Authors: Jennet Conant
The post-test hysteria was catching, and the whole town went wild. “The place was a madhouse,” said Anne Wilson. “All the scientists, their SEDs and assistants, and even the GIs who were there—they were so pleased with themselves. They had worked so hard, and they had done it. There was lots of rejoicing. Feynman got his bongo drums out and led a snake dance through the whole Tech Area.” People sat on the hoods of jeeps and led noisy parades down the main streets.
“Everybody had parties, and we all ran around,” recalled Feynman. “But one man I remember, Bob Wilson, was just sitting there moping.” When he asked him what was wrong, Wilson replied, “It’s a terrible thing that we made.” Feynman, who was still walking on air, protested, “But you started it. You got us into it.” At the time, Wilson’s behavior struck him as very odd, but what he failed to realize in his boyish enthusiasm, Feynman wrote later, was that they had all been so caught up in their calculations and experiments that they had lost sight of what the project was really about: “You see what happened to me—what happened to the rest of us—is we
started
for a good reason, then you’re working very hard to accomplish something and it’s a pleasure, it’s excitement. And you stop thinking, you know; you just
stop
.”
Emotions on the mesa were running very high. “They were all just ecstatic,” said Emily Morrison. “It was strange, but thrilling in a way. They were all so relieved and happy. But it didn’t last.” Reports came in that the moving cloud had deposited dust and radioactive materials as far as 120 miles away and that some parts of the desert were still too “hot” for humans to enter. The gadget, it seemed, had lethal coattails. Some stray cattle had been seen in the vicinity of the test area with large gray radiation burns on their brown coats, signaling their death sentence.
At the end of the week, Bill Penney, the British expert on blast effects, gave a seminar translating the weapon’s yield into the brutal statistics of mass destruction, detailing exactly what it would mean in terms of the number of buildings destroyed and bodies incinerated. The meeting had a sobering effect on the physicists, many of whom had put the bomb’s murderous power out of their minds while they had concentrated on the task at hand. Now there was no avoiding the awful reality. “The next day they had to go back to work to get the bomb ready to drop on Japan,” said Emily Morrison, whose husband, Phil, was one of the small crew of men packing their footlockers and preparing to leave for the Pacific war zone. “There was one British physicist who realized how terrible it was going to be and went home. Bob Wilson was pretty upset, though he didn’t leave. But I’m pretty sure he thought about it.”
By Friday night, when the Oppenheimers threw a party for the senior Tech Area staff, as well as some of the army officials who had presided over the test, more than a few of the physicists had begun to have second thoughts. Overwhelming success has its own hangover, and after the posttest exaltation on the mesa had died down, remorse had begun to set in. There was plenty of drinking and dancing that night, but as Eleanor Jette recalled, a certain grimness showed through the surface gaiety. “Cyril [Smith] and Joe Kennedy stood talking together most of the evening,” she recalled. “Neither man looked as though he’d ever smile again.”
Oppie’s mood had also turned somber. While some physicists thought they recognized a new swagger in their director’s stride after his triumph at Trinity, Anne Wilson never detected any cockiness in his demeanor. “I saw him for so long every day—
every day
—afterwards and I never saw any of that arrogance or conceit,” she said. “If anything, he was slightly depressed thinking about what was going to happen. It was, Oh God, what have we done! All this work, and people are going to die in the thousands.”
Three days after the detonation, on July 19, Oppenheimer sent a telegram to Groves in Washington that read in part: “Should like to be quite sure that the cost of going through with our present program is understood by you.” The bulk of the cable covered technical issues, which could have conceivably provided grounds to delay the assault on Japan until an improved bomb design could be implemented, allowing additional bombs to be built. But by that time Groves had become convinced that two bombs would probably get the job done. He would brook no delay. The Trinity test had not allayed all doubts about the bomb, he wrote in his memoir, “It proved merely that one implosion-type, plutonium bomb had worked; it did not prove that another would or that a uranium bomb of the gun type would.” They were confident enough of the original gun-type bomb that no one had argued against using it in combat without first completing a test. “In any case,” wrote Groves, “we simply had to take the chance.” His reply ruled out any revision of the planned bombing schedule, which could now be fixed around the first of August:
Factors beyond our control prevent us from considering any decision, other than to proceed according to the existing schedule for the time being.
By the time the gadget was detonated at Trinity, detailed arrangements were already in place for the use of a subsequent bomb as soon as enough material had been produced, and a carefully planned sequence of events began to unfold in quick succession. Just hours after Trinity, the cruiser USS
Indianapolis
sailed out of San Francisco Bay with Little Boy, the uranium bomb assembly, en route to Tinian, near Guam in the western Pacific and less than 1,500 air miles from Tokyo. A second shipment, containing the last necessary piece of uranium, soon followed by air. Fat Man would be ready around the first week in August and, once the Japanese submarine threat became obvious, would travel by plane. A second plutonium weapon would be ready two weeks after that, with more in production, as needs dictated.
In the hours immediately after the test explosion, Groves worked out with Oppenheimer what he would report by cable to Secretary of War Stimson, who was with the president at Potsdam. At 7:30
A.M.
Washington time, Groves phoned his secretary in the War Department and dictated, with “guarded brevity,” the pertinent facts, making use of a special code sheet, the only other copy of which was in her possession. He left base camp as soon as it was established that radioactive fallout in the area did not pose a problem and no one would have to be evacuated. Groves headed straight back to D.C. on the afternoon of July 16, accompanied by Bush, Conant, Lawrence, and Tolman, whom he observed were “still upset by what they had seen and could talk of little else.” As for himself, Groves noted, “my thoughts were now completely wrapped up with the preparations for the coming climax in Japan.”
Two days later, Groves followed up his first cable with an expanded account of the Trinity test that was not, as he advised Stimson, “a concise, formal military report, but an attempt to recite what I would have told you if you had been here on my return from New Mexico.” Groves’ report was sent by courier and reached Potsdam on July 21. Stimson read it to President Truman and Secretary of State James Byrnes that afternoon and later brought it to a meeting with Churchill and Lord Cherwell. It was “an immensely powerful document,” Stimson noted in his diary that day. “It gave a pretty full and eloquent report of the tremendous success of the test and revealed far greater destructive power than we expected in S-I.” His diary records Trinity’s immediate impact on history:
Churchill read Groves’ report in full. He told me that he had noticed at the meeting of the Three yesterday that Truman was much fortified by something that had happened, that he had stood up to the Russians in a most emphatic and decisive manner, telling them as to certain demands that they could not have and that the United States was entirely against them. He said, “Now I know what happened to Truman yesterday. I couldn’t understand it. When he got to the meeting after having read this report, he was a changed man. He told the Russians just where they got on and off and generally bossed the whole meeting.” Churchill said he now understood how this pepping up had taken place and he felt the same way.
Assured two more bombs would be ready by the end of the month, Churchill and Truman finalized their plans for action against Japan. On July 24, they approved the November 1 deadline for the invasion of Kyushu. Before the session was over, Truman, according to the Interim Committee’s recommendation, was supposed to inform Stalin of their atomic progress. But the new president was in no mood to tip his hand to the Russians and instead made only a passing comment to the effect that the United States possessed “a new weapon of unusual destructive force.” Exactly what Stalin made of the cryptic comment was unclear, as his reply was elaborately casual. All he said, according to Truman, was that “he was glad to hear it and hoped we would make ‘good use of it against the Japanese.’” It is unlikely, however, that he was surprised, given the Soviets access to atomic secrets through Klaus Fuchs and other sources.
The following day, Churchill and Truman gave Stimson and Marshall approval to move ahead with the operational orders to use the first atomic bomb as soon after August 3 as weather permitted. The Target Committee, together with Stimson’s military staff, had drawn up a final list of suggested target cities. Stimson had struck Kyoto from the list, even though it was deemed a strategic military target, because it had been an ancient Japanese capital and was considered a sacred shrine. He had approved four other targets, including Hiroshima, Kokura, Niigata, and Nagasaki. The order had been given to spare these cities from the continuing saturation bombing so the effects of the atomic bomb could be clearly seen. As Stimson would later argue in an open letter to
Harper’s Magazine
, entitled “The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb,” all four were active working parts of the Japanese war effort. In particular, “Hiroshima was the headquarters of the Japanese Army defending southern Japan and was a major military storage and assembly point,” he wrote. They would strike where it hurt the Japanese military the most.
On July 26, Churchill and Truman issued the Potsdam Declaration. At Los Alamos, people listened to the ominous terms of the ultimatum being broadcast on the radio. It called for the Japanese government to proclaim “unconditional surrender” of all their armed forces and to provide proper and adequate assurances of their good faith, and it warned that the alternative was “prompt and utter destruction.” Two days later, the premier of Japan, Baron Kantaro Suzuki, rejected the Potsdam Declaration and called it “unworthy of public notice.”
After that, Dorothy left her kitchen radio on all the time. She did not know when or where it was going to happen, but like everyone at Los Alamos, she sensed
something
was going to happen soon. Security remained very tight, and MPs patrolled outside the office. G-2 returned several times to question her about the suspicious phone call on the day of the test shot, but she stuck to her story. Incredibly, life returned to normal. The
Daily Bulletin
was full of the usual scolding notices—unless customers return their empty bottles immediately, there will be an inadequate supply of Coca-Cola for sale; unless crutches and canes are returned to the hospital ASAP, a shortage will ensue—and banal news about Scout hikes, picnics, and Saturday night dances. There was no mention of Trinity, the bomb, or the impending assault. Life took on a slightly unreal quality. “We just followed the same routine, taking care of the children and playing cards with our friends,” said Marge Schreiber. The war might continue for many months, or it might end in an hour. One friend who could not stand the interminable anxiety complained that the problem with life on the Hill was that “it was so daily,” recalled Shreiber: “I always thought that pretty much summed it up.”
They were all supposed to go on about their business while they waited to see if the Japanese would surrender, knowing all the while that the deadliest weapon in the world’s history was waiting in the wings on some small Pacific island, only striking distance away. Of course, it was forbidden to talk about the bomb, but people did anyway. A contingent of sixty to seventy people from Los Alamos had been assigned the task of assembling the bomb components and preparing Little Boy for airlift. They had been sent to Tinian, a B-29 base in the Mariana Islands that was the staging area for the bomb operation. The post grapevine, efficient as ever, buzzed with the names of the men who had left the mesa: Deke Parsons, Luis Alvarez, Phil Morrison, Harold Agnew, Bob Serber, Bill Penney, and Norman Ramsey, among many others.
Work in the laboratory had slowed considerably, and those left behind had little to do but document what they had done and debate the pros and cons of using the weapon. Wouldn’t it be better if the Japanese were invited to watch a demonstration on an uninhabited island? But what display could convince such an ancient, honor-bound people to agree to the Allied demand for unconditional surrender? On the other hand, wasn’t it better to destroy one Japanese city if it served to save the lives of many more Americans, as well as Japanese, who would die in the invasion slaughter, which, in the absence of the atom bomb, was the only way to terminate the war?
Others, like Kistiakowsky, felt the bomb was “no worse than the fire raids.” The Japanese had lost a hundred thousand civilians in just one night of the war, during the firebombing of Tokyo on March 9, 1945. More than a million people had been wounded in that demonstration of might, and yet the Japanese, with their ancient tradition of honor that made unconditional surrender unthinkable, had fought on. How many lives would have to be sacrificed in battle before the Japanese military leaders, who had attacked and sunk the U.S. Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor, were humbled? As proof of their defiance, on July 30, a Japanese submarine sank the
Indianapolis
on her way to the Philippines. It was the single greatest loss in the history of the U.S. Navy, but at the time, few people knew how close to disaster the country had really come—only four days earlier, the cruiser had delivered the uranium bomb to Tinian. The scientists argued the issue endlessly, with some insisting that they should take a moral stand like Szilard and Franck, while others took the view it was out of their hands, and that “the cobbler should stick to his last.” Dorothy heard enough of these discussions to know they could get pretty lively.