Pandora's Keepers (36 page)

The dropping of the atomic bomb was so dramatic, the awed shock it provoked throughout the world was so deep, and the sense
that it was, in President Truman’s words, “the greatest thing in history” seemed so incontestable that there was a general
instinct to think that it had brought one phase of human affairs to an end. The events of the summer of 1945, Hans Bethe concurred,
“changed everything.”
³⁵

T
HE TRINITY TEST
, closely followed by Hiroshima and Nagasaki, shook the atomic scientists out of their absorption in the technical problems
of building the bomb and awakened them to its enormous moral and political implications. The scientific work was finished,
and the awful magnitude of what they had done began to sink in. I.I. Rabi voiced their confused reactions in a widely read
magazine article that fall. “I would say that we are frankly pleased, terrified, and to an even greater extent embarrassed
when we contemplate the results of our wartime efforts,” he wrote. “Our terror comes from the realization—which is nowhere
more strongly felt than among us—of the tremendous forces of destruction now existing in an all too practical form.”
¹
Many felt “a feeling of accomplishment
and
a feeling of revulsion about what we had done,” as Bethe said.
²

All of them were haunted by the sarcasm of a Japanese radiologist in Hiroshima. “I did the experiment years ago, but only
on a few rats. But you Americans—you are wonderful. You have made the
human
experiment.” “No one,” wrote a Los Alamos physicist, “could fail to carry the scar of such a cutting remark.”
³
Many decided to leave Los Alamos. They left for many reasons, and not all explained why. Those who watched them go saw answers
in their eyes or read them in letters written some time afterward. “We all felt,” Bethe remembered, “that, like the soldiers,
we had done our duty and that we deserved to return to the type of work that we had chosen as our life’s career, the pursuit
of pure science and teaching. Moreover, it was not obvious that there was any need for a large effort on atomic weapons in
peacetime.”
⁴

Some felt a sense of unease, even those who believed that ending a bloody war had justified using the bomb. Many came to regard
themselves, in the phrase of
Time
magazine, as the “world’s guilty men.”
⁵
Oppenheimer spoke for himself and many other physicists when he wrote, “In some sort of crude sense which no vulgarity, no
humor, no overstatement can quite extinguish, the physicists have known sin; and this is a knowledge which they cannot lose.”
⁶
Oppenheimer’s words expressed the anguish of those caught between the commitment to pursue knowledge wherever it might lead
and the realization that the knowledge discovered had caused great misery to other human beings.

Oppenheimer’s anxiety was intensified by fear that the bomb threatened popular respect for the discipline of science he revered.
Although physicists now seemed to wear the “tunic of Superman,” in the phrase of
Life
magazine, and to stand in the spotlight of a thousand suns, the physicists themselves knew better.
⁷
“If we take the stand that our object is merely to see that the next war is bigger and better,” Rabi warned, “we will ultimately
lose the respect of the public. In popular demagogy we [will] become the unpaid servants of the ‘munitions makers’ and mere
technicians rather than the self-sacrificing public-spirited citizens which we feel ourselves to be.”
⁸
The bomb seemed an ominous refutation of the Enlightenment principle—an article of faith to them—that more knowledge would
inevitably bring more happiness and progress. “We have made a thing, a most terrible weapon,” admitted Oppenheimer, one “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, or whether it is good
to learn about the world, to try to understand it, to try to control it.”
⁹
Slowly, as if feeling their way in a blinding light, they struggled to understand what it all meant.

Oppenheimer was not the only physicist uneasy about a world armed with atomic bombs, but his exhaustion was deeper than most.
The day after Nagasaki, Lawrence flew to Los Alamos (he had overcome his fear of airplanes), where he found his Berkeley colleague
looking weary and feeling pessimistic, his hair turning gray. “I know that he felt guilty in spite of having told Truman the
weapon had to be used,” recalled Bethe. “He felt guilty for having directed the project.”
¹⁰

Compton and Fermi joined Oppenheimer and Lawrence that weekend to draft a report for Washington on postwar atomic policy.
The four were emerging from the secret project as public heroes; not just policy makers but also the American people were
clamoring for their views. Understanding this, they eschewed merely technical advice and decided to draft a plea for international
control. “Other powers,” they presciently warned, “can produce these weapons in a few years and all too soon be in a threatening
position. We consider it imperative, therefore, to take determined steps toward international arrangements that will make
such developments highly improbable, if not impossible.”
¹¹

“We are convinced,” they went on, “that weapons quantitatively and qualitatively far more effective than now available will
result from further work on these problems.” They were referring to the superbomb. The physicists further emphasized their
“firm opinion” that “no military countermeasures will be found which will be adequately effective in preventing the delivery
of atomic weapons” on the American homeland. This led to their most sobering but farsighted conclusion:

We are not only unable to outline a program that would assure to this nation for the next decades hegemony in the field of
atomic weapons; we are equally unable to insure that such hegemony, if achieved, could protect us from the most terrible destruction.

The development, in the years to come, of more effective atomic weapons, would appear to be a most natural element in any
national policy of maintaining our military forces at great strength; nevertheless we have grave doubts that this further
development can contribute essentially or permanently to the prevention of war. We believe that the safety of this nation—as
opposed to its ability to inflict damage on an enemy power—cannot lie wholly or even primarily in its scientific or technical
prowess. It can be based only on making future wars impossible. It is our unanimous and urgent recommendation to you that,
despite the present incomplete exploitation of technical possibilities in this field, all steps be taken, all necessary international
arrangements be made, to this one end.
¹²

Oppenheimer took their report to Washington in late August. The timing was unfortunate; the report stood in jarring contrast
to the triumphant mood of the capital, where policy makers were exulting in victory over Japan, anticipating trouble with
Russia, and more interested in building up the U.S. atomic arsenal than in pursuing international control. Oppenheimer described
Washington’s reaction in a disappointed letter back to Lawrence at Berkeley:

August 30, 1945

Dear Ernest:

After our meetings [at Los Alamos] I had a few days in Washington: it was a bad time, too early for clarity. I took our letter
to Bush and to [Stimson’s assistant] Harrison—Conant, Stimson, Compton were all away—and had an opportunity with them to explain
in more detail than was appropriate in a letter what our common feelings were in this all-important thing. I emphasized of
course that all of us would earnestly do whatever was really in the national interest, no matter how desperate and disagreeable;
but that we felt reluctant to promise that much real good could come of continuing the atomic bomb work just like poison gases
after the last war…. I had the fairly clear impression from the talks that things had gone most badly at Potsdam, and that
little or no progress had been made in interesting the Russians in collaboration or control.
^*
I don’t know how seriously an effort was made: apparently neither Churchill nor Attlee nor Stalin was any help at all, but
this is only my conjecture. While I was in Washington two things happened, both rather gloomy: the President issued an absolute
Ukase, forbidding any disclosures on the atomic bomb—and the terms were broad—without his personal approval. The other was
that Harrison took our letter to Byrnes, who sent back word just as I was leaving that “in the present critical international
situation there was no alternative to pushing the [atomic] program full steam ahead.”… I do not come away from a profound
grief, and a profound perplexity about the course we should be following….

Affectionately
,
Robert
¹³

Oppenheimer sensed that policy makers did not grasp what scientists had put into their hands. Just weeks after the war, in
response to a reporter’s question, he said: “If you ask: ‘Can we make [atomic bombs] more terrible?’ the answer is yes. If
you ask: ‘Can we make a lot of them?’ the answer is yes. If you ask: ‘Can we make them terribly more terrible?’ the answer
is probably.”
¹⁴
It was already clear to Oppenheimer that the atomic bomb represented only the
beginning
of a revolutionary new level of destructiveness. And he and the other atomic scientists were no longer in control, if they
ever had been. This sobering realization led Oppenheimer, Lawrence, Compton, and Fermi to use even stronger language in a
second report they prepared for policy makers in late September. This time, the four intended to jolt Washington into confronting
the bomb’s dangers. “The realization of atomic weapons constitutes a peril of the first magnitude for this nation and for
the world,” they bluntly wrote. They warned that America’s nuclear monopoly would not last—the atomic genie had been let out
of the bottle; other powers would one day develop their own weapons of mass destruction. All of this raised the specter of
an atomic arms race, which they doubted America could win because the destructiveness of nuclear weapons could be increased
almost infinitely and the development of effective countermeasures was unlikely. “There is no foundation for the hope that
this nation can be safe against atomic weapons on the basis of technical prowess or technical ingenuity alone,” noted these
technical wizards, with deliberate irony.

The looming issue for all of them was the superbomb. As Teller’s latest report had suggested, there was a good chance it could
be developed. They flatly opposed such development on moral grounds. “We feel that this development should
not
be undertaken,”
they wrote, “primarily because we should prefer defeat in war to a victory obtained at the expense of the enormous human disaster
that would be caused by its determined use.” Their dread was rooted in the superbomb’s boggling destructiveness: the atomic
bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki had leveled four square miles; a superbomb would level one hundred square miles.

They cited other reasons for restraint. “If developed here, other great powers must follow suit,” they warned. Within a decade
the United States could develop enough atomic bombs to destroy “all major industrial and military facilities throughout the
world” anyway. The bomb had transformed the nature of war: “all the world faces a future in which sudden destruction is possible
at any time.” Instead of building bigger bombs, they urged “work[ing] with speed and determination toward establishing a world
‘government’” that, to be effective, would require “the United States, along with the other great powers, to place into its
hands all atom bomb and other major war-making facilities, and to submit to international inspection and control of work in
the field of atomic energy.”
¹⁵
It was a bold—even revolutionary—conclusion, requiring an unprecedented—and perhaps unrealistic—political transformation.
But they saw no other way. “The only solution to the problem,” they pointedly concluded, “must lie in politics, and this implies
a profound and shattering alteration in the relations among nations.”
¹⁶

Although curious as scientists, they nevertheless had concluded that the superbomb was a problem that should not be solved—some
science had become too deadly, its implications too dangerous. Breaking with their past, they had decided to put the interests
of humanity above the pursuit of knowledge, a courageous and farsighted stance that reflected the revulsion that the mass
killings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki had brought over each of them. They could not foresee that some of them would reverse their
stance when America’s effort at international control failed and the Cold War set in.
¹⁷