Authors: Jennet Conant
For Oppenheimer, who was intimately involved with the final preparations for the bomb delivery, it was not a happy time. In the days after the Trinity test, the momentum propelling the combat use of the bomb accelerated. At the same time, Oppenheimer was not immune to the inner turmoil afflicting many of the mesa scientists. He, too, dreaded the fearsome demonstration offeree to come. But at no time did he, or any of the presidents chief advisors—including Stimson, General Marshall, Groves, Bush, and Conant—recommend calling a halt to the operation. “After Trinity, there was no slowing down,” said Anne Wilson. “If anything, it speeded up. They were selecting targets for bombing. It was a very busy time. We even had some of the pilots come up to the Hill, maps were brought in, and there were discussions of the whole business.” One day, as they walked together to the Tech Area office, Wilson noticed that Oppie appeared “very distressed.” When she asked him about it, he just shook his head and said, “I just keep thinking about all those poor little people.”
On the morning of Monday, August 6, Dorothy received word “to bring a radio along to work.” She asked no questions, but brought her small radio from home, put it on her desk, and kept it turned on very low. “It was a typical New Mexico day of summer,” she recalled. “Sunshine of golden brilliance, sky bluer than paint….” At 11:00
A.M.
, there was a news flash from the White House, and Harry Truman’s voice came over the radio:
Sixteen hours ago an American airplane dropped one bomb on Hiroshima, an important Japanese Army base. That bomb had more power than 20,000 tons of T.N.T. It had more than two thousand times the blast power of the British “Grand Slam” which is the largest bomb ever yet used in the history of warfare….
It is an atomic bomb. It is a harnessing of the basic power of the universe. The force from which the sun draws its power has been loosed against those who brought war to the Far East.
The president explained that the Germans had been working feverishly on ways to add atomic energy to their other “engines of war,” with which they “hoped to enslave the world.” By pooling their knowledge and resources, the greatest American and British scientific brains were able to beat the Germans in “the race of discovery.” Employment in the bomb project, at several secret plants, during peak construction, numbered 125,000, and more than 65,000 were presently employed at the plants. His reference to “the many who had been working for two and a half years,” while “few knew what they have been producing,” was not lost on Dorothy. “We have spent two billion dollars on the greatest scientific gamble in history—and won,” he said. “The battle of the laboratories held fateful risks for us as well as the battles of the air, land and sea, and we have now won the battle of the laboratories as we have won the other battles.”
There was more. If the Japanese did not accept the terms of the Potsdam ultimatum, the president promised, “They may expect a rain of ruin from the air, the like of which has never been seen on this earth.” Dorothy sat and listened to his speech, scarcely breathing. She listened to all the radio broadcasts that followed, the announcers so excited they could hardly control their voices. Colonel Paul Tibbets, the boyish-looking air force officer she had allowed up to the Hill, had piloted the
Enola Gay
over Hiroshima, and the bomb had been dropped at 7:15
P.M.
on August 5. While she had been eating dinner, the port city had been wiped out, and more than 100,000 Japanese were thought to have been instantly killed. It had been morning in Hiroshima, and they had awoken to death and destruction on a scale no one had ever seen before. Four square miles of the city had been disemboweled. A news bulletin interrupted to report that when Tibbets landed, he was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross for his daring strike on Hiroshima, for “carrying for the first time a bomb totally new to modern warfare.” He had safely turned his plane away from a “monstrous” column of smoke that had erupted from the ground while aerial shocks, like bursts of flak, rocked his plane…. Dorothy listened to report after report until she could not stand to listen anymore.
At noon, she made a beeline back to the house, where she knew Kevin would be returning from his summer job for lunch. They both worked only five minutes from home and usually ate together. She sat down and, struggling to appear calmer than she felt, faced him across the dining room table. She had never told him anything more than that the laboratory was connected to the war effort and he could never mention its existence or his visits there. “Keep your mouth shut,” she had told him a hundred times. Now at fourteen, he was tall and gangly, a boy in a man’s body, but old enough to be told the truth. The words came out in a rush: “Kevvy the President of the United States announced this morning to the whole world that the bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima was manufactured in the hills up in northern New Mexico.”
His eyes quickly met hers. For a moment, neither of them said anything. Then she spoke again, adding quietly, “That’s our bomb.”
A long silence followed between them. Then, as she recorded in her memoir, she was gripped by panic. No sooner had the words left her lips than she wanted to call them back, as “the realization of what she had said, she, conditioned for more than two years not to so much as whisper the name of Los Alamos.” Her hand shot across the table and caught his wrist. This time when she spoke, her voice was full of alarm: “
But don’t tell anyone!
”
It did not take long for Dorothy to realize that the secret was out. Her phone was ringing off the hook with friends and family demanding to know if this was the same “government project” she had been working for all along. Had she been up to the Los Alamos laboratory? Had she known from the beginning that they were building a bomb? Had she witnessed the Trinity test? How could she not have told anyone? So many people called with so many questions that she felt overwhelmed by it all.
The president’s announcement had lifted the veil on their mysterious encampment, and the army propaganda office was busy working overtime distributing a general history of the project, complete with quaint details of life behind barbed wire, to the press. The late editions of Mondays
New Mexican
ran front-page stories under the banner headlines: “
LOS ALAMOS SECRET DISCLOSED BY TRUMAN; ATOMIC BOMBS
[
sic
]
DROP ON JAPAN
.” The first line in the local story about the laboratory was: “Santa Fe learned officially today of a city of 6,000 in its own front yard.” Dorothy read with fascination as the classified bomb project that had been her life for the past twenty-seven months was demystified in a series of cold facts and statistics. Most of the reporting about the bomb’s development and test detonation was new to her, as was the great potential promised by the “Atomic Age” and the “tool to end wars.” Groves was heralded as the head of the atomic bomb project, and Oppenheimer credited with “achieving the implementation of atomic power for military purposes.”
It was a very strange and unsettling feeling to see the name “J. Robert Oppenheimer” staring out at her in inky black type in the newspaper. His name, his very presence in Santa Fe, had been her most closely guarded secret for more than two years. And now the whole world knew. After being turned inward for so long, and trained to keep every detail of her work and association with the laboratory locked up inside her, it was stunning to have everything suddenly exposed to the light of day. It was as if the heavy door of secrecy that had shut behind her in the spring of 1943 had been thrown open, and she found herself surprised and confused to be the center of so much flattering attention. It had all worked out better than she had dared to believe when, those many months ago, she had signed on to work for Oppenheimer in hope and ignorance. She took great pride in the scientists’ achievement and, to a lesser degree, her own small part in the projects success. They had brought the war to an early end. It would all be over in a matter of days, as much as six months to a year earlier than expected, and they had saved the lives of innumerable American and British soldiers. “She was thrilled and proud about the whole thing,” said Kevin. “The local papers were full it. Just to think of all the people that might have been killed by the Japanese.”
Up on the Hill, one big party was in progress. The town was delirious, and there was dancing in the streets. There were even bigger, noisier parades than after Trinity, and children ran in and out of the apartment complexes beating pots and pans and applauding their suddenly famous fathers. Parsons, Alvarez, Agnew—the whole bomb crew—were on the way home and being hailed as conquering heroes. There was a big assembly that night at Fuller Lodge, and when Oppenheimer strode in, they all rose and applauded. As he stepped up to the podium, he clasped his hands above his head in triumph. But even in the midst of the euphoria, many of the scientists experienced a rising anguish, and the bilious aftertaste stayed with them. Frank Oppenheimer had been standing just outside his brothers office when the Hiroshima announcement came over the loudspeaker. “The first reaction was thank God it wasn’t a dud,” he recalled. “But before the whole sentence of the broadcast was finished one suddenly got this horror of all the people who had been killed. I don’t know why up to then we—I—hadn’t really thought of all those flattened people.” He had no doubt his brothers reaction was the same. “The image of all those people was really pretty awful.”
Otto Frisch was working in the Tech Area when he heard the sound of yelling and running feet. “Somebody opened my door and shouted, ‘Hiroshima has been destroyed.’” Years later, he still vividly remembered the moment and “the feeling of unease, indeed nausea” when he saw how many of his friends were “rushing to the telephone to book tables at the La Fonda hotel in Santa Fe, in order to celebrate.”
But Little Boy did not end the war. The great fireball that incinerated the city of Hiroshima had not brought a quick capitulation. The U.S. Army prepared for a second raid, and millions of leaflets were dropped over Japan warning them what lay in store and urging them to petition their Emperor to sue for peace. Two days later Russia declared war on Japan. Robert Patterson, under secretary of war, sent a telegram “To the Men and Women of the Manhattan District,” lauding them for their help in developing “the most devastating military weapon that any country has ever been able to turn against its enemy.” It went on to remind them “to keep the secrets you have kept so well. The need for security and continued effort is fully as great now as it ever was.”
On Thursday, August 9, the White House announced that another bomb, Fat Man, had been dropped on Nagasaki. To maximize the shock effect, it was delivered as soon after the first as possible. But the weather was not favorable over Japan, and the second mission did not go as smoothly. For many hours there was no word of the fate of the plane, the
Bock’s Car
, and its crew. Although it was a major seaport that contained several large industrial plants, Nagasaki had not been the intended target. The primary target was the large arsenal at Kokura on the northern coast of Kyushu. But because of poor visibility, Major Charles Sweeney, the pilot of
Bock’s Car
, was forced to keep circling, burning up fuel reserves and attracting the attention of Japanese fighter planes. Finally, he made a desperate run for Nagasaki. At the last minute a hole opened in the cloud cover, and he unloaded Fat Man, missing his target by two miles. It landed in a valley, in the middle of an industrial area, and a fiery yellow ball erupted, followed by a massive black mushroom cloud that billowed up to 20,000 feet.
Later that same day, President Truman sent a cable to the Hill with his thanks from “a grateful nation.” At Los Alamos, there was nothing they could do but pray the Japanese military leaders would come to their senses and realize the utter hopelessness of their position. The scientists were in for yet another agonizing wait. They had lost control of their creation, and as the president had foretold, the force of the sun was being “loosed” on the world. “One of the things we learned was that once a machinery like Los Alamos is started, it takes on a life of its own,” said Rose Bethe. “We could no more have stopped it than we could have stopped a boulder from rolling downhill.”
Two bombs proved sufficient. Fat Man, as predicted, was more powerful than Little Boy, with a yield of roughly 22 kilotons, yet did less damage, landing wide of the target and obliterating approximately a third of the city and half as many civilians. But it was enough to shock the Japanese into surrender. Twelve hours later, Nagasaki was still engulfed in flames. At 7:00
A.M.
August 10, Tokyo time, Japan sent a cable to its minister in Switzerland agreeing to the Potsdam terms, but insisting on one condition—that Emperor Hirohito be allowed to retain his sovereignty. While Suzuki awaited an official response, a rogue faction of the military, unable to accept the Emperor’s shameful capitulation, attempted a coup, and it was quashed. After a day of confusion and wild speculation, during which the president negotiated the terms with the British, Chinese, and Russians, a compromise was struck: the Supreme Allied Military Commander, in all probability General Douglas Mac Arthur, would rule Japan through the authority of the Emperor. At noon on August 15, the Emperor ended his imperial silence and gave an unprecedented radio broadcast informing the Japanese public that he had no choice but to “order the acceptance of the provisions of the Joint Declaration of the Powers,” and blaming “a new and most cruel bomb.”
Los Alamos residents reacted with a mixture of relief and sorrow, delight and profound distress. Their emotions were in such a tumultuous state it was hard to know how to feel or act. Only the GIs seemed to celebrate with total abandon, piling en masse onto army trucks and jeeps and riding around cheering wildly. George Kistiakowsky drunkenly saluted the long-awaited end of the war by firing off twenty-one boxes of Composition B in an empty field. Other celebrations followed, but there were fewer of them, and they were more subdued. There was something unseemly, almost “ghoulish,” as Frisch put it, “about celebrating the sudden death of so many people, even if they were ‘enemies.’”