Authors: Brian Van DeMark
Sixty-seven Met Lab scientists signed Szilard’s petition. The scientists who did not told Szilard that more lives would be saved by using the atomic bomb than by continuing the bloody war without it. Thousands of American—to say nothing of Japanese—soldiers were being killed each week, and they felt they would be guilty of permitting this slaughter to continue if they did not urge use of the bomb to end the war. Still others felt that patriotism demanded the bomb’s use. “Are we to go on shedding American blood when we have available the means to speedy victory?” one note angrily demanded. “No! If we can save even a handful of American lives, then let us use this weapon—now! These sentiments, we feel, represent more truly those of the majority of Americans and particularly those who have sons in the foxholes and warships of the Pacific.”
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Szilard also sent a copy of his petition to friends at Los Alamos. “I hardly need to emphasize that such a petition does not represent the most effective action that can be taken in order to influence the course of events,” he wrote to Oppenheimer and other scientists on the Hill. “But I have no doubt in my own mind that from a point of view of the standing of the scientists in the eyes of the general public one or two years from now it is a good thing that a minority of scientists should have gone on record in favor of giving greater weight to moral arguments.”
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Szilard urged Teller to both sign the petition and gather signatures for it. Before deciding what to do, Teller went to see Oppenheimer, who answered him in a polite and convincing way by questioning Szilard’s political judgment. “What does he know about Japanese psychology?” Oppenheimer told Teller. “How can he judge the way to end the war? The people in Washington are very wise, they know all the facts. Szilard knows nothing. Don’t do anything.”
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Teller complied, and wrote Szilard a letter to that effect:
Dear Szilard:
Since our discussion I have spent some time thinking about your objections to an immediate military use of the weapon we may produce. I decided to do nothing. I should like to tell you my reasons.
First of all let me say that I have no hope of clearing my conscience. The things we are working on are so terrible that no amount of protesting or fiddling with politics will save our souls.
This much is true: I have not worked on the project for a very selfish reason and I have gotten much more trouble than pleasure out of it. I worked because the problems interested me and I should have felt it a great restraint not to go ahead. I can not claim that I simply worked to do my duty. A sense of duty could keep me out of such work. It could not get me into the present kind of activity against my inclinations. If you should succeed in convincing me that your moral objections are valid, I should quit working. I hardly think that I should start protesting.
But I am not really convinced of your objections. I do not feel that there is any chance to outlaw any one weapon. If we have a slim chance of survival, it lies in the possibility to get rid of wars. The more decisive a weapon is the more surely it will be used in any real conflict and no agreements will help.
Our only hope is in getting the facts of our results before the people. This might help to convince everybody that the next war would be fatal. For this purpose actual combat-use might even be the best thing.
And this brings me to the main point. The accident that we worked out this dreadful thing should not give us the responsibility of having a voice in how it is to be used. This responsibility must in the end be shifted to the people as a whole and that can be done only by making the facts known. This is the only cause for which I feel entitled in doing something: the necessity of lifting the secrecy at least as far as the broad issues of our work are concerned. My understanding is that this will be done as soon as the military situation permits it.
All this may seem to you quite wrong. I should be glad if you showed this letter to Eugene [Wigner] and to [James] Franck who seem to agree with you rather than with me. I should like to have the advice of all of you whether you think it is a crime to continue to work. But I feel that I should do the wrong thing if I tried to say how to tie the little toe of the ghost to the bottle from which we just helped it escape.
With best regards.
Teller did not mention Oppenheimer’s opposition to the petition in his letter to Szilard because he knew that Oppenheimer would see the letter before it was sent.
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In later years, Teller looked back on his refusal to sign Szilard’s petition—and the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki—as mistakes. In 1962 he wrote:
I am convinced that the tragic surprise bombing was not necessary. We could have exploded the bomb at a very high altitude over Tokyo in the evening. Triggered at such a high altitude, the bomb would have created a sudden, frightening daylight over the city But it would have killed no one. After the bomb had been demonstrated—after we were sure it was not a dud—we could have told the Japanese what it was and what would happen if another atomic bomb were detonated at low altitude.
After the Tokyo demonstration, we could have delivered an ultimatum for Japanese surrender. The ultimatum, I believe, would have been met, and the atomic bomb could have been used more humanely but just as effectively to bring a quick end to the war. But to my knowledge, such an unannounced, high altitude demonstration over Tokyo at night was never proposed.
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And in 1987 he wrote:
I eventually felt strongly that action without prior warning or demonstration was a mistake. I also came to the conclusion that, although the opinions of scientists on political matters should not be given special weight, neither should scientists stay out of public debates just because they are scientists. In fact, when political decisions involve scientific and technical matters, they have an obligation to speak out.
I failed my first test at Los Alamos, but subsequently I have stood by that conviction.
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“Could we have avoided the tragedy of Hiroshima?” he wondered. “Could we have started the atomic age with clean hands?”
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The questions would haunt him to the end of his life.
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I. I. Rabi did not share Teller’s opinion. When Rabi arrived on the Hill in mid-July, he told Oppenheimer that the war was almost over, that the Japanese were as good as defeated, but that it was wishful thinking to expect Truman not to use the bomb. Rabi, who had an office in Washington and understood the mood of the capital, could sense the determination—even the zeal—there to end the war quickly and decisively. Rabi’s view was equally jaundiced about cowing Japan with a demonstration. He saw no way to shake them with such a gambit. Who would evaluate such a demonstration—the emperor? “This is absurd,” he told Oppenheimer. It would be empty “fireworks.” Only the destruction of a city would be “incontrovertible.”
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Oppenheimer was under intense pressure from Groves to prevent political debate over the bomb on the Hill. Oppenheimer’s job, the general repeatedly told him, was to finish the “gadget”—nothing else. Early on, Oppenheimer had fought compartmentalization by telling Groves that scientists would work more effectively if they were permitted unfettered discussion among themselves. Groves had acceded to Oppenheimer’s request, but he had extracted a promise in return: Oppenheimer would limit discussions strictly to scientific matters. Groves used the bargain he struck with Oppenheimer in the spring of 1943 to restrict debate about use of the bomb in the summer of 1945.
Although Oppenheimer stopped Szilard’s petition, no one at Los Alamos was more concerned than he was about the role atomic bombs would play after the war. But Oppenheimer did not think that scientists could do much about postwar problems while the war was still going on. Better informed than any other scientist on the Hill about the state of play in Washington, Oppenheimer perhaps also realized that scientists, at the end of the day, had no real voice in the decision to use the bomb. He also probably knew that those who did have a voice had no need for the opinions of those at Los Alamos or the Met Lab.
An incident earlier in the year suggested Oppenheimer was right. As Allied forces raced toward the heart of Germany, U.S. Army Intelligence discovered that the Nazis had no atomic bombs. Soon after this was learned, the sensational news swept like wildfire through the Manhattan Project laboratories, where it was eagerly discussed. “Isn’t it wonderful that the Germans have no atom bomb?” a physicist said to an army liaison officer at one of the labs. “Now we won’t have to use ours.” The officer, schooled in the ways of the military and of Washington, looked at him for a long moment, rolled his eyes, shook his head, and said, “Of course you understand that if we have such a weapon we are going to use it.” His reply shocked the naive physicist.
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Truman never saw Szilard’s petition. Szilard gave it to Compton on July nineteenth, and asked him to keep the signers’ names secret from Groves. Compton did so, sealing it in a manila envelope addressed “To The President of the United States.” Also included in the envelope was a poll of 150 Met Lab scientists who had been asked to choose among five possible courses of action. By far the largest number, 46 percent, voted to “give a military demonstration in Japan, to be followed by a renewed opportunity to surrender before full use of the weapon is employed.” The phrase “military demonstration in Japan” was later interpreted by officials in Washington to mean an attack without warning, but many of the polled scientists subsequently contended that they meant just the opposite: the phrase “before full use of the weapon is employed” meant that they first wanted a demonstration that would not kill a large number of civilians.
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After checking with Groves, Compton sent the package to Groves’s deputy, Colonel Kenneth Nichols, on July twenty-fourth, noting that “since the matter presented in the petition is of immediate concern, the petitioners desire the transmission occur as promptly as possible.”
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When Nichols received the package on July twenty-fifth, he sent it by special military courier to Groves in Washington, urging “that these papers be forwarded to the President of the United States with proper comments.”
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Groves delayed sending the package to Secretary Stimson’s office until August first—after Truman had left Washington for the Potsdam Conference and a telex from Tinian Island in the western Pacific had assured him that the atomic bomb was ready for combat use against Japan.
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In the end, the decision was one for policy makers, not scientists, to make. From the time the project got underway in October 1941, policy makers saw the bomb as a legitimate part of the overall war effort. They asked whether it would be ready in time, not whether it should be used if it was. Their chief purpose was to win the war at the least possible cost in American lives. They also considered the effect of the bomb’s use on Japan, which they hoped would be shocked into surrender, and to a lesser degree on the Soviet Union, which they hoped might be made more cooperative after the war. These anticipated effects dampened any inclination to question the bomb’s use, to consider an advance warning, or to ponder its broader moral and political consequences. Truman and his advisers concluded that using the bomb against Japan would achieve their primary aim of bringing the war to a speedy end and would further, rather than impair, the prospects of postwar peace. From their point of view, the greater the shock effect in Tokyo, the more quickly the war would end; and the greater the shock effect in Moscow, the more willing Stalin would be to deal in a friendly way with the United States. That was their assumption.
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It was time to test it.
July 1945 was unusually hot and dry in Los Alamos. Instead of the usual summer rains, electrical storms rolled like loose cannonballs down from the Jemez Mountains, the blue sky forboding and crackling with branches of white lightning. Plutonium was arriving from Hanford and U-235 was arriving from Oak Ridge. The thump from explosives tests on nearby mesas could be heard more frequently each day. Nerves visibly tensed. Oppenheimer smoked constantly and grew painfully thin and gaunt, his porkpie hat looking bigger and bigger as his face grew thinner and thinner.
The approaching climax, coming after two years of constant strain and pressure, produced drawn faces on the scientists, who seemed to one spouse to be “driven by demons.”
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Failure was unthinkable, and yet some couldn’t suppress the thought as the enterprise entered its final phase.
They had come a long way since the laboratory opened in April 1943 and Ernest Lawrence scoffed that “thirty scientists could design this bomb in three months if we had the fissionable material.”
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Then, they had known almost nothing about bomb design. How much fissionable material was needed to make the explosion? What was the best way to get the biggest explosion? What should be the material’s shape? How should it be detonated? Could the force of the explosion be predicted?