Pandora's Keepers (35 page)

The morning of August sixth was sunny, calm, and warm in Hiroshima—a beautiful summer day. The sky was sharply blue. “Shimmering leaves, reflecting sunlight from a cloudless sky, made a pleasant contrast with shadows in my garden,” a resident of the city noted in his diary.
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People walked, bicycled, and rode streetcars to work. Soldiers exercised on parade grounds while schoolgirls swept city streets. An air-raid siren sounded just before 8:15
A.M.
, but few scurried for cover—people were more concerned with getting to work than with sheltering themselves from three planes—although many raised their eyes to watch the B-29s high in the sky. No military alert sounded when the
Enola Gay
and two trailing B-29s loaded with instruments to measure and photograph the blast approached Hiroshima; Japanese officials assumed the three planes were on a routine reconnaissance flight. Unchallenged, the
Enola Gay
flew to the heart of the city.
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A minute later the bomb was dropped. Ground Zero was the Aioi Bridge, spanning the delta islands of the Ōta River in central Hiroshima. Whistling and spinning, the bomb had tiny holes where wires came out as it fell; these triggered its primary arming system. Other holes on its casing took in air samples as it fell; when the bomb reached seven thousand feet, a barometric switch activated the second arming system. Protruding out of the bomb’s spinning tail fins were numerous wispy radio antennae; these received returning radio signals as a way of determining altitude.
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At nineteen hundred feet—the height calculated for maximum damage—the bomb detonated. There was a tremendous flash of light and heat. It lasted only a fraction of a second, but its intensity was sufficient to instantly incinerate everything up to five hundred yards from Ground Zero. The temperature at Ground Zero reached seventy-two hundred degrees Fahrenheit. People within half a mile of the fireball were seared to smoking black bundles, their internal organs boiled away. Thousands of these black bundles littered the smashed streets and bridges and sidewalks of Hiroshima. Farther out, the thermal flash instantly blistered and tore loose people’s skin, leaving it hanging from the horribly swollen faces and bodies of severely injured survivors who groaned and staggered like sleepwalkers as they called out names of loved ones in their shock and suffering.

The blast wave, rocketing from Ground Zero at two miles per second, threw up a vast cloud of swirling debris. The sickly sweet odor of burning human flesh hung over all of Hiroshima, which had changed to a wasteland of scorched earth. Everything as far as the eye could see was ashes and ruins. Smoke thick enough to obscure the sun covered the sky. Rain that was muddy and chilly (and highly radioactive) began to fall. Children cried for their mothers; mothers searched desperately for their children. Pain and suffering were everywhere. “I know of no word or words to describe the view,” a survivor later said.
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Some people thought the world was ending. Others thought it was Hell on earth.

Hiroshima had been destroyed in an instant. Fire stations, police stations, railroad stations, post offices, telephone and telegraph offices, broadcasting stations, and schools were demolished. Streetcars, roads, and electricity, gas, water, and sewer facilities were ruined beyond use. Hospitals and first-aid clinics were destroyed. Ninety percent of all medical personnel in the city were killed or disabled. An entire community had been shattered. And this was only the beginning. Within hours, victims not killed or horribly burned began to vomit due to radiation poisoning. They seemed to improve for a time, but then they worsened, slowly and painfully. It was a strange and agonizing form of illness: nausea, loss of appetite, bloody diarrhea, fever, weakness, ulceration and bleeding in the mouth, the eyes, the lungs—a slow but progressive worsening until death. Those who would survive suffered a greatly increased risk of leukemia. There would also be high mortality rates among fetuses exposed to radiation in the womb, and many infants who lived showed retarded growth and abnormally small heads. Nearly 200,000 people were killed outright or would die in Hiroshima in subsequent years from the effects of heat, blast, and fire. There was to be a continuing toll of radiation-induced genetic disorders in children conceived years afterward.

Nagasaki was a densely populated and cosmopolitan city built around a harbor and up into surrounding hills like San Francisco. And like San Francisco, it was a fabled port of spectacular beauty, particularly now, for autumn had come early to the city and many of its trees were brilliant with red and yellow leaves. The Portuguese and the Dutch had arrived in Nagasaki in the late sixteenth century and helped transform it from a fishing village into Japan’s chief port for foreign trade and Jesuit missionaries. In 1945 Nagasaki remained the most Christianized city in Japan, a harmonious blend of Eastern and Western cultures with its many churches and western-style houses, including the legendary home of Madame Butterfly, immortalized by Puccini, overlooking the harbor. It was also where the Mitsubishi torpedoes used to devastating effect at Pearl Harbor had been made.

Nagasaki was not the intended target on the morning of August 9, 1945. The intended target was Kokura, on the northeast coast of Kyushu, but heavy ground haze and smoke obscured Kokura and the aiming point could not be seen. So the B-29 flew on to Nagasaki, and found that it, too, was obscured by clouds racing in from the East China Sea. Running low on fuel, the pilot had time for one final pass over the city. At the last minute, the clouds broke just long enough to give the bombardier a view of the target. A plutonium bomb fell from the B-29 and exploded 1,650 feet above Nagasaki just after 11:00 in the morning.

There was a blinding bluish-white flash, accompanied by intense glare and heat. The split-second flash was so intense that it caused third-degree burns to exposed human skin up to a distance of a mile. Clothing ignited, telephone poles charred, thatch-roofed houses caught fire. Black or other dark-colored surfaces absorbed the heat and immediately burst into flames. A blast wave followed that roared like an earthquake. People forty miles away felt the concussion. The sky darkened ominously, turning an eerie red and then a ghostly yellow. Huge radioactive raindrops fell from the sky. The scene on the ground was obscured first by a bluish haze and then by a purple-brown cloud of choking dust and smoke. The victims of Nagasaki, like those of Hiroshima, thought they had descended into Hell. They stumbled around, terrified and helpless, in the twilight gloom. Bodies of the dead were so charred that one could not distinguish men from women, backs from chests. As the dust settled and the smoke cleared, the search for victims buried in the rubble began. The flesh of survivors peeled off their bones like gloves from hands as they were pulled screaming and moaning from the debris.

Far from the human suffering below, the crew of the B-29 stared in shocked amazement at a boiling cauldron where a beautiful, vibrant city had been just moments before. Over four square miles in the center of the city had been flattened and blackened. They watched as a gigantic ball of flame rose in a huge column of thick smoke two miles up in the sky. A massive, swelling mushroom billowed at the top. It seethed like a thousand geysers, changing colors kaleidoscopically. Then it broke free from the stem and a smaller mushroom took its place. It was like a decapitated monster growing a new head.

After a while, countless men, women, and children began to gather for a drink of water at the banks of the Urakami River. Their hair and clothing were scorched and their burnt skin hung off in sheets like rags. Begging for help, they died one after another in the water or in heaps on the banks. Then radiation began to take its toll. Seventy thousand people died in Nagasaki that day and another 70,000 more over the next five years—a slightly smaller death toll than in Hiroshima because the surrounding hills had deflected the blast and radiation. But the victims of Nagasaki endured equally unspeakable suffering. An American naval officer who visited Nagasaki a month after the bombing described in a letter home to his wife what he felt when he saw the once beautiful city:

A smell of death and corruption pervades the place, ranging from the ordinary carrion smell to somewhat subtler stenches with strong overtones of ammonia (decomposing nitrogenous matter, I suppose). The general impression, which transcends those derived from the evidence of our physical senses, is one of deadness, the absolute essence of death in the sense of finality without hope of resurrection. And all this is not localized. It’s everywhere, and nothing has escaped its touch. In most ruined cities you can bury the dead, clean up the rubble, rebuild the houses and have a living city again. One feels that is not so here. Like the ancient Sodom and Gomorrah, its site has been sown with salt and
ichabod
[“the glory is departed”] is written over its gates.
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Groves telephoned Oppenheimer from Washington on the afternoon of August sixth with the news that Hiroshima had been bombed. Oppenheimer was tense. He had been pacing his office and chain-smoking. Groves told him he was proud of his lab. “It went all right?” Oppenheimer anxiously asked. “Apparently it went with a tremendous bang,” the general replied. Remembering the profound impression that the predawn Trinity test had made on him, and hoping that Hiroshima would similarly shock the world, Oppenheimer asked Groves if the bomb had been dropped before sunrise. No, said Groves, the bomb had been dropped in daylight in order to safeguard the plane’s crew. “Everybody is feeling reasonably good about it here and I extend my heartiest congratulations,” Oppenheimer said to Groves, his voice trailing off. “It’s been a long road.” “One of the wisest things I ever did was when I selected the director of Los Alamos,” the general crowed. “Well, I have my doubts, General Groves,” said Oppenheimer, in no mood for self-congratulation at that moment.
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Teller learned about Hiroshima on the afternoon of August sixth as he walked from his apartment along the Jemez Mesa to the Tech Area. On the way, he saw another scientist sitting in a jeep parked beneath the Los Alamos water tower. His face was exuberant. He was as exhilarated as a victorious boxer. He called to Teller excitedly: “One down!” Teller did not know what he meant, and walked on toward the Tech Area. There he heard the news. But word of the Hiroshima bombing created no exuberance, no exhilaration, no elation in Teller that afternoon. Instead, he felt worried, concerned, and anxious. A new force was loose in the world. What this new force would do, Teller could not guess.

When Oppenheimer had returned to Los Alamos after Trinity, he had found Teller’s latest report on superbomb research waiting on his desk. Calculations suggested that a thermonuclear reaction could indeed be triggered by an atomic bomb. On the afternoon of Hiroshima, Oppenheimer went to Teller’s office for a long and private talk. He made it clear to Teller that he, personally, would have nothing further to do with research on a superbomb. If he had his way, Oppenheimer added, Los Alamos would never develop such a weapon.
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But even in that case, he was solicitous of Teller’s well-being. He did not simply inform Teller of his opinion; he did his best to persuade him that abandoning work on a superbomb was the wisest course.

When news of Hiroshima reached Szilard at the University of Chicago’s faculty club on the afternoon of August sixth, he reacted with anger, sadness, and horror. His first stop after he heard the news was University President Robert Maynard Hutchins’s office, where he proposed that the Met Lab staff wear black mourning bands on their arms. Hutchins suggested that Szilard find some less provocative way for them to express their anguish.
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That evening Szilard poured out his guilt and regret in a letter to his beloved Trude:

I suppose you have seen today’s newspapers. Using atomic bombs against Japan is one of the greatest blunders of history. Both from a practical point of view on a 10-year scale and from the point of view of our moral position. I went out of my way (and very much so) in order to prevent it, but as today’s papers show, without success. It is very difficult to see what wise course of action is possible from here on.
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“I always thought it was his way of apologizing,” Trude said after Leo’s death. “It was one of the most important letters he ever wrote to me.”
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Compton was in his office at the University of Chicago when news of Hiroshima flashed over the radio. He called together the scientists of the Met Lab, and told them what details he knew. It was a tough audience. Compton expressed his regret for the enormous human suffering caused by the bomb, and accepted his share of responsibility for the decision to drop it. To an acquaintance who decried the atomic attacks, Compton responded, “I favored the use of the bomb, substantially as it was used, and believe now that this was wise.” Yet he obliquely acknowledged moral qualms, arguing that the atomic bombing was no worse than the firebombing of Tokyo that had erased any distinction between combatants and noncombatants. The atomic bomb’s chief difference, he asserted, “was the psychological effect of its surprise use. It was of about the same destructiveness as a raid by a fleet of B-29s using ordinary bombs.” “I say that before God our consciences are clear,” Compton declared, somewhat plaintively. “We made the best choice for man’s future that we knew how to make.”
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That night, Oppenheimer called a general meeting in the Tech Area auditorium. He entered at the rear—not from the side, as was his custom—and made his way up the center aisle amid whistling, cheering, and foot stomping. Once onstage, Oppenheimer pumped his clasped hands above his head like a triumphant prizefighter. When the roar subsided, he read from a message flashed from the B-29 after the drop. There was no hint of regret in his words—no trace of the ambivalence and guilt the private Oppenheimer had expressed to Groves and Teller. The public Oppenheimer played unashamedly to the crowd. A young physicist in the audience that night remembered him strutting in triumph: