The Plutonium Files (28 page)

Within days of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, politicians, military leaders, scientists, and newspaper editors across the United States began the acrimonious debate over the future of the atomic bomb. Out of the year-long discussion would emerge the Atomic Energy Commission, a powerful new department that one congressional witness proclaimed to be possibly “the most important federal bureau in the history of the republic.”
¹
The Atomic Energy Commission would indeed have godlike powers, controlling virtually every aspect of the nuclear weapons program for the next three decades.

Although few in Congress understood the excruciating deaths caused by radiation or the bomb’s long-lived and dangerous by-products, many developed a quasi-religious view toward the new weapon. “God Almighty in His infinite wisdom [has] dropped the atomic bomb in our lap,” Senator Edwin Johnson of Colorado enthused.
²
“It’s our opportunity right now to compel mankind to adopt the policy of lasting peace … or be burned to a crisp.”

Nearly everyone recognized that the atomic bomb was a revolutionary weapon that would change the nature of war and the United States’ relationship to other nations. Perhaps no country better understood this than the Soviet Union. Although the United States did not yet realize it, its former wartime ally had already obtained many of the bomb’s secrets from Manhattan Project scientist Klaus Fuchs and other atomic spies.

The issues immediately after the war revolved around the following questions: Should the bomb be placed under military or civilian control? Should the United States relinquish the bomb and its secrets to an
international commission in an effort to prevent an all-out arms race? Just how would the new weapon change the nature of war?

The Navy was the first branch of the military to recognize that it might be rendered obsolete by the bomb.
^3
4
Two days after Japan announced that it would surrender, Lewis Strauss, the astute businessman who had supported Ernest Lawrence’s prewar cancer research, urged Navy Secretary James Forrestal to conduct atomic tests on surplus ships. “If such a test is not made,” cautioned Strauss, who served as a rear admiral during the war, “there will be loose talk to the effect that the fleet is obsolete in the face of this new weapon and this will militate against appropriations to preserve a postwar Navy of the size now planned.”

Eager not to be left behind or see its own budget cut, the Army Air Forces pounced on Strauss’s idea and proposed that two atomic bombs be used to sink captured Japanese vessels. Eventually a compromise was worked out between the two fierce rivals: a joint Army-Navy test involving two, possibly three, atomic bombs would be conducted and supervised by the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The test series was dubbed “Operation Crossroads,” a name that accurately described the confusing period immediately after the war.

While the military branches began planning for Operation Crossroads, several bills were introduced in Congress that would establish and define the parameters of the Atomic Energy Commission. The first major piece of legislation, the May-Johnson bill, was introduced in October of 1945 by Democrats Andrew J. May of Kentucky and Colorado’s Edwin Johnson.
⁵
Using a corporate model, the bill called for a general manager with sweeping powers who was not subject to removal by the president, and nine full-time commissioners who could be either civilians or retired or active military officers.

The May-Johnson bill alarmed many atomic scientists. They were disturbed by the severe restrictions imposed on the dissemination of information and the heavy penalties for inadvertently disclosing atomic secrets. Above all else, they believed the legislation was nothing more than a power grab by Leslie Groves, who would eventually succeed in installing himself as the general manager.

Still smarting from Groves’s wartime policies of secrecy and com-partmentalization, the atomic scientists began traveling to Washington to lobby against the bill. Although Groves repeatedly denied that he was trying to set himself up as the atomic energy czar, many of the Manhattan Project veterans didn’t believe him. Silenced for too long, the atomic
scientists were an exceptionally eloquent and effective lobbying group that became known as the “reluctant lobby.”

On November 1, 1945, they established the Federation of Atomic Scientists in a warren of poorly heated offices in downtown Washington.
⁶
When they began attracting support from scientists in other disciplines, they changed their name to the Federation of American Scientists, an organization that still exists today and continues to closely monitor nuclear issues. William Higinbotham, the federation’s executive secretary, said in an interview in 1946 that the scientists’ lobby had no interest in politics: “The question is: Are you pro- or anti-suicide?”

The earnest young men soon became the toast of Washington’s social scene.
⁷
David Lang, who was covering atomic issues for the
New Yorker
magazine at the time, wrote, “The scientists quickly discovered, to their embarrassment, that ‘atom’ was a magic word in Washington and that they, the only ones who fully understood its meaning, were looked upon as glamour boys.”
⁸
But the scientists’ curmudgeonly boss, Leslie Groves, did not fare as well. Anti-Groves sentiment began to spread through Washington, and many a social gathering ended with an obligatory excoriation of the general. Wrote one scientist after a typical outing, “His nibs (G.G.) took quite a beating.”
⁹

As opposition mounted to the May-Johnson bill, Senator Brien Mc-Mahon, the ambitious Democrat from Connecticut, proposed the creation of the Special Senate Committee on Atomic Energy. McMahon, who had introduced the first piece of atomic legislation, also had quasi-religious sentiments about the bomb and often told his fellow senators that the bombing of Hiroshima was the greatest event in world history since the birth of Jesus Christ.

The Senate soon approved McMahon’s idea and made him the chairman of the committee he had suggested.
¹⁰
When it became clear that the May-Johnson bill would not pass, the action shifted to McMahon’s committee, where a new atomic energy bill would be hashed out over the next few months. The Special Senate Committee on Atomic Energy began its work in November of 1945 by first trying to educate itself about the Manhattan District. It took trips to the bomb project’s production sites and invited a remarkable number of the project’s stars and supporting cast to Washington to testify. From Philip Morrison, for example, the committee learned the new weapon resembled a “small piece of the sun.” From Leslie Groves, it heard that radiation was a “pleasant way to die.”

The McMahon committee, composed of mostly conservative senators, supported a strong military involvement in the new Atomic Energy
Commission. But committee staffers, as well as McMahon himself, wanted an all-civilian commission that would have absolutely no military representation. The atomic scientists threw their support behind the McMahon bill. “They felt that an army, being an agency for waging war, would naturally and properly concentrate on the improvement of atomic weapons,” wrote David Lang.
¹¹

While the members of the McMahon committee were thrashing out details of the new legislation, other officials in Washington were engaged in the equally demanding task of trying to formulate a policy on international control of the atomic bomb. As early as 1944, scientists such as Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr recognized that an arms race was inevitable unless some kind of agreement could be reached among all the nations of the world. Such a pact would require that all countries renounce the bomb, open their borders to inspections, and be willing to accept heavy penalties for violations—including an atomic attack if necessary.

President Truman had expressed his support for putting the bomb under international control. As a result, Undersecretary of State Dean Acheson had appointed a committee of consultants to develop a workable plan. Among the consultants were J. Robert Oppenheimer and David E. Lilienthal, who would eventually be appointed the first chairman of the new Atomic Energy Commission.

Working eighteen hours a day for nearly two months in early 1946, the group had developed a detailed plan that became known as the Acheson-Lilienthal Report. “The study was a peculiar one,” wrote Lang, because the consultants, working in almost complete secrecy, were trying to come up with “a way for the nations of the world to get along together without the dread of being blown up at any moment.”
¹²

The plan the consultants came up with called for the creation of an international commission that would control the world’s supply of uranium sources, aggressively support the peaceful uses of atomic energy, and conduct inspections to make sure rogue nations weren’t surreptitiously trying to build a bomb. Bernard Baruch, a seventy-five-year-old Wall Street businessman, was appointed by President Truman to present the plan to the newly formed United Nations Atomic Energy Commission. Both Oppenheimer and Lilienthal were appalled by the choice; they had wanted someone younger and more dynamic to lead the U.S. negotiations. The elder statesman supported the Acheson-Lilienthal plan, but he wanted to make sure violators would face swift and certain
punishment. Over time, the Acheson-Lilienthal proposal became known as the Baruch plan.

Under the terms of the plan, the United States would stop making nuclear weapons, destroy its existing weapons, and transfer its nuclear materials to an international authority
after
the Soviet Union had agreed to an in-depth inspection and verification program.
¹³
But the Soviets, who were secretly engaged in their own bomb-building effort, didn’t like the idea of U.S. inspectors snooping around. Andrei Gromyko, the young Soviet negotiator, offered a substitute that turned the U.S. proposal on its head and effectively challenged whether the United States was sincere about handing the bomb over to an internationally respected authority. The Soviet Union, Gromyko said, would be willing to subject itself to an intrusive system of inspections and controls provided the United States first agreed to halt its bomb production program and destroy all of its existing weapons. In other words, the United States wanted controls first, then disarmament; the Soviets wanted it the other way around.

The Baruch plan and legislation that would provide the blueprint for the domestic Atomic Energy Commission were both in their most delicate stages of negotiation when Operation Crossroads began. Unlike the Trinity test, which was conducted in complete secrecy, Crossroads was to be a highly publicized event. Scores of journalists, foreign observers, and congressmen were invited to witness the two detonations. Many people in other countries viewed the upcoming event with a mixture of horror and confusion. On the one hand, the United States was claiming that it was willing to destroy its atomic arsenal once proper controls were put into place. On the other, it was preparing to host a military extravaganza unlike any the world had ever seen.

Through the spring and early summer months of 1946, ships loaded with men and supplies sailed from California toward Bikini Atoll, a tropical paradise in the middle of the Pacific Ocean some 2,500 miles southwest of Hawaii. On May 29, the USS
Haven,
a ship that had been converted into a floating laboratory, departed from San Francisco, her hold filled with medical supplies, Geiger counters, and test tubes. On board were Stafford Warren and several hundred other men who would serve as radiation monitors. Warren may have had a little more swagger in his step as he ambled over the ship’s wooden decks. He had been a member of the supporting cast only during the Manhattan Project, but would
have a starring role during the joint Army-Navy exercise. Warren was the chief radiation safety officer for Crossroads and had orders from President Truman himself to make sure that no one was harmed by the “special attributes of the atom bomb.” Considerably older than the rest of the passengers, Warren celebrated his fiftieth birthday aboard the
Haven
and was given a “Mark III” lead jockstrap.
¹⁵

Warren had begun recruiting radiation monitors for Crossroads soon after he returned from Japan.
¹⁴
But with the rapid downsizing of the armed forces and the desire on the part of many civilian scientists to return to academia, he had run into problems. Warm bodies were so hard to come by that he had pressed his own son into service: “I had to practically browbeat Dean to do it,” he told a historian.
¹⁶
Warren also had to do some fancy talking to get his Manhattan Project colleagues to sign on. Louis Hempelmann reluctantly put aside some pressing problems he was working on to help out. Wright Langham shelved his chemical analyses of the Rochester patients. Samuel Bassett left his assistants in charge of the metabolic ward. And Joseph Hamilton and Kenneth Scott temporarily halted their analyses of the data gathered from Simeon Shaw. In return, Warren tried to spare his medical colleagues from the rigors of daily work. “I felt they might be kind of soft, physically, and that it might be kind of hazardous, so I didn’t want them to get hurt.”
¹⁷

As the floating laboratory plowed west across the glassy blue ocean, lectures were held on the balmy navigation deck. The first talk, on security, so intimidated many of the men that they threw their scientific notebooks and cameras overboard.
¹⁸
The slow somnolent days were filled with lessons on nuclear physics, radioactivity, and the intricacies of the detection instruments. The evenings were filled with murder mystery films, poker games, and coffee drinking.

On June 12 the bored and restless passengers on the
Haven
spotted the gray silhouettes of ships and the low line of Bikini Atoll. “A little eggshell of coral, like hundreds of others out here; hitherto unknown, unremembered for glamour or sorrow, it now suddenly becomes a pinpoint in the sea of human affairs, truly a crossroads,” wrote David Bradley, one of the radiation monitors.
¹⁹