Authors: David McCullough
Tags: #Biography & Autobiography, #Presidents & Heads of State, #Political, #Historical
And that was about all there was [recorded Lilienthal, incredulous and thrilled]…. No talk about what a “rap” he, as President, was assuming in naming me…no talk, such as…President Roosevelt had given me, about what McKellar could do to disrupt the peace if his wishes concerning me were not respected—none of that—just there it was.
It was an admirable performance. Simple. No mock heroics. Nothing complex. Straightforward!
As it turned out, McKellar’s opposition had little effect. The nomination was confirmed by the Senate on May 23.
Earlier, talking with his staff before seeing Lilienthal, Truman had said with a pleased look, “Old Mack is going to have a hemorrhage.”
Another morning in late May, at their regular nine o’clock meeting, Truman told his staff he had done something about which there might be objection. He had invited Herbert Hoover to come see him. He had written Hoover in longhand the night before. The letter was already in the mail, so there was no use trying to stop it.
The former President had been
persona non grata
at the White House since Roosevelt first took office in 1933. Truman thought it was time that ended. He wanted to talk with Hoover, he said, about famine relief in Europe. Also, as he did not say, Hoover was the one other mortal who had ever sat in his place, or who knew the feeling of being constantly compared to Roosevelt.
“Saw Herbert Hoover,” Truman wrote in his diary, “…and had a pleasant and constructive conversation on food and the general troubles of U.S. Presidents—two in particular.”
Things were going so well overall, Truman also recorded, that he hardly knew what to think. “I can’t understand it—except to attribute it to God. He guides me, I think.”
Besides Henry Stimson, who served as chairman, the newly organized, entirely civilian and highly secret Interim Committee on S-1 included eight members, three of whom were eminent scientists involved with the project: James Bryant Conant, the president of Harvard, who was chairman of the National Defense Research Committee; Karl T. Compton, president of M.I.T.; and Vannevar Bush, president of the Carnegie Institute in Washington and director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development. Ralph A. Bard was Under Secretary of the Navy and a former Chicago financier. William L. Clayton was Assistant Secretary of State for Economic Affairs and a specialist in international trade. George L. Harrison was the president of the New York Life Insurance Company and Stimson’s special assistant on matters related to S-1.
The eighth man was Jimmy Byrnes, who had been appointed by the President as his personal representative.
The first meeting was held on Wednesday, May 9, 1945, in Stimson’s office at the Pentagon. “Gentlemen, it is our responsibility to recommend action that may turn the course of civilization,” the venerable Secretary of War began. Meetings followed on May 14 and May 18. On Thursday, May 31, the committee convened for a crucial two-day session, joined now by an advisory panel of four physicists actively involved with development of the bomb: Enrico Fermi and Arthur H. Compton of the University of Chicago; Ernest O. Lawrence of the Radiation Laboratory at the University of California at Berkeley; and, most important, J. Robert Oppenheimer, head of the Los Alamos Laboratory, where the bomb was being assembled.
A wide range of subjects was covered at this final session, including relations with Soviets. General Marshall raised the possibility of inviting the Russians to send some of their scientists to witness the first test. Byrnes objected, expressing a view agreed to by all present, that the best program would be to “push ahead as fast as possible in production and research to make certain that we stay ahead and at the same time make every effort to better our political relations with Russia.”
After much discussion, the committee and scientific panel reached three unanimous conclusions:
Byrnes went directly from the meeting to the White House to report to Truman, and Truman, according to Byrnes’s later recollection, said that “with reluctance he had to agree, that he could think of no alternative….”
Stimson, in the meantime, had received a long letter that impressed him greatly and that he passed on immediately to Marshall, calling it a “remarkable document” from an honest man. It was addressed to the President and had come through regular security channels. “I shall take the President’s copy to him personally,” Stimson wrote in reply, “or through Byrnes….”
Dated May 24, it was from an unknown engineer named O. C. Brewster of 23 East 11th Street, New York, who had worked on uranium isotope separation for S-1, but who, since the defeat of Germany, had become tormented over what the release of the energy “locked up in the atom” might mean for the future. “The idea of the destruction of civilization is not melodramatic hysteria or crackpot raving. It is a very real and, I submit, almost inevitable result.” In the early stages of the project, like many others, Brewster had hoped it would be conclusively proved impossible. “Obviously, however, so long as there was any chance that Germany might succeed at this task there was only one course to follow and that was to do everything in our power to get this thing first and destroy Germany before she had a chance to destroy us…. So long as the threat of Germany existed we had to proceed with all speed…. With the threat of Germany removed we must stop this project.” He urged a demonstration of one atomic bomb on a target in Japan, but then no further production of nuclear material.
I do not of course want to propose anything to jeopardize the war with Japan but, horrible as it may seem, I know it would be better to take greater casualties now in conquering Japan than to bring upon the world the tragedy of unrestrained competitive production of this material…. In the name of the future of our country and of the peace of the world, I beg you, sir, not to pass this off because I happen to be unknown, without influence or name in the public eye….
The letter reached the White House, but whether Truman saw it is not known. It was, however, returned shortly with no sign of presidential reaction.
The one hint of Truman’s state of mind to be found in his own hand is a diary entry on Sunday, June 3: “Have been going through some very hectic days,” is his only comment. Later, he would say that of course he realized an atomic explosion would inflict damage and casualties “beyond imagination.”
Actually, no one was very clear on what power the weapon might have. Forecasts provided by the scientific panel for the explosive force varied from the equivalent of 2,000 tons of TNT to 20,000 tons.
Estimates by the scientists on how long it might take the Soviets to develop such a weapon ranged from three to five years, although General Groves personally reckoned as much as twenty years.
Stimson was thinking more of the larger historic consequences. At the final meeting of the committee he had said how vitally important it was to regard the bomb not “as a new weapon merely but as a revolutionary change in the relations of man to the universe,” and like O. C. Brewster, he warned that the project might mean “the doom of civilization.” It might be a Frankenstein monster, or it might mean “the perfection of civilization.” (Ernest O. Lawrence of the scientific panel had forecast the day when it might be possible to “secure our energy from terrestrial sources rather than from the sun.”) But no one knew.
On Wednesday, June 6, Stimson came to discuss the report with the President in more detail.
Stimson told Truman he was deeply troubled by reports of the devastation brought on Japan by the B-29 fire raids. He had insisted always on precision bombing, Stimson said, but was now informed by the Air Force that that was no longer possible, since in Japan, unlike Germany, industries were not concentrated but scattered among and closely connected with the houses of employees.
As Stimson appreciated, attitudes about the bombing of civilian targets had changed drastically in Washington, as in the nation, the longer the war went on. When the Japanese bombed Shanghai in 1937, it had been viewed as an atrocity of the most appalling kind. When the war in Europe erupted in 1939, Roosevelt had begged both sides to refrain from the “inhuman barbarism” of bombing civilians. His “arsenal of democracy” speech in December 1940 had had particular power and urgency because German bombers were pounding London. (“What a puny effort is this to burn a great city,” Edward R. Murrow had said.) But the tide of war had turned, and the “ghastly dew” raining from the skies in the Tennyson poem that Truman still carried in his wallet had become more ghastly by far. That winter, in February 1945, during three raids on Dresden, Germany—two British raids, one American—incendiary bombs set off a fire-storm that could be seen for 200 miles. In all an estimated 135,000 people had died.
A recent issue of
Life
carried aerial photographs taken after three hundred B-29 bombers swept such destruction on Tokyo, said
Life,
as was hitherto visited on the city only by catastrophic earthquakes. The magazine said nothing of how many men, women, and children were killed, but in one such horrendous fire raid on Tokyo the night of March 9–10, more than 100,000 perished. Bomber crews in the last waves of the attack could smell burning flesh. With Japan vowing anew to fight to the end, the raids continued. On May 14, five hundred B-29s hit Nagoya, Japan’s third largest industrial city, in what
The New York Times
called the greatest concentration of fire bombs in the history of aerial warfare. On May 23, five square miles of Tokyo were obliterated. Thirty-six hours later, 16 square miles were destroyed. As weeks passed, other coastal cities were hit—Yokahama, Osaka, Kobe.
Stimson told Truman he didn’t want to see the United States “outdoing Hitler in atrocities.” But he was also concerned that targets in Japan might become so bombed out by conventional raids that S-1 would have no “fair background” to show its strength, an observation that seems to have struck Truman as so odd, coming on top of Stimson’s previous worry, that he actually laughed, then added that he understood.
Neither Stimson nor General Marshall was concerned over whether the bomb should be used on Japan, only with how to use it to stop the slaughter as quickly as possible. Stimson’s directive to General Groves in 1942 had been to produce the bomb at “the earliest possible date so as to bring the war to a conclusion.”
As Stimson stressed, the committee’s role was advisory only. The responsibility for a recommendation to the President was his alone, and he was painfully aware of all that was riding on his judgment.
The ultimate responsibility for the recommendation to the President rested on me [he would later write], and I have no desire to veil it. The conclusions of the Committee were similar to my own, although I reached mine independently. I felt that to extract a genuine surrender from the Emperor and his military advisers, there must be administered a tremendous shock which could carry convincing proof of our power to destroy the Empire. Such an effective shock would save many times the number of lives, both American and Japanese, that it would cost.
The possibility of dropping the atomic bomb on some target other than a city, as a harmless technical demonstration for the Japanese, had been considered by the committee and by the scientific panel and it had been rejected. General Marshall had thought initially that the weapon might first be used against such a “straight military objective” as a large naval installation, and then, if necessary, against manufacturing centers, from which the people would be warned in advance to leave. “We must offset by such warning methods,” Marshall had said, “the opprobrium which might follow from an ill-considered employment of such force.” But by now apparently Marshall had changed his mind, and besides, he was not formally a member of the committee. The scientists were able to propose no demonstration sufficiently spectacular to give the needed “tremendous shock.” Probably only one bomb would be ready. There were worries it might not work, and that any advance announcement of a supposedly all-powerful secret weapon that failed would be worse than no attempt and only bolster Japanese resolve to fight on. Writing for the scientific panel, Oppenheimer said:
The opinions of our scientific colleagues on the initial use of these weapons are not unanimous: they range from the proposal of a purely technical demonstration to that of the military application best designed to induce surrender. Those who advocate a purely technical demonstration would wish to outlaw the use of atomic weapons, and have feared that if we use the weapons now our position in future negotiation will be prejudiced. Others emphasize the opportunity of saving American lives by immediate military use, and believe that such use will improve the international prospects, in that they are more concerned with the prevention of war than with the elimination of this specific weapon. We find ourselves closer to these latter views; we can propose no technical demonstration likely to bring an end to the war; we see no acceptable alternates to direct military use.
Byrnes had introduced the further thought that if the Japanese were told in advance where the bomb was to be dropped, they might bring American prisoners of war to the area. Oppenheimer, who supposedly knew the most about the bomb, stressed that the number of people killed by it would be considerably less than in a conventional incendiary raid. Oppenheimer’s estimate was that twenty thousand would die.
Stimson told Truman what the committee had stressed, and what all his senior military advisers were saying, that it was the “shock value” of the weapon that would stop the war. Nothing short of that would work.