The Age of Radiance (41 page)

Others did not see nuclear weapons as being any more immoral than other methods of slaughter. If not short-listed for nuclear war, Hiroshima and Nagasaki would have been firebombed by LeMay into oblivion just as had been done with every other Japanese metropolis of their size. Bombing civilians was a fact of this war, as anyone living in London or Dresden could attest. Philip Anderson: “The firebombing of Tokyo was so close to genocide, killed so many people, that it seemed to me much more of a horror than the atom bombs. Another thing I was conscious of, and I don’t know why so few Americans are conscious of it, is Nanking [where in 1937, the Japanese massacred three hundred thousand Chinese]. Nanking and the Japanese behavior in China and Korea was a horrible thing, unbelievably savage. I don’t think I have any complaint whatsoever about the atom bombs. And I’m not sympathetic to the Germans about Dresden. The old saying is absolutely right: ‘He that soweth the wind shall reap the whirlwind.’ ” Others at the time asked, what if Stalin or Hitler had been first with nuclear arms? The carnage would have been unimaginable.

Then it was revealed that before Hiroshima, the Army Air Forces chief, General Hap Arnold, said that conventional bombing would have ended the war without requiring an invasion, and Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Ernest King thought Japan could be forced to surrender through a naval
blockade, while General Eisenhower called using nuclear weapons
“completely unnecessary” and “no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives,” and George Marshall thought the Japanese should have been warned ahead of time with the Potsdam call for unconditional surrender. In a postwar analysis, the United States Strategic Bombing Command determined,
“Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war, and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated.” Truman’s aide Admiral William Leahy told the British chiefs of staff that it was
“because of the vast sums that had been spent on the project,” though it meant the United States “had adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages.” Yet in truth, even with both Hiroshima and Nagasaki devastated and much of their country in ruins from the napalm of Mr. B, the Japanese military chiefs still refused to surrender. They had lost sixty cities; Hiroshima and Nagasaki were just numbers sixty-one and sixty-two. If they hadn’t given up after losing Tokyo, after all, they certainly wouldn’t because of Nagasaki. It required the USSR’s declaring war against the country, and the sacred intervention of Emperor Hirohito, to change their minds to an unconditional surrender on September 2.

So a new theory arose, based on what the man who would become secretary of state, James Byrnes, mentioned in his conversation with Leo Szilard. Using an atomic bomb against Japan was a diplomatic signal to the USSR, an attempt to make “Russia more manageable in Europe.” British physicist Joseph Rotblat:
“In March 1944, I experienced a disagreeable shock. [General] Groves said that, of course, the real purpose in making the bomb was to subdue the Soviets. . . . Remember, this was said at a time when thousands of Russians were dying every day on the Eastern Front, tying down the Germans and giving the Allies time to prepare for the landing on the continent of Europe. Until then I had thought that our work was to prevent a Nazi victory, and now I was told that the weapon we were preparing was intended for use against the people who were making extreme sacrifices for that very aim.”

With hindsight, Hiroshima and Nagasaki prove that nuclear bombs are ineffective as weapons of war and, with insight, that their place in history as the only nuclear attacks in the world to date did not signal the end of World War II.

They signaled the start of the Cold War.

B
EFORE
they left Los Alamos, Fermi, Oppenheimer, Bohr, Lawrence, Groves, Chadwick, and Compton had dinner to discuss the future. Some were hopeful about fission-generated nuclear energy; Groves fretted about a decline in American military power with the end of the war.
“And Fermi,” Oppenheimer remembered, “said, thoughtfully, ‘I think it would be nice if we could find a cure for the common cold.’ ”

Enrico and Laura went home on New Year’s Eve 1945, to the University of Chicago’s newly created Institute for Nuclear Studies, where Fermi hoped to re-create the intellectual paradise of Weimar Germany with eleven laureates and future laureates—including Urey, Franck, Mayer, Anderson, Segrè, Teller, Dyson, Garwin, and Agnew. As Valentine Telegdi said,
“It was a place where you could be proud to be the dumbest one.”

Harold Agnew:
“Just to show you what a straight shooter and a modest individual Fermi was: When Laura came back from Italy [after the war], she said she’d really like to have a dishwasher and a washing machine. Now, she had a Bendix washing machine, screwed to the floor, and it rotated parallel to the floor, and when it ran—there was no automatic balancing—the whole house sort of shook. It was quite a thing. But she wanted a new one. We were at dinner, and Enrico had just come back from Hanford, I guess. I asked him, wasn’t he working for General Electric? Didn’t he know the boss? And Laura said before that, that she had gone down to the local hardware store and put her name on a list to get a washing machine and a dishwasher, which was what you did after the war—it wasn’t like today, you had to get on a list and wait. And I said, ‘Enrico, gosh, you could call your friend, the president of General Electric, and they’d bring it by helicopter, and you’d get it for
free, I bet!’ Laura was intrigued with this idea. Enrico would have no part of it. No way. He would not use his influence, or whatever you want to call it, to get ahead in line.”

Believing nuclear physics had become a mature field with little left to discover, Enrico turned his attention to subatomic particles composed of quarks and antiquarks—mesons. He explained this dramatic change by quoting Mussolini: “Either renew oneself, or perish.” Though a complete novice in the high-energy field, Fermi became so engrossed with it for the remaining years of his life that he coined the terms
pion
and
muon
.

In 1951, Chicago’s new cyclotron was inaugurated, and as at Oak Ridge, the lab workers had to be careful. One day, Herb Anderson picked up a piece of reinforced concrete, forgetting about the metal in its innards. The cyclotron’s magnet yanked it so hard that his hand was crushed.

Valentine Telegdi: “At the yearly Christmas parties, the physics students would compete with the faculty in various tests (always loaded in favor of the students!) and put on theatrical sketches. In some of these an electronic computer able to provide instantly order-of-magnitude estimates, aptly named the ENRIAC, was displayed. This computer consisted of a large box, complete with blinking lights, and contained a junior faculty member who could imitate Fermi’s voice and accent.”

Nella Fermi: “One day my father brought home a strange substance which was soft like well-chewed chewing gum, yet could be shattered like glass. He told Giulio and me that he had been given a sample of this new material so that he could suggest possible applications for it. We were fascinated. He showed us how we could pull it into a long, thin string like chewing gum if you pulled slowly, but as soon as you jerked, it cracked! You could shape it into a hump or scratch designs on it, but leave it alone, and it melted into a blob. A blow with a hammer shattered it like glass and sent it flying all over the room. My father wouldn’t demonstrate that one (I had to take it on faith), because if he did that it would be all over the room and we’d never get it back. I asked a lot of questions and got a physics lesson: this stuff was basically like glass, my father said, it was a liquid. Glass is not a liquid, I said. It is, said my father. I thought he was pulling my leg, but he convinced me. Glass had the molecular structure of a liquid and, given sufficient time, would melt into a blob, but it would take ages. I wouldn’t be around to see it, he wouldn’t be around to see it, none of us would be around to see it. We spent a happy afternoon with the odd material. My father was puzzling about possible applications but also taking boyish delight in the strange properties of the material. We thought about using it to patch up cracks on windows, but
that would be no good, it would only drip down into a blob. He asked us for suggestions for possible uses, but we could come up with none, and neither could he. In spite of the fun that we had with it, we missed the obvious use. It was a great toy. Later it was marketed as Silly Putty.”

I
n the autumn of 1945, Curtis LeMay joined Eighth Air Force chief Jimmy Doolittle to lead a squadron of B-29s flying nonstop from Tokyo to Washington. The trip’s “only significance,” as reported in the
Chicago Tribune
, was “that it is going to be possible very soon to fly from here to Tokyo in 24 hours by commercial airliner.” That this operation had nothing whatsoever to do with the future of business travel became evident in an August 30, 1945, Army Air Forces memorandum, “A Strategic Chart of Certain Russian and Manchurian Urban Areas,” identifying the Soviet Union’s most important cities, their size, population, and industry, the number of nuclear bombs needed to destroy each, as well as the necessary B-29 flight paths over the north pole from Alaska, Germany, Norway, Italy, Crete, India, and Okinawa to their Red targets.

A more detailed AAF assessment of September 1945 decided that the Soviet Union would surrender after sixty-six “cities of strategic importance” were destroyed, with the field of combat narrowed by the atomic bombing of both the Suez Canal and the Dardanelles—the Middle East gateway to the Mediterranean and the Turkish gateway from the Black Sea to the Aegean—in sum requiring 466 Fat Men. Even Leslie Groves was taken aback:
“My general conclusion would be that the number of bombs indicated as required, is excessive.” In fact, the B-29’s range wasn’t anywhere close to accomplishing this absurdly belligerent scheme; the United States did not have enough Fat Men on hand or enough Superfortress-capable airfields at these varied locations; and the necessary aerial refueling technique and technology were in their infancies. So these weren’t plans of attack for the moment they were written . . . but nightmares of the future.

At Los Alamos, Norris Bradbury succeeded Robert Oppenheimer and invited Edward Teller to replace Hans Bethe as Theoretical Division chief. Ever since relinquishing implosion calculations to Klaus Fuchs and inspiring Oppenheimer to move him from Bethe to Fermi, Teller had continuously been working on his Super, the great thermonuclear fission-fusion design that would obsess him for decades, which would be, as he saw it, the weapon giving the United States of America the ultimate defense against dictators like Hitler and Stalin.

Following the success of Trinity, Teller believed his Super would be put into fast-track development as the next evolution in atomic weaponry. In their last months in New Mexico together, Teller and Fermi had begun theoretical analysis of thermonuclear ignition, predicting that one cubic meter of liquid deuterium would explode with the force of 10 million tons of TNT. But when Ed asked Oppie to support postwar hydrogen bomb research, Robert coldly replied,
“I neither can nor will do so.” Then, instead of joining Teller to create the next generation of nuclear weapons, almost all of Los Alamos’s most significant physicists returned to civilian life—Wigner going home to Princeton; Alvarez, Seaborg, and Segrè to Berkeley; Kistiakowsky to Harvard; and Bethe to Cornell. As Teller saw it, they had lost
“their appetites for weapons work,” and only he held fast to the faith. It was the beginnings of a conflict that would rend the scientific community for the next four decades.