Inside the Centre: The Life of J. Robert Oppenheimer (84 page)

Many more eyewitness accounts have subsequently been published, confirming and adding to the details in Hersey’s terrifying and horrible account. One man recalls that the streets were full of people whose skin was black and hanging from their bodies. ‘Many of them died along the road – I can still picture them in my mind – like walking ghosts.’ Other horrors described include ‘a woman with her jaw missing and her tongue hanging out of her mouth’, ‘people with their bowels and brains coming out’, a ‘dead child lying there and another who seemed to be crawling over him in order to run away, both of them burned to blackness’. To one person who saw many such dreadful sights, however, the most shocking experience was of climbing a hill and looking down and seeing ‘that Hiroshima had disappeared . . . Hiroshima didn’t exist – that was mainly what I saw – Hiroshima just didn’t exist’. Almost all the buildings in the city (the official estimate was 70,000 out of 76,000) were damaged or destroyed by the bomb. As for casualties, there has been some dispute, but the best estimate seems to be 135,000, of which 66,000 died and 69,000 were injured. In other words, the casualties amounted to more than half of the total population. Of the people who were 3,000 feet or closer to the centre of the blast, the bomb killed more than 90 per cent.

It would be some weeks before the harrowing details of the suffering inflicted upon the people of Hiroshima were known to the scientists who made it possible. Indeed, it took nearly a day for the bare fact of the bombing to reach most of them. Two notable exceptions were Deak Parsons, who was aboard the
Enola Gay
during its fateful mission, in order to carry out, mid-flight, the very last stages of assembly, and Luis Alvarez, who was aboard one of the two observation planes that accompanied
Enola Gay
. The first person to hear the news who was not actually on one of the planes was General Farrell, who was on Tinian island. At
about 9.40 a.m. local time – twenty-five minutes after the explosion – Farrell received a radio message from Parsons, who was on the
Enola Gay
, heading back to Tinian:

The remark about the visible effects being greater than at the Trinity test gave Farrell the impression that the yield of the bomb was at least 20,000 tons of TNT.

The time difference between Tinian and Washington is fourteen hours, so when the
Enola Gay
left Tinian at 2.45 a.m. on Monday 6 August, it was 12.45 p.m. on Sunday 5 August in Washington. That morning Groves had arrived at his office to find a cable telling him that take-off was scheduled for that day. He therefore waited for the report of the take-off. By 2 p.m. he had heard nothing, so, to relieve the tension, he went out to play tennis. That evening at 6.45, while having dinner at the Army-Navy Club, he was called to the phone and told that the plane had left on schedule. In fact, this was just half an hour before the bomb would be dropped on Hiroshima, but of course neither Groves nor whoever he spoke to in Tinian would have known that. After dinner, Groves went back to his office to spend the night there, awaiting news from the Pacific. ‘The hours went by,’ he writes in his autobiography, ‘more slowly than I ever imagined hours could go by, and still there was no news.’ At 11.30 p.m. – nearly four hours after the original message – Groves received a copy of the report of the bombing that Parsons had sent to Farrell from the
Enola Gay
. After he received this message, Groves remembers, ‘I went to sleep on the cot that had been brought into my office, after telling the Duty Officer to call me when the next message came in.’

At about 3 p.m. local time on 6 August (1 a.m. in Washington), the
Enola Gay
returned to Tinian. It arrived in triumph, with 200 or more soldiers, technicians and scientists there to greet it and cheer the crew. General Spaatz was there to pin the Distinguished Service Cross on the breast of Colonel Tibbets’s overalls. Afterwards, in the briefing room, Parsons was awarded the Silver Star. Four and a half hours later, Groves was awakened to be told that a cable had arrived from General Farrell, reporting ‘additional information furnished by Parsons, crews, and observers on return to Tinian’. Parsons and other observers, Farrell reported, ‘felt this strike was tremendous and awesome even in comparison with New Mexico test’.

President Truman had not yet arrived back in the States from the Potsdam conference. He heard the news midway across the Atlantic Ocean on board the USS
Augusta
. As he tells the story in his
Memoirs
: ‘I was eating lunch with members of the
Augusta
’s crew when Captain Frank Graham, White House Map Room watch officer, handed me the following message’:

‘I was greatly moved,’ Truman writes. ‘I telephoned Byrnes aboard ship to give him the news and then said to the group of sailors around me, “This is the greatest thing in history. It’s time for us to get home.”’

In Truman’s absence, it fell to Groves, with the assistance of William L. Laurence, the
New York Times
journalist whom he had invited to witness Trinity, to prepare a statement about the bombing. The announcement, read out by the President’s press secretary, was made at 11 a.m., Washington time. Containing, as it did, the first public acknowledgement of the atomic-bomb project, it had a sensational impact throughout the world. ‘Sixteen hours ago,’ it began:

‘We have spent two billion dollars on the greatest scientific gamble in history,’ the statement continued, ‘and won.’ If the Japanese did not now accept the terms of the Potsdam ultimatum, they could ‘expect a rain of ruin from the air, the like of which has never been seen on this earth’.

Much to his chagrin, listening to this statement on the radio – at what, for him in Los Alamos, would have been 9 a.m. on the morning of Monday 6 August – was the first confirmation Oppenheimer had that the bomb had gone off successfully. He had expected to be told before it was made public. Indeed, he had sent his assistant John Manley to Washington with the express purpose of phoning him as soon as the news reached Groves’s office. Just as Manley was about to phone, however, Groves stopped him,
telling him that no one was to tell anybody about it until the President had announced it.

There was, perhaps, some consolation for Oppenheimer in the fact that the statement emphasised the importance of what it called ‘the achievement of scientific brains in putting together infinitely complex pieces of knowledge held by many men in different fields of science into a workable plan’: ‘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.’

At Los Alamos, the effect of the announcement was an emotional release every bit as powerful as that which had followed the Trinity test. On that occasion it had been centred on the demonstration that what they had been designing and building actually
worked
. On this occasion it was to do with the fact that, where previously they had worked in furtive secrecy, now the spotlight had been shone upon them. What they had achieved had been recognised – by the President no less – as a crucially important task. They were celebrities.

That evening at Los Alamos there was a big assembly to celebrate their success. Oppenheimer made a dramatic entrance, walking from the back of the room to the stage and, once there, clasping his hands together like a prize-winning boxer. To ecstatic cheering, Oppenheimer told the crowd that it was too early to say what the results of the bombing had been, but that ‘the Japanese didn’t like it’. His only regret, he said, was that ‘we hadn’t developed the bomb in time to use it against the Germans’. This, according to the young physicist who later recalled the event, ‘practically raised the roof’.

The following day, 7 August 1945, the front pages of newspapers all over the world were dominated by the extraordinary revelations contained in the statement made on Truman’s behalf, about the destruction of Hiroshima, the atomic-bomb project and about Oppenheimer. Overnight, Los Alamos changed from being a secret to being the most talked-about place in the world. Among those talking about it were the German physicists who had worked on the abortive Nazi bomb project, including Heisenberg, Weizsäcker and Otto Hahn, the last of whom had first announced the startling fact about nuclear fission back in January 1939. Those scientists had been captured by the Allies and at the time of the Hiroshima bombing were being held in a country house in Cambridgeshire called Farm Hall. Unknown to the scientists, microphones placed around the house were picking up almost every word they said to each other, so that a complete record exists of how they reacted to the news about Hiroshima.

The officer in charge of Farm Hall, Major T.H. Ritter, reported in a memo that, shortly before dinner on the evening of 6 August, he told
Hahn that the BBC had announced that an atomic bomb had been dropped.

The news was greeted with incredulity, particularly by Heisenberg, who declared: ‘I don’t believe a word of the whole thing.’ The reason he gave for his scepticism reveals how little the German scientists knew about atomic-bomb physics. Such a bomb, Heisenberg declared, would require ‘ten tons of pure U-235’, which, understandably, he did not believe the Allies could possibly have acquired.

Heisenberg’s scepticism, however, did not last long. At 9 p.m. that evening, the German scientists gathered around a radio set to listen to the BBC news. It began: ‘Here is the news: It’s dominated by a tremendous achievement of Allied scientists – the production of the atomic bomb.’ ‘The greatest destructive power devised by man,’ the report continued, ‘went into action this morning – the atomic bomb. British, American and Canadian scientists have succeeded, where Germans failed, in harnessing the basic power of the universe.’

Some details in the report that captured the attention of the German scientists included: 1. that the cost of the project was £500 million (equivalent to $2 billion at the time); 2. that up to 125,000 people were employed in the factories that were built for the programme, few of whom knew what they were producing; and 3. that the material used to make the bomb was uranium.

The report also included a statement prepared by Churchill before he left office, which emphasised the part played by Britain in the bomb programme, especially in its early stages. ‘By God’s mercy,’ Churchill said, somewhat rubbing it in for those listening at Farm Hall, ‘British and American science outpaced all German efforts. These were on a considerable scale, but far behind.’ ‘The whole burden of execution,’ he declared, ‘constitutes one of the greatest triumphs of American – or indeed human – genius of which there is a record.’

Listening to the broadcast made the German scientists appreciate the colossal scale of the Manhattan Project. ‘We were unable to work on that
scale,’ Hahn remarked to his colleagues, later adding: ‘I am thankful we didn’t succeed.’ Heisenberg recalled that about a year earlier he had been told by someone in the German Foreign Office that the Americans had threatened to drop a uranium bomb on Dresden if the Germans did not surrender soon. ‘I was asked whether I thought it possible, and with complete conviction, I replied “No.”’

The next day, 7 August, the German scientists at Farm Hall – like millions of people all over the world – spent the entire morning poring over the newspaper reports of the Hiroshima bombing. Among the other impressed readers of the newspapers that day was Haakon Chevalier, who, on learning what his old friend had been up to, wrote him a note of congratulations, telling him: ‘You are probably the most famous man in the world today . . . I want you to know that we are very proud of you.’ It was three weeks before he received a reply.

The delay was possibly partly to do with Oppenheimer’s difficulties in knowing what to say to a man whom he had named to the security services as the key go-between in what was regarded as one of the most serious attempts at atomic espionage of the entire war. However, even without that problem, Oppenheimer would have had little time for purely personal correspondence in the days immediately after the Hiroshima bombing. The scientific task was done, but much was happening – politically, militarily and socially.

Truman finally returned to Washington from Potsdam on the evening of 7 August and was immediately caught up in a whirlwind of activity generated by Groves, who was determined to proceed as quickly as possible with a second atomic bombing of Japan. He and Admiral William Purnell, Groves writes in his autobiography, ‘had often discussed the importance of having the second blow follow the first one quickly, so that the Japanese would not have time to recover their balance’. This second bomb would have to be of the Fat Man type, there being no chance of assembling another uranium bomb at this stage (in fact, the Little Boy bomb remained one of a kind; the Fat Man design, despite its complicated assembly, being easier to manufacture, safer to transport and more powerful). After the success of the Trinity test, the only thing standing in the way of using a Fat Man bomb in Japan was the availability of plutonium. Groves had originally been advised that a plutonium bomb could be ready to use on 20 August. At the end of July, this was revised to 11 August. Groves, however, was too impatient to wait that long and, somewhat against the advice he was given by the scientists, saw to it that the bomb was assembled, loaded and ready to use by the evening of 8 August.