109 East Palace (44 page)

The living conditions at the base camp were almost intolerable. The desert was broiling hot, with temperatures reaching above 100 degrees Fahrenheit, and even though they stripped down to shorts and shoes, they had to retreat from the brutal midday sun. The hard water and alkaline dust clogged their nostrils and lungs, and dehydration and dysentery were rampant. Work began at 6:00
A.M.
and often continued after dinner and well into the night, when it was cooler. Days that stretched for ten to eighteen hours were not unusual, but bone tired as they were, when they finally collapsed in their bunks, it was hard to sleep, especially when bedrolls had to be carefully combed for tarantulas and scorpions before being used. It did not help that on two separate nights B-29s from the Alamogordo Air Base mistakenly took their camp as a lighted target for their night exercises and nearly obliterated the site. The airmen apparently needed the practice because their one-hundred-pound bombs, carrying five-pound black powder flash units, fell wide, and all they succeeded in blowing up was the Trinity carpentry shop and stables. The barracks, where all the scientists and soldiers slept, survived unscathed. The truth was no one wanted to stay in the “dread Jornada” a moment longer than necessary.

Despite the hardships, Oppenheimer kept the Trinity crew to a tight schedule, running them through drills designed to weed out as many technical problems as possible before the actual test. Groves approved the installation of additional phone lines and a public address system for the shelters, and agreed to blacktop twenty-five miles of road at a cost of $125,000. Laboratory personnel shuttled back and forth between Los Alamos and Trinity in buses and cars. Truckloads of equipment took off for the remote southern site, convoys of two to ten trucks departing every evening after dark to avoid detection and the broiling desert sun. An entire detachment of MPs was transferred from Los Alamos to Trinity to guard the base camp during the ongoing preparations. Top army officials came through for inspection tours. In late May, Brigadier General Thomas F. Farrell, deputy military commander of the Manhattan Project, and Richard Tolman, one of Groves’ chief scientific advisors, paid the test site a visit and, as Baindridge put it, treated him to “a friendly between-the-halves fight talk.” Their agenda, probably at Groves’ suggestion, was to see how much time Oppie was spending at Trinity and to see if his presence there could be curtailed. “Essentially, they ordered me to keep Robert Oppenheimer away from the tower and the bomb before the final test for his own safety, and not let him know I was trying to do it,” recalled Bainbridge. “No way! The bomb was Robert’s baby and he would and did follow every detail of its development.”

The next day, Jumbo arrived at Trinity. Just as Groves had predicted, the huge steel bottle turned out to be a monumentally expensive headache from beginning to end. At first, the feasibility of designing the massive container had seemed doubtful. Then, even after the Los Alamos physicists and engineers had satisfied themselves that it was possible, virtually every steel company they consulted had expressed serious doubts. After much haggling back and forth, the Babcock and Wilcox Company was finally persuaded to take up the challenge, and Jumbo was commissioned at enormous expense.

The cost was further compounded by the fact that the 25-foot-long, 214-ton vessel had to be carefully transported over railroads in specially reinforced cars to New Mexico and then transferred to a custom-built, sixty-four-wheel flatbed trailer and towed by tractor thirty miles overland to the test site. But by then, more plutonium was being delivered, and the tremendous steel container was no longer in favor. Oppenheimer and his division leaders were feeling much more positive about implosion, and there was a substantial lobby opposed to using Jumbo at all, on the grounds that it would throw off all their measurements and possibly even create additional dangers. One concern was that if the heat from the explosion did not melt the steel casing, it might send pieces of jagged steel hurtling great distances. Jumbo was sidelined, and the $500,000 albatross was set up a half mile away from ground zero, where it remained unused.

All that spring, as they hurried to complete their preparations for the test, a steady stream of top advisors came to see Oppenheimer, and the Los Alamos scientists were keenly aware that the high-level deliberations concerned the use and consequences of the atomic bomb. Following the Yalta conference, there had been a debate about whether it would be better to encircle Japan and isolate it or to defeat it by direct attack. Both General Douglas MacArthur and Admiral Chester Nimitz voted for direct assault, and with their support, the Joint Chiefs of Staff approved the Kyushu invasion plan in April. The target date was set for November 1, 1945. “It was estimated that a force of 36 divisions—1,532,000 men in all—would be required for the final assault, and it was recognized that casualties would be heavy,” Groves reported in his memoir. “In such a climate, no one who held a position of responsibility in the Manhattan Project could doubt that we were trying to perfect a weapon that, however repugnant to us as human beings, could nonetheless save untold numbers of American lives.”

In Washington, Secretary of War Henry Stimson had briefed the new president on the issues created by the development of the bomb, not just as a weapon in the United States’ arsenal, but as a powerful new force in the world. But Stimson was deeply concerned about the international reaction that would result from the bomb’s being tested and used without any advance notice. Niels Bohr had been warning the American government that diplomacy with the Soviet Union was vital and that any sudden use of the bomb would inevitably trigger an arms race. Conant and Vannevar Bush, the head of the OSRD, who were sympathetic to his views, had been lobbying for greater consideration of the issues at stake.

On May 2, Stimson received approval to set up the Interim Committee to advise Truman on the postwar implications of the bomb. It was chaired by Stimson, who, at seventy-seven, was in some ways the wisest and most respected member of the administration and was uniquely qualified to undertake such a grave responsibility. He had been secretary of war under two administrations and secretary of state under Herbert Hoover, and had served as a colonel in World War I. He had also overseen the bomb project from the very beginning, had backed the appointment of Groves, and was one of the few who was knowledgeable about both the military situation and the global ramifications of using atomic weapons. The committee included General George C. Marshall; Ralph A. Bard, undersecretary of the navy; William L. Clayton, assistant secretary of state; George Harrison, a special advisor to Stimson; the incoming secretary of state, James Francis Byrnes; and three key scientific advisors—Karl Compton, Vannevar Bush, and James Conant.

Conant, reluctant to make bomb policy, asked to be excused from the Interim Committee. He was already aware, he reported to Stimson, of “a growing restlessness among scientists actively involved in the program.” Many of the scientists who had joined the Manhattan Project, particularly those who had fled Nazi persecution, had done so because of their fear of a German head start on atomic weapons and because they viewed Hitler’s regime as the supreme enemy. They did not have the same level of conviction about destroying the Japanese. He made no reference to what he felt sure was also their “lack of confidence in those of us who had been determining policy.” Conant feared that as one of the chief administrators of the Manhattan Project, he would be held responsible for the dangers posed by the bomb in the postwar world. He suspected that in helping to craft the vast covert undertaking, and in preserving the extreme secrecy that covered every phase of the research that resulted in hundreds of scientists being kept in the dark, he would ultimately be the focus of considerable suspicion and hostility. He had “serious doubt,” he wrote Stimson, that he and Bush were the proper men to serve on such a committee—“for we have been primarily distant administrators rather than active participants.”

Conant and Bush had in fact given considerable thought to the international problems that would arise from the use of the atomic bomb and had spent the past year trying to convince Stimson and Roosevelt of the necessity of preparing plans for the postwar era. During an inspection trip to Los Alamos in the summer of 1944, Conant and Bush had taken advantage of the opportunity “to discuss at leisure and in complete privacy what the policy of the United States should be after the war was over.” On the basis of that exchange and subsequent conversations, Bush had drafted a memorandum to Stimson in September 1944, which he asked Conant to sign. Conant recalled in his memoir:

This was the first of several papers we sent to the Secretary, signed by both of us, in which we pointed out totally new and alarming situations which would result if no U.S. policy was developed before the war ended and the knowledge of the existence of the bomb was made public. We advocated free exchange of scientific information with other nations, including Russia, under arrangements by which the staff of an international office would have unimpeded access to scientific laboratories, industrial plants and military establishments throughout the world.

Stimson knew Conant did not want to be drawn into the debate, but prevailed on him to serve on the Interim Committee. Conant finally agreed to do so, but only after insisting that some of the more “active participants” in the project also had a seat at the table. As a result, on May 14, at his urging, a four-man Scientific Panel, consisting of Oppenheimer, Fermi, Lawrence, and Met Lab head Arthur Compton, was appointed to provide advice. At the end of the month, Oppenheimer and Fermi traveled to Washington for the top-secret meetings, which were held over two days, on May 31 and June 1. During the first morning session, Stimson dictated the agenda and led a rather lofty discussion that centered on the future of the Manhattan Project, atomic energy, and the need to solidify America’s role as the leader of this unprecedented endeavor, and its potential benefits for mankind. It was brave-new-world talk, and Stimson held the floor as he warmed to his theme, making it clear the administration already had a stake in the postwar advantages of the soon-to-be-tested weapon.

That afternoon, the committee took up the much thornier issue of how to use the bomb against Japan. The question of whether or not the bomb should be used, which, as Conant later observed, “was the most important matter on which an opinion was to be recorded,” received scant consideration. The discussion dealt with the advisability of using it without warning as opposed to conducting a harmless demonstration of its destructive power and then delivering the Japanese an ultimatum. It was primarily a debate over tactics, and with his forceful presence, cool analytic mind, and extraordinary powers of elucidation, it was Oppenheimer’s moment to shine. Perhaps he knew he had been brought in for the day to play the role of atomic expert, or perhaps by then he had reconciled himself to the position advocated by Stimson and Groves, that the bomb was built as a weapon of war and should be used at the earliest date to quickly end the fighting. Certainly, the vision of Fat Man’s ferocity that he articulated for the committee bolstered their case: a single bomb, he told them, would wipe out a city in a flash, a “brilliant luminescence that would rise to the height of 10,000 to 20,000 feet.”

During lunch, the scientists “threshed over” the alternatives to direct military use. Lawrence favored a prior demonstration, but Oppenheimer could not conceive of a technical demonstration that would be spectacular enough to actually induce the Japanese to surrender. He cut through the morass of objections to dropping the bomb and exposed the heart of the problem: any harmless demonstration would result in losing the overwhelming shock effect of surprise. All the security measures surrounding the project had been designed to preserve that element of surprise. The debate tested Oppenheimer’s novice political skills, and eager to prove himself in this new arena, he did much of the talking for the panel. “He told us the uranium bomb couldn’t be tested, because material was being supplied too slowly,” recalled Ralph Bard. “He said the plutonium bomb might be a dud, and would have to be tested, but that even after that he couldn’t guarantee the force of the explosion of the next one. He didn’t say drop the bomb or don’t drop it. He just tried to do his job, which was to give us the technical background.”

The official minutes of the Interim Committee recorded the fateful outcome of the May 31 meeting: “After much discussion, the Secretary [Stimson] expressed the conclusion, on which there was general agreement, that we could not give the Japanese any warning; that we could not concentrate on a civilian area; but that we should make a profound psychological impression on as many of the inhabitants as possible. At the suggestion of Dr. Conant, the Secretary agreed that the most desirable target would be a vital war plant employing a large number of workers and closely surrounded by worker’s houses.”

Afterward, the members of the Scientific Panel agreed they would meet again in mid-June to finalize their recommendations to the Interim Committee. In the meantime, the foursome were told they could inform their laboratory personnel about the committee’s work in dealing with the future control of atomic weapons, though without identifying any individual members, and should generally impress upon their colleagues that the government was taking an active role in developing policy. But on his return to Los Alamos, Oppenheimer found the scientists on the Hill obsessed with the outcome of their wartime labors. At the Met Lab, Arthur Compton contended with far greater skepticism and emotional turmoil. Leo Szilard, who had earlier convinced Einstein to alert Roosevelt to the necessity of starting an American bomb program, was once again trying to precipitate American policy and had been agitating the Chicago scientists to oppose combat use of the bomb on “moral grounds” and to strongly push for a public demonstration before killing a multitude of Japanese. Szilard’s protest echoed some of Bohr’s arguments, and it stirred up old doubts and anxieties and resulted in heated discussions about the need for more responsibility on the part of the scientists in making recommendations for the weapon. In an effort to quell the dissension, Compton dispatched a series of committees to study and report on the implications of the atomic bomb.