Pandora's Keepers (26 page)

To compensate for his inexperience, his ignorance, and his anxiety to do well the job suddenly thrust upon him, Truman relied heavily on his inherited advisers, particularly Secretary of War Henry Stimson and James F. Byrnes, a close confidante of Truman who had been his mentor in the Senate, a Supreme Court justice, and war mobilization director under Roosevelt. The race for the atomic bomb was consuming an increasing amount of Stimson’s time by April 1945, even as the war in the Pacific grew fierce and the weight of his seventy-seven years left him in need of rest every afternoon; and as he became more deeply involved with atomic matters, he began to ponder and reflect.

Stimson inclined toward the bomb’s wartime use and to hold the secret of the bomb as a reward to induce Stalin’s cooperation. Although he knew the Soviets were spying on the project, he did not believe they had acquired any crucial information; and while he was troubled about the possible effect of continuing to keep them officially uninformed about the enterprise, he believed that it was essential, as he wrote in his diary at the end of 1944, “not to take them into our confidence until we were sure to get a real quid pro quo from our frankness.” Stimson had no illusions about the possibility of keeping such a secret permanently, but he did not think “it was yet time to share it with Russia.”
13
Stimson did not intend to threaten the Soviet Union with the new weapon, but he expected that once its power was demonstrated, the Soviets would be more cooperative about postwar issues.
14

At the end of Truman’s first Cabinet meeting, hastily convened after he was sworn in on April twelfth, Stimson stayed behind. He would spell out the details later, he said, but before departing he wanted to inform the new president of “a new explosive of almost unbelievable destructive power.”
15
Two weeks later, on April twenty-fifth, Stimson and Groves briefed Truman on the details of the Manhattan Project. They told him scientists would soon complete “the most terrible weapon ever known in human history,” one of which “could destroy a whole city.” They were confident the weapon would bring the bloody war to a rapid conclusion, thereby justifying the years of effort, the vast expenditures, and the judgment of officials responsible for the project. A serious and thoughtful man, Stimson also reflected on the bomb’s larger meaning in an accompanying memo. The world, “in its present state of moral advancement compared with its technical development[,] would be eventually at the mercy of such a weapon,” he warned the new president, adding: “Modern civilization might be completely destroyed.” Stimson asserted that “a certain moral responsibility” flowed from U.S. leadership in this field that the nation could not shirk “without very serious responsibility for any disaster to civilization which it would further.”
16

To address this serious challenge, Stimson proposed the establishment of a committee to consider the proper use of the bomb once it was finished and the postwar problems related to its development. Truman agreed, and the Interim Committee, as the advisory group came to be known, was created on May 1, 1945.
^*
Stimson sought to keep the Interim Committee small enough to conduct meaningful discussions but varied enough in its membership to represent diverse viewpoints. More than a year after Bohr had urged policy makers to begin looking ahead, machinery was finally established to consider the most momentous and dangerous development of the war. Stimson’s charge to the committee asked for advice about
how
, but not
whether
, the bomb should be used against Japan. That the bomb would be used once it was ready seems to have been a foregone conclusion.

A Scientific Advisory Panel to the Interim Committee was also created, composed of Compton, Lawrence, Oppenheimer, and Fermi, the first three chosen because they were directors of the Chicago, Berkeley, and Los Alamos laboratories; Fermi, because of his unrivaled knowledge of nuclear physics. The Scientific Advisory Panel reflected policy makers’ desire for expert advice, but it was also an attempt to preempt discontent among scientists if decisions were made about how to use the bomb without consulting those who had made it.

Somewhat like Szilard, Oppenheimer, after much soul-searching, had concluded that the bomb he and others at Los Alamos were making
had
to be used because that was the only way to awaken the world to the necessity of abolishing war altogether. No demonstration—even if it was possible under wartime conditions, which he doubted—could take the place of actual combat use, with its horrible and sobering results. Moreover, Oppenheimer thought it would be very difficult if not impossible to get political action on international control
unless
the bomb’s immensely destructive power deeply penetrated the popular mind. “My own view,” he asserted later, “is that the development of atomic weapons can make the problem more hopeful because it intensifies the urgency of our hopes—in frank words, because we are scared.”
17
He hoped that a military demonstration of the bomb would compel a general recognition that pre-atomic age calculations had to give way to new realities.

Oppenheimer privately worried to Szilard, however, that Washington officials had inadequately pondered these sobering new realities. Oppenheimer’s worry intensified Szilard’s own fears. Referring to the prospects of a “superbomb” infinitely more powerful even than an atomic bomb, he asked Oppenheimer “what men like Stimson and Wallace would think if they were fully advised of the turn which the technical development can be expected to take within a few years.”

Using the bomb did not necessarily mean using it on a civilian target. Szilard knew, however, that he faced an uphill battle persuading Oppenheimer to oppose dropping the bomb on a Japanese city. “I expect that you who have been so strenuously working at [Los Alamos] on getting these devices ready will naturally lean towards wanting that they should be used,” he told him.
18
In this, Szilard was perceptive. Work on the atomic bomb had begun in the spring of 1939 out of fear that the Nazis were building one of their own, but the surrender of Germany in the spring of 1945 brought the resignation of only
two
scientists at Los Alamos. If others thought of leaving—or debating use of the bomb—a meeting that Oppenheimer called a few days after Germany’s surrender stopped them in their tracks. Oppenheimer told them they should finish their task and leave the politics to policy makers in Washington. “He was very uncompromising and very sharp,” remembered one who attended the meeting. “He indicated that he would not tolerate that kind of discussion and he implicitly invited those who felt that way to get out.”
19
No one else left.

The project had long ago assumed a momentum and a life of its own. It had become a monumental scientific and engineering endeavor, involving prodigious effort and expense and labor. It was now a hurtling train moving forward—like the Pacific War itself—with awesome, almost unstoppable force. Most scientists were too involved in their work and too committed to achieving their goal to stop and reflect. “Most people just didn’t think too much about what would happen,” recalled a physicist on the Hill that spring—“No, that was somebody else’s problem.”
20
What had begun as a fearful race with Nazi Germany had become an end in itself. “I don’t think there was any time where we worked harder at the speed-up than in the period after the German surrender and the actual combat use of the bomb,” Oppenheimer recalled after the war.
21

Ethical and moral concerns had been eclipsed by their emotional and psychological investment and the intensity they brought to problem solving. The physics existed; it simply waited to be revealed. They believed the bomb was going to be built by someone, and they wanted it to be them. The intensity of collaborative work with extraordinarily gifted people also had enormous appeal. That camaraderie, shared in the exploration of an arcane and forbidden realm, provided a rare sense of intimacy, a sense of transcendence that combined strong creative satisfaction with feelings of individual power—how many people could resist that? And like most Americans in 1945, they found it hard to empathize with the fate of a people whose soldiers had committed atrocities against Americans and who were so physically and culturally different. There was not a single Asian American among the Manhattan Project staff, and it was easy for the scientists to think of the Japanese as “the other.” There was some private debate about the morality of dropping the bomb on a city, but most felt it was no worse than the fire raids then devastating Japan and that it was justified if it ended the war. In addition, most scientists believed—or wanted to believe—that once this horrible weapon was used, there could never be another war. This made the idea of using the bomb to kill large numbers of civilians emotionally easier for those who were building it.

Szilard was determined to do all he could to prevent this. On May twenty-eighth, he and two fellow scientists that he persuaded to come along traveled to South Carolina to see James Byrnes, who was now secretary of state designate. Szilard was directed there by the president’s appointments secretary after an unsuccessful attempt to speak personally with Truman. Szilard and his two companions traveled by train to Spartanburg, a small town nestled in the piney foothills of western South Carolina, and walked from the red brick railroad station to Byrnes’s house nearby.

The meeting between Szilard and Byrnes echoed the one between Bohr and Churchill the year before. It was a tense, unsatisfactory exchange between different men with different assumptions and perspectives. A purse-lipped man with a wiry frame, beaklike nose, and sharp eyes that peered at others with steely geniality, Byrnes was a savvy politician thoroughly schooled in the practicalities of power. He had grown up in the 1880s, when the southern up-country still had a tough frontier ethos. Byrnes was brought up to believe that when you fought, you fought with everything you had. He had little patience, or sympathy, for the moral arguments of a physicist with a foreign accent, though he concealed his lack of interest beneath the mask of amiability that politicians always have on call.
22

Szilard gave the secretary of state designate a copy of the memo he had prepared for Roosevelt shortly before the president’s death. Even before Byrnes got halfway through the memo, Szilard started to warn him against dropping the bomb on Japan as a way to impress Russia. Byrnes replied that demonstrating the bomb would make Russia more manageable in Europe. “You come from Hungary,” he said—“you would not want Russia to stay in Hungary indefinitely.”
23
But Szilard did not share Byrnes’s assumption that the bomb would make Russia more manageable and he countered that the “interests of peace might best be served and an arms race avoided by not using the bomb against Japan, keeping it secret, and letting the Russians think that our work on it had not succeeded.”
24
Byrnes was appalled and incredulous. The nation had spent more than $2 billion on the bomb’s development, he said—Congress would demand to see results. As he had told FDR shortly before the president’s death, the administration might well avoid embarrassment during the war if the bomb remained in doubt, but afterward, “If the project proves a failure, it will then be subjected to relentless investigation and criticism.”
25

Szilard left Spartanburg acutely frustrated. How could he communicate with politicians insensitive to the bomb’s revolutionary power and implications? “I thought to myself,” he later wrote, “how much better off the world might be had I been born in America and become influential in American politics, and had Byrnes been born in Hungary and studied physics. In all probability there would have been no atomic bomb, and no danger of an arms race between America and Russia.” Szilard was convinced that Byrnes, and by implication President Truman, were inclined toward a shortsighted policy that would make a postwar atomic arms race inevitable.
26

On the way back to Chicago, Szilard stopped in Washington to see Oppenheimer, who was in the capital for an upcoming meeting of the Interim Committee. Szilard told Oppenheimer about his unsuccessful meeting with Byrnes and stressed how important it was to persuade policy makers to inform the Russians about the bomb before it was used against Japan. “Don’t you think if we tell the Russians what we intend to do and then use the bomb in Japan, the Russians will understand it?” Oppenheimer asked. “They’ll understand it only too well,” Szilard answered.
27

Three days after the Spartanburg meeting, on May 31, 1945, the Interim Committee and its Scientific Advisory Panel met in Stimson’s Pentagon office to work out a recommendation for President Truman on the use of the atomic bomb. Nazi Germany had surrendered only three weeks earlier. Fighting for Okinawa had entered its bloodiest phase. Japan’s militarists seemed unwavering in their determination to fight to the finish. It would be another seven weeks before the first atomic bomb would be tested.

In preparation for the meeting, Arthur Compton drafted a memorandum for the other participants. In it, he stressed that the use of the atomic bomb on Japan was “more a political than a military question because it introduces the question of mass slaughter, really for the first time in history. Essentially, the question of the use to be made of the new weapon carries much more serious implications than the introduction of poison gas.” He called the question of the bomb’s use “first in point of urgency.” “This whole question,” Compton wrote skeptically, “may well have received the broad study it demands. I merely mention it as one of the urgent problems that have bothered our men because of its many ramifications and humanitarian implications.”
28