Inside the Centre: The Life of J. Robert Oppenheimer (85 page)

At Tinian, therefore, there was little time to reflect on the Hiroshima bomb. Bernard O’Keefe, a young navy officer who was part of the assembly team, remembers: ‘With the success of the Hiroshima weapon, the
pressure to be ready with the much more complex implosion device became excruciating.’

While the bomb that would destroy Nagasaki was being hurriedly assembled, diplomatic manoeuvres were being pursued with equal urgency – the bombing of Hiroshima having accelerated both the Soviet Union’s plans for joining the war against Japan and the Japanese plans for negotiating peace. On 8 August, the Japanese Foreign Minister was hoping to secure Soviet mediation in the search for acceptable surrender terms. When, however, his ambassador in Moscow met the Soviet Foreign Minister, Vyacheslav Molotov, he was told that, far from brokering a peace, the Soviet Union was entering the war against Japan, with effect from the following day. Bearing in mind the time difference between Moscow and Japan, this meant that, within two hours of that meeting, at midnight local time, the 1.6 million Soviet troops that had massed on the Manchurian border received their orders to attack.

Meanwhile, at Tinian the Fat Man bomb assembled by O’Keefe and his team was loaded into the bomb bay of a B-29 called
Bock’s Car
, named after its usual pilot, Frederick Bock. On this mission, however, the bomber would be piloted by Major Charles W. Sweeney, who had been told that his primary target was Kokura, one of Japan’s most important arsenals. The secondary target was the port of Nagasaki, an important centre of ship-building. Neither the President nor Oppenheimer and the rest of the Scientific Advisory Panel were involved in the decision to carry out this second atomic bombing. Indeed, no separate decision was made, or deemed necessary. The directive of 24 July had ordered General Spaatz to drop the first bomb ‘after about 3 August’ and subsequent bombs ‘as soon as made ready by the project staff’. He would therefore keep dropping whatever bombs were made available to him until he was ordered to stop.

Just before dawn on 9 August,
Bock’s Car
took off from Tinian. Unlike the first mission, this second one was beset with problems. For one thing, the weather – squally showers and storms – was hardly ideal. Second, they discovered just before take-off that
Bock’s Car
had a defective fuel pump, which meant that 800 gallons of fuel could not be pumped into the engine from the bomb bay. This meant that the plane would have to fly to Japan and back with the extra weight of those gallons of fuel. Despite these problems, so keen were Groves and Purnell to get a second bomb off
quickly that there was no question of delaying the flight. Immediately before taking off, Sweeney was approached by Purnell. ‘Young man,’ he said, ‘do you know how much that bomb cost?’ ‘About twenty-five million dollars,’ Sweeney replied. ‘See that we get our money’s worth,’ Purnell told him.

Accompanied by just one observation plane (the other got separated in the bad weather),
Bock’s Car
arrived at Kokura at 10.44 a.m. local time to find that the target was obscured by cloud. Sweeney therefore decided to switch to Nagasaki. The sky above that city too was covered in cloud, but at about 11 a.m. a hole opened in the cloud cover long enough (twenty seconds) for the bombardier to see the target. The bomb was dropped and exploded with a force significantly greater than that of the Hiroshima Little Boy bomb: 22,000 rather than 12,500 tons of TNT. Because the hills around the city contained the blast, however, the casualties at Nagasaki were not quite so high. The best estimate seems to be that at the moment of impact around 40,000 people died and 60,000 were injured. It is thought that, by 1946, mainly because of the lingering effects of radiation, the number of deaths caused by the bomb had risen to about 70,000.

Robert Serber was supposed to be on one of the observation planes for this second mission, but the pilot ordered him off the plane because he did not have a parachute. As Serber was the only one who knew how to operate the high-speed camera that was to have been used, no photographs of the raid were taken from the air. Even if he had been on board, no photographs would have been taken, since the plane in question was the one that got separated. When the bomb was being dropped on Nagasaki, that observation plane was still flying over Kokura. By the time the pilot realised what had happened and flew to Nagasaki, the bomb had been dropped and the mushroom cloud had already appeared. ‘The only picture we got,’ recalls Serber ruefully, ‘was taken by his tail gunner with a snapshot camera.’

Moments before the bomb was dropped, the other observation plane dropped some instruments attached to parachutes that would enable the scientists to measure the force of the blast and some of its effects. Among those instruments was a pressure cylinder to which Serber, Alvarez and Morrison had attached a personal letter to the Japanese physicist Ryokichi Sagane, whom they had known at Berkeley and who was then a professor at the University of Tokyo. The point of the letter was to tell Sagane on good authority about the threat facing Japan:

To some extent, this threat of more bombs was a bluff. Immediately after the Nagasaki bombing the Allies did not possess any more atomic bombs. It is true that, as Groves puts it, ‘our entire organization both at Los Alamos and on Tinian was maintained in a state of complete readiness to prepare additional bombs’, but, as he himself reported to General Marshall, the earliest date at which the next bomb could be assembled for use was 17 August, and almost everybody expected the war to be over by then. Even Groves says that when he received reports indicating that the Nagasaki bomb had inflicted a smaller number of casualties than they had expected, he was relieved, ‘for by that time I was certain that Japan was through and that the war could not continue for more than a few days’.

In fact, the very day after the bombing of Nagasaki, Washington received a message sent via Switzerland that the Japanese were ready to accept the terms of the Potsdam Declaration, except one: they would not accept ‘any demand which prejudices the prerogatives of His Majesty as a Sovereign Ruler’. At the same time the Japanese government issued an urgent plea to the United States to call a halt to the atomic bombing. This bomb, the Japanese declared, had ‘the most cruel effects humanity has ever known’. Its use in ‘massacring a great number of old people, women, children; destroying and burning down Shinto and Buddhist temples, schools, hospitals, living quarters, etc.’, the statement claimed, constituted a ‘new crime against humanity and civilization’.

It was not just the Japanese who had had enough of the terrifying carnage of nuclear warfare. From the diary of Henry Wallace, who was at the time a member of Truman’s cabinet, we learn that on 10 August Truman gave the order to stop the atomic bombing. Truman, Wallace records, ‘said the thought of wiping out another 100,000 people was too horrible. He didn’t like the idea of killing, as he said, “all those kids”.’ The following day, James Byrnes, as Secretary of State, responded to the not-quite unconditional Japanese offer of surrender in a way that sought to nullify the one condition they had made, insisting:

Despite having people around him who were urging him to continue the fight, Emperor Hirohito realised there was no sane course of action left open to him other than the acceptance of these terms. ‘I cannot endure the thought of letting my people suffer any longer,’ he told his ministers and counsellors on the morning of 14 August. ‘A continuation of the war would bring death to tens, perhaps even hundreds, of thousands of persons. The whole nation would be reduced to ashes. How then could I carry on the wishes of my imperial ancestors?’

Later that day, Truman announced that Japan had accepted the terms of surrender offered by the Allies. The war was over. The following day, the Emperor took the unprecedented step of broadcasting a message to his subjects, telling them that, partly because ‘the enemy has begun to employ a new and most cruel bomb, the power of which to do damage is indeed incalculable’, he had ordered the acceptance of the Potsdam Declaration.

‘Seldom, if ever,’ commented the journalist and broadcaster Edward Murrow, ‘has a war ended leaving the victors with such a sense of uncertainty and fear, with such a realization that the future is obscure and that survival is not assured.’ To be sure, ‘VJ Day’ was celebrated with parties and processions, both in the UK and in the US. Especially relieved and thankful that the war was over were the three million US servicemen poised to launch an invasion of Japan in October, few of whom had any doubt that what had saved them was the atomic bomb. ‘Let me tell you,’ writes Serber in his autobiography, ‘we were really heroes out there in the Pacific. There were an awful lot of guys who weren’t looking forward to landing on the Japanese beaches.’ One of those men awaiting orders to invade was Rossi Lomanitz, who wrote to his old teacher: ‘Hey, Oppie, you’re about the best loved man in these parts.’

On the day of the surrender Serber wrote to his wife, Charlotte, from Tinian, telling her: ‘There’s surprisingly little excitement or jubilation here. The army seems to be taking the news quite soberly . . . There is no sign at all, so far, of any celebration.’ At Los Alamos, the celebrations of peace were led by the GIs, who sounded sirens and klaxons and partied all over the laboratory. Among the scientists, there were mixed feelings. George Kistiakowsky remembers:

However, the sense of triumph among the scientists at Los Alamos had been severely mitigated by the knowledge that their work had resulted in the deaths of tens – perhaps hundreds – of thousands of people. And many of them were struggling to see those deaths as justified, especially in connection with the second bombing. Otto Frisch recalls: ‘Few of us could see any moral reason for dropping a second bomb . . . Most of us thought the Japanese would have surrendered in a few days anyhow.’

Certainly Oppenheimer was not, as he had been after Trinity, swaggering like a cowboy, nor was he, as he had been after Hiroshima, raising his hands in the air like a prize-winning boxer. On the contrary, on 9 August, the day of the Nagasaki bombing, he was described in an FBI report as being a ‘nervous wreck’, and the following day, when Lawrence came to Los Alamos for a meeting of the Scientific Advisory Panel, he found Oppenheimer unable to keep his mind for long off the distressing news of casualties from Nagasaki. Even before the bomb on Nagasaki, Oppenheimer was brought face-to-face with some of the extremely unpleasant realities of atomic bombing when he was asked to comment on reports of long-term damage from radiation. In a newspaper report published on 8 August, he was quoted as saying: ‘There is every reason to believe that there was no appreciable radioactivity on the ground at Hiroshima and what little there was decayed very rapidly.’ If Oppenheimer did not already know when he made that remark that it was misleading, he soon would know. In the days, weeks, months and years that followed, more and more information emerged from Hiroshima and Nagasaki, not only about the utterly horrific scenes in the immediate aftermath of the bombings, but also about the grisly and deadly long-term effects of radiation poisoning.

According to Alice Kimball Smith, who was there at the time, there was at Los Alamos in the days following Nagasaki an increasing ‘revulsion’ towards the bombings, which, even for those who thought they were justified by the end of war, brought with it ‘an intensely personal experience of the reality of evil’. Some comfort was felt, says Smith, when word got round that ‘Oppie says that the atomic bomb is so terrible a weapon that war is now impossible’.

This, of course, is the justification for using the bomb against civilians that Oppenheimer acquired from Bohr, and which he in turn persuaded many others to adopt. Though it had some plausibility as a justification for dropping
one
bomb, it was very hard to see how it justified the bombing of Nagasaki. Shirley Barnett, one of Oppenheimer’s secretaries at Los Alamos, was probably speaking for many when she said: ‘The reasons for
using the first bomb were valid. I didn’t have any doubts about it. But I did feel bad about Nagasaki. The biggest sadness of my life, and that of many others, was the dropping of the second bomb.’

In his remorse and anxiety following the second bomb (‘He smoked constantly, constantly, constantly,’ Dorothy McKibbin remembers of those days), Oppenheimer was determined to do everything he could to fulfil Bohr’s vision of the good that might come from the terrible weapon he had built. The report of the Scientific Advisory Panel that Lawrence had travelled to Los Alamos to help him write is dominated by that vision of an end of war – representing it as the only sane response, not only to the fearsome demonstration of the power of atomic bombs that the world had just witnessed, but also to the even more fearsome weapons that would inevitably be built in the future. Emphasising that the panel was unable to recommend ways to ensure US hegemony in the field of atomic weapons, the report – in the form of a letter from Oppenheimer to Stimson – stated: ‘We believe that the safety of this nation . . . can be based only on making future wars impossible.’ The concluding remarks urged upon the Interim Committee a ‘unanimous and urgent recommendation’ that ‘all steps be taken, all necessary international arrangements be made, to this end’.