Pandora's Keepers (36 page)

It was too early to determine what the results of the bombing might have been, but he was sure that the Japanese didn’t like it. More cheering. He was proud, and he showed it, of what he had accomplished. Even more cheering. And his only regret was that we hadn’t developed the bomb in time to have used it against the Germans. This practically raised the roof.
23

As the days passed, Oppenheimer grew depressed as what had really happened started to sink in. To one observer, he seemed “a nervous wreck.”
24
Many physicists shared the moral burden of building such a destructive weapon, but Oppenheimer had been given an opportunity to advise “No”; he could not deny that the death of Hiroshima’s inhabitants was partly his responsibility. When news of Nagasaki reached him on August ninth, he released this statement to the press on behalf of his lab:

We have believed that the use of this weapon in the war against Japan might help to shorten the war and be a benefit to the world for that reason alone; but above all we have thought that this rather spectacular technical development, and the assured prospect of far more terrifying future developments, would force upon the people of this country, and all the war-weary people of the world, a recognition of how imperative it has become to avert wars in the future; how the cooperation and understanding between nations which has seemed desirable for so long has become a desperate necessity….
25

Szilard immediately asked the chaplain of the University of Chicago to include a prayer for the Japanese casualties of the two devastated cities in any memorial service commemorating the end of the war. He offered to relay the prayer to the survivors personally.
26
He then sat down and drafted another petition to President Truman, calling the atomic bombings “a flagrant violation of our own moral standards” and asking that they be stopped. The Japanese surrender on August fourteenth mooted the issue and Szilard never sent his petition. When he tried to publish his first petition to President Truman in
Science
magazine later that month, Groves ordered it classified “secret” and explicitly forbade Szilard from publishing the second petition anywhere, threatening to imprison him if he did.

August 6, 1945, had found Bohr in London, awaiting return to his native Denmark. News of Hiroshima had provoked Bohr to speak out and give citizens of the world an understanding of the revolutionary issues involved and some way to deal with them. He wrote a letter to the
London Times
which appeared on August eleventh under a two-column headline: “Science and Civilization.” It was Bohr’s first public statement about the need for a more open world:

The formidable power of destruction which has come within reach of man may become a mortal menace unless human society can adjust itself to the exigencies of the situation. Civilization is presented with a challenge more serious perhaps than ever before…. Against the new destructive powers no defense may be possible [and] no control can be effective without international supervision of all undertakings which unless regulated might become a source of disaster.

Such measures will demand the abolition of barriers hitherto considered necessary to safeguard national interests but now standing in the way of the common security against unprecedented danger. Certainly the handling of the precarious situation will demand the good will of all nations, but it must be recognized that we are dealing with what is potentially a deadly challenge to civilization itself.

Hiroshima and Nagasaki hit home for Bethe when photographs of the devastated cities arrived at Los Alamos by special courier several days later. Although Bethe had witnessed the Trinity test and had calculated the effect of an atomic blast over an urban area, he was unprepared emotionally for what he saw when he looked at the grim pictures. “The total destruction, the total leveling of a wide area was really very shocking,” Bethe said with considerable emotion many years later. “It really came to mind when I saw the pictures.”
27

Lawrence learned of Hiroshima while listening to the radio in his living room. He sensed this meant the end of Japan’s resistance and looked toward the future. “Now we will have no more war and the most backward countries will be able to start catching up,” he told his wife, Molly.
28
On the day Nagasaki was bombed, Lawrence received a phone call from an agitated physicist who condemned the targeting of Japanese civilians and feared the bombings’ effect on the reputation of science. The physicist wrote Lawrence later that day:

Many people, including some who are prominent and influential, think that science does more harm than good to humanity. Some of these, and some who think oppositely, contend that scientists ought to control the applications of their discoveries, though I for one cannot imagine how they could exercise any control. Some people go so far as to blame scientists for the consequences of their discoveries. I think that it is not far-fetched nor absurd to conjecture that in time to come, people will be saying, “Those wicked physicists of the ‘Manhattan Project’ deliberately developed a bomb which they knew would be used for killing thousands of innocent people without any warning, and they either wanted this outcome or at least condoned it. Away with physicists!” It will not be accepted as an excuse that they may have disapproved in silence. We do not excuse the German civilians who accepted Buchenwald while possibly disapproving in silence.
29

Lawrence responded that same day:

In view of the fact that two bombs ended the war, I am inclined to feel that they made the right decision. Surely many more lives were saved by shortening the war than were sacrificed as a result of the bombs. Further, it goes without saying that all of us hope and pray that there will never be an occasion to use another one. The world must realize that there can never be another war.

As regards criticism of science and scientists, I think that is a cross we will have to bear, and I think in the long run the good sense of everyone the world over will realize that in this instance, as in all scientific pursuits, the world is better as a result.
30

A short time later Lawrence left Berkeley for Los Alamos, partly to escape reporters clamoring for comment and partly to work with Oppenheimer on a report on postwar atomic efforts. Lawrence reacted impatiently to Oppenheimer’s developing remorse. He felt little of Oppenheimer’s soul-searching guilt. Although Lawrence had initially believed that the bomb would never be used against people and then had been one of the last members of the Scientific Advisory Panel to abandon the idea of a demonstration, he now thought of the bomb as a terrible swift sword that had forced Japan’s surrender. Publicly, Lawrence confidently declared that “the harnessing of atomic energy in a weapon of war will come to be regarded in the future not as a mark of the doom of mankind, but rather as a first step in man’s conquest of a new realm of the universe for his own betterment and welfare.”
31

Cool and controlled as always, Fermi did not comment publicly. When Japan surrendered on August fourteenth, residents of Los Alamos came out the next day to celebrate the end of the war. Fermi joined in the celebration, but he never once mentioned Hiroshima or Nagasaki in conversations with close friends that day. Fermi remained characteristically mum about his reaction to the bombing, even when his sister Maria, writing from Italy, reported that “All [here] are perplexed and appalled by its dreadful effects, and with time the bewilderment increases rather than diminishes. For my part I recommend you to God, Who alone can judge you morally.”
32

Fermi had, however, discussed the bomb privately with Oppenheimer. The two had concluded before Hiroshima that nothing could be done to control the bomb after the war if the American people did not even know that it existed, much less how much destruction it could inflict. Fermi and Oppenheimer believed that only its use would breach the wall of secrecy, and do the sort of shocking and horrific damage that might end war altogether.

Having witnessed the Trinity test, Rabi had understood the appalling damage the bomb would do to cities. A sensitive and moral man who had expressed misgivings to Oppenheimer early on in the project about making a weapon of mass destruction, Rabi had learned a “frightening thing” in the course of the war: “how easy it is to kill people when you turn your mind to it.” “When you turn the resources of modern science to the problem of killing people,” Rabi later wrote of his feelings in August 1945, “you realize how vulnerable they really are.”
33

Pollsters reported that the American public backed the use of the atomic bombs against Japan overwhelmingly because it—along with the Soviet Union’s entrance into the conflict—brought the Pacific War to a speedy end. To those who cheered at the time (and they were the vast majority)—that was what mattered most. As Winston Churchill later wrote: “To avert a vast, indefinite butchery, to bring the war to an end, to give peace to the world, to lay healing hands upon its tortured peoples by a manifestation of overwhelming power at the cost of a few explosions, seemed, after all our toils and perils, a miracle of deliverance.”
34

Hiroshima and Nagasaki marked the culmination of a willingness on the part of American policy makers in World War II to tolerate the killing of noncombatants in the pursuit of victory. And of course the war against Japan had acquired such terrible momentum by the summer of 1945 that there was very little argument against waging war in any way, including in a new and terrible way: using a weapon of mass destruction on civilians in undefended cities. It was a bloody sort of progress: by inflicting suffering, the atomic bomb ended the suffering caused by firebombings and starvation blockades, and it obviated the ghastly specter of a U.S. invasion of the Japanese home islands.

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

CHAPTER 8

An End, a Beginning

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.