109 East Palace (67 page)

The question of how heavy the sacrifice would be remains murky: Secretary of War Stimson asserted the November invasion would cost between a half million and a million Allied casualties, and at least as many Japanese lives. Army Chief of Staff Marshall reportedly put the figure closer to forty thousand. After the war, these casualty estimates became controversial and subject to a great deal of second guessing. Stimson was accused of inflating the figures by those who believed there was already ample evidence Japan had been pushed to the brink and could have been made to surrender without the bomb.

The Alamogordo press release, the first of many that would be necessary, was prepared with the help of the
New York Times
’s science reporter Bill Laurence, to give it, in Groves’ words, “a more objective touch.” The Office of Censorship saw to it that no news of the explosion made it into any Eastern newspaper, except a few lines in one Washington paper. On the Pacific Coast, however, it got picked up by radio and got a lot of play.

The death toll steadily went up as more information was available and as fatalities due to injuries and radiation exposure accumulated: the total number of deaths was closer to 140,000, with the five-year total estimated to reach 200,000.

In a bizarre twist, Slotin was involved in a similar accident on the same day one year later. In October 1946, he was showing a group of physicists a plutonium assembly at Los Alamos and was using a screwdriver to lower one of the hemispheres of beryllium on the core when the tool slipped, the pieces came into contact, and the assembly went critical. Five others in the room were irradiated, but only Slotin, who was closest, died.

ALAS later merged with similar groups to become the Federation of American Scientists.