clear sounded?), looked around and saw through the darkness that all the houses in her neighborhood had collapsed. The house next door, which its owner had been tearing down to make way for a fire lane, was now very thoroughly, if crudely, torn down; its owner, who had been sacrificing his home for the community's safety, lay dead. Mrs. Nakamoto, wife of the head of the local air-raid defense Neighborhood Association, came across the street with her head all bloody, and said that her baby was badly cut; did Mrs. Nakamura have any bandage ? Mrs. Nakamura did not, but she crawled into the remains of her house again and pulled out some white cloth that she had been using in her work as a seamstress, ripped it into strips, and gave it to Mrs. Nakamoto. While fetching the cloth, she noticed her sewing machine; she went back in for it and dragged it out. Obviously, she could not carry it with her, so she unthinkingly plunged her symbol of livelihood into the receptacle which for weeks had been her symbol of safety: the cement tank of water in front of her house, of the type every household had been ordered to construct against a possible fire raid. A nervous neighbor, Mrs. Hataya, called to Mrs. Nakamura to run away with her to the woods in Asano Park an estate by the Kyo River not far off, belonging to the wealthy Asano family who once owned the Toyo Kisen Kaisha steamship line. The park had been designated as an evacuation area for their neighborhood. Seeing fire breaking out in a nearby ruin (except at the very center, where the bomb itself ignited some fires, most of Hiroshima's citywide conflagration was caused by inflammable wreckage falling on cookstoves and live wires), Mrs. Nakamura suggested going over to fight it. Mrs. Hataya said, "Don't be foolish. What if planes come and drop more bombs?" So Mrs. Nakamura started out for Asano Park with her children and Mrs. Hataya, and she carried her ruck-sack of emergency clothing, a blanket, an umbrella, and a suitcase of things she had cached in her air-raid shelter. Under many ruins, as they hurried along, they heard muffled screams for help. The only building they saw standing on their way to Asano Park was the Jesuit mission house, alongside the Catholic kindergarten to which Mrs. Nakamura had sent Myeko for a time. As they passed it, she saw Father Kleinsorge, in bloody underwear, running out of the house with a small suitcase in his hand.
Right after the explosion, while Father Wilhelm Kleinsorge was wandering around in his underwear in the vegetable garden, Father Superior LaSalle came around the corner of the building in the darkness. His body, especially his back, was bloody; the flash had made him twist away from his window, and tiny pieces of glass had flown at him. Father Kleinsorge, still bewildered, managed to ask, "Where are the rest?" Just then, the two other priests living in the mission house appeared: Father Cieslik, unhurt, supporting Father Schiffer, who was covered with blood that spurted from a cut above his left ear and who was very pale. Father Cieslik was rather pleased with himself, for after the flash he had dived into a doorway, which he had previously reckoned to be the safest place inside the building, and when the blast came, he was not injured. Father LaSalle told Father Cieslik to take Father Schiffer to a doctor before he bled to death, and suggested either Dr. Kanda, who lived on the next corner, or Dr. Fujii, about six blocks away. The two men went out of the compound and up the street. The daughter of Mr. Hoshijima, the mission catechist, ran up to Father Kleinsorge and said that her mother and sister were buried under the ruins of their house, which was at the back of the Jesuit compound, and at the same time the priests noticed that the house of the Catholic-kindergarten teacher at the foot of the compound had collapsed on her. While Father LaSalle and Mrs. Murata, the mission housekeeper, dug the teacher out, Father Kleinsorge went to the catechist's fallen house and began lifting things off the top of the pile. There was not a sound underneath; he was sure the Hoshijima women had been killed. At last, under what had been a corner of the kitchen, he saw Mrs. Hoshijima's head. Believing her dead, he began to haul her out by the hair, but suddenly she screamed, "Itai! Itai! It hurts! It hurts!" He dug some more and lifted her out. He managed, too, to find her daughter in the rubble and free her. Neither was badly hurt.
A public bath next door to the mission house had caught fire, but since there the wind was southerly, the priests thought their house would be spared. Nevertheless, as a precaution, Father Kleinsorge went inside to fetch some things he wanted to save. He found his room in a state of weird and illogical confusion. A first-aid kit was hanging undisturbed on a hook on the wall, but his clothes, which had been on other hooks nearby, were nowhere to be seen. His desk was in splinters all over the room, but a mere papier-mache suitcase, which he had hidden under the desk, stood handle-side up, without a scratch on it, in the doorway of the room, where he could not miss it. Father Kleinsorge later came to regard this as a bit of Providential interference, inasmuch as the suitcase contained his breviary, the account books for the whole diocese, and a considerable amount of paper money belonging to the mission, for which he was responsible. He ran out of the house and deposited the suitcase in the mission air-raid shelter.
At about this time, Father Cieslik and Father Schiffer, who was still spurting blood, came back and said that Dr. Kanda's house was ruined and that fire blocked them from getting out of what they supposed to be the local circle of destruction to Dr. Fujii's private hospital, on the bank of the Kyo River. Dr. Masakazu Fujii's hospital was no longer on the bank of the Kyo River; it was in the river. After the overturn, Dr. Fujii was so stupefied and so tightly squeezed by the beams gripping his chest that he was unable to move at first, and he hung there about twenty minutes in the darkened morning. Then a thought which came to him that soon the tide would be running in through the estuaries and his head would be submerged inspired him to fearful activity; he wriggled and turned and exerted what strength he could (though his left arm, because of the pain in his shoulder, was useless), and before long he had freed himself from the vice. After a few moments' rest, he climbed on to the pile of timbers and, finding a long one that slanted up to the river bank, he painfully shinnied up it.
Dr. Fujii, who was in his underwear, was now soaking and dirty. His undershirt was torn, and blood ran down it from bad cuts on his chin and back. In this disarray, he walked out onto Kyo Bridge, beside which his hospital had stood. The bridge had not collapsed. He could see only fuzzily without his glasses, but he could see enough to be amazed at the number of houses that were down all around. On the bridge, he encountered a friend, a doctor named Machii, and asked in bewilderment, "What do you think it was?" Dr. Machii said, " It must have been a Molotoffano hanakago" a Molotov flower basket, the delicate Japanese name for the "bread basket," or self- scattering cluster of bombs.
At first, Dr. Fujii could see only two fires, one across the river from his hospital site and one quite far to the south. But at the same time, he and his friend observed something that puzzled them, and which, as doctors, they discussed: although there were as yet very few fires, wounded people were hurrying across the bridge in an endless parade of misery, and many of them exhibited terrible burns on their faces and arms. "Why do you suppose it is?" Dr. Fujii asked. Even a theory was comforting that day, and Dr. Machii stuck to his. "Perhaps because it was a Molotov flower basket," he said.
There had been no breeze earlier in the morning when Dr. Fujii had walked to the railway station to see a friend off, but now brisk winds were blowing every which way; here on the bridge the wind was easterly. New fires were leaping up, and they spread quickly, and in a very short time terrible blasts of hot air and showers of cinders made it impossible to stand on the bridge any more. Dr. Machii ran to the far side of the river and along a still unkindled street. Dr. Fujii went down into the water under the bridge, where a score of people had already taken refuge, among them his servants, who had extricated themselves from the wreckage. From there, Dr. Fujii saw a nurse hanging in the timbers of his hospital by her legs, and then another painfully pinned across the breast. He enlisted the help of some of the others under the bridge and freed both of them. He thought he heard the voice of his niece for a moment, but he could not find her; he never saw her again. Four of his nurses and the two patients in the hospital died, too. Dr. Fujii went back into the water of the river and waited for the fire to subside.
The lot of Drs. Fujii, Kanda, and Machii right after the explosion and, as these three were typical, that of the majority of the physicians and surgeons of Hiroshima with their offices and hospitals destroyed, their equipment scattered, their own bodies incapacitated in varying degrees, explained why so many citizens who were hurt went untended and why so many who might have lived died. Of a hundred and fifty doctors in the city, sixty-five were already dead and most of the rest were wounded. Of 1,789 nurses, 1,654 were dead or too badly hurt to work. In the biggest hospital, that of the Red Cross, only six doctors out of thirty were able to function, and only ten nurses out of more than two hundred. The sole uninjured doctor on the Red Cross Hospital staff was Dr. Sasaki. After the explosion, he hurried to a storeroom to fetch bandages. This room, like everything he had seen as he ran through the hospital, was chaotic bottles of medicines thrown off shelves and broken, salves spattered on the walls, instruments strewn everywhere. He grabbed up some bandages and an unbroken bottle of mercuro- chrome, hurried back to the chief surgeon, and bandaged his cuts. Then he went out into the corridor and began patching up the wounded patients and the doctors and nurses there. He blundered so without his glasses that he took a pair off the face of a wounded nurse, and although they only approximately compensated for the errors of his vision, they were better than "nothing. (He was to depend on them for more than a month.)
Dr. Sasaki worked without method, taking those who were nearest him first, and he noticed soon that the corridor seemed to be getting more and more crowded. Mixed in with the abrasions and lacerations which most people in the hospital had suffered, he began to find dreadful burns. He realized then that casualties were pouring in from outdoors. There were so many that he began to pass up the tightly wounded; he decided that all he could hope to do was to stop people from bleeding to death. Before long, patients lay and crouched on the floors of the wards and the laboratories and all the other rooms, and in the corridors, and on the stairs, and in the front hall, and under the porte-cochere, and on the stone front steps, and in the driveway and courtyard, and for blocks each way in the streets outside. Wounded people supported maimed people; disfigured families leaned together. Many people were vomiting. A tremendous number of schoolgirls, some of those who had been taken from their classrooms to work outdoors, clearing fire lanes, crept into the hospital. In a city of two hundred and forty- five thousand, nearly a hundred thousand people had been killed or doomed at one blow; a hundred thousand more were hurt. At least ten thousand of the wounded made their way to the best hospital in town, which was altogether unequal to such a trampling, since it had only six hundred beds, and they had all been occupied. The people in the suffocating crowd inside the hospital wept and cried, for Dr. Sasaki to hear, "Sensei! Doctor!" and the less seriously wounded came and pulled at his sleeve and begged him to come to the aid of the worse-wounded. Tugged here and there in his stockinged feet, bewildered by the numbers, staggered by so much raw flesh, Dr. Sasaki lost all sense of profession and stopped working as a skillful surgeon and a sympathetic man ; he became an automaton, mechanically wiping, daubing, winding, wiping, daubing, winding.
Some of the wounded in Hiroshima were unable to enjoy the questionable luxury of hospitalization. In what had been the personnel office of the East Asia Tin Works, Miss Sasaki lay doubled over, unconscious, under the tremendous pile of books and plaster and wood and corrugated iron. She was wholly unconscious (she later estimated) for about three hours. Her first sensation was of dreadful pain in her left leg. It was so black under the books and debris that the borderline between awareness and unconsciousness was fine; she apparently crossed it several times, for the pain seemed to come and go. At the moments when it was sharpest, she felt that her leg had been cut off somewhere below the knee. Later, she heard someone walking on top of the wreckage above her, and anguished voices spoke up, evidently from within the mess around her: "Please help ! Get us out!"
Father Kleinsorge stemmed Father Schiffer's spurting cut as well as he could with some bandage that Dr. Fujii had given the priests a few days before. When he finished, he ran into the mission house again and found the jacket of his military uniform and an old pair of grey trousers. He put them on and went outside. A woman from next door ran up to him and shouted that her husband was buried under her house and the house was on fire; Father Kleinsorge must come and save him. Father Kleinsorge, already growing apathetic and dazed in the presence of the cumulative distress, said, "We haven't much time." Houses all around were burning, and the wind was now blowing hard. "Do you know exactly which part of the house he is under ?" he asked.
"Yes, yes," she said. "Come quickly."
They went around to the house, the remains of which blazed violently, but when they got there, it turned out that the woman had no idea where her husband was. Father Kleinsorge shouted several times, "Is anyone there?" There was no answer. Father Kleinsorge said to the woman, "We must get away or we will all die." He went back to the Catholic compound and told the Father Superior that the fire was coming closer on the wind, which had swung around and was now from the north; it was time for everybody to go.
Just then, the kindergarten teacher pointed out to the priests Mr. Fukai, the secretary of the diocese, who was standing in his window on the second floor of the mission house, facing in the direction of the explosion, weeping. Father Cieslik, because he thought the stairs unusable, ran around to the back of the mission house to look for a ladder. There he heard people crying for help under a nearby fallen roof. He called to passers-by running away in the street to help him lift it, but nobody paid any attention, and he had to leave the buried ones to die. Father Kleinsorge ran inside the mission house and scrambled up the stairs, which were awry and piled with plaster and lathing, and called to Mr. Fukai from the doorway of his room. Mr. Fukai, a very short man of about fifty, turned around slowly, with a queer look, and said, "Leave me here.*'
Father Kleinsorge went into the room and took Mr. Fukai by the collar of his coat and said, "Come with me or you'll die."
Mr. Fukai said, "Leave me here to die."
Father Kleinsorge began to shove and haul Mr. Fukai out of the room. Then the theological student came up and grabbed Mr. Fukai's feet, and Father Kleinsorge took his shoulders, and together they carried him downstairs and outdoors. "I can't walk!" Mr. Fukai cried. "Leave me here!" Father Kleinsorge got his paper suitcase with the money in it and took Mr. Fukai up pick-a-back, and the party started for the East Parade Ground, their district's " safe area." As they went out of the gate, Mr. Fukai, quite childlike now, beat on Father Kleinsorge's shoulders and said, " I won't leave. I won't leave." Irrelevantly, Father Kleinsorge turned to Father LaSalle and said, "We have lost all our possessions but not our sense of humor."
The street was cluttered with parts of houses that had slid into it, and with fallen telephone poles and wires. From every second or third house came the voices of people buried and abandoned, who invariably screamed, with formal politeness, "Tasukete kure! Help, if you please!" The priests recognized several ruins from which these cries came as the homes of friends, but because of the fire it was too late to help. All the way, Mr. Fukai whimpered, "Let me stay." The party turned right when they came to a block of fallen houses that was one flame. At Sakai Bridge, which would take them across to the East Parade Ground, they saw that the whole community on the opposite side of the river was a sheet of fire; they dared not cross and decided to take refuge in Asano Park, off to their left. Father Kleinsorge, who had been weakened for a couple of days by his bad case of diarrhea, began to stagger under his protesting burden, and as he tried to climb up over the wreckage of several houses that blocked their way to the park, he stumbled, dropped Mr. Fukai, and plunged down, head over heels, to the edge of the river. When he picked himself up, he saw Mr. Fukai running away. Father Kleinsorge shouted to a dozen soldiers, who were standing by the bridge, to stop him. As Father Kleinsorge started back to get Mr. Fukai, Father LaSalle called out, "Hurry! Don't waste time!" So Father Kleinsorge just requested the soldiers to take care of Mr. Fukai. They said they would, but the little, broken man got away from them, and the last the priests could see of him, he was running back toward the fire.
Mr. Tanimoto, fearful for his family and church, at first ran toward them by the shortest route, along Koi Highway. He was the only person making his way into the city; he met hundreds and hundreds who were fleeing, and every one of them seemed to be hurt in some way. The eyebrows of some were burned off and skin hung from their faces and hands. Others, because of pain, held their arms up as if carrying something in both hands. Some were vomiting as they walked. Many were naked or in shreds of clothing. On some undressed bodies, the burns had made patterns of undershirt straps and suspenders and, on the skin of some women (since white repelled the heat from the bomb and dark clothes absorbed it and conducted it to the skin), the shapes of flowers they had had on their kimonos. Many, although injured themselves, supported relatives who were worse off. Almost all had their heads bowed, looked straight ahead, were silent, and showed no expression whatever.
After crossing Koi Bridge and Kannon Bridge, having run the whole way, Mr. Tanimoto saw, as he approached the center, that all the houses had been crushed and many were afire. Here the trees were bare and their trunks were charred. He tried at several points to penetrate the ruins, but the flames always stopped him. Under many houses, people screamed for help, but no one helped; in general, survivors that day assisted only their relatives or immediate neighbors, for they could not comprehend or tolerate a wider circle of misery. The wounded limped past the screams, and Mr. Tanimoto ran past them. As a Christian he was filled with compassion for those who were trapped, and as a Japanese he was overwhelmed by the shame of being unhurt, and he prayed as he ran, "God help them and take them out of the fire." He thought he would skirt the fire, to the left. He ran back to Kannon Bridge and followed for a distance one of the rivers. He tried several cross streets, but all were blocked, so he turned far left and ran out to Yokogawa, a station on a railroad line that detoured the city in a wide semi-circle, and he followed the rails until he came to a burning train. So impressed was he by this time by the extent of the damage that he ran north two miles to Gion, a suburb in the foothills. All the way, he overtook dreadfully burned and lacerated people, and in his guilt he turned to right and left as he hurried and said to some of them, "Excuse me for having no burden like yours." Near Gion, he began to meet country people going toward the city to help, and when they saw him, several exclaimed, "Look ! There is one who is not wounded." At Gion, he bore toward the right bank of the main river, the Ota, and ran down it until he reached fire again. There was no fire on the other side of the river, so he threw off his shirt and shoes and plunged into it. In midstream, where the current was fairly strong, exhaustion and fear finally caught up with him he had run nearly seven miles and he became limp and drifted in the water. He prayed, "Please, God, help me to cross. It would be nonsense for me to be drowned when I am the only uninjured one.*' He managed a few more strokes and fetched up on a spit downstream.
Mr. Tanimoto climbed up the bank and ran along it until, near a large Shinto shrine, he came to more fire, and as he turned left to get around it, he met, by incredible luck, his wife. She was carrying their infant son. Mr. Tanimoto was now so emotionally worn out that nothing could surprise him. He did not embrace his wife; he simply said, "Oh, you are safe." She told him that she had got home from her night in Ushida just in time for the explosion; she had been buried under the parsonage with the baby in her arms. She told how the wreckage had pressed down on her, how the baby had cried. She saw a chink of light, and by reaching up with a hand, she worked the hole bigger, bit by bit. After about half-an-hour, she heard the crackling noise of wood burning. At last the opening was big enough for her to push the baby out, and afterward she crawled out herself. She said she was now going out to Ushida again. Mr. Tanimoto said he wanted to see his church and take care of the people of his Neighborhood Association. They parted as casually as bewildered as they had met.
Mr. Tanimoto's way around the fire took him across the East Parade Ground, which, being an evacuation area, was now the scene of a gruesome review: rank on rank of the burned and bleeding. Those who were burned moaned, "Mizu, mizu! Water, water!" Mr. Tanimoto found a basin in a near-by street and located a water tap that still worked in the crushed shell of a house, and he began carrying water to the suffering strangers. When he had given drink to about thirty of them, he realized he was taking too much time. "Excuse me," he said loudly to those nearby who were reaching out their hands to him and crying their thirst. "I have many people to take care of." Then he ran away. He went to the river again, the basin in his hand, and jumped down on to a sand spit. There he saw hundreds of people so badly wounded that they could not get up to go farther from the burning city. When they saw a man erect and unhurt, the chant began again: "Mizu, mizu, mizu." Mr. Tanimoto could not resist them ; he carried them water from the river which was a mistake, since it was tidal and brackish. Two or three small boats were ferrying hurt people across the river from Asano Park, and when one touched the spit, Mr. Tanimoto again made his loud, apologetic speech and jumped into the boat. It took him across to the park. There, in the underbrush, he found some of his charges of the Neighborhood Association, who had come there by his previous instructions, and saw many acquaintances, among them Father Kleinsorge and the other Catholics. But he missed Fukai, who had been a close friend. "Where is Fukai?" he asked.
"He didn't want to come with us," Father Kleinsorge said. "He ran back."
When Miss Sasaki heard the voices of the people caught along with her in the dilapidation at the tin factory, she began speaking to them. Her nearest neighbor, she discovered, was a high-school girl who had been drafted for factory work, and who said her back was broken. Miss Sasaki replied, "I am lying here and I can't move. My left leg is cut off." Sometime later, she again heard somebody walk overhead and then move off to one side, and whoever it was began burrowing. The digger released several people, and when he had uncovered the high-school girl, she found that her back was not broken, after all, and she crawled out. Miss Sasaki spoke to the rescuer, and he worked toward her. He pulled away a great number of books, until he had made a tunnel to her. She could see his perspiring face as he said, "Come out, Miss." She tried. "I can't move," she said. The man excavated some more and told her to try with all her strength to get out. But books were heavy on her hips, and the man finally saw that a bookcase was leaning on the books and that a heavy beam pressed down on the bookcase. *" Wait," he said. "I'll get a crowbar." The man was gone a long time, and when he came back, he was ill-tempered, as if her plight were all her fault. "We have no men to help you," he shouted in through the tunnel. "You'll have to get out by yourself."
"That's impossible," she said. "My left leg . . ." The man went away.
Much later, several men came and dragged Miss Sasaki out. Her left leg was not severed, but it was badly broken and cut and it hung askew below the knee. They took her out into a courtyard. It was raining. She sat on the ground in the rain. When the downpour increased, someone directed all the wounded people to take cover in the factory's air-raid shelters. "Come along," a torn-up woman said to her. "You can hop." But Miss Sasaki could not move, and she just waited in the rain. Then a man propped up a large sheet of corrugated iron as a kind of lean-to, and took her in his arms and carried her to it. She was grateful until he brought two horribly wounded people, a woman with a whole breast sheared off and a man whose face was all raw from a burn, to share the simple shed with her. No one came back. The rain cleared and the cloudy afternoon was hot; before nightfall the three grotesques under the slanting piece of twisted iron began to smell quite bad.
The former head of the Nobori-cho Neighborhood Association, to which the Catholic priests belonged, was an energetic man named Yoshida. He had boasted, when he was in charge of the district air-raid defenses, that fire might eat away all of Hiroshima but it would never come to Nobori-cho. The bomb blew down his house, and a joist pinned him by the legs, in full view of the Jesuit mission house across the way and of the people hurrying along the street. In their confusion as they hurried past, Mrs. Nakamura, with her children, and Father Kleinsorge, with Mr. Fukai on his back, hardly saw him; he was just part of the general blur of misery through which they moved. His cries for help brought no response from them; there were so many people shouting for help that they could not hear him separately. They and all the others went along. Nobori-cho became absolutely deserted, and the fire swept through it. Mr. Yoshida saw the wooden mission house the only erect building in the area go up in a lick of flame, and the heat was terrific on his face. Then flames came along his side of the street and entered his house. In a paroxysm of terrified strength, he freed himself and ran down the alleys of Nobori-cho, hemmed in by the fire he had said would never come. He began at once to behave like an old man; two months later his hair was white.
As Dr. Fujii stood in the river up to his neck to avoid the heat of the fire, the wind grew stronger and stronger, and soon, even though the expanse of water was small, the waves grew so high that the people under the bridge could no longer keep their footing. Dr. Fujii went close to the shore, crouched down, and embraced a large stone with his usable arm. Later it became possible to wade along the very edge of the river, and Dr. Fujii and his two surviving nurses moved about two hundred yards upstream, to a sand-spit near Asano Park. Many wounded were lying on the sand. Dr. Machii was there with his family; his daughter, who had been outdoors when the bomb burst, was badly burned on her hands and legs but fortunately not on her face. Although Dr. Fujii's shoulder was by now terribly painful, he examined the girl's burns curiously. Then he lay down. In spite of the misery all around, he was ashamed of his appearance, and he remarked to Dr. Machii that he looked like a beggar, dressed as he was in nothing but torn and bloody underwear. Late in the afternoon, when the fire began to subside, he decided to go to his parental house, in the suburb of Nagatsuka. He asked Dr. Machii to join him, but the Doctor answered that he and his family were going to spend the night on the spit, because of his daughter's injuries. Dr. Fujii, together with his nurses, walked first to Ushida, where, in the partially damaged house of some relatives, he found first- aid materials he had stored there. The two nurses bandaged him and he them. They went on. Now not many people walked in the streets, but a great number sat and lay on the pavement, vomited, waited for death, and died. The number of corpses on the way to Nagatsuka was more and more puzzling. The Doctor wondered: Could a Molotov flower basket have done all this?
Dr. Fujii reached his family's house in the evening. It was five miles from the center of town, but its roof had fallen in and the windows were all broken.
All day, people poured into Asano Park. This private estate was far enough away from the explosion so that its bamboos, pines, laurel, and maples were still alive, and the green place invited refugees - partly because they believed that if the Americans came back, they would bomb only buildings; partly because the foliage seemed a center of coolness and life, and the estate's exquisitely precise rock gardens, with their quiet pools and arching bridges, were very Japanese, normal, secure; and also partly (according to some who were there) because of an irresistible, atavistic urge to hide under leaves. Mrs. Nakamura and her children were among the first to arrive, and they settled in the bamboo grove near the river. They all felt terribly thirsty, and they drank from the river. At once they were nauseated and began vomiting, and they retched the whole day. Others were also nauseated; they all thought (probably because of the strong odor of ionization, an "electric smell " given off by the bomb's fission) that they were sick from a gas the Americans had dropped. When Father Kleinsorge and the other priests came into the park, nodding to their friends as they passed, the Nakamuras were all sick and prostrate. A woman named Iwasaki, who lived in the neighborhood of the mission and who was sitting near the Nakamuras, got up and asked the priests if she should stay where she was or go with them. Father Kleinsorge said, "I hardly know where the safest place is." She stayed there, and later in the day, though she had no visible wounds or burns, she died. The priests went farther along the river and settled down in some underbrush. Father LaSalle lay down and went right to sleep. The theological student, who was wearing slippers, had carried with him a bundle of clothes, in which he had packed two pairs of leather shoes. When he sat down with the others, he found that the bundle had broken open and a couple of shoes had fallen out and now he had only two lefts. He retraced his steps and found one right. When he rejoined the priests, he said, "It's funny, but things don't matter anymore. Yesterday, my shoes were my most important possessions. Today, I don't care. One pair is enough."
Father Cieslik said, "I know. I started to bring my books along, and then I thought, ‘This is no time for books.' "
When Mr. Tanimoto, with his basin still in his hand, reached the park, it was very crowded, and to distinguish the living from the dead was not easy, for most of the people lay still, with their eyes open. To Father Kleinsorge, an Occidental, the silence in the grove by the river, where hundreds of gruesomely wounded suffered together, was one of the most dreadful and awesome phenomena of his whole experience. The hurt ones were quiet; no one wept, much less screamed in pain; no one complained; none of the many who died did so noisily; not even the children cried; very few people even spoke. And when Father Kleinsorge gave water to some whose faces had been almost blotted out by flash burns, they took their share and then raised themselves a little and bowed to him, in thanks.
Mr. Tanimoto greeted the priests and then looked around for other friends. He saw Mrs. Matsumoto, wife of the director of the Methodist School, and asked her if she was thirsty. She was, so he went to one of the pools in the Asanos' rock gardens and got water for her in his basin. Then he decided to try to get back to his church. He went into Nobori-cho by the way the priests had taken as they escaped, but he did not get far ; the fire along the streets was so fierce that he had to turn back. He walked to the river bank and began to look for a boat in which he might carry some of the most severely injured across the river from Asano Park, and away from the spreading fire. Soon he found a good-sized pleasure punt drawn up on the bank, but in and around it was an awful tableau five dead men, nearly naked, badly burned, who must have expired more or less all at once, for they were in attitudes which suggested that they had been working together to push the boat down into the river. Mr. Tanimoto lifted them away from the boat, and as he did so, he experienced such horror at disturbing the dead preventing them, he momentarily felt, from launching their craft and going on their ghostly way that he said out loud, "Please forgive me for taking this boat. I must use it for others, who are alive." The punt was heavy, but he managed to slide it into the water. There were no oars, and all he could find for propulsion was a thick bamboo pole. He worked the boat upstream to the most crowded part of the park and began to ferry the wounded. He could pack ten or twelve into the boat for each crossing, but as the river was too deep in the center to pole his way across, he had to paddle with the bamboo, and consequently each trip took a very long time. He worked several hours that way.
Early in the afternoon, the fire swept into the woods of Asano Park. The first Mr. Tanimoto knew of it was when, returning in his boat, he saw that a great number of people had moved toward the riverside. On touching the bank, he went up to investigate, and when he saw the fire, he shouted, "All the young men who are not badly hurt come with me!" Father Kleinsorge moved Father Schiffer and Father LaSalle close to the edge of the river and asked people there to get them across if the fire came too near, and then joined Tanimoto's volunteers. Mr. Tanimoto sent some to look for buckets and basins and told others to beat the burning underbrush with their clothes; when utensils were at hand, he formed a bucket chain from one of the pools in the rock gardens. The team fought the fire for more than two hours, and gradually defeated the flames. As Mr. Tanimoto's men worked, the frightened people in the park pressed closer and closer to the river, and finally the mob began to force some of the unfortunates who were on the very bank into the water. Among those driven into the river and drowned were Mrs. Matsumoto, of the Methodist School, and her daughter.
When Father Kleinsorge got back after fighting the fire, he found Father Schiffer still bleeding and terribly pale. Some Japanese stood around and stared at him, and Father Schiffer whispered, with a weak smile, "It is as if I were already dead." "Not yet," Father Kleinsorge said. He had brought Dr. Fujii's first-aid kit with him, and he had noticed Dr. Kanda in the crowd, so he sought him out and asked him if he would dress Father Schiffer's bad cuts. Dr. Kanda had seen his wife and daughter dead in the ruins of his hospital ; he sat now with his head in his hands. "I can't do anything," he said. Father Kleinsorge bound more bandage around Father Schiffer's head, moved him to a steep place, and settled him so that his head was high, and soon the bleeding diminished.
The roar of approaching planes was heard about this time. Someone in the crowd near the Nakamura family shouted, *' It's some Grummans coming to strafe us !" A baker named Nakashima stood up and commanded, "Everyone who is wearing anything white, take it off." Mrs. Nakamura took the blouses off her children, and opened her umbrella and made them get under it. A great number of people, even badly burned ones, crawled into bushes and stayed there until the hum, evidently of a reconnaissance or weather run, died away.
It began to rain. Mrs. Nakamura kept her children under the umbrella. The drops grew abnormally large and someone shouted, "The Americans are dropping gasoline. They're going to set fire to us!" (This alarm stemmed from one of the theories being passed through the park as to why so much of Hiroshima had burned: it was that a single plane had sprayed gasoline on the city and then somehow set fire to it in one flashing moment.) But the drops were palpably water, and as they fell, the wind grew stronger and stronger, and suddenly probably because of the tremendous convection set up by the blazing city a whirlwind ripped through the park. Huge trees crashed down; small ones were uprooted and flew into the air. Higher, a wild array of flat things revolved in the twisting funnel pieces of iron roofing, papers, doors, strips of matting. Father Kleinsorge put a piece of cloth over Father Schiffer's eyes, so that the feeble man would not think he was going crazy. The gale blew Mrs. Murata, the mission housekeeper, who was sitting close by the river, down the embankment at a shallow, rocky place, and she came out with her bare feet bloody. The vortex moved out on to the river, where it sucked up a waterspout and eventually spent itself.
After the storm, Mr. Tanimoto began ferrying people again, and Father Kleinsorge asked the theological student to go across and make his way out to the Jesuit Novitiate at Nagatsuka, about three miles from the center of town, and to request the priests there to come with help for Fathers Schiffer and LaSalle. The student got into Mr. Tanimoto's boat and went off with him. Father Kleinsorge asked Mrs. Nakamura if she would like to go out to Nagatsuka with the priests when they came. She said she had some luggage and her children were sick they were still vomiting from time to time, and so, for that matter, was she and therefore she feared she could not. He said he thought the fathers from the Novitiate could come back the next day with a pushcart to get her.
Late in the afternoon, when he went ashore for a while, Mr. Tanimoto, upon whose energy and initiative many had come to depend, heard people begging for food. He consulted Father Kleinsorge, and they decided to go back into town to get some rice from Mr. Tanimoto's Neighborhood Association shelter and from a mission shelter. Father Cieslik and two or three others went with them. At first, when they got among the rows of prostrate houses, they did not know where they were; the change was too sudden, from a busy city of two hundred and forty-five thousand that morning to a mere pattern of residue in the afternoon. The asphalt of the streets was still so soft and hot from the fires that walking was uncomfortable. They encountered only one person, a woman, who said to them as they passed, "My husband is in those ashes." At the mission, where Mr. Tanimoto left the party, Father Kleinsorge was dismayed to see the building razed. In the garden on the way to the shelter, he noticed a pumpkin roasted on the vine. He and Father Cieslik tasted it and it was good. They were surprised at their hunger, and they ate quite a bit. They got out several bags of rice and gathered up several other cooked pumpkins and dug up some potatoes that were nicely baked under the ground, and started back. Mr. Tanimoto rejoined them on the way. One of the people with him had some cooking utensils. In the park, Mr. Tanimoto organized the lightly wounded women of his neighborhood to cook. Father Kleinsorge offered the Nakamura family some pumpkin, and they tried it, but they could not keep it in their stomachs. Altogether, the rice was enough to feed nearly a hundred people.
Just before dark, Mr. Tanimoto came across a twenty-year-old girl, Mrs. Kamai, the Tanimotos' next-door neighbor. She was crouching on the ground with the body of her infant daughter in her arms. The baby had evidently been dead all day. Mrs. Kamai jumped up when she saw Mr. Tanimoto and said, "Would you please try to locate my husband? " Mr. Tanimoto knew that her husband had been inducted into the Army just the day before; he and Mrs. Tanimoto had entertained Mrs. Kamai in the afternoon, to make her forget. Kamai had reported to the Chugoku Regional Army Headquarters near the ancient castle in the middle of town where some four thousand troops were stationed. Judging by the many maimed soldiers Mr. Tanimoto had seen during the day, he surmised that the barracks had been badly damaged by whatever it was that had hit Hiroshima. He knew he hadn't a chance of finding Mrs. Kamai's husband, even if he searched, but he wanted to humor her. "I'll try," he said. "You've got to find him," she said. "He loved our baby so much. I want him to see her once more."
If the Atomic Bomb Had Not Been Used
BY KARL T. COMPTON, DECEMBER 1946 ISSUE OF
THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY MAGAZINE
About a week after V-J Day, I was one of a small group of scientists and engineers interrogating an intelligent, well-informed Japanese Army officer in Yokohama. We asked him what, in his opinion, would have been the next major move if the war had continued. He replied: "You would probably have tried to invade our homeland with a landing operation on Kyushu about November 1. I think the attack would have been made on such and such beaches."
"Could you have repelled this landing?" we asked, and he answered: "It would have been a very desperate fight, but I do not think we could have stopped you."
"What would have happened then?" we asked.
He replied: "We would have kept on fighting until all Japanese were killed, but we would not have been defeated," by which he meant that they would not have been disgraced by surrender.
It is easy now, after the event, to look back and say that Japan was already a beaten nation, and to ask what therefore was the justification for the use of the atomic bomb to kill so many thousands of helpless Japanese in this inhuman way; furthermore, should we not better have kept it to ourselves as a secret weapon for future use, if necessary? This argument has been advanced often, but it seems to me utterly fallacious.
I had, perhaps, an unusual opportunity to know the pertinent facts from several angles, yet I was without responsibility for any of the decisions. I can therefore speak without doing so defensively. While my role in the atomic bomb development was a very minor one, I was a member of the group called together by Secretary of War Stimson to assist him in plans for its test, use, and subsequent handling. Then, shortly before Hiroshima, I became attached to General MacArthur in Manila, and lived for two months with his staff. In this way I learned something of the invasion plans and of the sincere conviction of these best-informed officers that a desperate and costly struggle was still ahead. Finally, I spent the first month after V-J Day in Japan, where I could ascertain at first hand both the physical and the psychological state of that country. Some of the Japanese whom I consulted were my scientific and personal friends of long standing.
From this background I believe, with complete conviction, that the use of the atomic bomb saved hundreds of thousands—perhaps several millions—of lives, both American and Japanese; that without its use the war would have continued for many months; that no one of good conscience knowing, as Secretary Stimson and the Chiefs of Staff did, what was probably ahead and what the atomic bomb might accomplish could have made any different decision. Let some of the facts speak for themselves.
Was the use of the atomic bomb inhuman? All war is inhuman. Here are some comparisons of the atomic bombing with conventional bombing. At Hiroshima the atomic bomb killed about 80,000 people, pulverized about five square miles, and wrecked an additional ten square miles of the city, with decreasing damage out to seven or eight miles from the center. At Nagasaki the fatal casualties were 45,000 and the area wrecked was considerably smaller than at Hiroshima because of the configuration of the city.
Compare this with the results of two B-29 incendiary raids over Tokyo. One of these raids killed about 125,000 people, the other nearly 100,000.
Of the 210 square miles of greater Tokyo, 85 square miles of the densest part was destroyed as completely, for all practical purposes, as were the centers of Hiroshima and Nagasaki; about half the buildings were destroyed in the remaining 125 square miles; the number of people driven homeless out of Tokyo was considerably larger than the population of greater Chicago. These figures are based on information given us in Tokyo and on a detailed study of the air reconnaissance maps. They may be somewhat in error but are certainly of the right order of magnitude.
Was Japan already beaten before the atomic bomb? The answer is certainly "yes" in the sense that the fortunes of war had turned against her. The answer is "no" in the sense that she was still fighting desperately and there was every reason to believe that she would continue to do so; and this is the only answer that has any practical significance.
General MacArthur's staff anticipated about 50,000 American casualties and several times that number of Japanese casualties in the November 1 operation to establish the initial beachheads on Kyushu. After that they expected a far more costly struggle before the Japanese homeland was subdued. There was every reason to think that the Japanese would defend their homeland with even greater fanaticism than when they fought to the death on Iwo Jima and Okinawa. No American soldier who survived the bloody struggles on these islands has much sympathy with the view that battle with the Japanese was over as soon as it was clear that their ultimate situation was hopeless. No, there was every reason to expect a terrible struggle long after the point at which some people can now look back and say, "Japan was already beaten."
A month after our occupation I heard General MacArthur say that even then, if the Japanese government lost control over its people and the millions of former Japanese soldiers took to guerrilla warfare in the mountains, it could take a million American troops ten years to master the situation.
That this was not an impossibility is shown by the following fact, which I have not seen reported. We recall the long period of nearly three weeks between the Japanese offer to surrender and the actual surrender on September 2. This was needed in order to arrange details: of the surrender and occupation and to permit the Japanese government to prepare its people to accept the capitulation. It is not generally realized that there was threat of a revolt against the government, led by an Army group supported by the peasants, to seize control and continue the war. For several days it was touch and go as to whether the people would follow their government in surrender.
The bulk of the Japanese people did not consider themselves beaten; in fact they believed they were winning in spite of the terrible punishment they had taken. They watched the paper balloons take off and float eastward in the wind, confident that these were carrying a terrible retribution to the United States in revenge for our air raids.
We gained a vivid insight into the state of knowledge and morale of the ordinary Japanese soldier from a young private who had served through the war in the Japanese Army. He had lived since babyhood in America, and had graduated in 1940 from Massachusetts Institute of Technology. This lad, thoroughly American in outlook, had gone with his family to visit relatives shortly after his graduation. They were caught in the mobilization and he was drafted into the Army.
This young Japanese told us that all his fellow soldiers believed that Japan was winning the war. To them the losses of Iwo Jima and Okinawa were parts of a grand strategy to lure the American forces closer and closer to the homeland, until they could be pounced upon and utterly annihilated. He himself had come to have some doubts as a result of various inconsistencies in official reports. Also he had seen the Ford assembly line in operation and knew that Japan could not match America in war production. But none of the soldiers had any inkling of the true situation until one night, at ten-thirty, his regiment was called to hear the reading of the surrender proclamation.
Did the atomic bomb bring about the end of the war? That it would do so was the calculated gamble and hope of Mr. Stimson, General Marshall, and their associates. The facts are these. On July 26, 1945, the Potsdam Ultimatum called on Japan to surrender unconditionally. On July 29 Premier Suzuki issued a statement, purportedly at a cabinet press conference, scorning as unworthy of official notice the surrender ultimatum, and emphasizing the increasing rate of Japanese aircraft production. Eight days later, on August 6, the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima; the second was dropped on August 9 on Nagasaki; on the following day, August 10, Japan declared its intention to surrender, and on August 14 accepted the Potsdam terms.
On the basis of these facts, I cannot believe that, without the atomic bomb, the surrender would have come without a great deal more of costly struggle and bloodshed.
Exactly what role the atomic bomb played will always allow some scope for conjecture. A survey has shown that it did not have much immediate effect on the common people far from the two bombed cities; they knew little or nothing of it. The even more disastrous conventional bombing of Tokyo and other cities had not brought the people into the mood to surrender.
The evidence points to a combination of factors. (1) Some of the more informed and intelligent elements in Japanese official circles realized that they were fighting a losing battle and that complete destruction lay ahead if the war continued. These elements, however, were not powerful enough to sway the situation against the dominating Army organization, backed by the profiteering industrialists, the peasants, and the ignorant masses. (2) The atomic bomb introduced a dramatic new element into the situation, which strengthened the hands of those who sought peace and provided a face-saving argument for those who had hitherto advocated continued war. (3) When the second atomic bomb was dropped, it became clear that this was not an isolated weapon, but that there were others to follow. With dread prospect of a deluge of these terrible bombs and no possibility of preventing them, the argument for surrender was made convincing. This I believe to be the true picture of the effect of the atomic bomb in bringing the war to a sudden end, with Japan's unconditional surrender.
If the atomic bomb had not been used, evidence like that I have cited points to the practical certainty that there would have been many more months of death and destruction on an enormous scale. Also the early timing of its use was fortunate for a reason which could not have been anticipated. If the invasion plans had proceeded as scheduled, October, 1945, would have seen Okinawa covered with airplanes and its harbors crowded with landing craft poised for the attack. The typhoon which struck Okinawa in that month would have wrecked the invasion plans with a military disaster comparable to Pearl Harbor.
These are some of the facts which lead those who know them, and especially those who had to base decisions on them, to feel that there is much delusion and wishful thinking among those after-the-event strategists who now deplore the use of the atomic bomb on the ground that its use was inhuman or that it was unnecessary because Japan was already beaten. And it was not one atomic bomb, or two, which brought surrender; it was the experience of what an atomic bomb will actually do to a community, plus the dread of many more, that was effective.
If 500 bombers could wreak such destruction on Tokyo, what will 500 bombers, each carrying an atomic bomb, do to the City of Tomorrow? It is this deadly prospect which now lends such force to the two basic policies of our nation on this subject: (1) We must strive generously and with all our ability to promote the United Nations' effort to assure future peace between nations; but we must not lightly surrender the atomic bomb as a means for our own defense. (2) We should surrender or share it only when there is adopted an international plan to enforce peace in which we can have great confidence.
SOURCE: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1946/12/if-the-atomic-bomb-had-not- been-used/376238/
“Original Child Bomb” by Thomas Merton (1961)
Points for meditation to be scratched on the walls of a cave
1: In the year 1945 an Original Child was born. The name Original Child was given to it by the Japanese people, who recognized that it was the first of its kind. 2: On April 12th, 1945, Mr. Harry Truman became the President of the United States, which was then fighting the Second World War. Mr. Truman was a vice president who became president by accident when his predecessor died of a cerebral hemorrhage. He did not know as much about the war as the president before him did. He knew a lot less about the war than many people did.
About one hour after Mr. Truman became president, his aides told him about a new bomb which was being developed by atomic scientists. They called it the “atomic bomb”. They said scientists had been working on it for six years and that it had so far cost two billion dollars. They added that its power was equal to that of twenty thousand tons of TNT. A single bomb could destroy a city. One of those present added, in a reverent tone, that the new explosive might eventually destroy the whole world.
But Admiral Leahy told the president the bomb would never work.
3: President Truman formed a committee of men to tell him if this bomb would work, and if so, what he should do with it. Some members of this committee felt that the bomb would jeopardize the future of civilization. They were against its use. Others wanted it to be used in demonstrations on a forest of cryptomeria trees, but not against a civil or military target. Many atomic scientists warned that the use of atomic power in war would be difficult and even impossible to control. The danger would be very great. Finally, there were others who believed that if the bomb were used just once or twice, on one or two Japanese cities, there would be no more war. They believed the new bomb would product eternal peace.
4: In June 1945 the Japanese government was taking steps to negotiate for peace. On one hand the Japanese ambassador tried to interest the Russian government in acting as a go-between with the United States. On the other hand, an unofficial approach was made secretly through Mr. Allen Dulles in Switzerland. The Russians said they were not interested and that they would not negotiate. Nothing was done about the other proposal which was not official. The Japanese High Command was not in favor of asking for peace, but wanted to continue the war, even if the Japanese mainland were invaded. The generals believed that the war should continue until everybody was dead. The Japanese generals were professional soldiers.
5: In the same month of June, the President’s committee decided that the new bomb should be dropped on a Japanese city. This would be a demonstration of the bomb on a civil and military target. As “demonstration” it would be a kind of a “show”. “Civilians” all over the world love a good “show”. The “destructive” aspect of the bomb would be “military”.
6: The same committee also asked if America’s friendly ally, the Soviet Union, should be informed of the atomic bomb. Someone suggested that this information would make the Soviet Union even more friendly than it was already. But all finally agreed that the Soviet Union was now friendly enough.
7: There was discussion about which city should be selected as the first target. Some wanted it to be Kyoto, an ancient capital of Japan and a center of the Buddhist religion. Others said no, this would cause bitterness. As a result of a chance conversation, Mr. Stimson, the Secretary of War, had recently read up on the history and beauties of Kyoto. He insisted that this city should be left untouched. Some wanted Tokyo to be the first target, but others argued that Tokyo had already been practically destroyed by fire raids and could no longer be considered a “target.” So it was decided Hiroshima was the most opportune target, as it had not yet been bombed at all. Lucky Hiroshima! What others had experienced over a period of four years would happen to Hiroshima in a single day! Much time would be saved, and “time is money!”
8: When they bombed Hiroshima they would put the following out of business: The Ube Nitrogen Fertilizer Company; the Ube Soda Company; the Nippon Motor Oil Company; the Sumitoma Chemical Company; and most of the inhabitants.
9: At this time some atomic scientists protested again, warning that the use of the bomb in war would tend to make the United States unpopular. But the President’s committee was by now fully convinced that the bomb had to be used. Its use would arouse the attention of the Japanese military class and give them food for thought.
10: Admiral Leahy renewed his declaration that the bomb would not explode.
11: On the 4th of July, when the United States in displays of fireworks celebrates its independence from British rule, the British and Americans agreed together that the bomb ought to be used against Japan.
12: On July 7th the Emperor of Japan pleaded with the Soviet Government to act as mediator for peace between Japan and the Allies. Molotov said the question would be “studied.” In order to facilitate this “study” Soviet troops in Siberia prepared to attack the Japanese. The Allies had, in any case, been urging Russia to join the war against Japan. However, now that the atomic bomb was nearly ready, some thought it would be better if the Russians took a rest.
13: The time was coming for the new bomb to be tested, in the New Mexico desert. A name was chosen to designate this secret operation. It was called “Trinity”.
14: At 5:30 A.M. on July 16th, 1945 a plutonium bomb was successfully exploded in the desert at Almagordo, New Mexico. It was suspended from a hundred foot steel tower which evaporated. There was a fireball a mile wide. The great flash could be seen for a radius of 250 miles. A blind woman miles away said she perceived light. There was a cloud of smoke 40,000 feet high. It was shaped like a toadstool.
15: Many who saw the experiment expressed their satisfaction in religious terms. A semi- official report even quoted a religious book – The New Testament, “Lord, I believe, help thou my unbelief.” There was an atmosphere of devotion. It was a great act of faith. They believed the explosion was exceptionally powerful.
16: Admiral Leahy, still a “doubting Thomas,” said that the bomb would not explode when dropped from a plane over a city. Others may have had “faith,” but he had his own variety of “hope”. 17: On July 21st a full written report of the explosion reached President Truman at Potsdam. The report was documented by pictures. President Truman read the report and looked at the pictures before starting out for the conference. When he left his mood was jaunty and his step was light.
18: That afternoon Mr. Stimson called on Mr. Churchill, and laid before him a sheet of paper bearing a code message about the successful test. The message read “Babies satisfactorily born.” Mr. Churchill was quick to realize that there was more in this than met the eye. Mr. Stimson satisfied his legitimate curiosity.
19: On this same day sixty atomic scientists who knew of the test signed a petition that the bomb should not be used against Japan without a convincing warning and an opportunity to surrender.
At this time the U.S.S. Indianapolis, which had left San Francisco on the 18th, was sailing toward the island of Tinian, with some U 235 in a lead bucket. The fissionable material was about the size of a softball, but there was enough for one atomic bomb. Instructions were that if the ship sank, the Uranium was to be saved first, before any life. The mechanism of the bomb was on board the U.S.S. Indianapolis, but it was not yet assembled.
20: On July 26th the Potsdam declaration was issued. An ultimatum was given to Japan: “Surrender unconditionally or be destroyed.” Nothing was said about the new bomb. But pamphlets dropped all over Japan threatened “an enormous air bombardment” if the army would not surrender. On July 26th the U.S.S. Indianapolis arrived at Tinian and the bomb was delivered.
21: On July 28th, since the Japanese High Command wished to continue the war, the ultimatum was rejected. A censored version of the ultimatum appeared in the Japanese press with the comment that it was “an attempt to drive a wedge between the military and the Japanese people.” But the Emperor continued to hope that the Russians, after “studying” his proposal, would help to negotiate a peace. On July 30th Mr. Stimson revised a draft of the announcement that was to be made after the bomb was dropped on the Japanese target. The statement was much better than the original draft.
22: On August 1st the bomb was assembled in an air-conditioned hut on Tinian. Those who handled the bomb referred to it as “Little Boy”. Their care for the Original Child was devoted and tender.
23: On August 2nd President Truman was the guest of His Majesty King George VI on board the H.M.S. Renown in Plymouth Harbor. The atomic bomb was praised. Admiral Leahy, who was present, declared that the bomb would not work. His Majesty George VI offered a small wager to the contrary.
24: On August 2nd a special message from the Japanese Foreign Minister was sent to the Japanese Ambassador in Moscow. “It is requested that further efforts be exerted … Since the loss of one day may result in a thousand years of regret, it is requested that you immediately have a talk with Molotov.” But Molotov did not return from Potsdam until the day the bomb fell.
25: On August 4th the bombing crew on Tinian watched a movie of “Trinity” (the Almagordo Test). August 5th was a Sunday but there was little time for formal worship. They said a quick prayer that the war might end “very soon.” On that day, Colonel Tibbetts, who was in command of the B-29 that was to drop the bomb, felt that his bomber ought to have a name. He baptized it Enola Gay, after his mother in Iowa. Col. Tibbetts was a well-balanced man, and not sentimental. He did not have a nervous breakdown after the bombing, like some of the other members of his crew.
26: On Sunday afternoon “Little Boy” was brought out in procession and devoutly tucked away in the womb of Enola Gay. That evening few were able to sleep. They were as excited as little boys on Christmas Eve. 27: At 1:37 A.M. August 6th the weather scout plane took off. It was named the Straight Flush, in reference to the mechanical action of a water closet. There was a picture of one, to make this evident.
28: At the last minute before taking off Col. Tibbetts changed the secret radio call sign from “Visitor” to “Dimples.” The bombing mission would be a kind of flying smile.
29: At 2:45 A.M. Enola Gay got off the ground with difficulty. Over Iwo Jima she met her escort, two more B-29’s, one of which was called the Great Artiste. Together they proceeded to Japan.
30: At 6:40 they climbed to 31,000 feet, the bombing altitude. The sky was clear. It was a perfect morning.
31: At 3:09 they reached Hiroshima and started the bomb run. The city was full of sun. The fliers could see the green grass in the gardens. No fighters rose up to meet them. There was no flak. No one in the city bothered to take cover.
32: The bomb exploded within 100 feet of the aiming point. The fireball was 18,000 feet across. The temperature at the center of the fireball was 100,000,000 degrees. The people who were near the center became nothing. The whole city was blown to bits and the ruins all caught fire instantly everywhere, burning briskly. 70,000 people were killed right away or died within a few hours. Those who did not die right away suffered great pain. Few of them were soldiers.
33: The men in the plane perceived that the raid had been successful, but they thought of the people in the city and they were not perfectly happy. Some felt they had done wrong. But in any case they had obeyed orders. “It was war.”
34: Over the radio went the code message that the bomb had been successful: “Visible effects greater than Trinity … Proceeding to Papacy.” Papacy was the code name for Tinian.
35: It took a little while for the rest of Japan to find out what had happened to Hiroshima. Papers were forbidden to publish any news of the new bomb. A four line item said that Hiroshima had been hit by incendiary bombs and added: “It seems that some damage was caused to the city and its vicinity.”
36: Then the military governor of the Prefecture of Hiroshima issued a proclamation full of martial spirit. To all the people without hands, without feet, with their faces falling off, with their intestines hanging out, with their whole bodies full of radiation, he declared: “We must not rest a single day in our war effort … We must bear in mind that the annihilation of the stubborn enemy is our road to revenge.” He was a professional soldier.
37: On August 8th Molotov finally summoned the Japanese Ambassador. At last neutral Russia would give an answer to the Emperor’s inquiry. Molotov said coldly that the Soviet Union was declaring war on Japan.
38: On August 9th another bomb was dropped on Nagasaki, though Hiroshima was still burning. On August 11th the Emperor overruled his high command and accepted the peace terms dictated at Potsdam. Yet for three days discussion continued, until August 14th the surrender was made public and final.
39: Even then the Soviet troops thought they ought to fight in Manchuria “just a little longer.” They felt that even though they could not, at this time, be of help in Japan, it would be worthwhile if they displayed their good will in Manchuria, or even in Korea.
40: As to the Original Child that was now born, President Truman summed up the philosophy of the situation in a few words, “We found the bomb” he said “and we used it.”
41: Since that summer many other bombs have been “found.” What is going to happen? At the time of writing, after a season of brisk speculation, men seem to be fatigued by the whole question.
From The Collected Poems of Thomas Merton. New York: New Directions, 1977. (pp. 293- 302)
'One Hell of a Big Bang'
Today is Hiroshima Day, the anniversary of the first use of a bomb so powerful that it would come to threaten the existence of the human race. Only two such devices have ever been used, but now, a decade after the end of the cold war, the world faces new dangers of nuclear attack - from India, Pakistan, Iraq, al-Qaeda, and even the US. Launching a special investigation into nuclear weapons, Paul Tibbets, the man who piloted the Enola Gay on its mission to Japan, tells Studs Terkel why he has no regrets - and why he wouldn't hesitate to use it again
Tuesday 6 August 2002, 05:26 EDT
Last modified on Wednesday 18 June 2014 11.04 EDT
Studs Terkel: We're seated here, two old gaffers. Me and Paul Tibbets, 89 years old, brigadier-general retired, in his home town of Columbus, Ohio, where has lived for many years.
Paul Tibbets: Hey, you've got to correct that. I'm only 87. You said 89.
ST: I know. See, I'm 90. So I got you beat by three years. Now we've had a nice lunch, you and I and your companion. I noticed as we sat in that restaurant, people passed by. They didn't know who you were. But once upon a time, you flew a plane called the Enola Gay over the city of Hiroshima, in Japan, on a Sunday morning - August 6 1945 - and a bomb fell. It was the atomic bomb, the first ever. And that particular moment changed the whole world around. You were the pilot of that plane.
PT: Yes, I was the pilot.
ST: And the Enola Gay was named after...
PT: My mother. She was Enola Gay Haggard before she married my dad, and my dad never supported me with the flying - he hated airplanes and motorcycles. When I told them I was going to leave college and go fly planes in the army air corps, my dad said, "Well, I've sent you through school, bought you automobiles, given you money to run around with the girls, but from here on, you're on your own. If you want to go kill yourself, go ahead, I don't give a damn." Then Mom just quietly said, "Paul, if you want to go fly airplanes, you're going to be all right." And that was that.
ST: Where was that?
PT: Well, that was Miami, Florida. My dad had been in the real estate business down there for years, and at that time he was retired. And I was going to school at Gainesville, Florida, but I had to leave after two years and go to Cincinnati because Florida had no medical school.
ST: You were thinking of being a doctor?
PT: I didn't think that, my father thought it. He said, "You're going to be a doctor," and I just nodded my head and that was it. And I started out that way; but about a year before, I was able to get into an airplane, fly it - I soloed - and I knew then that I had to go fly airplanes.
ST: Now by 1944 you were a pilot - a test pilot on the program to develop the B-29 bomber. When did you get word that you had a special assignment?
PT: One day [in September 1944] I'm running a test on a B-29, I land, a man meets me. He says he just got a call from General Uzal Ent [commander of the second air force] at Colorado Springs, he wants me in his office the next morning at nine o'clock. He said, "Bring your clothing - your B4 bag - because you're not coming back." Well, I didn't know what it was and didn't pay any attention to it - it was just another assignment.
I got to Colorado Springs the next morning perfectly on time. A man named Lansdale met me, walked me to General Ent's office and closed the door behind me. With him was a man wearing a blue suit, a US Navy captain - that was William Parsons, who flew with me to Hiroshima - and Dr. Norman Ramsey, Columbia University professor in nuclear physics. And Norman said: "OK, we've got what we call the Manhattan Project. What we're doing is trying to develop an atomic bomb. We've gotten to the point now where we can't go much further till we have airplanes to work with."
He gave me an explanation which probably lasted 45, 50 minutes, and they left. General Ent looked at me and said, "The other day, General Arnold [commander general of the army air corps] offered me three names." Both of the others were full colonels; I was lieutenant-colonel. He said that when General Arnold asked which of them could do this atomic weapons deal, he replied without hesitation, "Paul Tibbets is the man to do it." I said, "Well, thank you, sir." Then he laid out what was going on and it was up to me now to put together an organization and train them to drop atomic weapons on both Europe and the Pacific - Tokyo.
ST: Interesting that they would have dropped it on Europe as well. We didn't know that.
PT: My edict was as clear as could be. Drop simultaneously in Europe and the Pacific because of the secrecy problem - you couldn't drop it in one part of the world without dropping it in the other. And so he said, "I don't know what to tell you, but I know you happen to have B-29s to start with. I've got a squadron in training in Nebraska - they have the best record so far of anybody we've got. I want you to go visit them, look at them, talk to them, do whatever you want. If they don't suit you, we'll get you some more." He said: "There's nobody could tell you what you have to do because nobody knows. If we can do anything to help you, ask me." I said thank you very much. He said, "Paul, be careful how you treat this responsibility, because if you're successful you'll probably be called a hero. And if you're unsuccessful, you might wind up in prison." ST: Did you know the power of an atomic bomb? Were you told about that?
PT: No, I didn't know anything at that time. But I knew how to put an organization together. He said, "Go take a look at the bases, and call me back and tell me which one you want." I wanted to get back to Grand Island Nebraska, that's where my wife and two kids were, where my laundry was done and all that stuff. But I thought, "Well, I'll go to Wendover [army airfield, in Utah] first and see what they've got." As I came in over the hills I saw it was a beautiful spot. It had been a final staging place for units that were going through combat crew training, and the guys ahead of me were the last P-47 fighter outfit. This lieutenant-colonel in charge said, "We've just been advised to stop here and I don't know what you want to do... but if it has anything to do with this base it's the most perfect base I've ever been on. You've got full machine shops, everybody's qualified, they know what they want to do. It's a good place."
ST: And now you chose your own crew.
PT: Well, I had mentally done it before that. I knew right away I was going to get Tom Ferebee [the Enola Gay's bombardier] and Theodore "Dutch" van Kirk [navigator] and Wyatt Duzenbury [flight engineer].
ST: Guys you had flown with in Europe?
PT: Yeah.
ST: And now you're training. And you're also talking to physicists like Robert Oppenheimer [senior scientist on the Manhattan project].
PT: I think I went to Los Alamos [the Manhattan project HQ] three times, and each time I got to see Dr. Oppenheimer working in his own environment. Later, thinking about it, here's a young man, a brilliant person. And he's a chain smoker and he drinks cocktails. And he hates fat men. And General Leslie Groves [the general in charge of the Manhattan project], he's a fat man, and he hates people who smoke and drink. The two of them are the first, original odd couple.
ST: They had a feud, Groves and Oppenheimer?
PT: Yeah, but neither one of them showed it. Each one of them had a job to do.
ST: Did Oppenheimer tell you about the destructive nature of the bomb?
PT: No.
ST: How did you know about that? PT: From Dr. Ramsey. He said the only thing we can tell you about it is, it's going to explode with the force of 20,000 tons of TNT. I'd never seen 1lb of TNT blow up. I'd never heard of anybody who'd seen 100lbs of TNT blow up. All I felt was that this was gonna be one hell of a big bang.
ST: Twenty thousand tons - that's equivalent to how many planes full of bombs?
PT: Well, I think the two bombs that we used [at Hiroshima and Nagasaki] had more power than all the bombs the air force had used during the war on Europe.
ST: So Ramsey told you about the possibilities.
PT: Even though it was still theory, whatever those guys told me, that's what happened. So I was ready to say I wanted to go to war, but I wanted to ask Oppenheimer how to get away from the bomb after we dropped it. I told him that when we had dropped bombs in Europe and North Africa, we'd flown straight ahead after dropping them - which is also the trajectory of the bomb. But what should we do this time? He said, "You can't fly straight ahead because you'd be right over the top when it blows up and nobody would ever know you were there." He said I had to turn tangent to the expanding shockwave. I said, "Well, I've had some trigonometry, some physics. What is tangency in this case?" He said it was 159 degrees in either direction. "Turn 159 degrees as fast as you can and you'll be able to put yourself the greatest distance from where the bomb exploded."
ST: How many seconds did you have to make that turn?
PT: I had dropped enough practice bombs to realize that the charges would blow around 1,500 feet in the air, so I would have 40 to 42 seconds to turn 159 degrees. I went back to Wendover as quick as I could and took the airplane up. I got myself to 25,000 feet, and I practiced turning, steeper, steeper, steeper and I got it where I could pull it round in 40 seconds. The tail was shaking dramatically and I was afraid of it breaking off, but I didn't quit. That was my goal. And I practiced and practiced until, without even thinking about it, I could do it in between 40 and 42, all the time. So, when that day came...
ST: You got the go-ahead on August 5.
PT: Yeah. We were in Tinian [the US island base in the Pacific] at the time we got the OK. They had sent this Norwegian to the weather station out on Guam [the US's westernmost territory] and I had a copy of his report. We said that, based on his forecast, the sixth day of August would be the best day that we could get over Honshu [the island on which Hiroshima stands]. So we did everything that had to be done to get the crews ready to go: airplane loaded, crews briefed, all of the things checked that you have to check before you can fly over enemy territory.
General Groves had a brigadier-general who was connected back to Washington DC by a special teletype machine. He stayed close to that thing all the time, notifying people back there, all by code, that we were preparing these airplanes to go any time after midnight on the sixth. And that's the way it worked out. We were ready to go at about four o'clock in the afternoon on the fifth and we got word from the president that we were free to go: "Use 'em as you wish." They give you a time you're supposed to drop your bomb on target and that was 9.15 in the morning, but that was Tinian time, one hour later than Japanese time. I told Dutch, "You figure it out what time we have to start after midnight to be over the target at 9am."
ST: That'd be Sunday morning.
PT: Well, we got going down the runway at right about 2.15am and we took off, we met our rendezvous guys, we made our flight up to what we call the initial point, that would be a geographic position that you could not mistake. Well, of course we had the best one in the world with the rivers and bridges and that big shrine. There was no mistaking what it was.
ST: So you had to have the right navigator to get it on the button.
PT: The airplane has a bomb sight connected to the autopilot and the bombardier puts figures in there for where he wants to be when he drops the weapon, and that's transmitted to the airplane. We always took into account what would happen if we had a failure and the bomb bay doors didn't open: we had a manual release put in each airplane so it was right down by the bombardier and he could pull on that. And the guys in the airplanes that followed us to drop the instruments needed to know when it was going to go. We were told not to use the radio, but, hell, I had to. I told them I would say, "One minute out," "Thirty seconds out," "Twenty seconds" and "Ten" and then I'd count, "Nine, eight, seven, six, five, four seconds", which would give them a time to drop their cargo. They knew what was going on because they knew where we were. And that's exactly the way it worked, it was absolutely perfect.
After we got the airplanes in formation I crawled into the tunnel and went back to tell the men, I said, "You know what we're doing today?" They said, "Well, yeah, we're going on a bombing mission." I said, "Yeah, we're going on a bombing mission, but it's a little bit special." My tailgunner, Bob Caron, was pretty alert. He said, "Colonel, we wouldn't be playing with atoms today, would we?" I said, "Bob, you've got it just exactly right." So I went back up in the front end and I told the navigator, bombardier, flight engineer, in turn. I said, "OK, this is an atom bomb we're dropping." They listened intently but I didn't see any change in their faces or anything else. Those guys were no idiots. We'd been fiddling round with the most peculiar-shaped things we'd ever seen.
So we're coming down. We get to that point where I say "one second" and by the time I'd got that second out of my mouth the airplane had lurched, because 10,000 pounds had come out of the front. I'm in this turn now, tight as I can get it, that helps me hold my altitude and helps me hold my airspeed and everything else all the way round. When I level out, the nose is a little bit high and as I look up there the whole sky is lit up in the prettiest blues and pinks I've ever seen in my life. It was just great.
I tell people I tasted it. "Well," they say, "what do you mean?" When I was a child, if you had a cavity in your tooth the dentist put some mixture of some cotton or whatever it was and lead into your teeth and pounded them in with a hammer. I learned that if I had a spoon of ice-cream and touched one of those teeth I got this electrolysis and I got the taste of lead out of it. And I knew right away what it was.
OK, we're all going. We had been briefed to stay off the radios: "Don't say a damn word, what we do is we make this turn, we're going to get out of here as fast as we can." I want to get out over the sea of Japan because I know they can't find me over there. With that done we're home free. Then Tom Ferebee has to fill out his bombardier's report and Dutch, the navigator, has to fill out a log. Tom is working on his log and says, "Dutch, what time were we over the target?" And Dutch says, "Nine-fifteen plus 15 seconds." Ferebee says: "What lousy navigating. Fifteen seconds off!"
ST: Did you hear an explosion?
PT: Oh yeah. The shockwave was coming up at us after we turned. And the tailgunner said, "Here it comes." About the time he said that, we got this kick in the ass. I had accelerometers installed in all airplanes to record the magnitude of the bomb. It hit us with two and a half G. Next day, when we got figures from the scientists on what they had learned from all the things, they said, "When that bomb exploded, your airplane was 10 and half miles away from it."
ST: Did you see that mushroom cloud?
PT: You see all kinds of mushroom clouds, but they were made with different types of bombs. The Hiroshima bomb did not make a mushroom. It was what I call a stringer. It just came up. It was black as hell, and it had light and colors and white in it and grey color in it and the top was like a folded-up Christmas tree.
ST: Do you have any idea what happened down below?
PT: Pandemonium! I think it's best stated by one of the historians, who said: "In one micro-second, the city of Hiroshima didn't exist." ST: You came back, and you visited President Truman.
PT: We're talking 1948 now. I'm back in the Pentagon and I get notice from the chief of staff, Carl Spaatz, the first chief of staff of the air force. When we got to General Spaatz's office, General Doolittle was there, and a colonel named Dave Shillen. Spaatz said, "Gentlemen, I just got word from the president he wants us to go over to his office immediately." On the way over, Doolittle and Spaatz were doing some talking; I wasn't saying very much. When we got out of the car we were escorted right quick to the Oval Office. There was a black man there who always took care of Truman's needs and he said, "General Spaatz, will you please be facing the desk?" And now, facing the desk, Spaatz is on the right, Doolittle and Shillen. Of course, militarily speaking, that's the correct order: because Spaatz is senior, Doolittle has to sit to his left.
Then I was taken by this man and put in the chair that was right beside the president's desk, beside his left hand. Anyway, we got a cup of coffee and we got most of it consumed when Truman walked in and everybody stood on their feet. He said, "Sit down, please," and he had a big smile on his face and he said, "General Spaatz, I want to congratulate you on being first chief of the air force," because it was no longer the air corps. Spaatz said, "Thank you, sir, it's a great honor and I appreciate it." And he said to Doolittle: "That was a magnificent thing you pulled flying off of that carrier," and Doolittle said, "All in a day's work, Mr. President." And he looked at Dave Shillen and said, "Colonel Shillen, I want to congratulate you on having the foresight to recognize the potential in aerial refueling. We're gonna need it bad someday." And he said thank you very much.
Then he looked at me for 10 seconds and he didn't say anything. And when he finally did, he said, "What do you think?" I said, "Mr. President, I think I did what I was told." He slapped his hand on the table and said: "You're damn right you did, and I'm the guy who sent you. If anybody gives you a hard time about it, refer them to me."
ST: Anybody ever give you a hard time?
PT: Nobody gave me a hard time.
ST: Do you ever have any second thoughts about the bomb?
PT: Second thoughts? No. Studs, look. Number one, I got into the Air Corps to defend the United States to the best of my ability. That's what I believe in and that's what I work for. Number two, I'd had so much experience with airplanes... I'd had jobs where there was no particular direction about how you do it and then of course I put this thing together with my own thoughts on how it should be because when I got the directive I was to be self-supporting at all times. On the way to the target I was thinking: I can't think of any mistakes I've made. Maybe I did make a mistake: maybe I was too damned assured. At 29 years of age I was so shot in the ass with confidence I didn't think there was anything I couldn't do. Of course, that applied to airplanes and people. So, no, I had no problem with it. I knew we did the right thing because when I knew we'd be doing that I thought, yes, we're going to kill a lot of people, but by God we're going to save a lot of lives. We won't have to invade [Japan].
ST: Why did they drop the second one, the Bockscar [bomb] on Nagasaki?
PT: Unknown to anybody else - I knew it, but nobody else knew - there was a third one. See, the first bomb went off and they didn't hear anything out of the Japanese for two or three days. The second bomb was dropped and again they were silent for another couple of days. Then I got a phone call from General Curtis LeMay [chief of staff of the strategic air forces in the Pacific]. He said, "You got another one of those damn things?" I said, "Yessir." He said, "Where is it?" I said, "Over in Utah." He said, "Get it out here. You and your crew are going to fly it." I said, "Yessir." I sent word back and the crew loaded it on an airplane and we headed back to bring it right on out to Tinian and when they got it to California debarkation point, the war was over.
ST: What did General LeMay have in mind with the third one?
PT: Nobody knows.
ST: One big question. Since September 11, what are your thoughts? People talk about nukes, the hydrogen bomb.
PT: Let's put it this way. I don't know any more about these terrorists than you do, I know nothing. When they bombed the Trade Centre I couldn't believe what was going on. We've fought many enemies at different times. But we knew who they were and where they were. These people, we don't know who they are or where they are. That's the point that bothers me. Because they're gonna strike again, I'll put money on it. And it's going to be damned dramatic. But they're gonna do it in their own sweet time. We've got to get into a position where we can kill the bastards. None of this business of taking them to court, the hell with that. I wouldn't waste five seconds on them.
ST: What about the bomb? Einstein said the world has changed since the atom was split.
PT: That's right. It has changed.
ST: And Oppenheimer knew that. PT: Oppenheimer is dead. He did something for the world and people don't understand. And it is a free world.
ST: One last thing, when you hear people say, "Let's nuke 'em," "Let's nuke these people," what do you think?
PT: Oh, I wouldn't hesitate if I had the choice. I'd wipe 'em out. You're gonna kill innocent people at the same time, but we've never fought a damn war anywhere in the world where they didn't kill innocent people. If the newspapers would just cut out the shit: "You've killed so many civilians." That's their tough luck for being there.
ST: By the way, I forgot to say Enola Gay was originally called number 82. How did your mother feel about having her name on it?
PT: Well, I can only tell you what my dad said. My mother never changed her expression very much about anything, whether it was serious or light, but when she'd get tickled, her stomach would jiggle. My dad said to me that when the telephone in Miami rang, my mother was quiet first. Then, when it was announced on the radio, he said: "You should have seen the old gal's belly jiggle on that one."
· Further information on the Enola Gay can be found at www.theenolagay.com.
“On Albert Einstein,” by J. Robert Oppenheimer
From the New York Review of Books, March 17, 1966
Though I knew Einstein for two or three decades, it was only in the last decade of his life that we were close colleagues and something of friends. But I thought that it might be useful, because I am sure that it is not too soon—and for our generation perhaps almost too late—to start to dispel the clouds of myth and to see the great mountain peak that these clouds hide. As always, the myth has its charms; but the truth is far more beautiful.
Late in his life, in connection with his despair over weapons and wars, Einstein said that if he had to live it over again he would be a plumber. This was a balance of seriousness and jest that no one should now attempt to disturb. Believe me, he had no idea of what it was to be a plumber; least of all in the United States, where we have a joke that the typical behavior of this specialist is that he never brings his tools to the scene of the crisis. Einstein brought his tools to his crises; Einstein was a physicist, a natural philosopher, the greatest of our time.
What we have heard, what you all know, what is the true part of the myth is his extraordinary originality. The discovery of quanta would surely have come one way or another, but he discovered them. Deep understanding of what it means that no signal could travel faster than light would surely have come; the formal equations were already known; but this simple, brilliant understanding of the physics could well have been slow in coming, and blurred, had he not done it for us. The general theory of relativity which, even today, is not well proved experimentally, no one but he would have done for a long, long time. It is in fact only in the last decade, the last years, that one has seen how a pedestrian and hard-working physicist, or many of them, might reach that theory and understand this singular union of geometry and gravitation; and we can do even that today only because some of the a priori open possibilities are limited by the confirmation of Einstein’s discovery that light would be deflected by gravity.
Yet there is another side besides the originality. Einstein brought to the work of originality deep elements of tradition. It is only possible to discover in part how he came by it, by following his reading, his friendships, the meager record that we have. But of these deep-seated elements of tradition—I will not try to enumerate them all; I do not know them all—at least three were indispensable and stayed with him.
THE FIRST IS from the rather beautiful but recondite part of physics that is the explanation of the laws of thermodynamics in terms of the mechanics of large numbers of particles, statistical mechanics. This was with Einstein all the time. It was what enabled him from Planck’s discovery of the law of black body radiation to conclude that light was not only waves but particles, particles with an energy proportional to their frequency and momentum determined by their wave-number, the famous relations that de Broglie was to extend to all matter, to electrons first and then clearly to all matter. It was this statistical tradition that led Einstein to the laws governing the emission and absorption of light by atomic systems. It was this that enabled him to see the connection between de Broglie’s waves and the statistics of light-quanta proposed by Bose. It was this that kept him an active proponent and discoverer of the new phenomena of quantum physics up to 1925.
The second and equally deep strand—and here I think we do know where it came from—was his total love of the idea of a field: the following of physical phenomena in minute and infinitely subdividable detail in space and in time. This gave him his first great drama of trying to see how Maxwell’s equations could be true. They were the first field equations of physics; they are still true today with only very minor and well- understood modifications. It is this tradition which made him know that there had to be a field theory of gravitation, long before the clues to that theory were securely in his hand.
The third tradition was less one of physics than of philosophy. It is a form of the principle of sufficient reason. It was Einstein who asked what do we mean, what can we measure, what elements in physics are conventional? He insisted that those elements that were conventional could have no part in the real predictions of physics. This also had roots: for one the mathematical invention of Riemann, who saw how very limited the geometry of the Greeks had been, how unreasonably limited. But in a more important sense, it followed from the long tradition of European philosophy, you may say starting with Descartes—if you wish you can start it in the Thirteenth Century, because in fact it did start then—and leading through the British empiricists, and very clearly formulated, though probably without influence in Europe, by Charles Pierce: One had to ask how do we do it, what do we mean, is this just something that we can use to help ourselves in calculating, or is it something that we can actually study in nature by physical means? For the point here is that the laws of nature not only describe the results of observations, but the laws of nature delimit the scope of observations. That was the point of Einstein’s understanding of the limiting character of the velocity of light; it also was the nature of the resolution in quantum theory, where the quantum of action, Planck’s constant, was recognized as limiting the fineness of the transaction between the system studied and the machinery used to study it, limiting this fineness in a form of atomicity quite different from and quite more radical than any that the Greeks had imagined or than was familiar from the atomic theory of chemistry. IN THE LAST YEARS of Einstein’s life, the last twenty-five years, his tradition in a certain sense failed him. They were the years he spent at Princeton and this, though a source of sorrow, should not be concealed. He had a right to that failure. He spent those years first in trying to prove that the quantum theory had inconsistencies in it. No one could have been more ingenious in thinking up unexpected and clever examples; but it turned out that the inconsistencies were not there; and often their resolution could be found in earlier work of Einstein himself. When that did not work, after repeated efforts, Einstein had simply to say that he did not like the theory. He did not like the elements of indeterminacy. He did not like the abandonment of continuity or of causality. These were things that he had grown up with, saved by him, and enormously enlarged; and to see them lost, even though he had put the dagger in the hand of their assassin by his own work, was very hard on him. He fought with Bohr in a noble and furious way, and he fought with the theory which he had fathered but which he hated. It was not the first time that this has happened in science.
He also worked with a very ambitious program, to combine the understanding of electricity and gravitation in such a way as to explain what he regarded as the semblance—the illusion—of discreteness, of particles in nature. I think that it was clear then, and believe it to be obviously clear today, that the things that this theory worked with were too meager, left out too much that was known to physicists but had not been known much in Einstein’s student days. Thus it looked like a hopelessly limited and historically rather accidentally conditioned approach. Although Einstein commanded the affection, or, more rightly, the love of everyone for his determination to see through his program, he lost most contact with the profession of physics, because there were things that had been learned which came too late in life for him to concern himself with them.
EINSTEIN was indeed one of the friendliest of men. I had the impression that he was also, in an important sense, alone. Many very great men are lonely; yet I had the impression that although he was a deep and loyal friend, the stronger human affections played a not very deep or very central part in his life taken as a whole. He had of course incredibly many disciples, in the sense of people who, reading his work or hearing it taught by him, learned from him and had a new view of physics, of the philosophy of physics, of the nature of the world that we live in. But he did not have, in the technical jargon, a school. He did not have very many students who were his concern as apprentices and disciples. And there was an element of the lone worker in him, in sharp contrast to the teams we see today, and in sharp contrast to the highly cooperative way in which some other parts of science have developed. In later years, he had people working with him. They were typically called assistants and they had a wonderful life. Just being with him was wonderful. His secretary had a wonderful life. The sense of grandeur never left him for a minute, nor his sense of humor. The assistants did one thing which he lacked in his young days. His early papers are paralyzingly beautiful, but there are many errata. Later there were none. I had the impression that, along with its miseries, his fame gave him some pleasures, not only the human pleasure of meeting people but the extreme pleasure of music played not only with Elizabeth of Belgium but more with Adolf Busch, for he was not that good a violinist. He loved the sea and he loved sailing and was always grateful for a ship. I remember walking home with him on his seventy-first birthday. He said, “You know, when it’s once been given to a man to do something sensible, afterward life is a little strange.”
Einstein is also, and I think rightly, known as a man of very great good will and humanity. Indeed, if I had to think of a single word for his attitude towards human problems, I would pick the Sanskrit word Ahinsa, not to hurt, harmlessness. He had a deep distrust of power; he did not have that convenient and natural converse with statesmen and men of power that was quite appropriate to Rutherford and to Bohr, perhaps the two physicists of this century who most nearly rivaled him in eminence. In 1915, as he made the general theory of relativity, Europe was tearing itself to pieces and half losing its past. He was always a pacifist. Only as the Nazis came into power in Germany did he have some doubts, as his famous and rather deep exchange of letters with Freud showed, and began to understand with melancholy and without true acceptance that, in addition to understanding, man sometimes has a duty to act.
AFTER what you have heard, I need not say how luminous was his intelligence. He was almost wholly without sophistication and wholly without worldliness. I think that in England people would have said that he did not have much “background,” and in America that he lacked “education.” This may throw some light on how these words are used. I think that this simplicity, this lack of clutter and this lack of cant, had a lot to do with his preservation throughout of a certain pure, rather Spinoza-like, philosophical monism, which of course is hard to maintain if you have been “educated” and have a “background.” There was always with him a wonderful purity at once childlike and profoundly stubborn.
Einstein is often blamed or praised or credited with these miserable bombs. It is not in my opinion true. The special theory of relativity might not have been beautiful without Einstein; but it would have been a tool for physicists, and by 1932 the experimental evidence for the inter-convertibility of matter and energy which he had predicted was overwhelming. The feasibility of doing anything with this in such a massive way was not clear until seven years later, and then almost by accident. This was not what Einstein really was after. His part was that of creating an intellectual revolution, and discovering more than any scientist of our time how profound were the errors made by men before then. He did write a letter to Roosevelt about atomic energy. I think this was in part his agony at the evil of the Nazis, in part not wanting to harm anyone in any way; but I ought to report that that letter had very little effect, and that Einstein himself is really not answerable for all that came later. I believe he so understood it himself.
His was a voice raised with very great weight against violence and cruelty wherever he saw them and, after the war, he spoke with deep emotion and I believe with great weight about the supreme violence of these atomic weapons. He said at once with great simplicity: Now we must make a world government. It was very forthright, it was very abrupt, it was no doubt “uneducated,” no doubt without “background”; still all of us in some thoughtful measure must recognize that he was right.
Without power, without calculation, with none of the profoundly political humor that characterized Gandhi, he nevertheless did move the political world. In almost the last act of his life, he joined with Lord Russell in suggesting that men of science get together and see if they could not understand one another and avert the disaster which he foresaw from the arms race. The so-called Pugwash movement, which has a longer name now, was the direct result of this appeal. I know it to be true that it had an essential part to play in the Treaty of Moscow, the limited test-ban treaty, which is a tentative, but to me very precious, declaration that reason might still prevail.
In his last years, as I knew him, Einstein was a twentieth-century Ecclesiastes, saying with unrelenting and indomitable cheerfulness, “Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.”
This was a lecture delivered at UNESCO House in Paris on December 13,1965.
The Agony of Atomic Genius by Algis Valiunas, Fall 2006 Issue
More than sixty years along, the development of nuclear weaponry remains the supreme technological innovation of our time, and the atomic physics on which it is based is perhaps the most wondrous intellectual achievement since Socrates taught his admirers that death holds no terrors for a good man. Of course, few men have ever been good enough to be entirely free of such terrors; and the unprecedented scientific advances of the past century have added the terror of thermonuclear megadeath and possible human extinction to the things that saddle all but the very best men with mortal angst.
These novel terrors have been intense and persistent enough in the popular mind that atomic science is widely regarded as the principal scourge of humanity; and the Manhattan Project physicists whose skill as bomb makers earned them the admiring gratitude of free peoples in 1945 are reviled as the evil geniuses who made life more perilous than it ever was before. They shouldn’t have done it, the sentiment runs; they were scientists, after all, and they should have known better than to lend their intelligence to so terrible an undertaking. But can scientists really be expected to know better — indeed, to know best? Does their understanding of the workings of nature endow them with a sounder moral understanding than the common run of humanity? Ought the immemorial guiding virtue of the political man, prudence, direct or instead be directed by the scientific intellect? By descending into the political inferno, were the scientists complicit in profound evil?
The career of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the physicist who headed the Manhattan Project, draws such questions to a focus that resembles the bead of a laser-gunsight on a victim’s breastbone. It was Oppenheimer whom the public lionized as the brains behind the bomb; who agonized about the devastation his brilliance had helped to unleash; who hoped that the very destructiveness of the new “gadget,” as the bomb makers called their invention, might make war obsolete; and whose sometime Communist fellow-traveling and opposition to the development of the hydrogen bomb — a weapon a thousand times more powerful than the bombs that incinerated Hiroshima and Nagasaki — brought about his political disgrace and downfall, which of course have marked him in the eyes of some as all the more heroic, a visionary persecuted by warmongering McCarthyite troglodytes. His legacy, of course, is far more complicated.
Julius Robert Oppenheimer was born in Manhattan in 1904. His father, Julius, was a German Jewish immigrant who made a fortune in clothing manufacture, and young Robert grew up a child of privilege, fussed over by a live-in governess and maid in a high-rise apartment on Riverside Drive. A dorky brainiac, virtually friendless, the poor kid was something of a Little Lord Fauntleroy in the bargain. At school a teacher complained that Robert took the elevator to the second floor, and asked his parents to teach him how to walk up and down stairs. The child made his own world, as loners do, reading poetry, collecting minerals; although inept at most sports, he became a crackerjack sailor and horseman, and was known for getting along better with horses than with human beings.
For ten years he attended the Ethical Culture School, which epitomized Jewish high bourgeois secular liberalism, concerned with the plight of the poor, guided by ideals of social justice, relentlessly hopeful, earnest, and progressive; Ethical Culture Society members promoted women’s suffrage and the prohibition of alcohol, and took part in the founding of the ACLU and the NAACP. To transform society was the express aim of Ethical Culture, and to produce an intellectual and moral elite devoted to service was the School’s appointed task. In this heroic order, intellectual excellence pointedly ranked just as high as moral virtue; and for an aspiring polymath like young Oppenheimer, the highest life of the mind was indispensable to the life of moral striving.
Oppenheimer entered Harvard intending to study chemistry and emerged three years later an experimental physicist on his way to becoming a theoretical physicist. That he happened to be a wizard at abstract speculation, had a “passion for the purely useless,” and was something of a dolt at what scientists call the bench — soldering copper wires gave him fits — made his ultimate career choice an easy one. But his overarching purpose, he announced, was to confront and master “the serious business of life, which is growing wise.” To that end he read French poetry, which may have been a dubious course to wisdom, and wrote English verse and stories, perhaps a more innocent activity. In J. Robert Oppenheimer and the American Century, his biographer David C. Cassidy, a historian and philosopher of science, chastises Oppenheimer for lacking the professional single-mindedness essential to a scientific career at the highest level, and faults him for having too many talents, none of which he concentrated on sufficiently. Oppenheimer’s champagne mind sparkled, fizzed, and sprayed in all directions, yet he still managed to become a superb theoretician, teacher, and administrator. He continued his formal training at Cambridge University, where he studied with Ernest Rutherford and met Niels Bohr, founding father of quantum physics; then he completed his Ph.D. at Göttingen, where he worked under Max Born and met Werner Heisenberg, who would lead the German effort to develop an atomic bomb; and he did postdoctoral training with Wolfgang Pauli in Zurich.
Born recalled Oppenheimer as a shining intelligence but a brash upstart, who would break in snidely on seminar presentations to explain matters more lucidly than the distinguished speakers could. Already he was cultivating his high-handed flair for the devastating remark, as though discussing the mysteries of the universe were a competitive sport. The purest, most disinterested life, untrammeled by egotism, is supposed to be that of thought about the highest things, according to the thinkers who have pursued such activity. Oppenheimer’s vanity or amour-propre, which impelled him to measure himself incessantly against his colleagues, whom he treated as rivals, muddied this theoretical purity even more than it does for most scientists.
Oppenheimer turned out a dozen research papers before he was twenty-five, mostly training the searchlight of the latest quantum theory on certain experimental observations old and new: important work, Cassidy avers, but derivative, well short of the theoretical cutting edge, where the finest minds — Heisenberg, Bohr, Born, Pauli, Paul Dirac — were laying bare the secrets of the subatomic world and transforming the understanding of matter and energy. The “quantum revolution,” in Cassidy’s phrase, began to take the staid precincts of academic physics by storm, and by the late 1920s its leaders occupied some of the most prestigious chairs in European universities.
America saw the future of physics in Europe, sent over young theoreticians by the boatload to sit at the feet of the masters, and coaxed some of the masters across the Atlantic to teach. Oppenheimer, a fledgling instructor at Berkeley in 1929, soon established himself as a professorial master. Hans Bethe was to declare that far and away “the greatest school of theoretical physics that the United States has ever known” was the one Oppenheimer headed at Berkeley and Caltech during the 1930s and early 1940s. Oppenheimer’s style of intelligence was perfectly suited to the seminar room: he possessed a mind quick as a striking cobra, capable of penetrating to the essentials of a new discovery while lesser men were fogged in by the details, recognizing straightaway the practical implications of abstruse theorizing, so thoroughly versed in the various relevant fields that concision and exactitude in explanation came naturally as breathing, and graced with a charm that captivated serious persons and drew the best out of them. Among topflight scientists, of course, prodigious feats of calculation or insight are as commonplace as a 90-mile-per-hour fastball in the major leagues; when everyone is a genius, the highest distinction is hard to come by. Although Oppenheimer’s mind was not the whiz- bang computer of a John von Neumann or the astral navigation system of a Hans Bethe, it processed other men’s original contributions so adeptly that for multifaceted excellence it may well have been the finest scientific instrument of all.
Indeed, Cassidy argues cogently that one of the most impressive facets of Oppenheimer’s achievement has been largely ignored. Although Oppenheimer’s accepting the directorship of the A-bomb project despite lacking a Nobel Prize caused something of a scandal among top- flight physicists, Cassidy claims that Oppenheimer had already conducted work worthy of the highest scientific honor: his “application of nuclear physics and of general relativity theory at the end of a star’s life cycle” anticipated by nearly thirty years the astronomical observations of the collapsed stars known as black holes. Oppenheimer’s theorizing was so startlingly original — so far in advance of the corroborating observations and so far off the beaten track of astrophysical research — that his colleagues’ ignorance cost him the recognition he deserved.
Oppenheimer’s continuing quest for wisdom led him far beyond the confines of modern science. He studied Sanskrit, a notoriously difficult language to acquire, and was soon reading the classic Indian religious literature, in search of knowledge that physics couldn’t provide him. Some colleagues saw this breadth of intellectual passion as dabbling in alien mysticism and a diversion from serious work. I. I. Rabi declared that a lot more analytical rigor and a lot less spiritual fuzziness would have been required to make Oppenheimer a scientific original: “[I]n some respects Oppenheimer was overeducated in those fields that lie outside the scientific tradition, such as his interest in religion, in the Hindu religion in particular, which resulted in a feeling for the mystery of the universe that surrounded him almost like a fog. He saw physics clearly, looking toward what had already been done, but at the border he tended to feel that there was much more of the mysterious and novel than there actually was.”
Drawn to the recondite and inexplicable in metaphysics, Oppenheimer sought firm conviction in politics, where ideology often passes for certainty; and like so many intellectuals in the 1930s, he fell for the utopian confidence game of Communism. It took some doing to get him even to notice the political world in the first place: the depth of the Great Depression did not register with him until his students found themselves jobless. A romance with the bitterly melancholic Jean Tatlock, who had an on-again off-again affair with the Communist Party, pulled him into sinister political company. His motives were noble in part, however misguided: like many fellow travelers, he saw Soviet Communism as the only curative for Fascism. The plight of the Jews in Nazi Germany — and indeed of science itself, for quantum mechanics and relativity theory were proscribed there as “Jewish physics” — moved him to what he called “a continuing, smoldering fury” and prompted him to give three percent of his salary to displaced scientists. With his customary whirlwind energy, he supported nearly every Communist-front organization in the Bay Area, backing striking longshoremen, organizing a teachers’ union, joining several committees for the Spanish Republican cause, helping out migrant farm workers, and taking part in gatherings of parlor-pink academics and more dedicated subversives. The woman he married, Katherine Puening Harrison, was the widow of a Communist labor organizer who had died in the Spanish Civil War, and she herself had been a Party member for several years. Oppenheimer’s brother, Frank, also a physicist, and Frank’s wife were members, too.
Oppenheimer always denied ever having been a Communist Party member — though as Cassidy points out, had he been a member, the Party would have kept his membership secret. The former Soviet spymaster Pavel Sudoplatov declared in 1994 that Oppenheimer had been a clandestine Party member — the equivalent of a Roman Catholic cardinal in cuore, who is living under a tyranny and whose identity only the Pope knows — and that, colluding with Enrico Fermi and Leo Szilard, he had helped spies infiltrate the Manhattan Project and deliver secret documents to their Soviet overseers. The Soviet cables intercepted by American counterintelligence and known as the Venona files have yielded no evidence to suggest Oppenheimer was a Party member or to implicate him or the other accused eminent physicists in any such espionage scheme. Sifting through these and other conflicting reports, Cassidy, like Oppenheimer’s other biographers, clears him of the damning allegations.
Yet his undeniable fellow-traveling made him suspect enough, particularly in the eyes of military intelligence; when his name was proposed for the scientific leadership of the A-bomb enterprise, various authorities pronounced him profoundly unsuitable. But Oppenheimer had the champion he needed in General Leslie Groves. Despite his preference for combat duty, Groves was assigned to command the Manhattan Project — his work heading up the construction of the Pentagon made him the ideal candidate — and he insisted, above numerous high-placed objections, that Oppenheimer be in charge of the physicist legions. The urgency of the task — what if the Nazis or the Japanese should produce such a weapon first? — overrode any reservations about Oppenheimer’s loyalty. At first, Oppenheimer was anything but eager to devote himself to the war effort, which he regarded as snatching the best minds away from their true vocation. However, Cassidy writes, an investigation into possible subversives that the California state assembly proposed early in 1941 made Oppenheimer fear for his teaching position, and in a letter to a friend already engaged in war research he announced that, to prove his loyalty, he too would serve his country: “I have a lot more misgivings even than you ever had about what will come of all this; but even so I think surely if I were asked to do a job I could do really well and that needed doing I’d not refuse. I’d worry a lot, perhaps even more than you. But we worry anyway.”
Such anxiety was unavoidable: In Oppenheimer’s Ethical Culture upbringing, and indeed in the culture at large, scientists were revered as white knights consecrated to the cosmopolitan ideals of perpetual peace, rapturous discovery in the name of humankind, and the fulfillment of Francis Bacon’s project for “the relief of man’s estate.” The distressing human predilection for the occasional blood-feast did, of course, impede man’s progress toward these ever-appealing ends. Alfred Nobel had hoped that his invention of dynamite, which enhanced exponentially the possibilities for battle carnage, would put people off war forever; it didn’t happen. Albert Einstein, equally peaceable but more discerning, said of the weaponry developed before the First World War — machine guns, massive artillery — that entrusting human beings with modern technology was like putting a meat ax in the hands of a psychopath. The flower of Wilhelmine chemistry devoted itself to devising chemical weapons that would eviscerate the throats and lungs of the French and British enemy in the Great War. When Fritz Haber, the presiding genius of German chemical weaponry, was implored by his wife, herself a chemistry Ph.D., to give up his work on poison gas, he replied that in peace a scientist serves mankind but in war he serves his country. His wife killed herself that night.
The atomic bomb would loose upon the world blast and heat and radiation of a magnitude dwarfing all previous agents of devastation. To activate this fearsome power latent in the atom required the labors of generations of scientists, most of whom never imagined their purely theoretical discoveries would be put to such use. The scientific succession reads like a Biblical genealogy, as Isaac Newton begat James Clerk Maxwell who begat Max Planck who begat Ernest Rutherford and so on to Stanislaw Ulam and Edward Teller, who begat the hydrogen bomb. Some of these researchers and thinkers were innocent as could be; in praise of Rutherford, who observed spontaneous radioactive decay in certain elements and thereby discovered the fundamental structure of the atom, his protégé James Chadwick honored “his genius to be astonished.” Wonder, sheer delighted amazement at nature’s paradoxical prodigality and order, was the prime mover for the best of these men, and probably animated all of them to some great degree. For some pure souls, working for the military corrupted that delight. As I. I. Rabi said in declining Oppenheimer’s offer to be associate director of the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos, New Mexico, he didn’t care to think that “the culmination of three centuries of physics” would be the biggest man-made explosion ever.
Oppenheimer for his part thought less of the previous 300 years than of immediate military necessities: “To me [the task at hand] is primarily the development in time of war of a military weapon of some consequence.” The devotion to his nation’s cause was real; so was the thought that making the weapon to save civilization would win him a handsome measure of honor and renown, equal perhaps to that enjoyed by great statesmen and generals, leaving a name down the centuries more lasting than even those of Roosevelt and Churchill. Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin paint a vivid portrait of Oppenheimer’s ambition in American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer. In 1943, as the book reports, General Groves told a project security officer who wanted to deny Oppenheimer his security clearance that the physicist’s craving to make his world-historical name was so intense that it assured his loyalty. Already evident in youth, the longing to stand head and shoulders above the rest of humanity showed all the more obviously as the stakes, and the prizes, reached heroic proportions. The intellectual world abounds with glory hounds, yet everyone who aspires to seriousness recognizes that the finest scholars and scientists, to a great degree, work for the sheer pleasure of knowing and not for the glint of envy in other men’s eyes. Oppenheimer was not graced with this pure-mindedness; the forces driving him were tangled and complex, or compound- complex, like an especially nasty fracture: protecting free men from the most formidable alliance of tyrants ever, winning all due recognition for his part in the success, overcoming the most refractory theoretical and practical difficulties that scientists had ever faced, commanding the greatest assembly of intellectual talent ever devoted to a single consuming public task, and proving himself in the most dramatic fashion a lord and master of nature itself. A man of such parts, had he been able to integrate the various impulses, might have been superbly whole; but Oppenheimer was anything but whole. Historians often speak of T. E. Lawrence as the most complicated soul in modern military annals; but when all the fissures, fault-lines, and contradictions are added up, Oppenheimer deserves this distinction as well.
The divisions in Oppenheimer’s nature widened as the project proceeded from developing the bomb to dropping it, from the creation of a nuclear weapon to the ravaging of entire cities. While waiting for the first atomic test at Alamogordo, ever the aesthete, he sat reading Baudelaire. Addressing a meeting convened by the Secretary of War in May 1945 to decide on the use of the bombs, he enthused as over a Turner skyscape, “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.” Only after admiring the atomic light show did Oppenheimer mention the lethal range of the explosion: any human being within two-thirds of a mile of Ground Zero was likely to die. Sometimes aesthetic appreciation can overcome moral considerations in the most disturbing way.
Such peculiar detachment stemmed from Oppenheimer’s conviction, at least at first, that simply to produce the weapon was his exclusive concern. How the bomb was to be used remained the prerogative of statesmen and military brass. Cassidy sees this feeling of reduced moral responsibility as largely a product of the prevailing culture rather than of Oppenheimer’s distinctive sensibility: “Under Vannevar Bush [the M.I.T. engineer who sold the Manhattan Project to President Roosevelt], the scientist as the enlightened keeper of cultural ideals and an equal partner with military and political leaders was replaced by a new conception of the scientist as a mere technician of physical processes, an employee working under orders at the bottom of a bureaucratic hierarchy.” When Project physicists began to voice misgivings about the morality of their handiwork, to the point of wondering whether they could decently continue working at Los Alamos, Oppenheimer did his best to curb their doubts. Speaking to groups of the querulous and disenchanted, with gentle eloquence he admitted that atomic bombs would make fear a permanent feature of ordinary life, but then proclaimed that they might nevertheless mean an end to war. Oppenheimer had already joined Niels Bohr in foretelling that national governments would yield a significant portion of their sovereignty to the United Nations, which would guarantee the peace of the world. Oppenheimer’s assumption of moral leadership over his team convinced the scientists it was not up to them to settle political and military questions, and further assured them that the men qualified to settle such matters would come up with the right answers.
The actual sight of the Trinity test explosion, however, prompted the beginnings of a change of heart, although that change was not apparent to everyone at first. I. I. Rabi remarked that after the successful test, Oppenheimer strode proudly as an Aristotelian great-souled man, who knows himself every other man’s superior, with some hip-swinging virile Hollywood flash besides: “I’ll never forget his walk; I’ll never forget the way he stepped out of the car.... [H]is walk was like High Noon ... this kind of strut. He had done it.” Yet doubts about what he had just done bored into his moral confidence, probing ever deeper over time. Years later he would remember thinking to himself as he saw the towering cloud of the blast, “Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds” — a quotation from his beloved Bhagavad Gita, in which the god Vishnu exhorts Prince Arjuna to do his duty and pursue martial greatness. This quotation would be enshrined as Oppenheimer’s signature line, and as the expression of inconsolable regret. However, the ambiguity of the line, which speaks of awful ruin, godly power, and endless glory in the same breath, suggests the depths of Oppenheimer’s own moral confusion. He was beginning to tremble at the dark power he had helped create, but the morning of the test he could still tell the New York Times: “Lots of boys not grown up yet will owe their life to it.”
Yet Oppenheimer was becoming all too aware of the suffering his prized invention was going to cause, and increasingly remorseful for being so complicit in so much death. An associate recalled running into Oppenheimer on his way to work, when the sorrowfully bemused chief repeated again and again of the Japanese victims: “Those poor little people, those poor little people.” Nevertheless, as Bird and Sherwin acidly observe, “That very week, however, Oppenheimer was working hard to make sure that the bomb exploded efficiently over those ‘poor little people.’” Whether one considers this diligence of Oppenheimer’s to be evidence of moral weakness or of admirable strength largely defines one’s view of the moral responsibility of scientists and political men: can one somehow weigh the suffering in Hiroshima and Nagasaki against the suffering averted by ending the war without the need for a monumentally bloody invasion of Japan? Oppenheimer seemed unable to make up his mind — proud yet guilty, relieved that many American soldiers would be spared yet haunted by the mass death inflicted on America’s enemies.
Oppenheimer’s growing guilt did not always stand in the way of the thrill of his scientific achievement. The evening of August 6, 1945, after the uranium bomb razed Hiroshima, before a packed and cheering auditorium at Los Alamos, Oppenheimer displayed all the chesty self- satisfaction of the conquering hero, playing to the crowd, indulging in the prizefighter’s traditional pose of triumphant manliness, clasping his hands over his head and waving them in the air. When Oppenheimer declared that his only regret was not making the bomb in time to use it against the Germans, the crowd went wild, as for a blast into the upper deck by Joe DiMaggio or Ted Williams. But the war fever soon cooled. As Life magazine proclaimed the Los Alamos physicists superheroes of scientific intelligence, Oppenheimer was lamenting the subservience of science to innate human cruelty in an address to the American Philosophical Society: “We have made a thing, a most terrible weapon, 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.” This public admission of personal despair at the moral collapse of the modern world’s leading intellectual enterprise could not be more nakedly penitent. The heartbreak of everlasting loss is unmistakable here: with the creation of the atomic bomb, the world will never again be what it once was. Modern science had permanently altered the nature of moral and political life.
Yet this transformation at the hands of scientific genius had come about without transforming human nature accordingly. And it was only his belief that human nature could indeed change, decisively and permanently, that colored Oppenheimer’s penitence with the hope of salvation. The time-honored life of men in nations, their tribal furies in perpetual collision, would now necessarily give way to a mode of harmonious existence imagined often enough but never seriously attempted before: the peoples of the world must and shall be one, or else they shall inevitably destroy each other. A millenarian fire burned in Oppenheimer’s spirit, fueled by his pride as a world-historical individual, by his fear that the natural force he loosed upon the world would escape all human control, and by a pure-hearted longing to ensure that his discovery of the devastation latent in the elemental substance of the world would serve concord rather than the ultimate discord, perpetual peace rather than permanent self-destruction. For the first time in history, technological advance had made the utopian fantasy of a unified world a prerequisite to mankind’s very survival. “The peoples of this world must unite or they will perish. This war, that has ravaged so much of the earth, has written these words. The atomic bomb has spelled them out for all men to understand.”
Oppenheimer’s struggle with despair never quite ended. His savage self-loathing reached its nadir when he met with President Truman and announced, “Mr. President, I feel I have blood on my hands.” Truman despised Oppenheimer’s theatrics on this occasion more than Oppenheimer despised himself. According to legend, Truman took out his handkerchief and presented it to the blood-soaked scientist, saying, “Well, here, would you like to wipe your hands?” After the encounter, Truman observed, “Blood on his hands, damn it, he hasn’t half as much blood on his hands as I have. You just don’t go around bellyaching about it.” Denouncing Oppenheimer as “a cry-baby scientist,” Truman, in a display of true manliness, insisted that nuclear war be conducted without tears.
The difficult debate over the morality of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, captured so vividly in the clash between the remorseful scientist and the hard-headed statesman, persists intensely to this day. The Japanese novelist Kenzaburo Oe, a Nobel laureate for literature, writes in his 1965 nonfiction work Hiroshima Notes, “From the instant the atomic bomb exploded, it became the symbol of all human evil; it was a savagely primitive demon and a most modern curse.” In Oe’s appraisal, Hiroshima outdoes even Auschwitz for evil. Yet his contention sounds parochial and even partisan when one considers the deliberate wickedness of Japanese wartime science, as numbered by Gavan Daws in Prisoners of the Japanese. Unit 731 in Manchuria subjected POWs and Asian civilians to so-called medical experiments after the Mengele fashion, in which the subjects were “burned with flame-throwers, blown up with shrapnel and left to develop gas gangrene, bombarded with lethal doses of X-rays, whirled to death in giant centrifuges, subjected to high pressure in sealed chambers until their eyes popped from their sockets, electrocuted, dehydrated, frozen, boiled alive.” One can debate whether using nuclear weapons is ever morally justifiable, given the unavoidability of mass civilian casualties; and one can argue whether America’s use of these weapons served a legitimate war aim. About Japanese wartime science, however, there is no such debate. Such experiments were diabolical by design; they had nothing to do with winning the war but seemed inspired by sadism mingled with inhuman scientific curiosity. Those who started the war were farther gone in evil than those who finished it with atomic weapons.
Yet the question whether Hiroshima and Nagasaki were necessary to finish the war remains alive sixty years on. In June 1946, Oppenheimer stated that the A-bombs had been dropped on a defeated enemy. More recently, intellectuals of the Left, including provocateur Gore Vidal and Oppenheimer biographer Kai Bird, have argued that Japan was on the verge of surrender before the bombings, meaning that the 200,000 Japanese casualties were not militarily necessary. They cite Japanese diplomatic cables to President Truman stating that, although the unconditional surrender the Allies demanded was unacceptable, the only condition Japan required was that the Emperor be allowed to remain on the throne. Critics of this line of argument find the leftist outrage outrageous. As the historian Richard B. Frank recently argued in The Weekly Standard, Allied intercepts of secret Japanese diplomatic cables revealed that the compromise peace was a red herring, that Japan intended to resist to the cruel finish, and that the Japanese believed the flabby Allies, weak even in victory, could be convinced thereby to set more agreeable terms for surrender. Furthermore, the Japanese military insisted not merely that the Emperor remain as figurehead but that the native military ethos and apparatus be preserved: the intention was to make peace only to prepare for later war. Hiroshima, then, spared an estimated million lives, which would have been lost in a full-out invasion of the home islands. The matter of Nagasaki is more problematic, however. Oppenheimer would state in 1953 that he “didn’t understand to this day why Nagasaki was necessary.” Some of those who now believe it to have been necessary argue that the Japanese military had its fanatics who were unconvinced even by Hiroshima that it was time to give up; others suspect that the Nagasaki bombing may have been conducted principally to get the Soviets’ attention, a first strike in the long Cold War to come.
With the end of the Second World War, the Soviet Union was now high on the list of tyrannical enemies of democracy, and American nuclear weapons development and strategic theory were fashioned with that enemy foremost in mind. Oppenheimer’s sympathy for Communism, his enthusiasm for world government as the ultimate arbiter of nuclear technology, and his qualms about the proposed second generation of nuclear weapons, played a critical role in the history of the Cold War and in the precipitous course of his subsequent career. Already, in the fall of 1945, when Edward Teller was pressing for immediate development of the hydrogen bomb (the “Super,” as it was called), Oppenheimer responded coldly and tersely: “I neither can nor will do so.” Oppenheimer regarded the Super as a genocidal weapon: its only conceivable purpose would be the destruction of civilian populations by the millions — and ideally in the tens or hundreds of millions. The sole end of war with H-bombs would be annihilation. The peace that such a war would bring would be that of the mass grave; and if there were any survivors, they would likely prefer to have been among the dead. Civilization would have to be reconstituted from radioactive ash.
And yet the undeniable perfidy of the Stalinist Soviet Union convinced even Oppenheimer that the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), created to oversee the use of atoms for peace, would be above all the instrument of war. In 1947, Oppenheimer declared that the agency’s main job was to “provide atomic weapons and good atomic weapons and many atomic weapons.” And Oppenheimer wanted to be the moving force in this work, despite his ever-deepening moral qualms.
But Oppenheimer was never of one mind for long. The Soviets’ test of an atomic bomb in 1949 propelled him back to the internationalist position he had taken just after the war, believing that a single world organization should govern the nuclear policies of every individual nation. While Edward Teller insisted that the Super was needed now more than ever, Oppenheimer huffed, “Keep your shirt on.” He joined Enrico Fermi and other eminent physicists in lobbying Roosevelt’s former vice-president Henry Wallace to stop H-bomb development, “primarily because we should prefer defeat in war to victory obtained at the expense of the enormous human disaster that would be caused by its determined use.” To possess a weapon of incalculable potency — some theoreticians feared it could ignite the atmosphere in an explosive chain reaction and destroy the earth — would pose graver dangers than not to have one at all.
AEC commissioner Lewis Strauss did not agree, joining Teller as the loudest voice in favor of a “quantum jump” in the lethal capacity of our nuclear stockpile. They wanted H-bombs as fast as they could be built. For a time, Oppenheimer’s counsel prevailed in the AEC; in November 1949 the Commission narrowly voted not to go after the Super. In short order, however, President Truman overrode the Commission’s decision, and the Super project was underway.
On February 1, 1950, the day after Truman had inaugurated development of the Super, J. Edgar Hoover informed Strauss that a Soviet spy had infiltrated the Manhattan Project during the war: Klaus Fuchs, a German refugee from Nazism. Strauss blamed Oppenheimer for this terrible lapse in security, and went after him with everything he had. Oppenheimer made other powerful enemies as well, notably the anti-Communist Congressman Henry “Scoop” Jackson and the Strategic Air Command. While Oppenheimer was making the case for tactical nuclear weapons, useful on the battlefield, the Strategic Air Command’s war plan emphasized a massive and decisive nuclear first strike in the event of a conventional Soviet attack on Western Europe. According to Bird and Sherwin, the H-bomb advocates were so obsessed with the threat of Communism that they believed “Oppenheimer’s championing of tactical nuclear weapons was a ploy to block the Super Bomb.” Teller went so far as to spread the word that in trying to block the H-bomb Oppenheimer was acting on “direct orders from Moscow.” Teller may have been out of control, the Strategic Air Command may have been defending its turf, and Strauss may have been seeking personal revenge against Oppenheimer, but all the same, the gravest matters were at stake. The Soviet Union was a real threat that needed to be confronted with sobriety; seeing the defenders of the H-bomb as fanatics and conspiracy theorists foolishly belittles the existential challenge America was then just beginning to face.
These ideological battles eventually, and perhaps inevitably, became even more personal. By 1953, Oppenheimer had discovered that the Strategic Air Command’s battle plan called for the defense of its own attack force but did nothing to protect the nation itself from attack: that job would have distracted from the self-appointed task of retaliating in turn for the Soviet retaliation for an American first strike. This military secret, Oppenheimer believed, had to be made public, yet such publicity was anathema to Strauss and his band. President Eisenhower seemed receptive at first to the Oppenheimer line, but Strauss saw to it that the President wound up mistrusting the physicist. In due course, Eisenhower authorized an AEC investigation into Oppenheimer’s loyalty, and ordered the attorney general to erect “a blank wall” to keep Oppenheimer away from classified material. In November 1953, Oppenheimer was presented with a formal list of the charges against him and informed that his security clearance was suspended. As summarized by Bird and Sherwin, the charges included his membership in various Communist front organizations; his affair with one known Communist, Jean Tatlock, his friendships with others, and his employing still others in the Manhattan Project; his making a significant monthly donation to the Communist Party in San Francisco; and his delay and dishonesty in notifying the authorities of an attempt in 1943 by a friend, a Berkeley professor of French literature, Haakon Chevalier, to enlist him in delivering secret information to Soviet spies under diplomatic cover in San Francisco. Furthermore, it was alleged that Oppenheimer’s opposition to the H-bomb project persuaded other scientists that the Super ought to have been aborted at conception, setting back progress on that weapon by months or years while the parallel Soviet project blithely moved forward. In his fear and despair, Oppenheimer resorted to alcohol and sleeping pills, collapsed unconscious on his bathroom floor one night, and had to be revived by his wife and friends.
Senator Joseph McCarthy claimed to have evidence of extensive sabotage of the H-bomb project, and implied that he had the goods on Oppenheimer. Fearing that McCarthy would steal his thunder, and supposedly acting in order to prevent Oppenheimer’s defection to the Soviets before the scheduled AEC hearing, Strauss saw to it that Oppenheimer be pilloried in short order before the American public, in the very hearing that Oppenheimer requested in the hope of regaining his security clearance.
For three and a half weeks, beginning in April 1954, a three-man board conducted a so-called inquiry that seemed more like a trial. Trying first to defend his protecting Chevalier from the authorities and then embroidering the truth to make his friend seem all the more guilty in the authorities’ eyes, Oppenheimer tied himself in explanatory knots of confusion that made him seem more guilty than he actually was. Under relentless prosecutorial grilling he sputtered that he had earlier deceived investigators “because I was an idiot,” and he finally admitted that he had lied about nothing less than a treasonable overture. That lie he could not explain — but Bird and Sherwin attempt to explain it by citing a remark Oppenheimer made five years earlier to a Communist graduate student and friend of his, in which he admitted “his tendency when things get too much” to blurt out “irrational things.” How difficult it must have been for an intellectual of his abilities, pride, and accomplishment to make such an admission ordinary men can only imagine.
In the course of the interrogation, Oppenheimer gave up the names of friends, his own and those of Jean Tatlock, who were Communists or fellow travelers. General Groves, caught in a hammerlock by Strauss, who discovered that Groves had concealed what Robert Oppenheimer had told him in 1943 or 1944 about Chevalier, testified that Oppenheimer’s deception about the Chevalier affair may have stemmed from his desire to protect his brother, Frank Oppenheimer. Frank was a Communist, and Groves speculated that he may have been implicated in the espionage operation for which Chevalier was a recruiter. (Frank Oppenheimer had already been blacklisted for academic jobs, and since 1949 he had earned his living as a cattle rancher in Colorado. Finally, in 1959, the University of Colorado gave him a job teaching physics. He later designed the Exploratorium science museum in San Francisco.) The most damning testimony against Oppenheimer came from his own mouth, but the witness most reviled for bringing Oppenheimer down was his old rival Edward Teller. Although Teller stated that he believed Oppenheimer was loyal to the United States, he also professed himself baffled by some of Oppenheimer’s decisions, openly disagreed with others, and pronounced some of Oppenheimer’s actions “confused and complicated.” Put simply, Teller would rather have someone with better judgment than Oppenheimer shaping U.S. nuclear policy: “If it is a question of wisdom and judgment, as demonstrated by actions since 1945, then I would say one would be wiser not to grant clearance.” Leaving the hearing room, Teller said to Oppenheimer, “I’m sorry,” and extended his hand to him. Oppenheimer shook Teller’s hand, probably too stunned to do anything else, but gathered the presence of mind to note, “After what you’ve just said, I don’t know what you mean.”
The hearing board voted 2-1 not to reinstate Oppenheimer’s security clearance. Of the two men voting against Oppenheimer, Bird and Sherwin write, “what they were saying was that they opposed Oppenheimer’s judgments and they did not want his views represented in the counsels of government. Oppenheimer wanted to corral and perhaps even reverse the nuclear arms race. He wanted to encourage an open democratic debate on whether the United States should adopt genocide as its primary defense strategy. Apparently, Gray and Morgan considered these sentiments unacceptable in 1954. More, they were asserting in effect that it was not legitimate, not permissible, for a scientist to express strong disagreement on matters of military policy.” This assessment of motives is partially foolish and partially sound. Genocide was never the primary defense strategy of the United States: had the government wished to conduct a genocidal war against the Soviet Union, it could have done so, when it had the A- bomb for years while the Soviets did not, and when it had the H-bomb for a year and a half while the Soviets did not.
Nevertheless, the government did intend to make an example out of Oppenheimer: as a scientist who thought himself more prudent than the politicians and military men. Although other scientists were shaken by the Oppenheimer decision, and feared they might be next to be hauled over the coals, the government intention backfired: 493 Los Alamos scientists and 214 more from the Argonne National Laboratory — centers of nuclear weapons research — signed a protest against the verdict. Carson Mark, who had been an essential figure in the H-bomb project, likened the Oppenheimer trial to the “Salem witchcraft delusion.” Rather than cow the scientists, as Bird and Sherwin argue the Oppenheimer show trial did (“Oppenheimer’s defeat was also a defeat for American liberalism”), the decision inflamed and emboldened them; it made them more confident than ever of their own probity and good sense.
As for Oppenheimer, he withdrew from public life to head the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, attracting world-class physicists and other intellectual leading lights to a sort of academic utopia, where they were free to pursue their work just as they chose. Bird and Sherwin see this return of Oppenheimer’s to the academic cloister as a thrashing for the forces of enlightenment, which should have been deciding on the most urgent matters of public policy rather than relegated to the academic sidelines or reduced to mere technicians in the service of political men. “For a few years after World War II, scientists had been regarded as a new class of intellectuals, members of a public-policy priesthood who might legitimately offer expertise not only as scientists but as public philosophers. With Oppenheimer’s defrocking, scientists knew that in the future they could serve the state only as experts on narrow scientific issues.” It is natural enough that the men who designed the bombs should consider themselves most capable of deciding how best to use or not use them; but then, intellectual pride being what it is, it is only natural that men gifted in one sphere of thought should imagine themselves equally gifted in others, when in fact they are not.
The record of Oppenheimer’s own divided mind shows that technical expertise is something very different from prudence. That he was a superb technician, even that he was a man of acute sensibility, did not make him a public philosopher or statesman. He felt everything — pride in his competence and leadership during the Second World War, pride in his noble intransigence during the Cold War, intellectual pleasure in what he called the “technically sweet” conception of the H-bomb, self-disgust that he could feel such pleasure in so monstrous a creation — but could decide on nothing. Brilliance of this scattershot type effectively disqualifies a man from political decision-making. Oppenheimer was simply not the sort of man a nation can entrust with its fate.
In 1966 Oppenheimer was diagnosed with cancer of the throat, caused by forty years of heavy smoking. As Oppenheimer’s death approached, Freeman Dyson, his former subordinate at Los Alamos and his colleague at the Institute for Advanced Study, found him ever finer in spirit: “He accepted his fate gracefully; he carried on with his job; he never complained; he became quite suddenly simple and no longer trying to impress anybody.” He was noblest toward the end, and seeing him frail and dying, one thinks of both the private man and the public life he led — a life with consequences beyond the state of his own soul.
In The Ruin of J. Robert Oppenheimer, Harvard scholar Priscilla J. McMillan examines that sad wreckage of his public career like a child observing insects through a magnifying glass: detail unseen by the naked eye looms big as life but grossly distorted, so the overall impression is of a horror show: malign right-wing spiders draining the life out of an unfortunate fly that meant no one any harm. A general presumption of fatuousness and viciousness on the part of Oppenheimer’s opponents dominates McMillan’s thinking: they are villains plain and simple, bereft of serious ideas — for surely no sensible person can regard 1950s anti-Communism as intellectually serious — and driven by petty grievances and savage compulsions they were either unaware of or simply unwilling to acknowledge. Admittedly, sometimes McMillan’s attribution of low motives seems plausible or even convincing — one can well believe that Strauss’s social envy of Oppenheimer, or his resentment for a cutting remark at his expense, played some part in his antagonism, or that Teller’s vanity made him want to crush his detractors. But even then one cannot but notice that the essence of the story, the clash of fundamental ideas about political good and evil, about democracy and Communist tyranny, is missing entirely. From the first page of this book, where McMillan writes of the “disagreement” between the U.S. and U.S.S.R. as “harden[ing] into a state of permanent tension,” there sounds the familiar squealing note of childish liberal make-believe, the naïve faith that disagreements can of course be smoothed out by reasonable and well-meaning people, so that this hardening into antipathy can only be a failure to act on our better angels. McMillan prefers to believe that if only the United States had been more considerate of Soviet feelings, the unpleasantness of the nuclear arms race could have been avoided. Considering the first Soviet H-bomb test in 1954, a year and a half after the first such American test, she writes, “Once again — Hiroshima in 1945 being the first time, Truman’s H-bomb announcement of 1950 the second, and [the U.S. H-bomb test] Mike in 1952 the third — the United States led the way in the competition to build weapons of mass destruction.” She scatters similar observations in passing, implying that the United States was in fact more culpable than the Soviet Union in bringing on and prolonging the Cold War; McMillan assumes the Soviets were only playing catch-up, and that they wouldn’t have played at all if the United States hadn’t bullied them into joining the brutal game. That the Soviet regime was the foremost danger to freedom once the Nazis and imperial Japanese were defeated is simply not an acceptable thought in McMillan’s world.
And without a clear awareness that the Cold War was a holding action against totalitarian evil, the case of Oppenheimer would remain a muddle, or a vulgar rallying cry for liberal bitterness under the assumed name of moral superiority. Both the ambiguity of Oppenheimer’s legacy and the moral complexity of the nuclear age are flattened entirely. McMillan does cite one of the great liberal heroes among atomic scientists who openly believed that atomic weapons were indispensable to the cause of freedom: Niels Bohr, in asking his American colleague John Wheeler in 1950, “Do you for a moment imagine that Europe would be free of Soviet control today were it not for the atomic bomb?” After considering his mentor’s remark, Wheeler put aside his misgivings and went to work on H-bomb research at Los Alamos. From this, McMillan draws the following conclusion: “So it was to go with decision after decision for forty years, and with each upward ratchet of the arms race, each side became less secure.”
The truth, of course, is that the nuclear stand-off of the Cold War might have ensured a form of security — though a nerve-wracking one — that kept the conflict from becoming fatally hot. The Second World War killed nearly 50 million people. The various subsequent wars that for 45 years engaged the United States, the Soviet Union, and their allies or surrogates did not come close to such terrible loss of life. Under the nuclear dispensation, anxiety that taking a step too far might trigger nuclear war enforced restraint upon nations with good reason to hate each other. When the H-bomb raised the stakes yet again, it became clear that actually fighting a thermonuclear war would be insane but that threatening to fight one was a necessity; the doctrine of deterrence, based on mutual assured destruction, not only prevented thermonuclear war, but also prevented conventional wars from rampaging out of control.
Machiavelli, so widely considered the founding father of modern political morality, or immorality, understood prudence, or the ability to choose among possible courses of action, as the sine qua non of the conqueror. But in the atomic age, the foremost aim of prudence among more or less decent nations is no longer to conquer but to avoid annihilation, while also avoiding the evil of annihilating the enemy — i.e., nuclear genocide. In October 1949, the General Advisory Committee to the AEC recommended that “a super bomb should never be produced” — that it “might become a weapon of genocide.” Oppenheimer was one of the signatories. To assume that the Soviet enemy would share this American scrupulousness was the committee’s fallacy; and to make such an assumption of Stalin was the depth of folly. At this point in his life, Oppenheimer, haunted by his leading role in the first use of atomic weapons, understood only one aspect of prudence. His longing not to do evil himself blinded him to the need to ward off the evil of others. This painfully knotted man hoped with one swipe of his moral sword to rid himself of the impossible tangle and to be clear and simple for once in his life. But being Oppenheimer could never be as easy as that.
For Oppenheimer embodied two of the highest human types, the theoretical man described by Aristotle as god-like for living in the mind, among changeless truths, and the paragon of Machiavellian virtue, god-like in commanding the power of life and death over other men. No theoretical man before Oppenheimer had known such lordly power. In certain high moments he approached that Aristotelian theoretical purity which lives for the joys of knowing the world, whatever it might prove to be; in another light he thrilled at that Machiavellian power and its attendant renown; in contrary moods he reviled himself for the suffering he brought into the world, and ached to renounce his distinction and to be merely another man among men. Perhaps no theoretical man can be equal to such a burden: to feel knowledge as power when one’s mind reshapes the world irrevocably, to see the light of truth as the agent of some dark majesty, is not grace but ordeal. Oppenheimer’s agony tore him open from top to bottom. More important than any political dispute his biographers may hope to re-animate or even to settle is a sense of that agony: what it means to be a man desiring scientific and political and moral greatness and living out the crucial ideas and struggles of our time, which pierce like knives, and rend the flesh and the spirit, and allow not a moment’s relief.
Algis Valiunas is a literary journalist and the author of Churchill’s Military Histories.
You can find this online at: http://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/the-agony-of-atomic-genius
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Video Links for Honors Classes Summer Assignment on Bomb
1. US Department of Defense Film on the Atomic Bombings https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d3oSS_FP-cA
2. Hiroshima— The Decision to Drop the Bomb (UK Documentary) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6pD2wPo0IZo
3. Stop the War Coalition’s Declassified Footage of the Aftermath https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DO98p2w05LE
4. “US Bombed Hiroshima to Intimidate Soviets:” Interview with Historian Jack Powers https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YDBCCPpUEEs
5. Interview with the Last Surviving Member of the Enola Gay Crew https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MDaiQ9n5wEM
6. “Hiroshima” by Sarah Kay (TED Talk) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AXb9N2cVUs4