A World at Arms (112 page)

The British concerns about possible development of atomic weapons had been calmed in the first months of World War II because of scientific advice that many more years of research would be needed before any such weapons became practical.
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In one of those developments that no one would believe if included in a work of fiction, two scientists who were refugees from Nazi Germany, and who as enemy aliens could not obtain security clearances and hence were only allowed to work on such unimportant matters as atomic physics, Otto Frisch and Rudolf Peierls, in April 1940 worked out how a U-235 bomb could be made out of a tiny fraction of the quantity originally believed necessary. This moved atomic weapons from a far distant future to a prospect a few years off. At Sir Henry Tizard’s recommendation, the British government now established the so-called Maud Commission, which urged a British program the following year.
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For a while British scientists were probably far ahead of all others in the scientific work on nuclear weapons, but their government’s refusal to share with the United States when this was suggested to them by the latter in 1941 meant that they soon fell behind the Americans.

Like the British, the Americans had been moved to investigate the possibility of nuclear weapons initially primarily out of fear that the Germans were working on them and were likely to have such a weapon before anyone else, and with dire consequences indeed. Roosevelt had been personally alerted to this possibility; an added urgency came with
the Japanese attack and the German and Italian declarations of war in December 1941. A scientific advisor, Vannevar Bush, reported to Roosevelt on March 9, 1942, on the progress to date. He argued that with a major industrial effort a weapon might be completed in 1944 and that a decision on whether to make such a commitment would have to be made soon. After further encouraging news, Roosevelt decided on June 17, 1942, that the United States would go forward with a major atomic program.
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As Mark Walker, the major scholar to work on the German atomic bomb project, has wisely pointed out in his discussion of the first official American report on the atomic bomb project, the basic difference between the British and American projects on the one hand and the German on the other, other than the major errors of the German scientists, was their different perception of the war. The Germans expected to win the war quickly and saw nuclear power as a post-war matter, whereas both the Americans and the British saw victory a long way off and hence were interested in the possibility of a weapon in time for use during the conflict.
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The American project was entrusted to the army which, using at first a headquarters in Manhattan, called the secret project by that name thereafter.
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Two issues concerning the development of the atomic bomb in the United States after Roosevelt’s decision of June 17, 1942, need a brief discussion. There was first the practical matter of actually going forward with the project. On the major issue of how to acquire sufficient U-235 to make a bomb, the government secretly took what looked like the most reasonable way, namely, it started massive work on all three likely possibilities simultaneously. In addition, the government built a fourth plant to manufacture plutonium, a new type of material correctly believed likely to be usable in atomic bombs. To build the necessarily huge secret laboratories and facilities for all this, vast lands were bought at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, Los Alamos, New Mexico, and Hanford, Washington. Under the direction of General Leslie R. Groves, the massive program went forward in the fall of 1942;
¹⁴⁷
the original prediction that the first atomic devices would be ready in 1944 was only half a year off. By late 1944, the American government, or rather the tiny number in it privy to the secret, was assured that enough fissionable material would be available for several bombs in the summer of 1945.

The second issue was that of relations on this subject with America’s British and Russian allies. By a coincidence, Churchill was in the United States and talked with Roosevelt about atomic weapons at Hyde Park three days after the President’s June 17, 1942, decision. In that conversation–of which no real record survives–the two appear to have agreed to
cooperate on atomic matters. That cooperation was, however, limited as the Americans became increasingly skeptical about British security to outsiders and reticence with the Americans. At the end of 1942 Roosevelt approved a policy of limiting the sharing of secrets, a policy Churchill protested at the Casablanca Conference in January 1943, asking Harry Hopkins to resolve this difference.
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The Americans relaxed their restrictions somewhat in view of Britain’s contribution to the whole enterprise, but even a new agreement arrived at by Churchill and Roosevelt at Quebec on August 19, 1943, did not remove all differences. A coordinating committee in Washington helped, a great deal of information was provided to the British, and the agreement to use in combat any atomic weapons only after consultation was fully adhered to, but some friction remained.
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A major aspect of Roosevelt’s reticence had been the preference for the United States rather than others to profit from any potential post-war benefits which might be derived from the great investment being made in the nuclear field by the American taxpayer, some two billion dollars by 1945, a sum incomparably greater in those years than later. Of equal if not greater importance, however, were American doubts about British security. These doubts concerned not leaks to the Axis powers but to Soviet espionage which the administration correctly believed was operating in both Great Britain and the United States.
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Roosevelt consistently opposed any sharing of nuclear information with the Soviet Union, seeing no prospect of Soviet knowledge of the subject being of use during the war and being vastly more suspicious of and concerned about Soviet intentions after the war than some post-war critics have imagined. While the second group of revisionist historians, those blaming Roosevelt for his alleged anti-Soviet attitude, as opposed to the first ones who criticized his supposed pro-Soviet views, have decried the President’s unwillingness to share American atomic secrets with the Soviet Union, the origins of his policy are not hard to find.
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There was no sign either of Soviet willingness to exchange important secret information about any subject whatever with the Western Allies, nor of any prospect that there would be wartime cooperation in weapons development, atomic or conventional. There were, however, lots of signs that Soviet espionage networks were continuing their activity in the United States, and presumably also in Britain, that these were trying to penetrate work being done in the atomic field, and that all this was likely to be exclusively of post-war application.

In his famous speech to the American Youth Congress in February 1940, denouncing the Soviet invasion of Finland, Roosevelt had described the Soviet Union as “run by a dictatorship as absolute as any
other dictatorship in the world.”
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The pro-Soviet audience had booed him, but nothing suggests that Roosevelt ever changed his mind on the subject. He recognized the enormous contribution which the Soviet Union was making in the war against Germany, and with his broad knowledge of the war appreciated this fact more than many Americans then or later; and he very much hoped that wartime cooperation might continue into the post-war era. Like Churchill, however, he saw no reason to take the Soviets into American confidence about a weapons system of potentially great significance in the post-war years, especially since he expected that the United States would dismantle most of the conventional forces it had built up during the war at the conclusion of hostilities as it had done after World War I, and in fact proceeded to do after World War II.

Roosevelt did live to learn that the Germans had dropped out of the race to build atomic weapons, but this in no way caused him to order the vast secret American effort to be relaxed. The available evidence supports the conclusion that he had expected any bombs built in time for use against Germany to be dropped on that country and any not ready in time to be dropped on Japan, in both cases in the hope of bringing a long war to a quick end.

Harry Truman was briefed on both the atomic bomb project and on Soviet espionage efforts at penetration of it as soon as he became President on Roosevelt’s death. He adhered to the outlines of his predecessor’s policies, becoming, if anything, less willing to share information with America’s allies. The accidents of chronology resulted in his presiding over the completion of the first nuclear weapons,
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so that the decision on their first use had to be made by him. That issue is discussed in
Chapter 16
; nothing suggests that Roosevelt, had he lived, would have decided differently.

The early stages of the Soviet nuclear program remain shrouded in secrecy, but these may yet become better known as new policies in the former Soviet Union bring new materials to light. Soviet physicists were as well informed on scientific developments in the nuclear field in the pre-war years as any other, but the pressures of the German invasion required that priority be given to the immediate defense needs of the country. A major program was, however, launched in 1942 and continued for the rest of the war. In this endeavor, the Soviets were aided by their espionage efforts in Britain and the United States. A reasonably clear and objective assessment of these matters remains to be written, but it would appear that the major contributions of outsiders were more on the scientific side from British individuals and more on the engineering side from Americans acting as Soviet spies.
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How these activities,
publicly most associated with the names of Klaus Fuchs on the British and Ethel and Julius Rosenberg on the American side, fit into the development of Soviet nuclear weapons in the wartime and post-war era remains to be explained.

The other belligerent apparently most involved in an effort to build nuclear weapons was Japan. While physicists in German-occupied France appear to have continued their essentially theoretical and experimental work during the war, thereby helping prepare the way for the post-war development of nuclear weapons by that country, it was in Japan that several separate attempts were made to turn the discoveries of the 1930s into weapons. Laboratories working for the army and navy were active in this field, but it was outside the practical realm of industrial capacity to devote to the project the resources required for any major production facility.

The handful of people involved in work on a uranium bomb solved some of the theoretical and a few of the laboratory problems. They, therefore, were among the few in Japan who immediately understood what had happened at Hiroshima, but they had thought it impossible for anyone else to have completed the development of nuclear weapons in so short a time.
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The Japanese would greatly have liked to make nuclear weapons but could not; they simply did not have the resources. The Japanese military attaché in Stockholm prepared a lengthy report on the atomic bomb on December 9, 1944. He was understandably not very accurate on the details of German, British, or American work on it, but few would quarrel with his stress on the bomb as the “most important technical advance in the present war.”
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If the atomic bomb was indeed the most important new technical development in World War II, that development was in practice employed within the context of strategic bombing, with that term used as meaning a strike at the enemy’s capacity and willingness to continue in the conflict. Nuclear weapons were considered a likely means of support for the landing in Kyushu planned for November 1, 1945; and if Japan had not surrendered after the dropping of the second atomic bomb, the bombs becoming available thereafter would almost certainly have been utilized in such a fashion. But Japan did surrender; the tactical support potential of such weapons was not tested in combat; and no atomic weapons have been used in warfare since 1945.

The actual use of the atomic bombs thus became the last step in a process that was debated in the pre-war years and at times during the
war. Should the air forces of belligerents be employed not only in direct support of other military operations or might they fulfill an independent role? There had been theorists in the years after World War I who argued that the new factor introduced into warfare by adding air power to the prior two forms of fighting, that on land and at sea, opened up the possibility of effectively by–passing the fronts of war to strike into the enemy’s home territory, a perspective which appeared especially attractive in the wake of the stalemated trench warfare of 1914–18. Bombing, it was argued, might destroy either the
capacity
of the enemy to continue fighting by wrecking the industrial facilities essential for the conduct of war, or the
will
to continue fighting by destroying the morale of the home front, which was equally necessary for the maintenance of a war effort, or to do both simultaneously.

The Germans had attempted to reach such a goal in World War I by bombing English cities, using dirigible airships called zeppelins and also long-range airplanes. The novelty of this approach may well have inspired some of the post-war theorists, but the actual effect of the attempt was not substantial. There was, of course, damage, and there were casualties, especially in London, but the main impact of these operations was to increase hatred of Germany in England for the introduction of this new type of warfare against urban areas far from the front. The raids also inspired the British to build long-range planes of their own capable of reaching Berlin and dropping bombs on that city. The war ended before these new planes could be employed, but the concept which the Germans had introduced into warfare remained.

The inter-war theorists who advocated an independent role for bombers, the Italian Giulio Douhet, the Briton Lord Trenchard, and the American Billy Mitchell, all believed that it would be possible to make direct, major, and independent air attacks upon the enemy which would be likely to force that enemy to make peace. It was assumed that this could be done by long-range bombers striking deep into enemy territory and bombing industrial facilities as well as urban areas. In practice, these theorists had an influence on the development of air power in several ways. It became ever more obvious that airplanes would have to have more than one engine, most likely four, to carry substantial bomb loads the required distance, and that larger numbers of them than originally anticipated would be needed. The discussion also produced widespread public fear of bombing as a likely eventuality in any war which might come. There were, however, several issues which the advocates of the new concept overlooked in all countries and one which was ignored in most. Overlooked everywhere were two inter-related problems of bombing: the plane would have to fly at a great height to
avoid being shot down but could not drop its bombs accurately from any substantial height. The idea of the dive-bomber, devised to cope with this difficulty, could not be used for any but the most limited, even if important, targets because such planes could not carry heavy bomb loads. The other problems were those of long-distance navigation and the identification of targets through cloud cover or at night. None of these puzzles was satisfactorily solved by any of the belligerents until the last stages of the war. The issue ignored by most was that of defense against fighter planes, which might be sent up to shoot down the bombers. The Americans eventually did develop a bomber, the B-17, which carried the name of “Flying Fortress” because it was designed to carry such heavy defensive armament that a group flying in close formation could supposedly defend itself against attacking fighter planes. In practice, this approach would not work as well as had been hoped, but it did provide more protection than most World War II bombers could employ.