109 East Palace (45 page)

On June 21, the Scientific Panel met at Los Alamos and, as promised, took time to consider the divergent points of view. The most important of these was written by members of the Met Lab, including Szilard, and chaired by James Franck, Oppenheimer’s old Göttingen professor. The Franck Report stated that a surprise atomic assault on Japan would destroy America’s credibility and precipitate an arms race. It urged that a demonstration take place in the desert or on an uninhabited island, and thereby end the war without any further bloodshed. While Stimson and Groves used bureaucratic channels to effectively block Szilard’s protest from reaching Truman’s ears, Franck was too well liked and respected to ignore, and his document, signed by seven physicists, and carrying a cover letter by Karl Compton, could not be swept under the rug. Instead, they passed the political hot potato to Oppenheimer, who had distinguished himself as the leader of the scientific panel and was already committed to the position that Fat Man might fizzle and that a bloodless demonstration could not be risked.

At Los Alamos, Serber recounted, Oppenheimer presented the problems facing the Interim Committee, the plans for the fall invasion, and the fact that the medical units of the armed services had been told to prepare for half a million casualties. “Given this background, we had no doubts about the necessity of using the bomb,” he recalled. “We spoke of it as a ‘psychological weapon,’ and were sure dropping a bomb on a Japanese city would end the war.” Both Oppenheimer and Fermi argued that physicists “had no claim to special competence in solving political, social or military questions which are presented by the advent of atomic power,” as they wrote in their final report. In the end, the panel came to the conclusion Stimson and Groves had been counting on: “We can propose no technical demonstration likely to bring an end to the war; we see no acceptable alternatives to direct military use.”

There were, however, still a number of physicists at Los Alamos who were troubled by their consciences. Bob Wilson, always an instigator, decided to convene a meeting in his laboratory one evening in June to examine the “impact of the gadget” and the issues raised by Szilard’s petition. Wilson had strong moral objections and felt that more discussion was warranted. Oppenheimer, who was consumed with preparations for the test, was not happy about the meeting and at first considered not attending, but when it became clear that a great many of the Tech Area personnel planned to go, he changed his mind. Most of the mesa physicists had long ago come to the conclusion that the bomb would be used, if only because Groves would not want his hugely expensive wartime effort to have been wasted. Priscilla Greene, who attended the meeting with her husband, Bob Duffield, recalled that many also believed the decision should be left to the president, even though they did not have much faith in him, and to experienced leaders like Stimson and Marshall, who understood the military situation. Phil Morrison joined the crowd that jammed the room, and while he sympathized with Wilson’s instinct, he thought it was a dangerous attitude to take at the time. “I supported Oppie and opposed Wilson, because I knew it was inevitable,” he said, “and I thought it was unwise of us to pretend to be owners of the bomb.”

Oppenheimer stood silently to one side and let Wilson have his say. But at some point, he had clearly had enough. As laboratory director, his job was to see to it that nothing distracted his staff from completing their work on the bomb. While he personally may have shared many of Wilson’s concerns about the use of the bomb, not to mention those of the Met Lab scientists, and had devoted many hours to the subject of postwar planning with Niels Bohr, he did not feel this was the time and place for such a discussion. There would be plenty of time to revive the topic when the war was over. He then delivered a brilliant impromptu speech spelling out his conviction that the weapon had to be made known to the world and that was the only way its potential destructiveness would ever be understood and ultimately controlled.

“Oppie totally dominated the meeting,” said Phil Morrison. “He was the boss and had every right to do so. He succeeded in swaying people, but it wasn’t so much to his point of view, as [it was] simply a question of what would happen.” By the time Oppie was finished, Morrison added, there was no support for the petition: “We went away sheepishly.”

By early July, Szilard, realizing he was running out of time, made a last attempt to enlist support for his cause by writing to Edward Teller at Los Alamos, begging him to circulate a petition to the president among his Tech Area colleagues. But Teller, who was still nursing his dream of the Super, and even bigger, more powerful bombs, lined up squarely with Oppenheimer: “The things we are working on are so terrible that no amount of protesting or fiddling with politics will save our souls,” he wrote Szilard. “The accident that we worked out this dreadful thing should not give us the responsibility of having a voice in how it is to be used. This responsibility must in the end be shifted to the people as a whole and that can only be done by making the facts known.” Later, Teller would complain that he had been perfectly willing to support Szilard, but Oppenhiemer talked him out of it, telling him “in a polite but convincing way that he thought it was improper for a scientist to use his prestige as a platform for political pronouncements.” If Teller is to be believed, it would have been the first time he was inclined to do as Oppenheimer asked since arriving on the Hill.

As the Trinity test neared, Dorothy, in her small office in town, felt the tremendous jump in activity. Although she was never officially told of the date, the term “Trinity” was in the air, and she knew the decisive moment was near. Security had imposed super-secrecy measures, and G-2 was swarming all over town. Trucks, loaded with tons of batteries, cables, and transistors, barreled through town—straight through the main street of Santa Fe—without stopping on their way to the classified test site in the south. The telephone was boiling over, but the usual friendly banter with men in the Tech Area had been replaced by barked orders, and the voices “showed strain and tautness.” A steady stream of project employees, from generals and GIs to technicians and engineers, shuttled back and forth between the Hill and the distant test site. As many as seventy new people a day were checking in, including high army brass and War Department officials. There were more hotel rooms to be arranged for and very few to be found. “I in my backroom felt the tension,” she recalled. “I just felt it in my bones.”

A
New York Times
reporter by the name of William L. Laurence caused a stir when he arrived with orders from Groves to be taken directly up to the site. At first, no one could believe it. As far as Dorothy knew, he was the first and only reporter ever invited up to the classified weapons installation. After a careful double-check of his credentials, he was cleared. But his brief tour of the laboratory was the talk of the Hill. A number of air force personnel started showing up, and the word was they were training at a secret air base in Wendover, Utah. It did not require much imagination to conclude they were part of the select crew who would be in charge of dropping the bomb on Japan and finally finishing the war. American troops in Europe were being redeployed, and several of Dorothy’s friends on the Hill had received letters informing them their loved one’s unit was on the move. She only hoped the super weapon the scientists were working on would be ready before they had to begin the assault on Japan. A few young soldiers, proudly sporting battle ribbons from Anzio, had arrived at Los Alamos, and she could only imagine what they had been through by how grateful they looked to be there.

In late May, an earnest-looking young man rushed into her office at the start of the lunch hour, just as the offices on the Hill were closing for an hour. He explained he was a lieutenant colonel in the air force, and had the papers to prove it, and insisted he was late for an important meeting “up there.” Dorothy had not been notified of his arrival and explained that regulations dictated that she had to detain him until she could confirm his identity with the director’s office. But he appeared very presentable and honest, and there was something in the urgency of his pleas that made her reconsider. “I didn’t want to hold him up,” she said. “He looked like a person for whom time was very valuable.” She studied him carefully one more time and then decided, as she put it, “to shoot my whole future to the winds with one wild and unprecedented action.” In a firm, unshaking hand, she wrote out a pass for Colonel Paul W. Tibbets. It was the one and only time she ever issued a pass without previous authorization. She did not know then that he had been assigned to pilot the
Enola Gay
, which would drop the first atomic bomb. She only hoped the tardy flier with the lovely smile would not get her into too much trouble.

Tibbets was on his way to a meeting of the Target Committee in Oppenheimer’s office to discuss combat employment of the bomb. A number of the top laboratory scientists were present, including Bethe, Penney, von Neumann, and Wilson. Deke Parsons was also there, of course, as Los Alamos’s only navy captain, and would be flying on the bombing mission. The main purpose of the meetings, first held on May 10 and 11 at Los Alamos, was to select the target cities and review the status of the conventional bombing of Japan. Of the initial seventeen targets selected by Stimson’s War Department staff, the number was winnowed down, partly because some of the cities had already been destroyed by fire bombing. Priority was to be given to cities that were still untouched, so as to provide incontrovertible proof of the bomb’s devastating power—and to provoke the maximum psychological effect—to induce Japan’s prompt surrender. By the meeting on May 28 that Tibbets attended, the list had been shortened to Kyoto, Hiroshima, and Niigata.

The Target Committee members, including air corps officers and Manhattan Project consultants, went over the combat employment of the bomb, the physics of the explosion, and the proper burst height. Norman Ramsey explained that the bomb would probably explode with the force of 20,000 tons of TNT. “Even though it was still theory,” Tibbets recalled, “I wanted to ask Oppenheimer how to get away from the bomb after we dropped it. I told him that when we dropped bombs in Europe and North Africa, we’d flown straight ahead after dropping them—which is also the trajectory of the bomb.” Tibbets wanted to know exactly what he should do the moment Little Boy dropped out of the bomb bay. Oppenheimer’s reply made working out the flight maneuvers sound like a simple mathematical problem. “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,” the slender, blue-eyed physicist told him. “Turn either way 159 degrees. You will then be tangent to it. That way you will get your greatest distance in the shortest length of time from the point at which the bomb explodes.”

In June, the tempo of activity at 109 East Palace jumped markedly. Rumor had it that the army was finally going to cut a new road to Los Alamos. Apparently, some generals were treated to a particularly bumpy ride down the switchbacks—rumor had it a disgruntled soldier stuck wood in the jeep’s springs—and demanded something be done about it. But Dorothy could tell that wherever the convoys were going, the roads had to be even worse than the deeply rutted washboard connecting Santa Fe to the Hill. She might as well have been in the repair business, judging by the number of urgent requests for automotive parts that came across her desk. Drivers came in swearing under their breath, demanding special replacement parts that needed to be installed immediately in dust-caked jeeps outside. Or she would get a call telling her to get a new battery or tire to a broken-down truck outside of town. The warm weather was making the going rougher than usual. Spring had arrived with an unexpected vengeance that year, and the sun had baked the arroyos dry, the hardened creek beds cratered and barely passable in places.

Complicating matters, the stringent new security measures forbade all recreational trips to town. The truck drivers and Trinity staff were barred from making any pit stops in the little junctions, and Dana Mitchell, assistant director of the laboratory, had issued a stern travel advisory: “Under no condition, when you are south of Albuquerque, are you to disclose that you are in any way connected with Santa Fe. If you are stopped for any reason and you have to give out information, state that you are employed by the Engineers in Albuquerque. Under no circumstances are telephone calls or stops for gasoline to be made between Albuquerque and your destination.” The confidential memo further instructed them to “stop for meals at Roys in Belen,” though more than one parched driver ignored the regulations and pulled into Meira’s bar and service station in the one-horse town of San Antonio to refuel.

The atmosphere on the Hill tightened with each passing week to the point where it was almost unbearable. Dry electric storms swept across the mesa and lit up the sky, but still no rain came. Rumors swirled. The test date, once scheduled for Independence Day, was postponed, and there was talk the deadline was now mid-July. Some of the scientists and medical staff were being inoculated for tropical diseases and would be leaving soon for the Pacific. This was supposed to be a secret, but some of their wives were wild with worry and could not help confiding in one another. People shook their heads over the fact that Jim Nolan and Henry Barnett, the post’s obstetrician and pediatrician, were both being sent overseas, while Louis Hempelmann, their trained radiologist, was not. Apparently, Hempelmann was the only member of the medical staff who was not in the army, and he was fit to be tied at being excluded. Everyone’s nerves were on edge. Sam Allison’s wife, Helen, took to pestering Dorothy daily to check the local jewelers to see if they had completed the repair job on her husband’s watch. The woman seemed positively frantic on the phone, and Dorothy, with all she had to do, could not imagine what could be so important about the old timepiece. She later heard Allison had just been ordered to Trinity to conduct the official countdown of the test and had hoped to have his own watch for good luck.