Armageddon Science (7 page)

Days ticked by. Paralleling the early hours of the birth of the first atomic explosion, it was at 2:45 a.m. on August 6, 1945, that the B-29 bomber Victor 82 took off. It is better remembered now as the
Enola Gay,
named after the mother of pilot Colonel Paul Tibbets, onetime personal pilot of General Dwight D. Eisenhower. Tibbets headed up the 509th Composite Group, the air combat group assembled with the sole task of dropping the atomic bomb.

The Little Boy uranium bomb was dropped from the
Enola Gay
over Hiroshima six and a half hours later, dispatched from a height of thirty-one thousand feet. The people of the city were expecting an attack. After the recent terrible firebombing of Tokyo, they had been preparing. On that August day, crowds of schoolchildren were working hard making firebreaks to reduce the spread of fire in case incendiaries were dropped as they had been on Tokyo. It was hot and humid, but the work was necessary.

There were, no doubt, some wary looks when the
Enola Gay
accompanied by its two observer aircraft flew overhead—but the three planes would not have been considered much of a threat. They were clearly not part of a major bombing raid. And then that single payload fell.

From the flight deck of the
Enola Gay
it seemed an unreal experience. Pilot Tibbets later commented:

The bomb exploded. With a temperature at its core of around 60 million degrees Celsius, far hotter than the surface of the Sun, the initial flash vaporized some individuals and turned everyone openly exposed to it for around half a mile around into a fused carbon relic. Immediately after came the shock wave, which combined with that initial flash killed around seventy thousand people—flattening nearly as many buildings in the process.

Above ground zero, a vast mushroom-shaped cloud—soon to be the definitive marker of nuclear explosions—rose into the stratosphere. In reality, this shape of cloud had nothing to do with the Hiroshima blast being a nuclear explosion—a large conventional explosion will also generate a mushroom cloud—but the association of photographs from Japan and from later tests with atomic weapons is fixed forever in the human psyche.

The White House rushed out a press release containing a statement by the president.

The press release went on to make it clear that Hiroshima might be only the beginning. Japan should be ready for a true holocaust.

The new bomb was, the president was making clear, much more than just another weapon.

The immediate impact of the Hiroshima bomb was no greater than the effects of the vast firebombing raids that had already been undertaken by the Allies. These raids were themselves vehicles of mass destruction, first deployed on the night of July 27, 1943, over Hamburg in Germany. Such was the massive scale of the firebomb attack that the heat blasted air up into the atmosphere, causing devastating winds that snapped trees like twigs. Road surfaces and the glass in windows melted in the intense heat. It was, the survivors said, a firestorm (
Feuersturm
in German). Around 50,000 people died that night.

Horrific though the Hamburg raid was, it was to be repeated elsewhere, notably Dresden and Toyko, with even more casualties after British and American scientists carefully studied just how to deploy their firebombs to ensure the most destructive effect. But Hiroshima was different. First, it was the result of a single weapon, rather than a mass raid by wave after wave of bombers. And more terrifying still, the effects of the attack on Hiroshima were not over once the dust had settled.

Death did not cease in the minutes following the initial explosion. Radiation sickness would nearly double the initial death toll to well over 100,000 people during the subsequent year. That was out of a population of 350,000. Some have put the eventual total at double this. Although the explosive power of nuclear bombs is terrible, this is the truly terrifying aspect of such weapons: the silent, invisible, deadly action of radioactivity. From the very first days of working with radioactive materials, it became clear that the remarkable power of these elements was a two-edged sword. One of the earliest radioactive elements discovered was radium—and this element would claim the life of its discoverer, the double Nobel Prize winner Marie Curie, born Maria Sklodowska.

Working with her husband, Pierre, Marie Curie was studying pitchblende, a mineral found in north Bohemia that contained uranium. Pitchblende was mined near what’s now Jáchymov in the Czech Republic, and after uranium had been extracted from the ore to be used to color pottery glazes and tint photographs, the residual slag was dumped in a nearby forest. Without the uranium, the pitchblende proved still to be radioactive—in fact, whatever the other radioactive material in pitchblende was, it was much more radioactive than the uranium itself.

Marie Curie wrote to her sister Bronia that “the radiation that I couldn’t explain comes from a new chemical element. The element is there and I’ve got to find it! We are sure!” After working through tons of the pitchblende slag, painstakingly processing the material by hand, the Curies identified two new elements in the remaining material—polonium and radium. Radium, named for the Latin for “ray,” was finally isolated in 1902 in its pure metal form and proved to be the most radioactive natural substance ever discovered.

Although Marie Curie lived until 1934, her death at the age of sixty-seven from aplastic anemia is almost certainly due to her exposure to radioactive materials, particularly radium. To this day her notebooks and papers have to be kept in lead-lined boxes and handled with protective clothing, as they remain radioactive. Marie Curie was the first victim, but radium would go on to kill others. It was seen in the early days after its discovery as a source of energy and brightness, it was included in toothpastes and patent medicines—it was even rubbed into the scalp as a hair restorer.

The application of radium that would bring it notoriety and would emphasize the dangers of radioactivity was its use in glow-in-the-dark paint. Unlike modern luminous paint, which has to be activated by bright light, storing up energy to release later, radium glows constantly from its natural radioactive energy. It was frequently used to provide luminous readouts on clocks and watches, aircraft switches and instrument dials; its eerie blue glow was seen as a harmless, practical source of nighttime illumination. It was only when a number of the workers who painted the luminous dials began to suffer from sores, anemia, and cancers around the mouth that it was realized that something was horribly wrong. The women workers would regularly bring their paintbrushes to a point by licking them. This left enough radioactive residue in their mouths to cause cell damage. Eventually more than a hundred of the workers would die from the effects.

These weren’t the first deaths from radiation. It has happened as long as human beings have been around, without realizing the cause. Natural radiation levels vary hugely from place to place. Denver, for instance, has a significantly higher background radiation level than New York. Some rock types, notably granite, release significantly more radiation than others, particularly when naturally released radon gas builds up in houses. Throughout history, background radiation has triggered cancer in handfuls of individuals. But this is as nothing compared with the aftermath of the dropping of Little Boy.

Three days after Hiroshima, confusion raged in Japan. Some argued that, disastrous though the attack had been, it was a one-off that changed nothing. Against this backdrop, another B-29, named
Bock’s Car,
with Major Charles Sweeney at the controls, took off from Tinian Island to drop the world’s second plutonium bomb on the Japanese military arsenal at Kokura. Conditions were difficult. The plane came under antiaircraft fire, and visibility was poor because of palls of smoke from conventional bombing attacks. Major Sweeney diverted to the alternate target he had been given—the city of Nagasaki.

With a yield of nearly twice that of the Little Boy, the Fat Man bomb might have been even more devastating, but the terrain around Nagasaki contained the blast to some degree, reducing the impact on the outskirts of the city—even so, another seventy thousand or more died immediately as the bomb exploded. The Japanese realized that Hiroshima had been no one-off, last-ditch attempt by their enemy. The Japanese surrender followed soon after.

During the Second World War, the Soviet Union had begun a limited nuclear program, but the intense pressures the Soviets faced in their battles with Germany meant that limited resources could be deployed. Now, as the war came to an end, two factors contributed to the Soviet Union quickly playing catch-up. One was espionage. During the war, a number of scientists with Communist sympathies, who believed it was essential to have a nuclear balance, were passing as many details as they could of both reactors and bombs to the Soviets. The other factor was a rapid buildup of effort, making use of as many materials as could be retrieved from the German nuclear program in the eastern section of occupied Germany.

Stalin was determined that the Soviet Union would not be held for ransom by American power, a possibility that he believed had been demonstrated in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The nuclear program was officially made a state priority just eleven days after the bombing of Nagasaki. Its importance was emphasized by Stalin’s putting his feared lieutenant and secret police chief Lavrenty Beria in charge of the development.

Stalin did not believe that the United States would use atomic weapons against the Soviet Union for anything less than a response to a direct attack—but he still felt that the USSR’s having its own nuclear weapons was essential to maintain a balance of power. By August 1949, newly built Soviet reactors had produced enough plutonium to test a bomb that had a more than accidental resemblance to the Fat Man design. At 7 a.m. on August 29, Beria and his team witnessed the first Soviet nuclear explosion in a test in the remote regions of Kazakhstan. Although the USSR would never catch up with the United States in numbers of warheads, it would not be long before both superpowers had nuclear arsenals capable of immense destruction.

Did the bomb have to be used in Japan? It’s too late to say now, but a committee of the scientists working on nuclear weapons development, meeting in June 1945 before the Trinity test took place, believed it wasn’t necessary to use the atomic bomb in anger to have a deterrent effect. In the Franck report, named after committee chairman James Franck, the group argued against nuclear proliferation. If anything, the report suggested, stockpiling more and more nuclear weapons might be the trigger for an attack rather than a means of defense. “Just because a potential enemy will be afraid of being outnumbered and outgunned,” the report commented, “the temptation for him may be overwhelming to attempt a sudden unprovoked blow.”

The Franck report argued that the best approach for world safety would be to demonstrate the new weapon in front of an assembled group of United Nations observers, and for the United States to express its magnanimity by saying, “Look what we could have done”—but instead of using the bomb, inviting the rest of the world to share in the knowledge of nuclear technology so that everyone could work together to prevent the proliferation and the use of nuclear weapons.

Presciently, the report went on, “If the United States would be the first to release this new means of indiscriminate destruction upon mankind, she would sacrifice public support throughout the world, precipitating the race of armaments, and prejudice the possibility of reaching international agreement on the future control of such weapons.”

We can’t tell how Japan would have reacted to such a show of strength without actually experiencing the impact of an atomic bomb on a Japanese city—but we do know that proliferation and difficulties of agreement over arms control did follow from the use of nuclear weapons. As soon as the bomb was dropped, the arms race was on, though for a brief moment toward the end of 1945, it had looked as if such action would prove unnecessary.

The three leaders of the Western powers involved in the development of the successful bomb—President Harry Truman for the United States, and Prime Ministers Clement Attlee and William King for the United Kingdom and Canada—met in Washington, D.C., on November 11, 1945. The three men came up with a proposal that seemed to carry forward the spirit of the Franck report. In it they said that the atomic bomb was a means of destruction previously unknown to mankind, against which there could be no adequate military defense, and which could not be a monopoly for any nation.