American Prometheus (53 page)
There was much that Oppenheimer did not know. As he later recalled, “We didn’t know beans about the military situation in Japan. We didn’t know whether they could be caused to surrender by other means or whether the invasion was really inevitable. But in the backs of our minds was the notion that the invasion was inevitable because we had been told that.” Among other things, he was unaware that military intelligence in Washington had intercepted and decoded messages from Japan indicating that the Japanese government understood the war was lost and was seeking acceptable surrender terms.
On May 28, for instance, Assistant Secretary of War John J. McCloy urged Stimson to recommend that the term “unconditional surrender” be dropped from America’s demands on the Japanese. Based on their reading of intercepted Japanese cable traffic (code-named “Magic”), McCloy and many other ranking officials could see that key members of the Tokyo government were trying to find a way to terminate the war, largely on Washington’s terms. On the same day, Acting Secretary of State Joseph C. Grew had a long meeting with President Truman and told him the very same thing. Whatever their other objectives, Japanese government officials had one immutable condition, as Allen Dulles, then an OSS agent in Switzerland, reported to McCloy: “They wanted to keep their emperor and the constitution, fearing that otherwise a military surrender would only mean the collapse of all order and of all discipline.”
On June 18, Truman’s chief of staff, Adm. William D. Leahy, wrote in his diary: “It is my opinion at the present time that a surrender of Japan can be arranged with terms that can be accepted by Japan. . . .” The same day, McCloy told President Truman that he believed the Japanese military position to be so dire as to raise the “question of whether we needed to get Russia in to help us defeat Japan.” He went on to tell Truman that before a final decision was taken to invade the Japanese home islands, or to use the atomic bomb, political steps should be taken that might well secure a full Japanese surrender. The Japanese, he said, should be told that they “would be permitted to retain the Emperor and a form of government of their own choosing.” In addition, he said, “the Japs should be told, furthermore, that we had another and terrifyingly destructive weapon which we would have to use if they did not surrender.”
According to McCloy, Truman seemed receptive to these suggestions. American military superiority was such that by July 17 McCloy was writing in his diary: “The delivery of a warning now would hit them at
the
moment. It would probably bring what we are after—the successful termination of the war.”
According to Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, when he was informed of the existence of the bomb at the Potsdam Conference in July, he told Stimson he thought an atomic bombing was unnecessary because “the Japanese were ready to surrender and it wasn’t necessary to hit them with that awful thing.” Finally, President Truman himself seemed to think that the Japanese were very close to capitulation. Writing in his private, handwritten diary on July 18, 1945, the president referred to a recently intercepted cable quoting the emperor to the Japanese envoy in Moscow as a “telegram from Jap Emperor asking for peace.” The cable said: “Unconditional surrender is the only obstacle to peace. . . .” Truman had extracted a promise from Stalin that the Soviet Union would declare war on Japan by August 15—an event that he and many of his military planners thought would be decisive. “He’ll [Stalin] be in the Jap war on August 15,” Truman wrote in his diary on July 17. “Fini Japs when that comes about.”
Truman and the men around him knew that the initial invasion of the Japanese home islands was not scheduled to take place until November 1, 1945—at the earliest. And nearly all the president’s advisers believed the war would be over prior to that date. It would surely end with the shock of a Soviet declaration of war—or it might end with the kind of political overture to the Japanese that Grew, McCloy, Leahy and many others envisioned: a clarification of the terms of surrender to specify that the Japanese could keep their emperor. But Truman—and his closest adviser, Secretary of State James F. Byrnes—had decided that the advent of the atomic bomb gave them yet another option. As Byrnes later explained, “. . . it was ever present in my mind that it was important that we should have an end to the war before the Russians came in.”
Short of a clarification of the terms of surrender—a move Byrnes opposed on domestic political grounds—the war could end prior to August 15 only with the use of the new weapon. Thus, on July 18, Truman noted in his diary, “Believe Japs will fold up before Russia comes in.” Finally, on August 3, Walter Brown, a special assistant to Secretary Byrnes, wrote in his diary, “President, Leahy, JFB [Byrnes] agreed Japs looking for peace. (Leahy had another report from the Pacific.) President afraid they will sue for peace through Russia instead of some country like Sweden.”
Isolated in Los Alamos, Oppenheimer had no knowledge of the “Magic” intelligence intercepts, no knowledge of the vigorous debate going on among Washington insiders over the surrender terms, and no idea that the president and his secretary of state were hoping that the atomic bomb would allow them to end the war without a clarification of the terms of unconditional surrender, and without Soviet intervention.
No one can be certain of Oppenheimer’s reaction had he learned that on the eve of the Hiroshima bombing, the president
knew
the Japanese were “looking for peace,” and that the military use of atomic bombs on cities was an option rather than a necessity for ending the war in August. But we do know that after the war he came to believe that he had been misled, and that this knowledge served as a constant reminder that it was henceforth his obligation to be skeptical of what he was told by government officials.
TWO WEEKS after Oppenheimer wrote his June 16 memo summarizing the views of the science panel, Edward Teller came to him with a copy of a petition that was circulating throughout the Manhattan Project’s facilities. Drafted by Leo Szilard, the petition urged President Truman not to use atomic weapons on Japan without a public statement of the terms of surrender: “. . . the United States shall not resort to the use of atomic bombs in this war unless the terms which will be imposed upon Japan have been made public in detail and Japan knowing these terms has refused to surrender. . . .” Over the next few weeks, Szilard’s petition garnered the signatures of 155 Manhattan Project scientists. A counter-petition mustered only two signatures. In a separate July 12, 1945, Army poll of 150 scientists in the project, seventy-two percent favored a demonstration of the bomb’s power as against its military use without prior warning. Even so, Oppenheimer expressed real anger when Teller showed him Szilard’s petition. According to Teller, Oppie began disparaging Szilard and his cohorts: “What do they know about Japanese psychology? How can they judge the way to end the war?” These were judgments better left in the hands of men like Stimson and General Marshall. “Our conversation was brief,” Teller wrote in his memoirs. “His talking so harshly about my close friends and his impatience and vehemence greatly distressed me. But I readily accepted his decision. . . .”
Teller claims in his memoirs to have thought in 1945 that use of the bomb without a demonstration and a warning “would be of uncertain expediency and of deplorable morality.” But his actual reply to Szilard, dated July 2, 1945, shows that he came to quite the contrary conclusion. “I am not really convinced of your objections [to immediate military use of the weapon],” Teller wrote. The gadget was indeed a “terrible” weapon, but Teller thought the only hope for humanity was to “convince everybody that the next war would be fatal. For this purpose actual combat use might even be the best thing.” At no point did Teller even hint that he thought a demonstration practical, or a warning necessary. “The accident that we worked out this dreadful thing,” Teller wrote Szilard, “should not give us the responsibility of having a voice in how it is to be used.”
This, of course, was one of the arguments Oppenheimer had advanced in his June 16 memo to Stimson. He was convinced that nothing more need be done by the scientific community. He told Ralph Lapp and Edward Creutz, two physicists at Los Alamos who had agreed to circulate Szilard’s petition, that, “since an opportunity has been given to people here to express, through him, their opinions on the matters concerned, the proposed method [the petition] was somewhat redundant and probably not very satisfactory.” Oppie could be persuasive. Creutz explained to Szilard, somewhat apologetically, “Because of his [Oppenheimer’s] very frank and non-peremptory treatment of the situation, I should like to abide by his suggestions.” Oppie would not expedite the petition to Washington; instead, it would be sent through normal Army channels—and it would arrive too late.
Oppie informed Groves of the Szilard petition—and did so in a disparaging tone: “The enclosed note [from Szilard to Creutz] is a further incident in the developments which I know you have watched with interest.” Groves’ aide, Colonel Nichols, called Groves that same day and in the course of their discussion of the Szilard petition, “Nichols asked why not get rid of the lion [Szilard] and general stated can’t do that at this time.” Groves understood that firing or arresting Szilard would inspire a revolt among the other scientists. But with Oppenheimer equally annoyed by Szilard’s actions, Groves felt confident that the problem could be safely contained until the bomb was ready.
THE SUMMER of 1945 was unusually hot and dry on the mesa. Oppenheimer pushed the men in the Tech Area to work longer hours; everyone seemed on edge. Even Miss Warner, isolated as she was down in the valley, noticed a change: “There was tension and accelerated activity on the Hill. . . . Explosions on the Plateau seemed to increase and then to cease.” She observed much more traffic on the road headed south—toward Alamogordo.
Initially, General Groves had opposed the idea of a test of the implosion bomb, on the grounds that plutonium was so scarce that not an ounce should be wasted. Oppenheimer convinced him that a full-scale test was absolutely necessary because of the “incompleteness of our knowledge.” Without a test, he told Groves, “the planning of the use of the gadget over enemy territory will have to be done substantially blindly.”
More than a year earlier, in the spring of 1944, Oppenheimer had spent three days and nights bouncing around the barren, dry valleys of southern New Mexico in a three-quarter-ton Army truck, searching for a suitably isolated stretch of wilderness where the bomb could be safely tested. Accompanying him were Kenneth Bainbridge, an experimental physicist from Harvard, and several Army officers, including the Los Alamos security officer, Capt. Peer de Silva. At night, the men slept in the truck’s flatbed to avoid rattlesnakes. De Silva later remembered Oppenheimer lying in a sleeping bag, gazing up at the stars and reminiscing about his student days at Göttingen. For Oppenheimer, it was a rare opportunity to savor the spartan desert he so loved. Several expeditions later, Bainbridge finally selected a desert site sixty miles northwest of Alamogordo. The Spanish had called the area the Jornada del Muerto—the “Journey of Death.”
Here the Army staked out an area eighteen by twenty-four miles in size, evicted a few ranchers by eminent domain and began building a field laboratory and hardened bunkers from which to observe the first explosion of an atomic bomb. Oppenheimer dubbed the test site “Trinity”—though years later, he wasn’t quite sure why he chose such a name. He remembered vaguely having in mind a John Donne poem that opens with the line “Batter my heart, three-person’d God . . .” But this suggests that he may also have once again been drawing from the Bhagavad-Gita; Hinduism, after all, has its trinity in Brahma the creator, Vishnu the preserver, and Shiva the destroyer.
EVERYONE WAS exhausted from working such long hours. Groves called for speed, not perfection. Phil Morrison was told that “a date near August tenth was a mysterious final date which we, who had the technical job of readying the bomb, had to meet at whatever cost in risk or money or good development policy.” (Stalin was expected to enter the Pacific War no later than August 15.) Oppenheimer recalled, “I did suggest to General Groves some changes in the bomb design which would have made more efficient use of the material. . . . He turned them down as jeopardizing the promptness of availability of these bombs.” Groves’ timetable was driven by President Truman’s scheduled meeting with Stalin and Churchill in Potsdam in mid-July. Oppenheimer later testified at his security hearing, “I believe we were under incredible pressure to get it done before the Potsdam meeting and Groves and I bickered for a couple of days.” Groves wanted a tested and usable bomb in Truman’s hands before that conference ended. Earlier that spring, Oppenheimer had agreed to a target date of July 4—but this soon proved to be unrealistic. By the end of June, after further pressure from Groves, Oppenheimer told his people that they were now aiming for Monday, July 16.
Oppenheimer had delegated Ken Bainbridge to supervise preparations at the Trinity site, but he also sent his brother, Frank, to serve as Bainbridge’s chief administrative assistant. To Robert’s delight, Frank had arrived in Los Alamos in late May, leaving Jackie and their five-year-old daughter, Judith, and three-year-old son, Michael, in Berkeley. Frank had spent the early war years working with Lawrence in the Radiation Lab. The FBI and Army intelligence kept a close watch on him, but he seems to have followed Lawrence’s advice and abandoned all political activity.
Frank began camping out at the Trinity site in late May 1945. Conditions were spartan, to say the least. The men slept in tents and toiled in hundred-degree weather. As the target date approached, Frank felt it only prudent to prepare for disaster. “We spent several days finding escape routes through the desert,” he recalled, “and making little maps so everybody could be evacuated.”
On the evening of July 11, 1945, Robert Oppenheimer walked home and said goodbye to Kitty. He told her that if the test was successful, he would get a message to her saying, “You can change the sheets.” For good luck, she gave him a four-leaf clover from their garden.