Fear Itself (54 page)

V.

W
ARTIME MOBILIZATION
witnessed dramatic changes to how the federal government organized a national capacity for technological innovation. During the 1930s, the New Deal had moved in fits and starts toward a society with a more enhanced scientific capacity.
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With the war, the issue became infinitely more pressing. In 1940, Vannevar Bush, an applied mathematician and electrical engineer and a former MIT professor and dean of the School of Engineering who had just come to Washington to direct the Carnegie Institution and head the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, persuaded President Roosevelt to create a federal agency to guide the mobilization of American science and technology for military purposes. On June 27 of that year, FDR created the National Defense Research Committee (NDRC) and asked Bush to lead its five research divisions on patents and inventions, instruments and controls, communications and transportation, armor and ordnance, and chemistry and explosives.

Within a year, Bush was also directing the Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD), which could not only help initiate research but act as well as an operating agency to develop prototypes of weapons and techniques for industrial production. At OSRD, which included the NDRC, Bush worked with other talented science administrators, including Harvard University’s president, James B. Conant, an organic chemist, who was put in charge of NDRC, and J. Robert Oppenheimer, the distinguished University of California theoretical physicist, to develop weapons that could be utilized as quickly as possible.
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With the backing of the president, Bush became the “czar of research,” with sufficient authority to dictate to the generals and civilians who led the Department of War. At a time when anti-Semitism was restricting Jewish opportunities in the humanities and social sciences at leading American universities, physics and chemistry were operating on more meritocratic grounds. As a result, American science was able to draw not only on native-born Jews of talent but also on a trove of Jewish scientists fleeing Nazism. Reinforced in this way, a talented community of natives and refugees joined together to fashion a cutting-edge large-project scientific research community at just the moment when German science had lost some of its key figures.
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During the course of the war, the OSRD and a new advisory group Bush headed, the Joint Committee on New Weapons and Equipment, blurred traditional lines. During World War I, the federal government had drafted scientists to build new military laboratories. By contrast, Bush and his colleagues launched projects and organized war-related research under contract to the country’s universities and laboratories, thus changing the relationship among government, the armed forces, and civilian institutions of higher learning. In this way, the government could take advantage of existing facilities and personnel without losing time to new construction and recruitment. Conant’s Harvard, as an example, quickly took up the task of conducting experiments to design more lethal explosives.
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The NDRC and OSRD also fashioned close ties between the military and the staffs of scientists and engineers who worked for private firms by offering contracts to these companies, thus further eroding the division between civilians and soldiers. In all, the new federal science establishment deepened Washington’s commitment to central military planning to unite and coordinate the military, corporations, and universities in a common endeavor for what Bush called “the preservation of civilization.”
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These were no small ventures. There had never been anything like this in terms of mobilizing science in civil society for public purposes. During its first year, the NDRC “enlisted the services of about 2,000 scientists, including about 75 percent of the nation’s top physicists and half of the leading chemists.” Many millions were invested in university science facilities and in federal testing facilities. By 1944, the OSRD was spending three million dollars every week, while harnessing six thousand scientists and engineers who worked in more than three hundred university and industrial research labs.
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Building what Bush boasted was a new intimacy between soldiers and scientists, these organizations directed a largely secret effort to assemble talented experts who could accelerate innovations in electronics, radar, and the destructive power of weapons. Together with the military services, the United States devoted some two billion dollars to military research and development between 1940 and 1945, based on the understanding that Conant had articulated two weeks after Pearl Harbor. “This war,” he observed, “is in many ways a race of scientific developments and devices.”
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The most important aspect of this race, the culmination of America’s scientific mobilization, was the successful construction of atomic weapons. Writing to President Roosevelt on March 9, 1942, Bush reported that the “work is under way at full speed,” adding, “The subject is more important than I believed when I last spoke to you about it.” He went on to explain that “the stuff will apparently be more powerful than we thought, the amount necessary appears to be less, the possibilities of actual production appear more certain.” The president responded two days later. Underscoring the need “for absolute secrecy,” he declared, “I think the whole thing should be pushed not only in regard to development, but also with due regard to time. This is very much of the essence.”
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Crucially, the administrators, scientists, and engineers who forged the bomb did so before any other was built.
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Whether by design, inexperience, or insufficient skill, their German counterparts did not manage this task, despite a common starting point.

Never questioning the ethics or necessity of the bomb, and drawing a sharp line dividing scientific from political decisions, the OSRD helped oversee advances that transformed nuclear physics into usable technology.
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At first, like nonnuclear research and technology, the project was decentralized to university and corporate settings. By March 1942, contracts had been let to Standard Oil for work on the diffusion process and suitable catalysts, to Westinghouse Electric for an experimental centrifuge and a four-meter gas separator, and to ten university labs. The three largest recipients of these funds were the University of California, for research on the relationship between electromagnetic methods and chemical processes; Columbia University, for pure chemical substances prepared by physical means; and the University of Chicago, for physics aspects of the tube alloy program and to study the “possibility of producing volatile ‘X’ compounds.”
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Soon, though, the scale of the program, and the need to conceal fissionable material, the technology of production, and testing placed the enterprise primarily at an immense purpose-built 45,000-acre secret research and development site in Los Alamos, New Mexico. Containing 37 technical buildings, 49 administrative structures, 620 apartment units, and 52 dormitories, this laboratory, and the larger Manhattan Project of which it was a part, was led administratively by Maj. Gen. Leslie Groves, of the Army Corps of Engineers, and directed intellectually by Oppenheimer. Together with a military contingent of two thousand, the civilian staff grew to nearly four thousand.
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Drawing on mass spectroscopy, tracer techniques, and other advances, these scientists overcame great practical and technical barriers.
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They did not work alone. Outside of Los Alamos, the Manhattan Project, which took its name from the Office of the Corps of Engineers in New York City, employed more than 125,000 scientists, engineers, construction personnel, and administrators in thirty-seven installations.
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When the first of two operational bombs literally wiped Hiroshima off the map on August 6, 1945, with an explosive force of at least 12,500 tons of TNT,
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Oppenheimer expressed relief. “Thank God it wasn’t a dud,” he told a cheering crowd at Los Alamos. Adding that he was “proud” of their accomplishment, he regretted only that the bomb had not been available to use against Nazi Germany.
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That day, President Truman proclaimed, “This is the greatest thing in history.”
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More soberly, Emperor Hirohito talked of “a most cruel bomb, the power of which to do damage is indeed incalculable.”
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“It had been there just a few minutes before,” a Japanese Catholic priest at Hiroshima testified, “but it was absolutely gone.”
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This triumph for atomic science certainly marked a fateful turning point, producing what Secretary of War Henry Stimson called, in May 1945, “a revolutionary change in the relations of man to the universe,” and giving humans what the émigré physicist Leo Szilard called, in July 1945, the capability for “devastation on an unimaginable scale.”
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Fear became permanent. Writing about “the Bomb” three years later, the constitutional scholar Clinton Rossiter cautioned, “You can’t go home again; the positive state is here to stay, and from now on the accent will be on power, not limitations.”
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Within five years, just after the Soviet Union exploded its first atomic bomb in August 1949, the United States possessed 298 bombs and 250 long-range bombers. By the time Dwight Eisenhower was inaugurated, the country’s strategic nuclear weapons stock had grown to 1,005.
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On August 12, 1945, three days after Nagasaki was made to disappear by an even more powerful bomb, bringing the combined total of atomic death to 210,000 civilians, an official report written by the physicist Henry DeWolf Smyth,
A General Account of the Development of Methods of Using Atomic Energy for Military Purposes
, gave the public the first comprehensive account of what had been the world’s most secret scientific project; secret, at least by intent, both from Axis enemies and America’s Soviet ally.
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Though short on details that remained classified, the sheer sweep of the story of unprecedented scientific capacity that it told “was startling even to the compartmentalized project scientists.”
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Looking back seven months after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Arthur Compton, the University of Chicago physicist who had headed the Manhattan Project’s Chicago radiation lab, maintained that atomic weapons were not worse than conventional bombing, as each “was of about the same destructiveness as a raid by a fleet of B-29s using ordinary bombs.”
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Indeed, well before any atomic weapon had been tested or used, the intensity of the air campaign the United States and Britain were conducting had led Winston Churchill to wonder, at a June 1943 meeting of the war cabinet, “Are we beasts? Are we taking this too far?”
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Rather than desist, the Allies accelerated the largest and most relentless bombing campaign ever directed against civilian targets, an operation that ultimately cost the lives of 140,000 American and British airmen.
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By 1944, America’s Eighth Air Force alone was dropping five thousand tons of incendiaries each month.
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Firebombing in Germany reduced Cologne, Hamburg (Operation Gomorrah), Berlin, Nuremberg, and, notably, Dresden to charred rubble. When attention turned to Japan, all attempts at precision bombing were supplanted by the type of saturation bombing that had been more of a hallmark of British air campaigns. In 1942, the bomb tonnage of America’s air force was just 6,123; in 1943, 154,117; and in 1944, fully 938,952. Likewise, the incidents of firepower from the air increased dramatically in the Pacific theater; 4,080 in 1942, 44,683 in 1943, 147,026 in 1944, and, before the atomic bombs, 1,051,714 in 1945.
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Incendiary attacks directed by Gen. Curtis LeMay (assisted by his statistician assistant, Robert McNamara) killed 83,000 people during the Great Tokyo Air Raid of March 10, 1945, and another 37,000 when more than 750,000 bombs were let fall thirteen days later. More than a million of that city’s residents were rendered homeless. Overall, fully 40 percent of the built area of sixty-six Japanese cities was destroyed.
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These attacks,
Time
exulted in jingoistic rhetoric, were “a dream come true” and had demonstrated how, “properly kindled, Japanese cities will burn like autumn leaves.”
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By August, more than half of Tokyo’s residential areas had been obliterated.
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These saturation campaigns combined strategic war aims with an impulse for revenge. These fantastic bombardments significantly reduced the ability of both Germany and Japan to hold out against Allied forces—given the scale and disruptive force of nearly 2.5 million tons of bombs, it could hardly be otherwise
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—but there was more. “Hitler and Mussolini,” the president told Congress at the start of 1943, “will understand the enormity of their miscalculation—that the Nazis would always have the advantage of superior war power as they did when they bombed Warsaw, Rotterdam, London, and Coventry. . . . Yes—the Nazis and Fascists have asked for it—and they are going to get it.”
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In March 1944, the
New York Times
justified “this hideous business” by recalling “what the Nazi fliers did in Rotterdam, on the roads of France and Belgium in 1940, in Poland in 1939, and to British cities in 1940 and 1941,” and
The Nation,
though condemning any “indecent gloating,” backed the bombing’s “revolting necessity.”
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By war’s end, with three-quarters of a million German and Japanese civilians killed from the air,
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it was hard to recall Cordell Hull’s horrified reaction to the bombing of Barcelona by Franco’s Nationalist air force from March 16–18, 1938, in which some thirteen hundred were killed and two thousand injured. “Speaking for the whole American people,” he had proclaimed that “no theory of war can justify such conduct.”
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Nor was it easy to remember Franklin Roosevelt’s own September 1, 1939, “urgent appeal” to the governments of Britain, France, Germany, Italy, and Poland to renounce “this form of human barbarism” and for each “publicly to affirm its determination that its armed forces shall in no event, and under no circumstances, undertake the bombardment from the air of civilian populations or unfortified cities.”
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Crusading for democracy, Washington had cast off such inhibitions to unleash terrifying and unconstrained expressions of American might.