PART THREE

LIFE AND DEATH

What will people of the future think of us? Will they say, as Roger Williams said of some of the Massachusetts Indians, that we were wolves with the minds of men? Will they think that we resigned our humanity? They will have the right.

C. P. Snow

I see that as human beings we have two great ecstatic impulses in us. One is to participate in life, which ends in the giving of life. The other is to avoid death, which ends tragically in the giving of death. Life and death are in our gift, we can activate life and activate death.

Gil Elliot

18

Trinity

Within twenty-four hours of Franklin Roosevelt’s death two men told Harry Truman about the atomic bomb. The first was Henry Lewis Stimson, the upright, white-haired, distinguished Secretary of War. He spoke to the newly sworn President following the brief cabinet meeting Truman called after taking the oath of office on the evening of the day Roosevelt died. “Stimson told me,” Truman reports in his memoirs, “that he wanted me to know about an immense project that was under way—a project looking to the development of a new explosive of almost unbelievable destructive power. That was all he felt free to say at the time, and his statement left me puzzled. It was the first bit of information that had come to me about the atomic bomb, but he gave me no details.”²²⁷¹

Truman had known of the Manhattan Project’s existence since his wartime Senate work as chairman of the Committee to Investigate the National Defense Program, when he had attempted to explore the expensive secret project’s purpose and had been rebuffed by the Secretary of War himself. That a senator of watchdog responsibility and bulldog tenacity would call off an investigation into unaccounted millions of dollars in defense-plant construction on Stimson’s word alone gives some measure of the quality of the Secretary’s reputation.

Stimson was seventy-seven years old when Truman assumed the Presidency. He could remember stories his great-grandmother told him of her childhood talks with George Washington. He had attended Phillips Andover when the tuition at that distinguished New England preparatory school was sixty dollars a year and students cut their own firewood. He had graduated from Yale College and Harvard Law School, had served as Secretary of War under William Howard Taft, as Governor General of the Philippines under Calvin Coolidge, as Secretary of State under Herbert Hoover. Roosevelt had called him back to active service in 1940 and with able assistance especially from George Marshall and despite insomnia and migraines that frequently laid him low he had built and administered the most powerful military organization in the history of the world. He was a man of duty and of rectitude. “The chief lesson I have learned in a long life,” he wrote at the end of his career, “is that the only way you can make a man trustworthy is to trust him; and the surest way to make him untrustworthy is to distrust him and show your distrust.”²²⁷² Stimson sought to apply the lesson impartially to men and to nations. In the spring of 1945 he was greatly worried about the use and consequences of the atomic bomb.

The other man who spoke to Truman, on the following day, April 13, was James Francis Byrnes, known as Jimmy, sixty-six years old, a private citizen of South Carolina since the beginning of April but before then for three years what Franklin Roosevelt had styled “assistant President”: Director of Economic Stabilization and then Director of War Mobilization, with offices in the White House.²²⁷³ While FDR ran the war and foreign affairs, that is, Byrnes had run the country. “Jimmy Byrnes . . . came to see me,” writes Truman of his second briefing on the atomic bomb, “and even he told me few details, though with great solemnity he said that we were perfecting an explosive great enough to destroy the whole world.”²²⁷⁴ Then or soon afterward, before Truman met with Stimson again, Byrnes added a significant twist to his tale: “that in his belief the bomb might well put us in a position to dictate our own terms at the end of the war.”²²⁷⁵

At that first Friday meeting Truman asked Byrnes to transcribe his shorthand notes on the Yalta Conference, three months past, which Byrnes had attended as one of Roosevelt’s advisers and about which Truman, merely the Vice President then, knew little. Yalta represented nearly all Byrnes’ direct experience of foreign affairs. It was more than Truman had. Under the circumstances the new President found it sufficient and informed his colleague that he meant to make him Secretary of State. Byrnes did not object. He insisted that he be given a free hand, however, as Roosevelt had given him in domestic affairs, and Truman agreed.

“A small, wiry, neatly made man,” a team of contemporary observers describes Jimmy Byrnes, “with an odd, sharply angular face from which his sharp eyes peer out with an expression of quizzical geniality.”²²⁷⁶ Dean Acheson, then an Assistant Secretary of State, thought Byrnes overconfident and insensitive, “a vigorous extrovert, accustomed to the lusty exchange of South Carolina politics.”²²⁷⁷ Truman assayed the South Carolinian most shrewdly a few months after their April discussion in a private diary he intermittently kept:

Had a long talk with my able and conniving Secretary of State. My but he has a keen mind! And he is an honest man. But all country politicians are alike. They are sure all other politicians are circuitous in their dealings. When they are told the straight truth, unvarnished, it is never believed—an asset sometimes.²²⁷⁸

A politician’s politician, Byrnes had managed in his thirty-two years of public life to serve with distinction in all three branches of the federal government. He was self-made from the ground up. His father died before he was born. His mother learned dressmaking to survive. Young Jimmy found work at fourteen, his last year of formal education, in a law office, but in lieu of classroom study one of the law partners kindly guided him through a comprehensive reading list. His mother in the meantime taught him shorthand and in 1900, at twenty-one, he earned appointment as a court reporter. He read for the law under the judge whose circuit he reported and passed the bar in 1904. He ran first, in 1908, for solicitor, the South Carolina equivalent of district attorney, and made himself known prosecuting murderers. More than forty-six stump debates won him election to Congress in 1910; in 1930, after fourteen years in the House and five years out of office, he was elected to the Senate. By then he was already actively promoting Franklin Roosevelt’s approaching presidential bid. Byrnes served as one of the candidate’s speechwriters during the 1932 campaign and afterward worked hard as Roosevelt’s man in the Senate to push through the New Deal. His reward, in 1941, was a seat on the United States Supreme Court, which he resigned in 1942 to move to the White House to take over operating the complicated wartime emergency program of wage and price controls, the assistant Presidency of which Roosevelt spoke.

In 1944 everyone understood that Roosevelt’s fourth term would be his last. The man he selected for Vice President would therefore almost certainly take the Democratic Party presidential nomination in 1948. Byrnes expected to be that man and Roosevelt encouraged him. But the assistant President was a conservative Democrat from the Deep South, and at the last minute Roosevelt compromised instead on the man from Missouri, Harry S. Truman. “I freely admit that I was disappointed,” Byrnes writes with understatement approaching lockjaw, “and felt hurt by President Roosevelt’s action.”²²⁷⁹ He made a point of visiting the European front with George Marshall in September 1944, in the midst of the presidential campaign; when he returned FDR had to appeal to him formally by letter—a document Byrnes could show around—to endorse the ticket with a speech.

Byrnes undoubtedly regarded Truman as a usurper: if not Truman but he had been Roosevelt’s choice he would be President of the United States now. Truman knew Byrnes’ attitude but needed the old pro badly to help him run the country and face the world. Hence the prize of State. The Secretary of State was the highest-ranking member of the cabinet and under the rules of succession then obtaining was the officer next in line for the Presidency as well when the Vice Presidency was vacant. Short of the Presidency itself, State was the most powerful office Truman had to give.

Vannevar Bush and James Bryant Conant had needed months to convince Henry Stimson to take up consideration of the bomb’s challenge in the postwar era. He had not been ready in late October 1944 when Bush pressed him for action and he had not been ready in early December when Bush pressed him again. By then Bush knew what he thought the problem needed, however:

We proposed that the Secretary of War suggest to the President the establishment of a committee or commission with the duty of preparing plans.²²⁸⁰ These would include the drafting of legislation and the drafting of appropriate releases to be made public at the proper time. . . . We were all in agreement that the State Department should now be brought in.

Stimson allowed one of his trusted aides, Harvey H. Bundy, a Boston lawyer, father of William P. and McGeorge, at least to begin formulating a membership roster and list of duties for such a committee. But he did not yet know even in broad outline what basic policy to recommend.

Bohr’s ideas, variously diluted, floated by that time in the Washington air. Bohr had sought to convince the American government that only early discussion with the Soviet Union of the mutual dangers of a nuclear arms race could forestall such an arms race once the bomb became known. (He would try again in April to see Roosevelt; Felix Frankfurter and Lord Halifax, the British ambassador, would be strolling in a Washington park discussing Bohr’s best avenue of approach when the bells of the city’s churches began tolling the news of the President’s death.) Apparently no one within the executive branch was sufficiently convinced of the inevitability of Bohr’s vision. Stimson was as wise as any man in government, but late in December he cautioned Roosevelt that the Russians should earn the right to hear the baleful news:

I told him of my views as to the future of S-1 [Stimson’s code for the bomb] in connection with Russia: that I knew they were spying on our work but had not yet gotten any real knowledge of it and that, while I was troubled about the possible effect of keeping from them even now that work, I believed that it was essential not to take them into our confidence until we were sure to get a real quid pro quo from our frankness. I said I had no illusions as to the possibility of keeping permanently such a secret but that I did not think it was yet time to share it with Russia.²²⁸¹ He said he thought he agreed with me.

In mid-February, after talking again to Bush, Stimson confided to his diary what he wanted in exchange for news of the bomb. Bohr’s conviction that only an open world modeled in some sense on the republic of science could answer the challenge of the bomb had drifted, in Bush’s mind, to a proposal for an international pool of scientific research. Of such an arrangement Stimson wrote that “it would be inadvisable to put it into full force yet, until we had gotten all we could in Russia in the way of liberalization in exchange for S-l.”²²⁸² That is, the quid pro quo Stimson thought the United States should demand from the Soviet Union was the democratization of its government. What for Bohr was the inevitable outcome of a solution to the problem of the bomb—an open world where differences in social and political conditions would be visible to everyone and therefore under pressure to improve—Stimson imagined should be a precondition to any initial exchange.

Finally in mid-March Stimson talked to Roosevelt, their last meeting. That talk came to no useful end. In April, with a new President in the White House, he prepared to repeat the performance.

In the meantime the men who had advised Franklin Roosevelt were working to convince Harry Truman of the increasing perfidy of the Soviet Union. Averell Harriman, the shrewd multimillionaire Ambassador to Moscow, had rushed to Washington to brief the new President. Truman says Harriman told him the visit was based on “the fear that you did not understand, as I had seen Roosevelt understand, that Stalin is breaking his agreements.” To soften that condescension Harriman added that he feared Truman “could not have had time to catch up with all the recent cables.” The self-educated Missourian prided himself on how many pages of documents he could chew through per day—he was a champion reader—and undercut Harriman’s condescension breezily by instructing the ambassador to “keep on sending me long messages.”²²⁸³

Harriman told Truman they were faced with a “barbarian invasion of Europe.”²²⁸⁴ The Soviet Union, he said, meant to take over its neighbors and install the Soviet system of secret police and state control. “He added that he was not pessimistic,” the President writes, “for he felt that it was possible for us to arrive at a workable basis with the Russians. He believed that this would require a reconsideration of our policy and the abandonment of any illusion that the Soviet government was likely soon to act in accordance with the principles to which the rest of the world held in international affairs.”

Truman was concerned to convince Roosevelt’s advisers that he meant to be decisive. “I ended the meeting by saying, ‘I intend to be firm in my dealings with the Soviet government.’ ”²²⁸⁵ Delegates were arriving in San Francisco that April, for example, to formulate a charter for a new United Nations to replace the old and defunct League. Harriman asked Truman if he would “go ahead with the world organization plans even if Russia dropped out.”²²⁸⁶ Truman remembers responding realistically that “without Russia there would not be a world organization.” Three days later, having heard from Stalin in the meantime and met the arriving Soviet Foreign Minister, Vyacheslav Molotov, he retreated from realism to bluster. “He felt that our agreements with the Soviet Union had so far been a one-way street,” an eyewitness recalls, “and that he could not continue; it was now or never. He intended to go on with the plans for San Francisco and if the Russians did not wish to join us they could go to Hell.”²²⁸⁷

Stimson argued for patience. “In the big military matters,” Truman reports him saying, “the Soviet government had kept its word and the military authorities of the United States had come to count on it. In fact . . . they had often done better than they had promised.”²²⁸⁸ Although George Marshall seconded Stimson’s argument and Truman could not have had two more reliable witnesses, it was not counsel the new and untried President wanted to hear. Marshall added a crucial justification that Truman took to heart:

He said from the military point of view the situation in Europe was secure but that we hoped for Soviet participation in the war against Japan at a time when it would be useful to us. The Russians had it within their power to delay their entry into the Far Eastern war until we had done all the dirty work. He was inclined to agree with Mr. Stimson that the possibility of a break with Russia was very serious.²²⁸⁹

Truman could hardly tell the Russians to go to hell if he needed them to finish the Pacific war. Marshall’s justification for patience meant Stalin had the President over a barrel. It was not an arrangement Harry Truman intended to perpetuate.

He let Molotov know. They had sparred diplomatically at their first meeting; now the President attacked. The issue was the composition of the postwar government of Poland. Molotov discussed various formulas, all favoring Soviet dominance. Truman demanded the free elections that he understood had been agreed upon at Yalta: “I replied sharply that an agreement had been reached on Poland and that there was only one thing to do, and that was for Marshal Stalin to carry out that agreement in accordance with his word.”²²⁹⁰ Molotov tried again. Truman replied sharply again, repeating his previous demand. Molotov hedged once more. Truman proceeded to lay him low: “I expressed once more the desire of the United States for friendship with Russia, but I wanted it clearly understood that this could be only on a basis of the mutual observation of agreements and not on the basis of a one-way street.” Those are hardly fighting words; Molotov’s reaction suggests that the President spoke more pungently at the time:

“I have never been talked to like that in my life,” Molotov said.

I told him, “Carry out your agreements and you won’t get talked to like that.”

If Truman felt better for the exchange, it disturbed Stimson. The new President had acted without knowledge of the bomb and its potentially fateful consequences. It was time and past time for a full briefing.

Truman agreed to meet with Stimson at noon on Wednesday, April 25. The President was scheduled to address the opening session of the United Nations conference in San Francisco by radio that evening. One more conditioning incident intervened; on Tuesday he received a communication from Joseph Stalin, “one of the most revealing and disquieting messages to reach me during my first days in the White House.”^{2291, 2292} Molotov had reported Truman’s tough talk to the Soviet Premier. Stalin replied in kind. Poland bordered on the Soviet Union, he wrote, not on Great Britain or the United States. “The question [of] Poland had the same meaning for the security of the Soviet Union as the question [of] Belgium and Greece for the security of Great Britain”—but “the Soviet Union was not consulted when those governments were being established there” following the Allied liberation. The “blood of the Soviet people abundantly shed on the fields of Poland in the name of the liberation of Poland” demanded a Polish government friendly to Russia. And finally:

I am ready to fulfill your request and do everything possible to reach a harmonious solution. But you demand too much of me. In other words, you demand that I renounce the interests of security of the Soviet Union, but I cannot turn against my country.

With this blunt challenge on his mind Truman received his Secretary of War.

Stimson had brought Groves along for technical backup but left him waiting in an outer office while he discussed issues of general policy. He began dramatically, reading from a memorandum:²²⁹³

Within four months we shall in all probability have completed the most terrible weapon ever known in human history, one bomb of which could destroy a whole city.

We had shared the development with the British, Stimson continued, but we controlled the factories that made the explosive material “and no other nation could reach this position for some years.” It was certain that we would not enjoy a monopoly forever, and “probably the only nation which could enter into production within the next few years is Russia.” The world “in its present state of moral advancement compared with its technical development,” the Secretary of War continued quaintly, “would be eventually at the mercy of such a weapon. In other words, modern civilization might be completely destroyed.”

Stimson emphasized what John Anderson had emphasized to Churchill the year before: that founding a “world peace organization” while the bomb was still a secret “would seem to be unrealistic”:

No system of control heretofore considered would be adequate to control this menace. Both inside any particular country and between the nations of the world, the control of this weapon will undoubtedly be a matter of the greatest difficulty and would involve such thorough-going rights of inspection and internal controls as we have never heretofore contemplated.

That brought Stimson to the crucial point:

Furthermore, in the light of our present position with reference to this weapon, the question of sharing it with other nations and, if so shared, upon what terms, becomes a primary question of our foreign relations.

Bohr had proposed to inform other nations of the common dangers of a nuclear arms race. At the hands of Stimson and his advisers that sensible proposal had drifted to the notion that the issue was sharing the weapon itself. As Commander in Chief, as a veteran of the First World War, as a man of common sense, Truman must have wondered what on earth his Secretary of War was talking about, especially when Stimson added that “a certain moral responsibility” followed from American leadership in nuclear technology which the nation could not shirk “without very serious responsibility for any disaster to civilization which it would further.” Was the United States morally obligated to give away a devastating new weapon of war?

Now Stimson called in Groves. The general brought with him a report on the status of the Manhattan Project that he had presented to the Secretary of War two days earlier. Both Stimson and Groves insisted Truman read the document while they waited. The President was restive. He had a threatening note from Stalin to deal with. He had to prepare to open the United Nations conference even though Stimson had just informed him that allowing the conference to proceed in ignorance of the bomb was a sham. A scene of darkening comedy followed as the proud man who had challenged Averell Harriman to keep sending him long messages tried to avoid public instruction in the minutiae of a secret project he had fought doggedly as a senator to investigate. Groves misunderstood completely:

Mr. Truman did not like to read long reports. This report was not long, considering the size of the project. It was about twenty-four pages and he would constantly interrupt his reading to say, “Why, I don’t like to read papers.” And Mr. Stimson and I would reply: “Well we can’t tell you this in any more concise language. This is a big project.” For example, we discussed our relations with the British in about four or five lines. It was that much condensed. We had to explain all the processes and we might just say what they were and that was about all.²²⁹⁴

After the reading of the lesson, Groves notes, “a great deal of emphasis was placed on foreign relations and particularly on the Russian situation”—Truman reverting to his immediate problems. He “made it very definite,” Groves adds for the record, “that he was in entire agreement with the necessity for the project.”²²⁹⁵

The final point in Stimson’s memorandum was the proposal Bush and Conant had initiated to establish what Stimson called “a select committee . . . for recommending action to the Executive and legislative branches of our government.” Truman approved.

In his memoirs the President describes his meeting with Stimson and Groves with tact and perhaps even a measure of private humor: “I listened with absorbed interest, for Stimson was a man of great wisdom and foresight. He went into considerable detail in describing the nature and the power of the projected weapon. . . . Byrnes had already told me that the weapon might be so powerful as to be capable of wiping out entire cities and killing people on an unprecedented scale.” That was when Byrnes had crowed that the new bombs might allow the United States to dictate its own terms at the end of the war.²²⁹⁶ “Stimson, on the other hand, seemed at least as much concerned with the role of the atomic bomb in the shaping of history as in its capacity to shorten this war. . . . I thanked him for his enlightening presentation of this awesome subject, and as I saw him to the door I felt how fortunate the country was to have so able and so wise a man in its service.” High praise, but the President was not sufficiently impressed at the outset with Stimson and Harriman to invite either man to accompany him to the next conference of the Big Three. Both found it necessary, when the time came, to invite themselves. Jimmy Byrnes went at the President’s invitation and sat at the President’s right hand.

Discussion between Truman and his various advisers was one level of discourse in the spring of 1945 on the uses of the atomic bomb. Another was joined two days after Stimson and Groves briefed the President when a Target Committee under Groves’ authority met for the first time in Lauris Norstad’s conference room at the Pentagon. Brigadier General Thomas F. Farrell, who would represent the Manhattan Project as Groves’ deputy to the Pacific Command, chaired the committee; besides Farrell it counted two other Air Force officers—a colonel and a major—and five scientists, including John von Neumann and British physicist William G. Penney. Groves opened the meeting with a variant of his usual speech to Manhattan Project working groups: how important their duty was, how secret it must be kept. He had already discussed targets with the Military Policy Committee and now informed his Target Committee that it should propose no more than four.²²⁹⁷

Farrell laid down the basics: B-29 range for such important missions no more than 1,500 miles; visual bombing essential so that these untried and valuable bombs could be aimed with certainty and their effects photographed; probable targets “urban or industrial Japanese areas” in July, August or September; each mission to be given one primary and two alternate targets with spotter planes sent ahead to confirm visibility.

Most of the first meeting was devoted to worrying about the Japanese weather. After lunch the committee brought in the Twentieth Air Force’s top meteorologist, who told them that June was the worst weather month in Japan; “a little improvement is present in July; a little bit better weather is present in August; September weather is bad.” January was the best month, but no one intended to wait that long. The meteorologist said he could forecast a good day for bombing operations only twenty-four hours ahead, but he could give two days’ notice of bad weather. He suggested they station submarines near the target areas to radio back weather readings.

Later in the afternoon they began considering targets. Groves had extended Farrell’s guidelines:

I had set as the governing factor that the targets chosen should be places the bombing of which would most adversely affect the will of the Japanese people to continue the war.²²⁹⁸ Beyond that, they should be military in nature, consisting either of important headquarters or troop concentrations, or centers of production of military equipment and supplies. To enable us to assess accurately the effects of the bomb, the targets should not have been previously damaged by air raids. It was also desirable that the first target be of such size that the damage would be confined within it, so that we could more definitely determine the power of the bomb.

But such pristine targets had already become scarce in Japan. If the first choice the Target Committee identified at its first meeting was hardly big enough to confine the potential damage, it was the best the enemy had left to offer:

Hiroshima is the largest untouched target not on the 21st Bomber Command priority list. Consideration should be given to this city.

“Tokyo,” the committee notes continue, “is a possibility but it is now practically all bombed and burned out and is practically rubble with only the palace grounds left standing. Consideration is only possible here.”

The Target Committee did not yet fully understand the level of authority it commanded. With a few words to Groves it could exempt a Japanese city from Curtis LeMay’s relentless firebombing, preserving it through spring mornings of cherry blossoms and summer nights of wild monsoons for a more historic fate. The committee thought it took second priority behind LeMay rather than first priority ahead, and in emphasizing these mistaken priorities the colonel who reviewed the Twentieth Air Force’s bombing directive for the committee revealed what the United States’ policy in Japan in all its deadly ambiguity had become:

It should be remembered that in our selection of any target, the 20th Air Force is operating primarily to laying waste all the main Japanese cities, and that they do not propose to save some important primary target for us if it interferes with the operation of the war from their point of view. Their existing procedure has been to bomb the hell out of Tokyo, bomb the aircraft, manufacturing and assembly plants, engine plants and in general paralyze the aircraft industry so as to eliminate opposition to the 20th Air Force operations. The 20th Air Force is systematically bombing out the following cities with the prime purpose in mind of not leaving one stone lying on another:

Tokyo, Yokohama, Nagoya, Osaka, Kyoto,
Kobe, Yawata & Nagasaki.

If the Japanese were prepared to eat stones, the Americans were prepared to supply them.

The colonel also advised that the Twentieth Air Force planned to increase its delivery of conventional bombs steadily until it was dropping 100,000 tons a month by the end of 1945.

The group decided to study seventeen targets including Tokyo Bay, Yokohama, Nagoya, Osaka, Kobe, Hiroshima, Kokura, Fukuoka, Nagasaki and Sasebo. Targets already destroyed would be culled from the list. The weather people would review weather reports. Penney would consider “the size of the bomb burst, the amount of damage expected, and the ultimate distance at which people would be killed.” Von Neumann would be responsible for computations. Adjourning its initial meeting the Target Committee planned to meet again in mid-May in Robert Oppenheimer’s office at Los Alamos.

A third level of discourse on the uses of the bomb revealed itself as Henry Stimson assembled the committee that Bush and Conant had proposed to him and he had proposed in turn to the President. On May 1, the day German radio announced the suicide of Adolf Hitler in the ruins of Berlin, George L. Harrison, a special Stimson consultant and the president of the New York Life Insurance Company, prepared for the Secretary of War an entirely civilian committee roster consisting of Stimson as chairman, Bush, Conant, MIT president Karl Compton, Assistant Secretary of State William L. Clayton, Undersecretary of the Navy Ralph A. Bard and a special representative of the President whom the President might choose. Stimson modified the list to include Harrison as his alternate and carried it to Truman for approval on May 2. Truman agreed and Stimson apparently assumed his interest in the project, but the President significantly did not even bother to name his own man to the list. Stimson wrote in his diary that night:²²⁹⁹

The President accepted the present members of the committee and said that they would be sufficient even without a personal representative of himself. I said I should prefer to have such a representative and suggested that he should be a man (a) with whom the President had close personal relations and (b) who was able to keep his mouth shut.²³⁰⁰

Truman had not yet announced his intention to appoint Byrnes Secretary of State because the holdover Secretary, Edward R. Stettinius, Jr., was heading the United States delegation to the United Nations in San Francisco and the President did not want to undercut his authority there. But word of the forthcoming appointment had diffused through Washington. Acting on it, Harrison suggested that Stimson propose Byrnes. On May 3 Stimson did, “and late in the day the President called me up himself and said that he had heard of my suggestion and it was fine. He had already called up Byrnes down in South Carolina and Byrnes had accepted.”²³⁰¹ Bundy and Harrison, Stimson told his diary, “were tickled to death.”²³⁰² They thought their committee had acquired a second powerful sponsor. In fact they had just welcomed a cowbird into their nest.

Stimson sent out invitations the next day. He proposed calling his new group the Interim Committee to avoid appearing to usurp congressional prerogatives: “when secrecy is no longer required,” he explained to the prospective members, “Congress might wish to appoint a permanent Post War Commission.”²³⁰³ He set the first informal meeting of the Interim Committee for May 9.

The membership would assemble in the wake of momentous change. The war in Europe had finally ground to an end. Supreme Allied Commander Dwight D. Eisenhower celebrated the victory on national radio the evening of Tuesday, May 8, 1945, V-E Day:

I have the rare privilege of speaking for a victorious army of almost five million fighting men. They, and the women who have so ably assisted them, constitute the Allied Expeditionary Force that has liberated western Europe. They have destroyed or captured enemy armies totalling more than their own strength, and swept triumphantly forward over the hundreds of miles separating Cherbourg from Lübeck, Leipzig and Munich. . . .²³⁰⁴

These startling successes have not been bought without sorrow and suffering. In this Theater alone 80,000 Americans and comparable numbers among their Allies, have had their lives cut short that the rest of us might live in the sunlight of freedom. . . .

But, at last, this part of the job is done. No more will there flow from this Theater to the United States those doleful lists of death and loss that have brought so much sorrow to American homes. The sounds of battle have faded from the European scene.

Eisenhower had watched Colonel General Alfried Jodl sign the act of military surrender in a schoolroom in Rheims—the temporary war room of the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force—in the early morning hours of May 7. Eisenhower’s aides had attempted then to draft a suitably eloquent message to the Combined Chiefs reporting the official surrender. “I tried one myself,” Eisenhower’s chief of staff Walter Bedell Smith remembers, “and like all my associates, groped for resounding phrases as fitting accolades to the Great Crusade and indicative of our dedication to the great task just accomplished.”²³⁰⁵ The Supreme Commander listened quietly for a time, thanked everyone for trying and dictated his own unadorned report:

The mission of this Allied force was fulfilled at 0241, local time, May 7th, 1945.²³⁰⁶

Better to be brief, better than resounding phrases. Twenty million Soviet soldiers and civilians died of privation or in battle in the Second World War. Eight million British and Europeans died or were killed and another five million Germans. The Nazis murdered six million Jews in ghettos and concentration camps. Manmade death had ended thirty-nine million human lives prematurely; for the second time in half a century Europe had become a charnel house.²³⁰⁷

There remained the brutal conflict Japan had begun in the Pacific and refused despite her increasing destruction to end by unconditional surrender.

Officially Byrnes was retired to South Carolina. In fact he was visiting Washington surreptitiously, absorbing detailed evening briefings by State Department division chiefs at his apartment at the Shoreham Hotel. On the afternoon of V-E Day he spent two hours closeted alone with Stimson. Then Harrison, Bundy and Groves joined them. “We all discussed the function of the proposed Interim Committee,” Stimson records.^{2308, 2309} “During the meeting it became very evident what a tremendous help Byrnes would be as a member of the committee.”

The next morning the Interim Committee met for the first time in Stimson’s office. The gathering was preliminary, to fill in Byrnes, State’s Clayton and the Navy’s Bard on the basic facts, but Stimson made a point of introducing the former assistant President as Truman’s personal representative. The membership was thus put on notice that Byrnes enjoyed special status and that his words carried extra weight.

The committee recognized that the scientists working on the atomic bomb might have useful advice to offer and created a Scientific Panel adjunct. Bush and Conant put their heads together and recommended Arthur Compton, Ernest Lawrence, Robert Oppenheimer and Enrico Fermi for appointment.

Between the first and second meetings of the Interim Committee its Doppelgänger, the Target Committee, met again for two days, May 10 and 11, at Los Alamos. Added to the full committee as advisers were Oppenheimer, Parsons, Tolman and Norman Ramsey and for part of the deliberations Hans Bethe and Robert Brode. Oppenheimer took control by devising and presenting a thorough agenda:

A. Height of Detonation²³¹⁰

B. Report on Weather and Operations

C. Gadget Jettisoning and Landing

D. Status of Targets

E. Psychological Factors in Target Selection

F. Use Against Military Objectives

G. Radiological Effects

H. Coordinated Air Operations

I. Rehearsals

J. Operating Requirements for Safety of Airplanes

K. Coordination with 21st [Bomber Command] Program

Detonation height determined how large an area would be damaged by blast and depended crucially on yield. A bomb detonated too high would expend its energy blasting thin air; a bomb detonated too low would expend its energy excavating a crater. It was better to be low than high, the committee minutes explain: “The bomb can be detonated as much as 40% below the optimum with a reduction of 24% in area of damage whereas a detonation [only] 14% above the optimum will cause the same loss in area.” The discussion demonstrates how uncertain Los Alamos still was of bomb yield. Bethe estimated a yield range for Little Boy of 5,000 to 15,000 tons TNT equivalent. Fat Man, the implosion bomb, was anybody’s guess: 700, 2,000, 5,000 tons? “With the present information the fuse would be set at 2,000 tons equivalent but fusing for the other values should be available at the time of final delivery. . . . Trinity data will be used for this gadget.”

The scientists reported and the committee agreed that in an emergency a B-29 in good condition could return to base with a bomb. “It should make a normal landing with the greatest possible care. . . . The chances of [a] crash initiating a high order [i.e., nuclear] explosion are . . . sufficiently small [as to be] a justifiable risk.” Fat Man could even survive jettisoning into shallow water. Little Boy was less forgiving. Since the gun bomb contained more than two critical masses of U235, seawater leaking into its casing could moderate stray neutrons sufficiently to initiate a destructive slow-neutron chain reaction. The alternative, jettisoning Little Boy onto land, might loose the U235 bullet down the barrel into the target core and set off a nuclear explosion. For temperamental Little Boy, the minutes note, unluckily for the aircrew, “the best emergency procedure that has so far been proposed is . . . the removal of the gun powder from the gun and the execution of a crash landing.”

Target selection had advanced. The committee had refined its qualifications to three: “important targets in a large urban area of more than three miles diameter” that were “capable of being damaged effectively by blast” and were “likely to be unattacked by next August.” The Air Force had agreed to reserve five such targets for atomic bombing. These included:

(1) Kyoto—This target is an urban industrial area with a population of 1,000,000. It is the former capital of Japan and many people and industries are now being moved there as other areas are being destroyed. From the psychological point of view there is the advantage that Kyoto is an intellectual center for Japan and the people there are more apt to appreciate the significance of such a weapon as the gadget. . . .

(2) Hiroshima—This is an important army depot and port of embarkation in the middle of an urban industrial area. It is a good radar target and it is such a size that a large part of the city could be extensively damaged. There are adjacent hills which are likely to produce a focusing effect which would considerably increase the blast damage. Due to rivers it is not a good incendiary target.

The other three targets proposed were Yokohama, Kokura Arsenal and Niigata. An unsung enthusiast on the committee suggested a spectacular sixth target for consideration, but wiser heads prevailed: “The possibility of bombing the Emperor’s palace was discussed. It was agreed that we should not recommend it but that any action for this bombing should come from authorities on military policy.”

So the Target Committee sitting in Oppenheimer’s office at Los Alamos under the modified Lincoln quotation that Oppenheimer had posted on the wall—THIS WORLD CANNOT ENDURE HALF SLAVE AND HALF FREE—remanded four targets to further study: Kyoto, Hiroshima, Yokohama and Kokura Arsenal.

The committee and its Los Alamos consultants were not unmindful of the radiation effects of the atomic bomb—its most significant difference in effect from conventional high explosives—but worried more about radiation danger to American aircrews than to the Japanese. “Dr. Oppenheimer presented a memo he had prepared on the radiological effect of the gadget. . . . The basic recommendations of this memo are (1) for radiological reasons no aircraft should be closer than 2½ miles to the point of detonation (for blast reasons the distance should be greater) and (2) aircraft must avoid the cloud of radio-active materials.”

Since the expected yields of the bombs under discussion made them something less than city-busters, the Target Committee considered following Little Boy and Fat Man with conventional incendiary raids. Radioactive clouds that might endanger LeMay’s follow-up crews worried the targeters, though they thought an incendiary raid delayed one day after an atomic bombing might be safe and “quite effective.”

With a better sense for having visited Los Alamos of the weapons it was targeting, the Target Committee scheduled its next meeting for May 28 at the Pentagon.

Vannevar Bush thought the second Interim Committee meeting on May 14 produced “very frank discussions.” The group, he decided, was “an excellent one.”²³¹¹ These judgments he passed along to Conant, who had been unable to attend. Stimson won approval of the Scientific Panel as constituted and discussed the possibility of assembling a similar group of industrialists. As his agenda noted, such a group would “advise of [the] likelihood of other nations repeating what our industry has done”—that is, whether other nations could build the vast, innovative industrial plant necessary to produce atomic bombs.²³¹²

That May Monday morning the committee received copies of Bush’s and Conant’s September 30, 1944, memorandum to Stimson, the discussion framed on Bohr’s ideas of the free exchange of scientific information and inspection not only of laboratories throughout the world but also of military installations. Bush promptly hedged his commitment to so open a world:

I . . . said that while we made the memorandum very explicit, that it certainly did not indicate that we were irrevocably committed to any definite line of action but rather felt that we ought to express our ideas early in order that there might be discussion as [a] result of which we might indeed change our thoughts as we studied into the subject further, and I said also that we would undoubtedly write the memorandum a little differently today due to the lapse of time since last September.²³¹³

At the end of the meeting Byrnes took his copy along and studied it with interest.²³¹⁴

The Secretary of State-designate was learning fast. When the Interim Committee met again on Friday, May 18, with Groves sitting in, Byrnes brought up the Bush-Conant memorandum as soon as draft press releases announcing the dropping of the first atomic bomb on Japan had been reviewed. It was Bush’s turn to be absent; Conant passed along the news:

Mr. Byrnes spent considerable time discussing our memorandum of last fall, which he had read carefully and with which he was much impressed. It apparently stimulated his thinking (which was all that we had originally desired I imagine). He was particularly impressed with our statement that the Russians might catch up in three to four years. This premise was violently opposed by the General [i.e., Groves], who felt that twenty years was a much better figure. . . . The General is basing his long estimate on a very poor view of Russian ability, which I think is a highly unsafe assumption. . . .

There was some discussion about the implications of a time interval as short as four years and various international problems were discussed, particularly the question of whether or not the President should tell the Russians of the existence of the weapon after the July test.

Bohr’s proposal to enlist the Soviet Union in discussions before the atomic bomb became a reality here slips to the question of whether or not to tell the Soviets the bare facts after the first bomb had been tested but before the second was dropped on Japan. Byrnes thought the answer to that question might depend on how quickly the USSR could duplicate the American accomplishment. The Interim Committee’s recording secretary, 2nd Lieutenant R. Gordon Arneson, remembered after the war of this confrontation that “Mr. Byrnes felt that this point was a very important one.”²³¹⁵ The veteran of House and Senate cloakrooms was at least as concerned as Henry Stimson to extract a quid pro quo for any exchange of information, as Conant’s next comment to Bush demonstrates:

This question [i.e., whether or not to tell the Russians about the atomic bomb before using it on Japan] led to the review of the Quebec Agreement which was shown once more to Mr. Byrnes. He asked the General what we had got in exchange, and the General replied only the arrangements controlling the Belgium-Congo [sic]. . . . Mr. Byrnes made short work of this line of argument.²³¹⁶

The Quebec Agreement of 1943 renewed the partnership of the United States and Great Britain in the nuclear enterprise; Groves was justifying it as an exchange for British help in securing the Union Minière’s agreement to sell the two nations all its uranium ore. The British-American relation was built on deeper foundations than that, and Conant moved quickly to limit the damage of Groves’ blunder:

Some of us then pointed out the historic background and [that] our connection with England flowed from the original agreement as to the complete exchange of scientific information. . . . I can foresee a great deal of trouble on this front. It was interesting that Mr. Byrnes felt that Congress would be most curious about this phase of the matter.²³¹⁷

If Byrnes had begun his service on the Interim Committee respecting the men who had carried the Manhattan Project forward, he must have conceived less respect for them now. Both Stimson and Bush, Conant told Byrnes, had talked to Churchill in Quebec.²³¹⁸If, as it seemed, they could be conned by the British into giving away the secrets of the bomb—whatever Byrnes imagined those might be—for the price of a few tons of uranium ore, how much was their judgment worth? Why give away something so stupendous as the bomb unless you got something equally stupendous in return? Byrnes believed international relations worked like domestic politics. The bomb was power, newly minted, and power was to politics as money was to banking, a medium of enriching exchange. Only naïfs and fools gave it away.

Enter Leo Szilard.

As the man who had thought longer and harder than anyone else about the consequences of the chain reaction, Szilard had chafed at his continuing exile from the high councils of government. Another politically active Met Lab scientist, Eugene Rabinowitch, a younger man, confirms “the feeling which was certainly shared . . . by others that we were surrounded by a kind of soundproof wall so that you could write to Washington or go to Washington and talk to somebody but you never got any reaction back.”²³¹⁹ With the successful operation of the production reactors and separation plants at Hanford the work of the Met Lab had slowed; Compton’s people, Szilard particularly, found time to think about the future. Szilard says he began to examine “the wisdom of testing bombs and using bombs.”²³²⁰ Rabinowitch remembers “many hours spent walking up and down the Midway [the wide World’s Fair sward south of the University of Chicago main campus] with Leo Szilard and arguing about these questions and about what can be done. I remember sleepless nights.”²³²¹

There was no point in talking to Groves, Szilard reasoned in March 1945, nor to Bush or Conant for that matter. Secrecy barred discussion with middle-level authorities. “The only man with whom we were sure we would be entitled to communicate,” Szilard recalls, “was the President.”²³²² He prepared a memorandum for Franklin Roosevelt and traveled to Princeton to enlist once again the durable services of Albert Einstein.

Except for some minor theoretical calculations for the Navy, Einstein had been excluded from wartime nuclear development. Bush explained why to the director of the Institute for Advanced Study early in the war:

I am not at all sure that if I place Einstein in entire contact with his subject he would not discuss it in a way that it should not be discussed. . . . I wish very much that I could place the whole thing before him . . . but this is utterly impossible in view of the attitude of people here in Washington who have studied into his whole history.²³²³

The great theoretician whose letter to Roosevelt helped alert the United States government to the possibility of an atomic bomb was thus spared by concern for security and by hostility to his earlier outspoken politics—his pacifism and probably also his Zionism—from contributing to that weapon’s development. Szilard could not show Einstein his memorandum. He told his old friend simply that there was trouble ahead and asked for a letter of introduction to the President. Einstein complied.

From Chicago Szilard approached Roosevelt through his wife. Eleanor Roosevelt agreed to see him on May 8 to pursue the matter. Thus fortified, he wandered to Arthur Compton’s office to confess his out-of-channel sins. Compton surprised him by cheering him on. “Elated by finding no resistance where I expected resistance,” Szilard reports, “I went back to my office.²³²⁴ I hadn’t been in my office for five minutes when there was a knock on the door and Compton’s assistant came in, telling me that he had just heard over the radio that President Roosevelt had died. . . .

“So for a number of days I was at a complete loss for what to do,” Szilard goes on. He needed a new avenue of approach. Eventually it occurred to him that a project as large as the Met Lab probably employed someone from Kansas City, Missouri, Harry Truman’s original political base. He found a young mathematician named Albert Cahn who had worked for Kansas City boss Tom Pendergast’s political machine to earn money for graduate school. Cahn and Szilard traveled to Kansas City later that month, dazzled Pendergast’s hoodlum elite with who knows what Szilardian tale “and three days later we had an appointment at the White House.”

Truman’s appointments secretary, Matthew Connelly, barred the door. After he read the Einstein letter and the memorandum he relaxed. “I see now,” Szilard remembers him saying, “this is a serious matter. At first I was a little suspicious, because the appointment came through Kansas City.”²³²⁵ Truman had guessed the subject of Szilard’s concern. At the President’s direction Connelly sent the wandering Hungarian to Spartansburg, South Carolina, to talk to a private citizen named Jimmy Byrnes.

A University of Chicago dean, a scientist named Walter Bartky, had accompanied Szilard to Washington. For added authority Szilard enlisted Nobel laureate Harold Urey and the three men boarded the overnight train south. Compartmentalization was working: “We did not quite understand why we were sent by the President to see James Byrnes. . . . Was he to . . . be the man in charge of the uranium work after the war, or what? We did not know.”²³²⁶ Truman had alerted Byrnes that the delegation was on its way. The South Carolinian received it warily at his home. He read the letter from Einstein first—“I have much confidence in [Szilard’s] judgment,” the theoretician of relativity testified—then turned to the memorandum.^{2327, 2328}

It was a prescient document. It argued that in preparing to test and then use atomic bombs the United States was “moving along a road leading to the destruction of the strong position [the nation] hitherto occupied in the world.” Szilard was referring not to a moral advantage but to an industrial: as he wrote elsewhere that spring, U.S. military strength was “essentially due to the fact that the United States could outproduce every other country in heavy armaments.”²³²⁹ When other countries acquired nuclear weapons, as they would in “just a few years,” that advantage would be lost: “Perhaps the greatest immediate danger which faces us is the probability that our ‘demonstration’ of atomic bombs will precipitate a race in the production of these devices between the United States and Russia.”

Much of the rest of the memorandum asked the sort of questions the Interim Committee was also asking about international controls versus attempting to maintain an American monopoly. But Szilard echoed Bohr in pleading for what no one among the national leaders concerned with the problem seemed able to grasp, that “these decisions ought to be based not on the present evidence relating to atomic bombs, but rather on the situation which can be expected to confront us in this respect a few years from now.” By present evidence the bombs were modest and the United States held them in monopoly; the difficulty was deciding what the future would bring. Szilard first offended Byrnes in his memorandum by concluding that “this situation can be evaluated only by men who have first-hand knowledge of the facts involved, that is, by the small group of scientists who are actively engaged in this work.” Having thus informed Byrnes that he thought him unqualified, Szilard then proceeded to tell him how his inadequacies might be corrected:

If there were in existence a small subcommittee of the Cabinet (having as its members the Secretary of War, either the Secretary of Commerce or the Secretary of the Interior, a representative of the State Department, and a representative of the President, acting as the secretary of the Committee), the scientists could then submit to such a committee their recommendations.

It was H. G. Wells’ Open Conspiracy emerging again into the light; it amused Byrnes, a man who had climbed to the top across forty-five years of hard political service, not at all:

Szilard complained that he and some of his associates did not know enough about the policy of the government with regard to the use of the bomb. He felt that scientists, including himself, should discuss the matter with the Cabinet, which I did not feel desirable. His general demeanor and his desire to participate in policy making made an unfavorable impression on me.²³³⁰

Byrnes proceeded to demonstrate the dangers of a lack of firsthand knowledge, Szilard remembers:

When I spoke of my concern that Russia might become an atomic power, and might become an atomic power soon, if we demonstrated the power of the bomb and if we used it against Japan, his reply was, “General Groves tells me there is no uranium in Russia.”²³³¹

So Szilard explained to Byrnes what Groves, busy buying up the world supply of high-grade ore, apparently did not understand: that high-grade deposits are necessary for the extraction of so rare an element as radium but that low-grade ores, which undoubtedly existed in the Soviet Union, were entirely satisfactory where so abundant an element as uranium was concerned.

To Szilard’s argument that using the atomic bomb, even testing the atomic bomb, would be unwise because it would disclose that the weapon existed, Byrnes took a turn at teaching the physicist a lesson in domestic politics:

He said we had spent two billion dollars on developing the bomb, and Congress would want to know what we had got for the money spent. He said, “How would you get Congress to appropriate money for atomic energy research if you do not show results for the money which has been spent already?”²³³²

But Byrnes’ most dangerous misunderstanding from Szilard’s point of view was his reading of the Soviet Union:

Byrnes thought that the war would be over in about six months. . . . He was concerned about Russia’s postwar behavior. Russian troops had moved into Hungary and Rumania, and Byrnes thought it would be very difficult to persuade Russia to withdraw her troops from these countries, that Russia might be more manageable if impressed by American military might, and that a demonstration of the bomb might impress Russia. I shared Byrnes’ concern about Russia’s throwing around her weight in the postwar period, but I was completely flabbergasted by the assumption that rattling the bomb might make Russia more manageable.²³³³

Shadowed by one of Groves’ ubiquitous security agents, the three discouraged men caught the next train back to Washington.

There on the same day the Target Committee was meeting, this time with Paul Tibbets as well as Tolman and Parsons on hand.²³³⁴ Much of the discussion concerned Tibbets’ training program for the 509th Composite Group. He had sent his best crews to Cuba for six weeks to give them radar experience and flying time over water. “On load and distance tests,” the committee minutes report, “Col. Tibbets stated crews had taken off at 135,000 lbs. gross load, flown 4300 miles with 10,000 lb. bomb load, bombed from 32,000 ft. and returned to base with 900 gallons of fuel. This is in excess of the expected target run and further tests will reduce the loading to reach the S.O.P. [standard operating procedure] of 500 gallons of fuel on return.” The 509th was in the process of staging out to Tinian. Pumpkin production was increasing; nineteen had been shipped to Wendover and some of them dropped.

LeMay was also keeping busy. “The 3 reserved targets for the first unit of this project were announced. With current and prospective rate of [Twentieth Air Force] H.E. bombing, it is expected to complete strategic bombing of Japan by 1 Jan 46 so availability of future targets will be a problem.” If the Manhattan Project did not hurry, that is, there would be no cities left in Japan to bomb.

Kyoto, Hiroshima and Niigata were the three targets reserved. The committee completed its review by abandoning any pretension that its objectives there were military:

The following conclusions were reached:

(1) not to specify aiming points, this is to be left to later determination at base when weather conditions are known.

(2) to neglect location of industrial areas as pin point target, since on these three targets such areas are small, spread on fringes of cities and quite dispersed.

(3) to endeavor to place first gadget in center of selected city; that is, not to allow for later 1 or 2 gadgets for complete destruction.

And that was that; the Target Committee would schedule no more meetings but would remain on call.

Stimson abhorred bombing cities. As he wrote in his third-person memoir after the war, “for thirty years Stimson had been a champion of international law and morality. As soldier and Cabinet officer he had repeatedly argued that war itself must be restrained within the bounds of humanity. . . . Perhaps, as he later said, he was misled by the constant talk of ‘precision bombing,’ but he had believed that even air power could be limited in its use by the old concept of ‘legitimate military targets.’ ” Firebombing was “a kind of total war he had always hated.”²³³⁵ He seems to have conceived the idea that even the atomic bomb could be somehow humanely applied, as he discussed with Truman on May 16:

I am anxious to hold our Air Force, so far as possible, to the “precision” bombing which it has done so well in Europe. I am told that it is possible and adequate. The reputation of the United States for fair play and humanitarianism is the world’s biggest asset for peace in the coming decades. I believe the same rule of sparing the civilian population should be applied, as far as possible, to the use of any new weapons.²³³⁶

But the Secretary of War had less control over the military forces he was delegated to administer than he would have liked, and nine days later, on May 25, 464 of LeMay’s B-29’s—nearly twice as many as flew the first low-level March 9 incendiary raid—once again successfully burned out nearly sixteen square miles of Tokyo, although the Strategic Bombing Survey asserts that only a few thousand Japanese were killed compared to the 86,000 it totals for the earlier conflagration. The newspapers made much of the late-May fire raid; Stimson was appalled.

On May 30 Groves crossed the river from his Virginia Avenue offices and hove into view.²³³⁷ Stimson’s frustration at the bombing of Japanese cities ignited a fateful exchange, as the general later told an interviewer:

I was over in Mr. Stimson’s office talking to him about some matter in connection with the bomb when he asked me if I had selected the targets yet. I replied that I had that report all ready and I expected to take it over to General Marshall the following morning for his approval. Mr. Stimson then said: “Well, your report is all finished, isn’t it?” I said: “I haven’t gone over it yet, Mr. Stimson. I want to be sure that I’ve got it just right.” He said: “Well, I would like to see it” and I said: “Well, it’s across the river and it would take a long time to get it.” He said: “I have all day and I know how fast your office operates. Here’s a phone on this desk. You pick it up and you call your office and have them bring that report over.” Well, it took about fifteen or twenty minutes to get that report there and all the time I was stewing and fretting internally over the fact that I was shortcutting General Marshall. . . . But there was nothing I could do and when I protested slightly that I thought it was something that General Marshall should pass on first, Mr. Stimson said: “This is one time I’m going to be the final deciding authority. Nobody’s going to tell me what to do on this. On this matter I am the kingpin and you might just as well get that report over here.” Well in the meantime he asked me what cities I was planning to bomb, or what targets. I informed him and told him that Kyoto was the preferred target.²³³⁸ It was the first one because it was of such size that we would have no question about the effects of the bomb. . . . He immediately said: “I don’t want Kyoto bombed.” And he went on to tell me about its long history as a cultural center of Japan, the former ancient capital, and a great many reasons why he did not want to see it bombed. When the report came over and I handed it to him, his mind was made up. There’s no question about that. He read it over and he walked to the door separating his office from General Marshall’s, opened it and said: “General Marshall, if you’re not busy I wish you’d come in.” And then the Secretary really double-crossed me because without any explanation he said to General Marshall: “Marshall, Groves has just brought me his report on the proposed targets.” He said: “I don’t like it. I don’t like the use of Kyoto.”

So Kyoto at least, the Rome of Japan, founded in 793, famous for silk and cloisonné, a center of the Buddhist and Shinto religions with hundreds of historic temples and shrines, would be spared, though Groves would continue to test his superior’s resolve in the weeks to come. The Imperial Palace in Tokyo had been similarly spared even as Tokyo was laid waste around it. There were still limits to the destructiveness of war: the weapons were still modest enough to allow such fine discriminations.

The Interim Committee was to meet in full dress with its Scientific Panel on Thursday, May 31, and on Friday, June 1, with its industrial advisers. The Joint Chiefs of Staff prepared the ground for those meetings on May 25 when they issued a formal directive to the Pacific commanders and to Hap Arnold defining U.S. military policy toward Japan in the months to come:²³³⁹

The Joint Chiefs of Staff direct the invasion of Kyushu (operation OLYMPIC) target date 1 November 1945, in order to:

(1) Intensify the blockade and aerial bombardment of Japan.

(2) Contain and destroy major enemy forces.

(3) Support further advances for the purpose of establishing the conditions favorable to the decisive invasion of the industrial heart of Japan.

Truman had not yet signed on for the Japanese invasion. One of his advisers favored a naval blockade to starve the Japanese to surrender. The President would soon tell the Joint Chiefs that he would judge among his options “with the purpose of economizing to the maximum extent possible the loss of American lives.”²³⁴⁰ Marshall, with MacArthur concurring from the field, estimated that casualties—killed, wounded and missing—in the first thirty days following an invasion of the southernmost Japanese home island would not exceed 31,000.²³⁴¹ An invasion of the main island of Honshu across the plain of Tokyo would be proportionately more violent.

When Szilard returned to Washington from South Carolina he looked up Oppenheimer, just arrived in town for the Interim Committee meeting, to lobby him. So hard was the Los Alamos director working to complete the first atomic bombs that Groves had doubted two weeks earlier if he could break free for the May 31 meeting.²³⁴² Oppenheimer would not for the world have missed the chance to advise at so high a level. But his candid vision of the future of the weapon he was building was as unromantic as his understanding of its immediate necessity was, in Szilard’s view, misinformed:

I told Oppenheimer that I thought it would be a very serious mistake to use the bomb against the cities of Japan. Oppenheimer didn’t share my view. He surprised me by starting the conversation by saying, “The atomic bomb is shit.” “What do you mean by that?” I asked him. He said, “Well, this is a weapon which has no military significance.²³⁴³ It will make a big bang—a very big bang—but it is not a weapon which is useful in war.” He thought that it would be important, however, to inform the Russians that we had an atomic bomb and that we intended to use it against the cities of Japan, rather than taking them by surprise. This seemed reasonable to me. . . . However, while this was necessary it was certainly not sufficient. “Well,” Oppenheimer said, “don’t you think that if we tell the Russians what we intend to do and then use the bomb in Japan, the Russians will understand it?” And I remember that I said, “They’ll understand it only too well.”

Stimson’s insomnia troubled him on the night of May 30 and he arrived at the Pentagon the next morning feeling miserable. His committee assembled at 10 A.M. Marshall, Groves, Harvey Bundy and another aide attended by invitation, but Stimson’s attention was focused on the four scientists, three of them Nobel laureates. The elderly Secretary of War welcomed them warmly, congratulated them on their accomplishments and was concerned to convince them that he and Marshall understood that the product of their labor would be more than simply an enlarged specimen of ordnance. The handwritten notes he prepared emphasize the awe in which he held the bomb; he was not normally a histrionic man:²³⁴⁴

S.l²³⁴⁵

Its size and character

We don’t think it mere new weapon

Revolutionary Discovery of Relation of man to universe

Great History Landmark like

Gravitation

Copernican Theory

But,

Bids fair [to be] infinitely greater, in respect to its Effect

—on the ordinary affairs of man’s life.

May destroy or perfect International Civilization

May [be] Frankenstein or means for World Peace

Oppenheimer was surprised and impressed. When Roosevelt died, he told an audience late in life, he had felt “a terrible bereavement . . . partly because we were not sure that anyone in Washington would be thinking of what needed to be done in the future.” Now he saw that “Colonel Stimson was thinking hard and seriously about the implications for mankind of the thing we had created and the wall into the future that we had breached.”²³⁴⁶ And though Oppenheimer knew Stimson had never sat down to talk with Niels Bohr, the Secretary seemed to be speaking in terms derived at some near remove from Bohr’s understanding of the complementarity of the bomb.

After Stimson’s introduction Arthur Compton offered a technical review of the nuclear business, concluding that a competitor would need perhaps six years to catch up with the United States. Conant mentioned the thermonuclear and asked Oppenheimer what gestation period that much more violent mechanism would require; Oppenheimer estimated a minimum of three years. The Los Alamos director took the floor then to review the explosive forces involved. First-stage bombs, he said, meaning crude bombs like Fat Man and Little Boy, might explode with blasts equivalent to 2,000 to 20,000 tons of TNT. That was an upward revision of the estimate Bethe had supplied the Target Committee at Los Alamos in mid-May. Second-stage weapons, Oppenheimer went on—meaning presumably advanced fission weapons with improved implosion systems—might be equal to 50,000 to 100,000 tons of TNT. Thermonuclear weapons might range from 10 million to 100 million tons TNT equivalent.

These were numbers most of the men in the room had seen before and were inured to. Apparently Byrnes had not; they worried him gravely: “As I heard these scientists . . . predict the destructive power of the weapon, I was thoroughly frightened.²³⁴⁷ I had sufficient imagination to visualize the danger to our country when some other country possessed such a weapon.” For now the President’s personal representative bided his time.

Entirely in energetic character, Ernest Lawrence spoke up for staying ahead of the rest of the world by knowing more and doing more than any other country. He made explicit a future course for the nation about which the previous record of all the meetings and deliberations is oddly silent, a course based on assumptions diametrically opposite to Oppenheimer’s profound insight that the atomic bomb was shit:

Dr. Lawrence recommended that a program of plant expansion be vigorously pursued and at the same time a sizable stock pile of bombs and material should be built up. . . . Only by vigorously pursuing the necessary plant expansion and fundamental research . . . could this nation stay out in front.

That was a prescription for an arms race as soon as the Soviet Union took up the challenge. Arthur Compton immediately signed on. So did his brother Karl. Oppenheimer contented himself with a footnote about materials allocation. Stimson eventually summarized the discussion:

1. Keep our industrial plant intact.

2. Build up sizeable stock piles of material for military use and for industrial and technical use.

3. Open the door to industrial development.

Oppenheimer demurred that the scientists should be released to return to their universities and get back to basic science; during the war, he said, they had been plucking the fruits of earlier research. Bush emphatically agreed.

The committee turned to the question of international control and Oppenheimer took the lead. His exact words do not survive, only their summary in the meeting notes kept by the young recording secretary, Gordon Arneson, but if that summary is accurate, then Oppenheimer’s emphasis was different from Bohr’s and misleading:

Dr. Oppenheimer pointed out that the immediate concern had been to shorten the war. The research that had led to this development had only opened the door to future discoveries. Fundamental knowledge of this subject was so widespread throughout the world that early steps should be taken to make our developments known to the world. He thought it might be wise for the United States to offer to the world free interchange of information with particular emphasis on the development of peace-time uses. The basic goal of all endeavors in the field should be the enlargement of human welfare. If we were to offer to exchange information before the bomb was actually used, our moral position would be greatly strengthened.

Where was Bohr’s understanding that the bomb was a source of terror but for that very reason also a source of hope, a means of welding together nations by their common dread of a menacing nuclear standoff? The problem was not exchanging information to improve America’s moral standing; the problem was leaders sitting down and negotiating a way beyond the mutual danger the new weapons would otherwise install. The opening up would emerge out of those negotiations, necessarily, to guarantee safety; it could not in the real world of secrecy and suspicion realistically precede them. In 1963, lecturing on Bohr, Oppenheimer understood well enough the fundamental weakness of his proposal:

Bush and Compton and Conant were clear that the only future they could envisage with hope was one in which the whole development would be internationally controlled.²³⁴⁸ Stimson understood this; he understood that it meant a very great change in human life; and he understood that the central problem at that moment lay in our relations with Russia. . . . But there were differences: Bohr was for action, for timely and responsible action. He realized that it had to be taken by those who had the power to commit and to act. He wanted to change the whole framework in which this problem would appear, early enough so that the problem would be altered by it. He believed in statesmen; he used the word over and over again; he was not very much for committees. The Interim Committee was a committee, and proved itself by appointing another committee, the scientific panel.

No one should presume to judge these men as they struggled with a future that even a mind as fundamental as Niels Bohr’s could only barely imagine. But if Robert Oppenheimer ever had a chance to present Bohr’s case to those who had the power to commit and to act he had it that morning. He did not speak the Dane’s hard plain truths. He spoke instead as Aaron to Bohr’s Moses. And Bohr, though he waited nearby in Washington, had not been invited to appear in the star chamber of that darkly paneled room.

Even Stimson thought Oppenheimer’s proposals misguided. He asked immediately “what would be the position of democratic governments as against totalitarian regimes under such a program of international control coupled with scientific freedom”—as if opening up the world would leave either democratic or totalitarian nations unchanged, a confusion that Oppenheimer’s confusion inspired. Which led to further confusion: “The Secretary said . . . it was his own feeling that the democratic countries had fared pretty well in this war. Dr. Bush endorsed this view vigorously.” Bush then unwittingly outlined a domestic model of what Bohr’s larger open world might be: “He said that our tremendous advantage stemmed in large measure from our system of team work and free interchange of information.” And promptly lapsed back into Stimson’s extended status quo: “He expressed some doubt, however, of our ability to remain ahead permanently if we were to turn over completely to the Russians the results of our research under free competition with no reciprocal exchange.”

Odder and odder, and Byrnes sitting among them trying to imagine a weapon equivalent to 100 million tons of TNT, trying to imagine what it would mean to possess such a weapon and listening to these highly educated men, men almost entirely of the Eastern establishment, of Harvard and MIT and Princeton and Yale, blithely proposing, it seemed, to give away the knowledge of how to make such a weapon.

Stimson left to attend a White House ceremony and they went on to speak of Russia, which Byrnes knew as an advancing brutality currently devouring Poland, and Oppenheimer again took the lead:

Dr. Oppenheimer pointed out that Russia had always been very friendly to science and suggested that we might open up this subject with them in a tentative fashion and in the most general terms without giving them any details of our productive effort. He thought we might say that a great national effort had been put into this project and express hope for cooperation with them in this field. He felt strongly that we should not prejudge the Russian attitude in this matter.

Oppenheimer found an ally then in George Marshall, who “discussed at some length the story of charges and counter-charges that have been typical of our relations with the Russians, pointing out that most of these allegations have proven unfounded.” Marshall thought Russia’s reputation for being uncooperative “stemmed from the necessity of maintaining security.” He believed a way to begin was to forge “a combination among like-minded powers, thereby forcing Russia to fall in line by the very force of this coalition.” Such bulldozing had worked in the gunpowder days now almost past but it would not work in the days of the bomb; that power would be big enough, as Oppenheimer’s estimates clarified, to make one nation alone a match for the world.

The surprise of the morning was perhaps Marshall’s idea for an opening to Moscow: “He raised the question whether it might be desirable to invite two prominent Russian scientists to witness the [Trinity] test.” Groves must have winced; after the years of secrecy, after the thousands of numb man-hours of security work, that would be a renunciation worthy of Bohr himself.

Byrnes had heard enough. He had sat behind Franklin Roosevelt at Yalta making notes. In all but the formalities he outranked even Henry Stimson. He put his foot down and the seasoned committeemen moved smoothly into line:

Mr. Byrnes expressed a fear that if information were given to the Russians, even in general terms, Stalin would ask to be brought into the partnership. He felt this to be particularly likely in view of our commitments and pledges of cooperation with the British. In this connection Dr. Bush pointed out that even the British did not have any of our blue prints on plants. Mr. Byrnes expressed the view, which was generally agreed to by all present, that the most desirable 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.

When Stimson returned, Compton summed up the sense of the crucial discussion the Secretary of War had missed—“the need for maintaining ourselves in a position of superiority while at the same time working toward adequate political agreements.” Marshall left them for duty and the rest of the committee trooped off to lunch.

They sat at adjoining tables in a Pentagon dining room. They were a civilian committee; separate conversations converged on the same question, only briefly mentioned during the morning and not taken up: was there no way to let this cup pass from them? Must Little Boy be dropped on the Japanese in surprise? Could their stubborn enemy not be warned in advance or a demonstration arranged?²³⁴⁹

Stimson, at the focus of one conversation (Byrnes the center of the other), may have spoken then of his outrage at the mass murder of civilians and his complicity; Oppenheimer remembered such a statement at some time during the day and lunch was the only unstructured occasion:

[Stimson emphasized] the appalling lack of conscience and compassion that the war had brought about . . . the complacency, the indifference, and the silence with which we greeted the mass bombings in Europe and, above all, Japan. He was not exultant about the bombings of Hamburg, of Dresden, of Tokyo. . . . Colonel Stimson felt that, as far as degradation went, we had had it; that it would take a new life and a new breath to heal the harm.

The only recorded response to Stimson’s mea culpa is Oppenheimer’s admiration for it, but there were a number of responses to the question of warning the Japanese or demonstrating the atomic bomb. Oppenheimer could not think of a suitably convincing demonstration:²³⁵⁰

You ask yourself would the Japanese government as then constituted and with divisions between the peace party and the war party, would it have been influenced by an enormous nuclear firecracker detonated at a great height doing little damage and your answer is as good as mine. I don’t know.²³⁵¹

Since the Secretary of State-designate had power to commit and to act, the significant responses to the question are Byrnes’. In a 1947 memoir he recalled several:

We feared that, if the Japanese were told that the bomb would be used on a given locality, they might bring our boys who were prisoners of war to that area. Also, the experts had warned us that the static test which was to take place in New Mexico, even if successful, would not be conclusive proof that a bomb would explode when dropped from an airplane. If we were to warn the Japanese of the new highly destructive weapon in the hope of impressing them and if the bomb then failed to explode, certainly we would have given aid and comfort to the Japanese militarists.²³⁵² Thereafter, the Japanese people probably would not be impressed by any statement we might make in the hope of inducing them to surrender.

In a later television interview he emphasized a more political concern: “The President would have had to take the responsibility of telling the world that we had this atomic bomb and how terrific it was . . . and if it didn’t prove out what would have happened to the way the war went God only knows.”²³⁵³

Someone among the assembled, Ernest Lawrence remembers, concluded that the “number of people that would be killed by the bomb would not be greater in general magnitude than the number already killed in fire raids,” making those slaughters a baseline, as indeed before the awful potential of the new weapon they were.²³⁵⁴

These troubled men returned to Stimson’s office and spent most of the afternoon considering the effect of the bombing on the Japanese and their will to fight. Someone unnamed chose to discredit the atomic bomb’s destructiveness, asserting it “would not be much different from the effect caused by any Air Corps strike of present dimensions.” Oppenheimer defended his creation’s pyrotechnics, citing the electromagnetic and nuclear radiation it would expel:

Dr. Oppenheimer stated that the visual effect of an atomic bombing would be tremendous. It would be accompanied by a brilliant luminescence which would rise to a height of 10,000 to 20,000 feet. The neutron effect of the explosion would be dangerous to life for a radius of at least two-thirds of a mile.²³⁵⁵

It was probably during this afternoon discussion that Oppenheimer reported an estimate prepared at Los Alamos of how many deaths an atomic bomb exploded over a city might cause. Arthur Compton remembers the number as 20,000, an estimate based on the assumption, he says, that the city’s occupants would seek shelter when the air raid began and before the bomb went off. He recalls Stimson bringing up Kyoto then, “a city that must not be bombed.” The Secretary still insisted passionately that “the objective was military damage . . . not civilian lives.”²³⁵⁶

The contradiction in Stimson’s caveat persisted into his summary of the afternoon’s findings, which he offered before he left the meeting at three thirty:

After much discussion concerning various types of targets and the effects to be produced, the Secretary expressed the conclusion, on which there was general agreement, that we could not give the Japanese any warning; that we could not concentrate on a civilian area; but that we should seek to make a profound psychological impression on as many of the inhabitants as possible. At the suggestion of Dr. Conant the Secretary agreed that the most desirable target would be a vital war plant employing a large number of workers and closely surrounded by workers’ houses.

Which had been the general formula in Europe, but according to Curtis LeMay the Japanese worked at home, as families:

We were going after military targets. No point in slaughtering civilians for the mere sake of slaughter. Of course there is a pretty thin veneer in Japan, but the veneer was there. It was their system of dispersal of industry. All you had to do was visit one of those targets after we’d roasted it, and see the ruins of a multitude of tiny houses, with a drill press sticking up through the wreckage of every home. The entire population got into the act and worked to make those airplanes or munitions of war . . . men, women, children. We knew we were going to kill a lot of women and kids when we burned [a] town. Had to be done.²³⁵⁷

Stimson had now left the meeting. Arthur Compton wanted to talk about problems at the Met Lab. Before that final discussion the spirit of Leo Szilard bustled through the room. Groves had just learned of another round of Szilardian conspiracy. The general was wrathful: “General Groves stated that the program has been plagued since its inception by the presence of certain scientists of doubtful discretion and uncertain loyalty.” Szilard had traveled on to New York after talking to Oppenheimer and that very morning had looked up Boris Pregel, the Russian-born French metals speculator and bon vivant who had helped out in the early Columbia days and whose mine on Great Bear Lake supplied the Manhattan Project with uranium ore. On May 16 Szilard had sent Pregel a version of his Truman memorandum. (Groves knew all this from what he calls “secret intelligence sources.”) Meeting with Pregel fresh from the May 28 meeting with Byrnes, Szilard had “expressed the opinion,” says Groves, “that someone high in the Government [i.e., Byrnes] had been completely misinformed as to [Russian] sources of ore by the [U.S.] Army. He claimed that the misinformation was given intentionally.”²³⁵⁸ Two could play at sniffing conspiracy, and even in the midst of debate on the necessity of total death in total war, they did.

The next morning, June 1, the Interim Committee met with four industrialists.²³⁵⁹ Walter S. Carpenter, the president of Du Pont, estimated that the Soviet Union would need “at least four or five years” to construct a plutonium production facility like Hanford. James White, president of Tennessee Eastman, “doubted whether Russia would be able to secure sufficient precision in its equipment to make [an electromagnetic separation plant] possible” at all. George Bucher, the president of Westinghouse, thought that if the Soviets acquired the services of German technicians and scientists they might build an electromagnetic operation in three years. A vice president of Union Carbide, James Rafferty, offered the longest odds: ten years to build a gaseous-diffusion plant from the ground up—but only three years if the Soviets ferreted out barrier technology by espionage.

Mentally Byrnes added processing time to plant construction: “I concluded that any other government would need from seven to ten years, at least, to produce a bomb.”²³⁶⁰ From a political point of view seven years was a millennium.

Stimson still quailed at destroying entire cities with atomic bombs. In the afternoon, absenting himself from the Interim Committee discussions, he distanced that horror by pursuing the precision-bombing question further with Hap Arnold, whom he says he “sternly questioned.”²³⁶¹ “I told him of my promise from [War Department Undersecretary for Air Robert] Lovett that there would be only precision bombing in Japan. . . .²³⁶² I wanted to know what the facts were.” Arnold told Stimson the one about dispersed Japanese industry. Area bombing was the only way to get at all those drill presses. “He told me, however, that they were trying to keep it down as far as possible.” Stimson was willing a few days later to pass that tale along to Truman, with a brace of ambivalent motives thrown in for good measure:

I told him how I was trying to hold the Air Force down to precision bombing but that with the Japanese method of scattering its manufacture it was rather difficult to prevent area bombing. I told him I was anxious about this feature of the war for two reasons: First, because I did not want to have the United States get the reputation for outdoing Hitler in atrocities; and second, I was a little fearful that before we could get ready, the Air Force might have Japan so thoroughly bombed out that the new weapon would not have a fair background to show its strength. He said he understood.

While Stimson was away Byrnes swiftly and decisively co-opted the committee. “Mr. Byrnes felt that it was important there be a final decision on the question of the use of the weapon,” recording secretary Arneson recalled after the war.²³⁶³ He described the decision-making process in the minutes he took on June 1:

Mr. Byrnes recommended, and the Committee agreed, that the Secretary of War should be advised that, while recognizing that the final selection of the target was essentially a military decision, the present view of the Committee was that the bomb should be used against Japan as soon as possible; that it be used on a war plant surrounded by workers’ homes; and that it be used without prior warning.²³⁶⁴

It remained to carry the decision to the President for endorsement. Byrnes headed straight for the White House as soon as the Interim Committee adjourned:

I told the President of the final decision of his Interim Committee. Mr. Truman told me he had been giving serious thought to the subject for many days, having been informed as to the investigation of the committee and the consideration of alternative plans, and that with reluctance he had to agree that he could think of no alternative and found himself in accord with what I told him the Committee was going to recommend.²³⁶⁵

Truman saw his Secretary of War five days later. The President, Stimson noted in his diary, “said that Byrnes had reported to him already about [the Interim Committee’s decision] and that Byrnes seemed to be highly pleased with what had been done.”²³⁶⁶

Harry Truman did not give the order to drop the atomic bomb on June 1. But he appears to have made the decision then, with a little help from Jimmy Byrnes.

After the Interim Committee meeting on May 31 Robert Oppenheimer had sought out Niels Bohr. “I was very deeply impressed with General Marshall’s wisdom,” he remembered in 1963, “and also that of Secretary Stimson; and I went over to the British mission and met Bohr and tried to comfort him; but he was too wise and too worldly to be comforted, and he left for England very soon after that, quite uncertain about what, if anything, would happen.”²³⁶⁷

Before Bohr left, late in June, he attempted one last time to see a high official of the United States government—Stimson—Harvey Bundy sending in a message on June 18 to the Secretary: “Do you want to try and work in a meeting with Professor Bohr, the Dane, before you get away this week?”²³⁶⁸

At the side of the memorandum, in bold script, whether from exhaustion or impatience or because he understood that the matter had been taken out of his hands, Henry Stimson struck finally: “No.”

*   *   *

No one doubted that Little Boy would work if any design would. Otto Frisch’s Dragon experiments had proven the efficacy of the fast-neutron chain reaction in uranium. The gun mechanism was wasteful and inefficient but U235 was forgiving. It remained to test implosion. While doing so the physicists could also compare their theory of the progress of such an exotic release of energy with the huge blinding fact. Trinity would be the largest physics experiment ever attempted up to that time.²³⁶⁹

The hard work of finding a proving ground sufficiently barren and remote and organizing it fell to a compact, close-cropped Harvard experimental physicist named Kenneth T. Bainbridge. His task, the Los Alamos technical history notes, “was one of establishing under conditions of extreme secrecy and great pressure a complex scientific laboratory in a barren desert.”²³⁷⁰ Bainbridge was well qualified. From Cooperstown, New York, the son of a wholesale stationer, he had worked under Ernest Rutherford at the Cavendish and had designed and built the Harvard cyclotron that now served the Manhattan Project’s purposes on the Hill. He had brought back word of the MAUD Committee report to Vannevar Bush in the summer of 1941 and had worked at MIT and in Great Britain on radar. Robert Bacher had recruited him for Los Alamos in the summer of 1943. Beginning in March 1944 he took charge of Trinity.

He needed a flat, desolate site with good weather, near enough to Los Alamos to make travel convenient but far enough away to obscure obvious connection. From map data he chose eight sites, including a desert training area in southern California, the Texas Gulf sandbar region now known as Padre Island and several barren dry valleys in southern New Mexico. Riding three-quarter-ton weapons carriers with Robert Oppenheimer and a team of Army officers in May 1944, Bainbridge led an exploration of the New Mexico sites through late snow; carrying along food and water and sleeping bags, he remembers, they “followed unmapped ranch trails past deserted areas of dry farming lands beaten by too many years of drought and high winds.”²³⁷¹ For Oppenheimer it was a rare escape from the daily burdens of directing Los Alamos, one he was not able to repeat. Several explorations later Bainbridge chose a flat scrub region some sixty miles northwest of Alamogordo between the Rio Grande and the Sierra Oscura, known ominously from Spanish times as the Jornada del Muerto—the dry and therefore dangerous Dead Man’s Trail, the Journey of Death. Two hundred ten miles south of Los Alamos, the Jornada formed the northwest sector of the Alamogordo Bombing Range; with the permission of Second Air Force Commander Uzal Ent, Bainbridge staked out an eighteen-by-twenty-four-mile claim.

The demands of the implosion crisis in the autumn of 1944 reduced Trinity’s priority, says Bainbridge, “almost to zero . . . until the end of February 1945.”²³⁷² With bomb physics well in hand by then Oppenheimer set the test shot’s target date at July 4 and Bainbridge got busy. His staff of twenty-five increased across the next five months to more than 250. Herbert Anderson, P. B. Moon, Emilio Segrè and Robert Wilson carried major responsibilities; William G. Penney, Enrico Fermi and especially Victor Weisskopf served as consultants.

The Army leased the David McDonald ranch in the middle of the Jornada site and renovated it for a field laboratory and Military Police station. About 3,400 yards northwest of McDonald Ranch Bainbridge marked out Ground Zero. From that center, at compass points roughly north, west and south at 10,000-yard distances, Corps of Engineers contractors built earth-sheltered bunkers with concrete slab roofs supported by oak beams thicker than railroad ties. N-10000, 5.7 miles from Zero, would house recording instruments and searchlights; W-10000 would house searchlights and banks of high-speed cameras; S-10000 would serve as the control bunker for the test. Another five miles south beyond S-10000 a Base Camp of tents and barracks took shape.

A hill named Compañia twenty miles northwest of Zero on the edge of the Jornada would serve as a VIP scenic overlook. The Oscuras to the east rose more than 4,000 feet above the high alkaline plain.

The Jornada was host to gray hard mesquite, to yucca sharp as the swords of samurai, to scorpions and centipedes men shook in the morning from their boots, to rattlesnakes and fire ants and tarantulas. The MP’s hunted antelope with machine guns for fresh meat and for sport. Groves authorized only cold showers for his troops; their isolated duty would win them eventual award for the lowest VD rate in the entire U.S. Army. The well water, fouled with gypsum, made a sovereign purgative. It also stiffened the hair.

Contractors built two towers. One, 800 yards south of Zero, they bolted together 20 feet high in trestles of heavy beams like those that framed the bunkers. It supported a wide platform like an outdoor dance floor and one day in early May the builders returned from a mandated layoff to find it had vanished. Bainbridge had seen it stacked with 100 tons of high explosives in wooden boxes, had packed canisters of dissolved hot Hanford slugs at the center and before dawn on May 7 had blown the entire stack, the largest chemical explosion ever deliberately set off, merely to practice routines and try out instruments. The dirt roads had caused delays; he demanded twenty-five miles of paved roads from Groves as a result and got them, and tightened up procedures for the one and only nuclear test to come.

The tower went up at Zero. It had been prefabricated of steel and shipped to the site in sections. Concrete footings poured through the hard desert caliche 20 feet into the earth supported its four legs, which were spaced 35 feet apart; braced with crossed struts it rose 100 feet into the air, culminating in an oak platform roofed and sheltered on three sides with sheets of corrugated iron. The iron shack’s open side faced toward the camera bunker to the west. A removable section at the center of the platform gave access to the ground below. The high-iron workers who finished the tower installed bracing at the top for a $20,000 electrically driven heavyduty winch.

Frank Oppenheimer, a Berkeley physics Ph.D. working for his brother now troubleshooting the test, remembers that when he arrived at Trinity in late May “people were feverishly setting up wires all over the desert, building the tower, building little huts in which to put cameras and house people at the time of the explosion.”²³⁷³ The reinforced concrete camera bunkers had portholes of thick bulletproof glass. Hundreds of 6-foot wooden T-poles strung thick as a loom frame with 500 miles of wire walked away from Zero to the instrument bunkers safe miles beyond; other wires buried underground ran protected inside miles of premium garden hose.

Besides photographic studies three kinds of experiments concerned Bainbridge and his team. One set, by far the most extensive, would measure blast, optical and nuclear effects with seismographs, geophones, ionization chambers, spectrographs, films and a variety of gauges. A second would study the implosion in detail and check the operation of the new exploding-wire detonators Luis Alvarez had invented. Experiments planned by Herbert Anderson to reveal the explosive yield radiochemically made up the third category. Harvard physicist David Anderson (no relation) arranged to acquire two Army tanks for that work and to pressurize them and line them with lead; Herbert Anderson and Fermi meant to ride them close to the crater at Zero immediately after the shot, scoop up some of the radioactive debris with a tethered cup hitched to a rocket fired into the crater and retrieve the material for laboratory measurement. Its ratio of fission products to unfissioned plutonium would reveal the yield.

By May 31 enough plutonium had arrived at Los Alamos from Hanford to begin critical-mass experiments. Seth Neddermeyer’s shell-configured core had been abandoned even though thin-walled shells give the highest compressions in implosion. Designing out their hydrodynamic instabilities required calculations too dificult to accomplish by hand. Berkeley theoretician Robert Christy designed a more conservative solid core, two mated hemispheres totaling less than one critical mass that implosion would squeeze to at least double their previous density, shortening the distance that fission neutrons would have to travel between nuclei and rendering the mass supercritical. Frisch’s group confirmed the core configuration experimentally on June 24. For the high-density form of Pu the critical mass within a heavy tamper is eleven pounds; even with a nutsized central hollow to encapsulate an initiator the Trinity core cannot have been larger than a small orange.²³⁷⁴

Delivery of full-sized molds for the implosion lens segments paced the test; they began arriving in quantity only in June, and on June 30 the committee responsible for deciding the test date moved it back to July 16 at the earliest. Kistiakowsky’s group worked night and day at S-Site to make enough lenses. “Most troublesome were the air cavities in the interior of the large castings,” he recalled after the war, “which we detected by x-ray inspection techniques but could not repair. More rejects than acceptable castings were usually our unfortunate lot.”^{2375, 2376}

Groves met with Oppenheimer and Parsons on June 27 to lay plans for shipping the first atomic bombs to the Pacific. They agreed to send the Little Boy U235 projectile by water and the several U235 target pieces later by air; the shipping program acquired the code name Bronx because of that New York borough’s adjacency to Manhattan. The metallurgists at Los Alamos cast one target piece before the end of June and the U235 bullet on July 3. The next day, Independence Day, the Combined Policy Committee met in Washington and the British officially gave their approval, as the Quebec Agreement provided, for the use of atomic bombs on Japan.

Truman had agreed to meet with Stalin and Churchill in the Berlin suburb of Potsdam sometime during the summer; he told Stimson on June 6 that he had succeeded in postponing the conference until July 15 “on purpose,” Stimson wrote in his diary, “to give us more time.”²³⁷⁷ Though Truman and Byrnes had not yet decided to tell Stalin about the atomic bomb, a successful test would change the Pacific equation; they might not need a Soviet invasion of Manchuria to challenge the Japanese and might therefore have to trade away less in Europe. To make sure the President had news of the test at Potsdam, Groves decided during the first week in July to fix the test date at July 16, subject to the vagaries of the weather. He had learned late in June of the possibility of dangerous radioactive fallout over populated areas of New Mexico—“What are you,” he berated the Los Alamos physician who gave him the news, “some kind of Hearst propagandist?”—or he would not have waited even on the weather.²³⁷⁸

So the shot was set for sometime in mid-July, in the heat of the desert summer when the temperature on the Jornada often burned above 100° late in the day. Oppenheimer wired Arthur Compton and Ernest Lawrence: ANY TIME AFTER THE 15TH WOULD BE A GOOD TIME FOR OUR FISHING TRIP. BECAUSE WE ARE NOT CERTAIN OF THE WEATHER WE MAY BE DELAYED SEVERAL DAYS.²³⁷⁹

The senior men arranged a betting pool with a one-dollar entry fee, wagering on the explosive yield. Edward Teller optimistically picked 45,000 tons TNT equivalent. Hans Bethe picked 8,000 tons, Kistiakowsky 1,400. Oppenheimer chose a modest 300 tons. Norman Ramsey took a cynical zero. When I. I. Rabi arrived a few days before the test the only bet left was for 18,000 tons; whether or not he believed that might be the Trinity yield, he bought it.

As of July 9 Kistiakowsky did not yet have enough quality lens castings on hand to assemble a complete charge.²³⁸⁰ Oppenheimer further compounded his troubles by insisting on firing a Chinese copy of the gadget a few days before the Trinity shot to test its high-explosive design at full scale with a nonfissionable core. Each unit would require ninety-six blocks of explosive. Kistiakowsky resorted to heroic measures:

In some desperation, I got hold of a dental drill and, not wishing to ask others to do an untried job, spent most of one night, the week before the Trinity test, drilling holes in some faulty castings so as to reach the air cavities indicated on our x-ray inspection films. That done, I filled the cavities by pouring molten explosive slurry into them, and thus made the castings acceptable. Overnight, enough castings were added to our stores by my labors to make more than two spheres.²³⁸¹

“You don’t worry about it,” he adds fatalistically.²³⁸² “I mean, if fifty pounds of explosives goes in your lap, you won’t know it.”

Navy Lieutenant Commander Norris E. Bradbury, a brisk, energetic Berkeley physics Ph.D., took charge of assembling the high explosives. On Wednesday, July 11, he met with Kistiakowsky to sort the charges according to their quality. “The castings were personally inspected by Kistiakowsky and Bradbury for chipped corners, cracks, and other imperfections,” writes Bainbridge. “ . . . Only first-quality castings which were not chipped or which could be easily repaired were used for the Trinity assembly. The remainder of the castings were diverted for the Creutz charge”—so named for Edward Creutz, the physicist who was running the Chinese copy test.²³⁸³ The castings were waxy, mottled, brown with varnish. They weighed in total, for each device, about 5,000 pounds.

Everyone felt the pressure of the approaching test. It took its toll. “That last week in many ways dragged,” Elsie McMillan remembers; “in many ways it flew on wings.²³⁸⁴ It was hard to behave normally. It was hard not to think. It was hard not to let off steam. We also found it hard not to overindulge in all the natural activities of life.” In a letter to Eleanor Roosevelt in 1950 Oppenheimer recalled an odd group delusion:

Very shortly before the test of the first atomic bomb, people at Los Alamos were naturally in a state of some tension. I remember one morning when almost the whole project was out of doors staring at a bright object in the sky through glasses, binoculars and whatever else they could find; and nearby Kirtland Field reported to us that they had no interceptors which had enabled them to come within range of the object. Our director of personnel was an astronomer and a man of some human wisdom; and he finally came to my office and asked whether we would stop trying to shoot down Venus. I tell this story only to indicate that even a group of scientists is not proof against the errors of suggestion and hysteria.²³⁸⁵

By then the two small plutonium hemispheres had been cast, and plated against corrosion and to absorb alpha particles with nickel, which made the assembly, as metallurgist Cyril Smith would write, “beautiful to gaze upon.”²³⁸⁶ But “an unscheduled change began to be evident three or four days before the scheduled date.” Plating solution trapped beneath the plating on the flat faces of the hemispheres began to blister the nickel, spoiling the fit. “For a time,” says Smith, “postponement of the whole event was threatened.”²³⁸⁷ Completely filing off the blisters would expose the plutonium. The metallurgists salvaged the castings by grinding only partway through the blisters and smoothing the bumpy fit with sheets of gold foil. The core of the first atomic bomb would go to its glory dressed in improvised offerings of nickel and gold.

A tropical air mass moved north over Trinity on July 10, just as the test meteorologist, Caltech-trained Jack M. Hubbard, thirty-nine years old, had predicted. Hubbard had resisted the July 16 date, a Monday, since he first heard of it; he expected bad weather that weekend. The Gulf air suspended salt crystals that diffused a slight haze. On July 12, worrying about Potsdam, Groves confirmed the test for the morning of July 16. Bainbridge passed the word to Hubbard. “Right in the middle of a period of thunderstorms,” the meteorologist stormed to his journal, “what son-of-a-bitch could have done this?” Groves had been awarded such scurrilous genealogy before.²³⁸⁸

The general’s decision started Norris Bradbury and his crews of Special Engineering Detachment GI’s—SED’s, the science-trained recruits were called—assembling the Trinity and Creutz high-explosive charges at two separate canyon sites near Los Alamos mesa that Thursday. They debated filling the small air spaces between the castings with grease. Kistiakowsky decided against such filler, writes Bainbridge, “on the basis that the castings assembled were much better than any previously made and that the air spaces left by the spacer materials were insignificant.”²³⁸⁹ The charges, each of which had been X-rayed one last time and numbered, were papered into snugness instead with facial tissue and Scotch tape. The simplified and improved casing of the unit to be tested, which was designated model 1561, differed from the earlier 1222 casing of bolted pentagons; it featured an equatorial band of five segments machined from dural castings to which were bolted large upper and lower domed polar caps. When the explosives that lined the lower hemisphere had been papered into place Bradbury’s SED’s winched down the heavy tamper sphere of natural uranium, which filled the cavity like the pit in an avocado. The tamper was missing a cylindrical plug; the resulting hole would receive the core assembly. The explosive blocks that formed the upper shell followed next.

For transport to Trinity one set of castings was temporarily left out, replaced by a trapdoor plug through which the core assembly could be positioned in the tamper. The reserved castings—an inner of solid Composition B, an outer lensed—were boxed separately with one spare of each type. The men completed preparing the HE assembly for the slow drive down to Trinity by bagging it in waterproof Butvar plastic, boxing it in a braced shipping crate of knotty pine and lashing the resulting package securely to the bed of a five-ton Army truck. A tarpaulin then muffled its secrets in inconclusive drape.

The plutonium core left the Hill first, at three that Thursday afternoon, shock-mounted in a field carrying case studded with rubber bumpers with a strong wire bail. It rode with Philip Morrison in the backseat of an Army sedan like a distinguished visitor, a carload of armed guards clearing the way ahead and another of pit-assembly specialists bringing up the rear. Morrison also delivered a real and a simulated initiator. At about six o’clock a sunburned young sergeant in a white T-shirt and summer uniform pants carried the plutonium core in its field case into the room at McDonald Ranch where it would spend the night. Guards surrounded the ranchhouse to keep vigil.

For security and to encounter less road traffic the HE assembly would make the trip by night; Kistiakowsky deliberately scheduled that more conspicuous convoy to leave at one minute after midnight on Friday, July 13, to put reverse English on the day’s unlucky reputation. He rode in the lead car with the security guards. He soon dozed off and was then startled awake by the scream of the car’s siren as the convoy ran through Santa Fe; the Army wanted no late-night drunken drivers rolling out of sidestreets to collide with its truckload of handmade high explosives. Beyond Santa Fe the convoy slowed again to below thirty miles an hour; the haul to Trinity took eight hours and Kistiakowsky got some sleep.

On Friday morning at nine the pit-assembly team gathered in white lab coats at McDonald Ranch to begin the final phase of its work. Brigadier General Thomas Farrell was on hand as Groves’ deputy, Robert Bacher as the team’s senior adviser. Bainbridge looked in; so did Oppenheimer. The ranchhouse room where the core had spent the night had been thoroughly vacuumed in preparation and its windows sealed against dust with black electrical tape to convert it to a makeshift clean room. On a table there the assemblers spread crisp brown wrapping paper and laid out the pieces of their puzzle: two gold-faced, nickel-plated hemispheres of plutonium, a shiny beryllium initiator hot with polonium alphas and, to confine these crucial elements, the several pieces of plum-colored natural uranium that formed the cylindrical 80-pound plug of tamper. Before assembly began Bacher asked for a receipt from the Army for the material it would soon explode. Los Alamos was officially an extension of the University of California working for the Army under contract and Bacher wanted to document the university’s release from responsibility for some millions of dollars’ worth of plutonium that would soon be vaporized. Bainbridge thought the ceremony a waste of time but Farrell saw its point and agreed. To relieve the tension Farrell insisted on hefting the hemispheres first to confirm that he was getting good weight. Like polonium but much less intensely, plutonium is an alpha emitter; “when you hold a lump of it in your hand,” says Leona Marshall, “it feels warm, like a live rabbit.”²³⁹⁰ That gave Farrell pause; he set the hemispheres down and signed the receipt.

The parts were few but the men worked carefully. They nested the initiator between the two plutonium hemispheres; they nested the nickel ball in turn in its hollowed plug of tamper. That required the morning and half the afternoon. Two men lugged the heavy boxed assembly on a barrow out to the car. It arrived in its lethal dignity at Zero at 3:18 P.M.

There Norris Bradbury’s crew had been busy with the five-foot sphere of high explosives Kistiakowsky had delivered that morning. At 1 P.M. the truck driver had backed his load under the tower. The men had used a jib winch to lift off the wooden packing crate, had swung it aside and lowered around the sphere a massive set of steel tongs suspended from the main winch anchored one hundred feet up at the top of the tower. With the tongs securing the sphere its two tons were winched up off the truck bed; the driver pulled the truck away and the winch lowered the preassembled unit to a skid set on the asphalt-paved ground. “We were scared to death that we would drop it,” Bradbury recalls, “because we didn’t trust the hoist and it was the only bomb immediately available. It wasn’t that we were afraid of setting it off, but we might damage it in some way.”²³⁹¹ Before they opened the upper polar cap to expose the trapdoor plug they erected a white tent over the assembly area; thereafter a diffused glow of sunlight illuminated their work.

Inserting the plug courted disaster, team member Boyce McDaniel remembers:

The [high-explosive] shell was incomplete, one of the lenses was missing.²³⁹² It was through this opening that the cylindrical plug containing the plutonium and initiator was to be inserted. . . . In order to maximize the density of the uranium in the total assembly, the clearance between the plug and the spherical shell had been reduced to a few thousandths of an inch. Back at Los Alamos, three sets of these plugs and [tamper spheres] had been made. However, in the haste of last minute production, the various units had not been made interchangeable, so not all of the plugs would fit into all [holes]. Great care had been exercised to make sure, however, that mating pieces had been shipped to [Trinity].

Imagine our consternation when, as we started to assemble the plug in the hole, deep down in the center of the high explosive shell, it would not enter! Dismayed, we halted our efforts in order not to damage the pieces, and stopped to think about it. Could we have made a mistake . . . ?

Bacher saw the cause and calmed them: the plug had warmed and expanded in the hot ranchhouse but the tamper, set deep within the insulation of its shell of high explosives, was still cool from Los Alamos. The men left the two pieces of heavy metal in contact and took a break. When they checked the assembly again the temperatures had equalized. The plug slid smoothly into place.

Then it was the turn of the explosives crew. Oppenheimer watched over them, conspicuous in his pork-pie hat, wasted to 116 pounds by a recent bout of chicken pox and the stress of months of late nights and sevenday weeks. In the motion picture that documents this historic assembly he darts in and out of the frame like a foraging water bird, pecking at the open well of the bomb. Someone hands Bradbury a strip of Scotch tape and his arms disappear into the well to secure a block of explosive. He finished the work in late evening under lights. The detonators were not yet installed. That would be the next day’s challenge after the unit had been hauled to the top of the tower.

The following morning, Saturday, around eight, Bradbury supervised raising the test device to its high platform. The openings into the casing where the detonators would be inserted had been covered and taped to keep out dust; as the bulky sphere rose into the air it revealed itself generously bandaged as if against multiple wounds. It stopped at fifteen feet long enough to allow a crew of GI’s to stack depths of striped tickingcovered Army mattresses up nearly to its skid, a prayer in cotton batting against a damaging fall. Then it started up again, twisting slowly, seeming on its thin, braided steel cable to levitate, rising the full height of the tower and diminishing slightly with distance as it rose. Two sergeants received it into the tower shack through the open floor, replaced the floor panel and lowered the unit onto its skid, positioning it with its north and south polar caps at left and right rather than above and below as they had been positioned during assembly, the same posture in which its militant armored twin, Fat Man, would ride to war in the bomb bay of a B-29. The delicate work of inserting the detonators then began.

Disaster loomed again that day. The Creutz group at Los Alamos had fired the Chinese copy, measured the simultaneity of its implosion by the magnetic method and called Oppenheimer to report the dismaying news that the Trinity bomb was likely to fail. “So of course,” says Kistiakowsky, “I immediately became the chief villain and everybody lectured me.”^{2393, 2394} Groves flew in to Albuquerque in his official plane with Bush and Conant at noon; they were appalled at the news and added their complaints to Kistiakowsky’s full burden:

Everybody at headquarters became terribly upset and focused on my presumed guilt. Oppenheimer, General Groves, Vannevar Bush—all had much to say about that incompetent wretch who forever after would be known to the world as the cause of the tragic failure of the Manhattan Project. Jim Conant, a close personal friend, had me on the carpet it seemed for hours, coldly quizzing me about the causes of the impending failure.

Sometime later that day Bacher and I were walking in the desert and as I timidly questioned the results of the magnetic test Bob accused me of challenging no less than Maxwell’s equations themselves! At another point Oppenheimer became so emotional that I offered him a month’s salary against ten dollars that our implosion charge would work.

In the midst of this contretemps all of Little Boy but its U235 target pieces slipped away. With two Army officers in escort, a closed black truck and seven carloads of security guards left Los Alamos Saturday morning for Kirtland Air Force Base in Albuquerque. A manifest describes the truck’s expensive cargo:

a. 1 box, wt. about 300 lbs, containing projectile assembly of active material for the gun type bomb.²³⁹⁵

b. 1 box, wt. about 300 lbs, containing special tools and scientific instruments.

c. 1 box, wt. about 10,000 lbs, containing the inert parts for a complete gun type bomb.

Two DC-3’s waiting at Kirtland flew the crates and their officer escorts to Hamilton Field, near San Francisco, from which another security convoy escorted them to Hunter’s Point Naval Shipyard to await the sailing of the U.S.S. Indianapolis, the heavy cruiser that would deliver them to Tinian.

At Trinity gloom was everywhere. A physical chemist from Los Alamos, Joseph O. Hirschfelder, remembers Oppenheimer’s discomfiture that Saturday evening at the hotel where the guests invited to view the test had begun to assemble: “We drove to the Hilton Hotel in Albuquerque, where Robert Oppenheimer was meeting with a large group of generals, Nobel laureates, and other VIP’s. Robert was very nervous. He told [us] about some experimental results which Ed Creutz had obtained earlier in the day which indicated that the [Trinity] atom bomb would be a dud.”²³⁹⁶

Oppenheimer searched for calm in the midst of this latest evidence of the physical world’s relentlessness and found a breath of it in the Bhagavad-Gita, the seven-hundred-stanza devotional poem interpolated into the great Aryan epic Mahabharata at about the same time that Greece was declining from its golden age. He had discovered the Gita at Harvard; at Berkeley he had learned Sanskrit from the scholar Arthur Ryder to set himself closer to the original text and thereafter a worn pink copy occupied an honored place on the bookshelf closest to his desk. There are meanings enough for a lifetime in the Gita, dramatized as a dialogue between a warrior prince named Arjuna and Krishna, the principal avatar of Vishnu (and Vishnu the third member of the Hindu godhead with Brahma and Shiva—a Trinity again). Vannevar Bush records the particular meaning Oppenheimer clutched that desperate Saturday in July:

His was a profoundly complex character. . . . So my comment will be brief. I simply record a poem, which he translated from the Sanscrit, and which he recited to me two nights before [Trinity]:²³⁹⁷

In battle, in forest, at the precipice in the mountains,

On the dark great sea, in the midst of javelins and arrows,

In sleep, in confusion, in the depths of shame,

The good deeds a man has done before defend him.

Back at Base Camp Oppenheimer slept no more than four hours that night; Farrell heard him stirring restlessly on his bunk in the next room of the quarters they shared, racked with coughing. Chain-smoking as much as meditative poetry drove him through his days.

Sturdy Hans Bethe found a way back from the precipice, Kistiakowsky remembers:

Sunday morning another phone call came with wonderful news. Hans Bethe spent the whole night of Saturday analyzing the electromagnetic theory of this experiment and discovered that the instrumental design was such that even a perfect implosion could not have produced oscilloscope records different from what was observed. So I became again acceptable to local high society.²³⁹⁸

When Groves called, Oppenheimer chatted happily about the Bethe results. The general interrupted: “What about the weather?” “The weather is whimsical,” the whimsical physicist said.²³⁹⁹ The Gulf air mass had stagnated over the test site. But change was coming. Jack Hubbard, the meteorologist, predicted light and variable winds the next day.

Stagnation exacerbated the July heat. Camera crews replacing battery packs damaged by a blown circuit burned their hands on metal camera housings. Frank Oppenheimer, thin enough not to suffer the heat unduly, hurried to construct a last-minute experiment less aloof than readings of light and radiation: he set out boxes filled with excelsior and posts nailed with corrugated iron strips to simulate the fragile Japanese houses where LeMay’s ubiquitous drill presses lurked. Groves had forbidden the construction of full-scale housing for the test, more scientific tomfoolery, a waste of money and time. Norris Bradbury’s instructions for bomb assembly as of Saturday listed “Gadget complete”; for “Sunday, 15 July, all day,” he advised his crews to “look for rabbits’ feet and four-leaved clovers.²⁴⁰⁰ Should we have the Chaplain down there?” Rabbits’ feet would turn up, but even chaplains would have had trouble finding a stem of clover on the Jornada.

Oppenheimer, Groves, Bainbridge, Farrell, Tolman and an Army meteorologist met with Hubbard at McDonald Ranch at four that afternoon to consider the weather. Hubbard reminded them that he had never liked the July 16 date. He thought the shot could go as scheduled, he noted in his journal, “in less than optimum conditions, which would require sacrifices.”²⁴⁰¹ Groves and Oppenheimer repaired to another room to confer. They decided to wait and see. They had scheduled a last weather conference for the next morning at 0200 hours; they would make up their minds then. The shot was set for 0400 and they let that time stand.

Sometime early that evening Oppenheimer climbed the tower to perform a final ritual inspection.²⁴⁰² There before him crouched his handiwork. Its bandages had been removed and it was hung now with insulated wires that looped from junction boxes to the detonator plugs that studded its dark bulk, an exterior ugly as Caliban’s. His duty was almost done.

At dusk the tired laboratory director was calm. He stood with Cyril Smith beside the reservoir at McDonald Ranch where cattle had watered and spoke of families and home, even of philosophy, and Smith found himself soothed. A storm was blowing up. Oppenheimer looked beneath it to anchorage, to the darkening Oscuras. “Funny how the mountains always inspire our work,” the metallurgist heard him say.²⁴⁰³

With the weather changing from stagnant to violent and with everyone short of sleep, moods swung at Base Camp. The occasion of Fermi’s satire that evening made Bainbridge furious. It merely irritated Groves:

I had become a bit annoyed with Fermi . . . when he suddenly offered to take wagers from his fellow scientists on whether or not the bomb would ignite the atmosphere, and if so, whether it would merely destroy New Mexico or destroy the world. He had also said that after all it wouldn’t make any difference whether the bomb went off or not because it would still have been a well worth-while scientific experiment. For if it did fail to go off, we would have proved that an atomic explosion was not possible.²⁴⁰⁴

On the realistic grounds, the Italian laureate explained with his usual candor, that the best physicists in the world would have tried and failed.

Bainbridge was furious because Fermi’s “thoughtless bravado” might scare the soldiers, who did not have the benefit of a knowledge of thermonuclear ignition temperatures and fireball cooling effects.²⁴⁰⁵ But a new force was about to be loosed on the world; no one could be absolutely certain—Fermi’s point—of the outcome of its debut. Oppenheimer had assigned Edward Teller the deliciously Tellerian task of trying to think of any imaginable trick or turn by which the explosion might escape its apparent bounds. Teller at Los Alamos that evening raised the same question Fermi had, but questioned Robert Serber, no mere uninformed GI:

Trying to find my way home in the darkness, I bumped into an acquaintance, Bob Serber. That day we had received a memo from our director . . . saying that we would have to be [at Trinity] well before dawn, and that we should be careful not to step on a rattlesnake. I asked Serber, “What will you do tomorrow about the rattlesnakes?” He said, “I’ll take a bottle of whiskey.”²⁴⁰⁶ I then went into my usual speech, telling him how one could imagine that things might get out of control in this, that, or a third manner. But we had discussed these things repeatedly, and we could not see how, in actual fact, we could get into trouble. Then I asked him, “And what do you think about it?” There in the dark Bob thought for a moment, then said, “I’ll take a second bottle of whiskey.”

Rabi, the real mystic among them, spent the evening playing poker.

Bainbridge managed a little sleep. He headed the Arming Party charged with arming the bomb. He was due at Zero by 11 P.M. to prepare the shot. An MP sergeant woke him at ten; he picked up Kistiakowsky and Joseph McKibben, the tall, lanky Missouri-born physicist responsible for running the countdown, and assembled with Hubbard and his crew and two security men. “On the way in,” Bainbridge remembers, “I stopped at S 10,000 and locked the main sequence timing switches. Pocketing the key I returned to the car and continued to Point Zero.”²⁴⁰⁷ A young Harvard physicist, Donald Hornig, was busy in the tower. He had designed the 500-pound X-unit of high-voltage capacitors that fired Fat Man’s multiple detonators with microsecond simultaneity, a crucial Luis Alvarez invention, and now was disconnecting the unit Bainbridge’s crews had used for practice runs and connecting the new unit reserved for the shot. In static test this Fat Man would be fired through cables from the S-10000 control bunker; the one to be shipped to Tinian, self-contained, would carry onboard batteries. Cables or batteries would charge the X-unit and on command it would discharge its capacitors to the detonators, vaporizing wires imbedded in the explosive blocks to start shock waves to set off the HE. “Soon after our arrival,” says Bainbridge, “Hornig completed his work and returned to S 10,000. Hornig was the last man to leave the top of the tower.”²⁴⁰⁸

Hubbard operated a portable weather station at the tower; to measure wind speed and direction the two sergeants who worked with him inflated and released helium balloons. At eleven o’clock he found the wind blowing across Zero toward N-10000. At midnight the Gulf air mass had thickened to 17,000 feet and arranged two inversions—cooler air above warmer—within its layered depths that might loop the radioactive Trinity column back down to the ground directly below.

To an observer traveling toward the desert from Los Alamos “the night was dark with black clouds, and not a star could be seen.”²⁴⁰⁹

Thunderstorms began lashing the Jornada at about 0200 hours on July 16, drenching Base Camp and S-10000. “It was raining cats and dogs, lightning and thunder,” Rabi remembers. “[We were] really scared [that] this object there in the tower might be set off accidentally. So you can imagine the strain on Oppenheimer.”²⁴¹⁰ Winds gusted to thirty miles an hour. Hubbard hung on at Zero for last-minute readings—only misting drizzle had yet reached the tower area—and arrived eight minutes late for the 0200 weather conference at Base Camp, to find Oppenheimer waiting for him outside the weather center there.²⁴¹¹ Hubbard told him they would have to scrub 0400 but should be able to shoot between 0500 and 0600. Oppenheimer looked relieved.

Inside they found an agitated Groves waiting with his advisers. “What the hell is wrong with the weather?” the general greeted his forecaster.²⁴¹² Hubbard took the opportunity to repeat that he had never liked July 16. Groves demanded to know when the storm would pass. Hubbard explained its dynamics: a tropical air mass, night rain. Afternoon thunderstorms took their energy from the heating of the earth and collapsed at sunset; this one, contrariwise, would collapse at dawn. Groves growled that he wanted a specific time, not an explanation. I’m giving you both, Hubbard rejoined.²⁴¹³ He thought Groves was ready to cancel the shot, which seems unlikely given the pressure from Potsdam. He told Groves he could postpone if he wanted but the weather would relent at dawn.

Oppenheimer applied himself to soothe his bulky comrade. Hubbard was the best man around, he insisted, and they ought to trust his forecast. The others at the meeting—Tolman and two Army meteorologists, one more than before—agreed. Groves relented. “You’d better be right on this,” he threatened Hubbard, “or I will hang you.” He ordered the meteorologist to sign his forecast and set the shot for 0530. Then he went off to roust the governor of New Mexico out of bed to the telephone to warn him he might have to declare martial law.

Bainbridge at Zero was less concerned with local effects than with distant, even though he had personally locked open the circuits that communicated with the shelters. “Sporadic rain was a disturbing factor,” he recalls. “ . . . We had none of the lightning reported by those at the Base Camp about 16,000 yards away or at S 10,000, but it made interesting conversation as many of the wires from N, S, W 10,000 ended at the tower.”²⁴¹⁴ About 0330 a gust of wind at Base Camp collapsed Vannevar Bush’s tent; he found his way to the mess hall, where from 0345 the cooks began serving a breakfast of powdered eggs, coffee and French toast.

The gods sent Emilio Segrè happier amusement. He had distracted himself through the evening with Andrè Gide’s The Counterfeiters and slept through the worst of the Base Camp storm. “But my attention was attracted by an unbelievable noise whose nature escaped me completely. As the noise persisted, Sam Allison and I went out with a flashlight and, much to our surprise, found hundreds of frogs in the act of making love in a big hole that had filled with water.”²⁴¹⁵

Hubbard departed Base Camp at 0315 for S-10000. The rain had moved on. He telephoned Zero; one of his men there said the clouds were opening and a few stars shone. By 0400 the wind was shifting toward the southwest, away from the shelters. The meteorologist prepared his final forecast at S-10000. He called Bainbridge at 0440. “Hubbard gave me a complete weather report,” the Trinity director recalls, “and a prediction that at 5:30 a.m. the weather at Point Zero would be possible but not ideal. We would have preferred no inversion layer at 17,000 feet but not at the expense of waiting over half a day. I called Oppenheimer and General Farrell to get their agreement that 5:30 a.m. would be T = 0.”²⁴¹⁶ Hubbard, Bainbridge, Oppenheimer and Farrell each had veto over the shot. They all agreed. Trinity would fire at 0530 hours July 16, 1945—just before dawn.

Bainbridge had arranged to report each step of the final arming process to S-10000 in case anything went wrong. “I drove McKibben to W 900 so that he could throw the timing and sequence switches there while I checked off his list.” Back at Zero Bainbridge called in the next step “and threw the special arming switch which was not on McKibben’s lines. Until this switch was closed the bomb could not be detonated from S 10,000.²⁴¹⁷ The final task was to switch on a string of lights on the ground which were to serve as an ‘aiming point’ for a B-29 practice bombing run. The Air Force wanted to know what the blast effects would be like on a plane 30,000 feet up and some miles away. . . . After turning on the lights, I returned to my car and drove to S 10,000.” Kistiakowsky, McKibben and the security guards rode with him. They were the last to leave the site. Behind them searchlight beams converged on the tower.

The Arming Party arrived at S-10000, the earth-sheltered concrete control bunker, at about 0508. Hubbard gave Bainbridge his signed forecast. “I unlocked the master switches,” Bainbridge concludes, “and McKibben started the timing sequence at –20 minutes, 5:09:45 a.m.”²⁴¹⁸ Oppenheimer would watch the shot from S-10000, as would Farrell, Donald Hornig and Samuel Allison. With the beginning of the final countdown Groves left by jeep for Base Camp. For protection against common disaster he wanted to be physically separated from Farrell and Oppenheimer.

Busloads of visitors from Los Alamos and beyond had begun arriving at Compañia Hill, the viewing site twenty miles northwest of Zero, at 0200. Ernest Lawrence was there, Hans Bethe, Teller, Serber, Edwin McMillan, James Chadwick come to see what his neutron was capable of and a crowd of other men, including Trinity staff no longer needed down on the plain. “With the darkness and the waiting in the chill of the desert the tension became almost unendurable,” one of them remembers.²⁴¹⁹ The shortwave radio requisitioned to advise them of the schedule refused to work until after Allison began broadcasting the countdown. Richard Feynman, a future Nobel laureate who had entered physics as an adolescent via radio tinkering, tinkered the radio to life. Men began moving into position. “We were told to lie down on the sand,” Teller protests, “turn our faces away from the blast, and bury our heads in our arms. No one complied. We were determined to look the beast in the eye.”²⁴²⁰ The radio went dead again and they were left to watch for the warning rockets to be fired from S-10000. “I wouldn’t turn away . . . but having made all those calculations, I thought the blast might be rather bigger than expected. So I put on some suntan lotion.”²⁴²¹ Teller passed the lotion around and the strange prophylaxis disturbed one observer: “It was an eerie sight to see a number of our highest-ranking scientists seriously rubbing sunburn lotion on their faces and hands in the pitch-blackness of the night, twenty miles from the expected flash.”²⁴²²

The countdown continued at S-10000. At 0525 a green Very rocket went up. That signaled a short wail of the siren at Base Camp. Shallow trenches had been bulldozed below the south rim of the Base Camp reservoir for protection and since these men watched ten miles closer to Zero than the crowd on Compañia Hill they planned to use them. Rabi lay down next to Kenneth Greisen, a Cornell physicist, facing south away from Zero. Greisen remembers that he was “personally nervous, for my group had prepared and installed the detonators, and if the shot turned out to be a dud, it might possibly be our fault.”²⁴²³ Groves found refuge between Bush and Conant, thinking “only of what I would do if, when the countdown got to zero, nothing happened.”²⁴²⁴ Victor Weisskopf remembers that “groups of observers had arranged small wooden sticks at a distance of 10 yds from our observation place in order to estimate the size of the explosion.” The sticks were posted on the rim of the reservoir. “They were arranged so that their [height] corresponded to 1000 ft. at zero point.”²⁴²⁵ Philip Morrison relayed the countdown to the Base Camp observers by loudspeaker.

The two-minute-warning rocket fizzled. A long wail of the Base Camp siren signaled the time. The one-minute warning rocket fired at 0529. Morrison also meant to look the beast in the eye and lay down on the slope of the reservoir facing Zero. He wore sunglasses and held a stopwatch in one hand and a piece of welder’s glass in the other. The welder’s glass was stockroom issue: Lincoln Super-visibility Lens, Shade #10.

At S-10000 someone heard Oppenheimer say, “Lord, these affairs are hard on the heart.”²⁴²⁶ McKibben had been marking off the minutes and Allison broadcasting them. At 45 seconds McKibben turned on a more precise automatic timer. “The control post was rather crowded,” Kistiakowsky notes, “and, having now nothing to do, I left as soon as the automatic timer was thrown in . . . and went to stand on the earth mound covering the concrete dugout. (My own guess was that the yield would be about 1 kt [i.e., 1,000 tons, 1 kiloton], and so five miles seemed very safe.)”²⁴²⁷

Teller prepared himself further at Compañia Hill: “I put on a pair of dark glasses. I pulled on a pair of heavy gloves. With both hands I pressed the welder’s glass to my face, making sure no stray light could penetrate around it. I then looked straight at the aim point.”²⁴²⁸

Donald Hornig at S-10000 monitored a switch that could cut the connection between his X-unit in the tower and the bomb, the last point of interruption if anything went wrong. At thirty seconds before T = 0 four red lights flashed on the console in front of him and a voltmeter needle flipped from left to right under its round glass cover to register the full charging of the X-unit. Farrell noticed that “Dr. Oppenheimer, on whom had rested a very heavy burden, grew tenser as the last seconds ticked off. He scarcely breathed. He held on to a post to steady himself. For the last few seconds, he stared directly ahead.”²⁴²⁹

At ten seconds a gong sounded in the control bunker. The men lying in their shallow trenches at Base Camp might have been laid out for death. Conant told Groves he never imagined seconds could be so long. Morrison studied his stopwatch. “I watched the second-hand until T =—5 seconds,” he wrote the day of the shot, “when I lowered my head onto the sand bank in such a way that a slight rise in the ground completely shielded me from Zero.²⁴³⁰ I placed the welding glass over the right lens of my sun glasses, the left lens of which was covered by an opaque cardboard shield. I counted seconds and at zero began to raise my head just over the protecting rise.” Ernest Lawrence on Compañia Hill had planned to watch the shot through the windshield of a car, allowing the glass to filter out damaging ultraviolet, “but at the last minute decided to get out . . . (evidence indeed I was excited!).”²⁴³¹ Robert Serber, his bottles of whiskey to succor him, stared twenty miles toward distant Zero with unprotected eyes. The last decisive inaction was Hornig’s:

Now the sequence of events was all controlled by the automatic timer except that I had the knife switch which could stop the test at any moment up until the actual firing . . . I don’t think I have ever been keyed up as I was during those final seconds . . . I kept telling myself “the least flicker of that needle and you have to act.” It kept on coming down to zero.²⁴³² I kept saying, “Your reaction time is about half a second and you can’t relax for even a fraction of a second.” . . . My eyes were glued on the dial and my hand was on the switch. I could hear the timer counting . . . three . . . two . . . one. The needle fell to zero. . . .

Time: 0529:45. The firing circuit closed; the X-unit discharged; the detonators at thirty-two detonation points simultaneously fired; they ignited the outer lens shells of Composition B; the detonation waves separately bulged, encountered inclusions of Baratol, slowed, curved, turned inside out, merged to a common inward-driving sphere; the spherical detonation wave crossed into the second shell of solid fast Composition B and accelerated; hit the wall of dense uranium tamper and became a shock wave and squeezed, liquefying, moving through; hit the nickel plating of the plutonium core and squeezed, the small sphere shrinking, collapsing into itself, becoming an eyeball; the shock wave reaching the tiny initiator at the center and swirling through its designed irregularities to mix its beryllium and polonium; polonium alphas kicking neutrons free from scant atoms of beryllium: one, two, seven, nine, hardly more neutrons drilling into the surrounding plutonium to start the chain reaction. Then fission multiplying its prodigious energy release through eighty generations in millionths of a second, tens of millions of degrees, millions of pounds of pressure. Before the radiation leaked away, conditions within the eyeball briefly resembled the state of the universe moments after its first primordial explosion.

Then expansion, radiation leaking away. The radiant energy loosed by the chain reaction is hot enough to take the form of soft X rays; these leave the physical bomb and its physical casing first, at the speed of light, far in front of any mere explosion. Cool air is opaque to X rays and absorbs them, heating; “the very hot air,” Hans Bethe writes, “is therefore surrounded by a cooler envelope, and only this envelope”—hot enough at that—“is visible to observers at a distance.”²⁴³³ The central sphere of air, heated by the X rays it absorbs, reemits lower-energy X rays which are absorbed in turn at its boundaries and reemitted beyond. By this process of downhill leapfrogging, which is known as radiation transport, the hot sphere begins to cool itself. When it has cooled to half a million degrees—in about one ten-thousandth of a second—a shock wave forms that moves out faster than radiation transport can keep up. “The shock therefore separates from the very hot, nearly isothermal [i.e., uniformly heated] sphere at the center,” Bethe explains.²⁴³⁴Simple hydrodynamics describes the shock front: like a wave in water, like a sonic boom in air. It moves on, leaving behind the isothermal sphere confined within its shell of opacity, isolated from the outside world, growing only slowly by radiation transport on this millisecond scale of events.

What the world sees is the shock front and it cools into visibility, the first flash, milliseconds long, of a nuclear weapon’s double flash of light, the flashes too closely spaced to distinguish with the eye. Further cooling renders the front transparent; the world if it still has eyes to see looks through the shock wave into the hotter interior of the fireball and “because higher temperatures are now revealed,” Bethe continues, “the total radiation increases toward a second maximum”: the second, longer flash.²⁴³⁵ The isothermal sphere at the center of the expanding fireball continues opaque and invisible, but it also continues to give up its energy to the air beyond its boundaries by radiation transport. That is, as the shock wave cools, the air behind it heats. A cooling wave moves in reverse of the shock wave, eating into the isothermal sphere. Instead of one simple thing the fireball is thus several things at once: an isothermal sphere invisible to the world; a cooling wave moving inward toward that sphere, eating away its radiation; a shock front propagating into undisturbed air, air that has not yet heard the news. Between each of these parts lay further intervening regions of buffering air.

Eventually the cooling wave eats the isothermal sphere completely away and the entire fireball becomes transparent to its own radiation. Now it cools more slowly. Below about 9000°F it can cool no more. Then, concludes Bethe, “any further cooling can only be achieved by the rise of the fireball due to its buoyancy, and the turbulent mixing associated with this rise. This is a slow process, taking tens of seconds.”²⁴³⁶

The high-speed cameras at W-10000 recorded the later stages of the fireball’s development, Bainbridge reports, tracking its huge swelling from the eyeball it had been:

The expansion of the ball of fire before striking the ground was almost symmetric . . . except for the extra brightness and retardation of a part of the sphere near the bottom, a number of blisters, and several spikes that shot radially ahead of the ball below the equator. Contact with the ground was made at 0.65 ms [i.e., thousandths of a second]. Thereafter the ball became rapidly smoother. . . . Shortly after the spikes struck the ground (about 2 ms) there appeared on the ground ahead of the shock wave a wide skirt of lumpy matter.²⁴³⁷  . . . At about 32 ms [when the fireball had expanded to 945 feet in diameter] there appeared immediately behind the shock wave a dark front of absorbing matter, which traveled slowly out until it became invisible at 0.85 s [the expanding front about 2,500 feet across]. The shock wave itself became invisible [earlier] at about 0.10 s. . . .

The ball of fire grew even more slowly to a [diameter] of about [2,000 feet], until the dust cloud growing out of the skirt almost enveloped it. The top of the ball started to rise again at 2 s. At 3.5 s a minimum horizontal diameter, or neck, appeared one-third of the way up the skirt, and the portion of the skirt above the neck formed a vortex ring. The neck narrowed, and the ring and fast-growing pile of matter above it rose as a new cloud of smoke, carrying a convection stem of dust behind it. . . . The stem appeared twisted like a left-handed screw.

But men saw what theoretical physics cannot notice and what cameras cannot record, saw pity and terror. Rabi at Base Camp felt menaced:

We were lying there, very tense, in the early dawn, and there were just a few streaks of gold in the east; you could see your neighbor very dimly. Those ten seconds were the longest ten seconds that I ever experienced. Suddenly, there was an enormous flash of light, the brightest light I have ever seen or that I think anyone has ever seen. It blasted; it pounced; it bored its way right through you. It was a vision which was seen with more than the eye. It was seen to last forever. You would wish it would stop; altogether it lasted about two seconds. Finally it was over, diminishing, and we looked toward the place where the bomb had been; there was an enormous ball of fire which grew and grew and it rolled as it grew; it went up into the air, in yellow flashes and into scarlet and green. It looked menacing. It seemed to come toward one.²⁴³⁸

A new thing had just been born; a new control; a new understanding of man, which man had acquired over nature.

To Teller at Compañia Hill the burst “was like opening the heavy curtains of a darkened room to a flood of sunlight.”²⁴³⁹ Had astronomers been watching they could have seen it reflected from the moon, literal moonshine.

Joseph McKibben made a comparison at S-10000: “We had a lot of flood lights on for taking movies of the control panel. When the bomb went off, the lights were drowned out by the big light coming in through the open door in the back.”²⁴⁴⁰

It caught Ernest Lawrence at Compañia Hill in the act of stepping from his car: “Just as I put my foot on the ground I was enveloped with a warm brilliant yellow white light—from darkness to brilliant sunshine in an instant and as I remember I momentarily was stunned by the surprise.”²⁴⁴¹

To Hans Bethe at Compañia Hill “it looked like a giant magnesium flare which kept on for what seemed a whole minute but was actually one or two seconds.”²⁴⁴²

Serber at Compañia Hill risked blindness but glimpsed an earlier stage of the fireball:

At the instant of the explosion I was looking directly at it, with no eye protection of any kind. I saw first a yellow glow, which grew almost instantly to an overwhelming white flash, so intense that I was completely blinded. . . . By twenty or thirty seconds after the explosion I was regaining normal vision. . . . The grandeur and magnitude of the phenomenon were completely breathtaking.²⁴⁴³

Segrè at Base Camp imagined apocalypse:

The most striking impression was that of an overwhelmingly bright light. . . . I was flabbergasted by the new spectacle. We saw the whole sky flash with unbelievable brightness in spite of the very dark glasses we wore. . . . I believe that for a moment I thought the explosion might set fire to the atmosphere and thus finish the earth, even though I knew that this was not possible.²⁴⁴⁴

Not light but heat disturbed Morrison at Base Camp:

From ten miles away, we saw the unbelievably brilliant flash. That was not the most impressive thing. We knew it was going to be blinding. We wore welder’s glasses. The thing that got me was not the flash but the blinding heat of a bright day on your face in the cold desert morning. It was like opening a hot oven with the sun coming out like a sunrise.²⁴⁴⁵

It unfolded in silence, a ballistics expert watching from Compañia Hill realized with awe:

The flash of light was so bright at first as to seem to have no definite shape, but after perhaps half a second it looked bright yellow and hemispherical with the flat side down, like a half-risen sun but about twice as large. Almost immediately a turgid rising of this luminous mass began, great swirls of flame seeming to ascend within a rather rectangular outline which expanded rapidly in height. . . . Suddenly out of the center of it there seemed to rise a narrower column to a considerably greater height. Then as a climax, which was exceedingly impressive in spite of the fact that the blinding brightness had subsided, the top of the slenderer column seemed to mushroom out into a thick parasol of a rather bright but spectral blue. . . . All this seemed very fast . . . and was followed by a feeling of letdown that it was all over so soon.²⁴⁴⁶ Then came the awe-inspiring realization that it was twenty miles away, that what had flared up and died so brilliantly and quickly was really a couple of miles high. The feeling of the remoteness of this thing which had seemed so near was emphasized by the long silence while we watched the grey smoke grow into a taller and taller twisting column, a silence broken after a minute or so that seemed much longer by a quite impressive bang, about like the crack of a five-inch anti-aircraft gun at a hundred yards.

“Most experiences in life can be comprehended by prior experiences,” Norris Bradbury comments, “but the atom bomb did not fit into any preconceptions possessed by anybody.”²⁴⁴⁷

As the fireball rose into the air, Joseph W. Kennedy reports, “the overcast of strato-cumulus clouds directly overhead [became] pink on the underside and well illuminated, as at a sunrise.”²⁴⁴⁸ Weisskopf noticed that “the path of the shock wave through the clouds was plainly visible as an expanding circle all over the sky where it was covered by clouds.”²⁴⁴⁹ “When the red glow faded out,” writes Edwin McMillan, “a most remarkable effect made its appearance. The whole surface of the ball was covered with a purple luminescence, like that produced by the electrical excitation of the air, and caused undoubtedly by the radioactivity of the material in the ball.”²⁴⁵⁰

Fermi had prepared an order-of-magnitude experiment to determine roughly the bomb’s yield:

About 40 seconds after the explosion the air blast reached me. I tried to estimate its strength by dropping from about six feet small pieces of paper before, during and after the passage of the blast wave. Since, at the time, there was no wind, I could observe very distinctly and actually measure the displacement of the pieces of paper that were in the process of falling while the blast was passing.²⁴⁵¹ The shift was about 2½ meters, which, at the time, I estimated to correspond to the blast that would be produced by ten thousand tons of T.N.T.

“From the distance of the source and from the displacement of the air due to the shock wave,” Segrè explains, “he could calculate the energy of the explosion. This Fermi had done in advance having prepared himself a table of numbers, so that he could tell immediately the energy liberated from this crude but simple measurement.”²⁴⁵² “He was so profoundly and totally absorbed in his bits of paper,” adds Laura Fermi, “that he was not aware of the tremendous noise.”²⁴⁵³

Frank Oppenheimer found his brother watching beside him outside the control bunker at S-10000:

And so there was this sense of this ominous cloud hanging over us. It was so brilliant purple, with all the radioactive glowing. And it just seemed to hang there forever. Of course it didn’t. It must have been just a very short time until it went up. It was very terrifying.²⁴⁵⁴

And the thunder from the blast. It bounced on the rocks, and then it went—I don’t know where else it bounced. But it never seemed to stop. Not like an ordinary echo with thunder. It just kept echoing back and forth in that Jornada del Muerto. It was a very scary time when it went off.

And I wish I would remember what my brother said, but I can’t—but I think we just said, “It worked.” I think that’s what we said, both of us. “It worked.”

Trinity director Bainbridge appropriately pronounced its benediction: “No one who saw it could forget it, a foul and awesome display.”²⁴⁵⁵

At Base Camp Groves “personally thought of Blondin crossing Niagara Falls on his tightrope, only to me the tightrope had lasted for almost three years, and of my repeated, confident-appearing assurances that such a thing was possible and that we would do it.”²⁴⁵⁶ Sitting up in their trenches before the blast wave arrived, he and Conant and Bush ceremoniously shook hands.

The blast had knocked Kistiakowsky down at S-10000. He scrambled up to watch the fireball rise and darken and mushroom purple auras, then moved to claim his bet. “I slapped Oppenheimer on the back and said, ‘Oppie, you owe me ten dollars.’ ”²⁴⁵⁷ The distracted Los Alamos director searched his wallet. “It’s empty,” he told Kistiakowsky, “you’ll have to wait.”²⁴⁵⁸ Bainbridge went around congratulating the S-10000 leaders on the success of the implosion method. “I finished by saying to Robert, ‘Now we are all sons of bitches.’ . . . [He] told my younger daughter later that it was the best thing anyone said after the test.”²⁴⁵⁹

“Our first feeling was one of elation,” Weisskopf remembers, “then we realized we were tired, and then we were worried.”²⁴⁶⁰ Rabi elaborates:

Naturally, we were very jubilant over the outcome of the experiment. While this tremendous ball of flame was there before us, and we watched it, and it rolled along, it became in time diffused with the clouds. . . .²⁴⁶¹ Then it was washed out with the wind. We turned to one another and offered congratulations, for the first few minutes. Then, there was a chill, which was not the morning cold; it was a chill that came to one when one thought, as for instance when I thought of my wooden house in Cambridge, and my laboratory in New York, and of the millions of people living around there, and this power of nature which we had first understood it to be—well, there it was.

Oppenheimer looked again into the Gita for a model sufficiently scaled:

We waited until the blast had passed, walked out of the shelter and then it was extremely solemn. We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, a few people cried. Most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad-Gita: Vishnu is trying to persuade the Prince that he should do his duty and to impress him he takes on his multiarmed form and says, “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” I suppose we all thought that, one way or another.²⁴⁶²

Other models also came to mind, Oppenheimer told an audience shortly after the war:

When it went off, in the New Mexico dawn, that first atomic bomb, we thought of Alfred Nobel, and his hope, his vain hope, that dynamite would put an end to wars.²⁴⁶³ We thought of the legend of Prometheus, of that deep sense of guilt in man’s new powers, that reflects his recognition of evil, and his long knowledge of it. We knew that it was a new world, but even more we knew that novelty itself was a very old thing in human life, that all our ways are rooted in it.

The successful director of the Los Alamos bomb laboratory left with Farrell in a jeep. Rabi watched him arrive at Base Camp and saw a change:

He was in the forward bunker. When he came back, there he was, you know, with his hat.²⁴⁶⁴ You’ve seen pictures of Robert’s hat. And he came to where we were in the headquarters, so to speak. And his walk was like “High Noon”—I think it’s the best I could describe it—this kind of strut. He’d done it.

“When Farrell came up to me,” Groves continues the story, “his first words were, The war is over.’ My reply was, ‘Yes, after we drop two bombs on Japan.’ I congratulated Oppenheimer quietly with ‘I am proud of you,’ and he replied with a simple ‘Thank you.’ ”²⁴⁶⁵ The theoretical physicist who was also a poet, who found physics, as Bethe says, “the best way to do philosophy,” had staked his claim on history.²⁴⁶⁶ It was a larger claim, but more ambivalent, than any Nobel Prize.

The horses in the MP stable still whinnied in fright; the paddles of the dusty Aermotor windmill at Base Camp still spun away the energy of the blast; the frogs had ceased to make love in the puddles. Rabi broke out a bottle of whiskey and passed it around. Everyone took a swig. Oppenheimer went to work with Groves on a report for Stimson at Potsdam. “My faith in the human mind has been somewhat restored,” Hubbard overheard him say.²⁴⁶⁷ He estimated the blast at 21,000 tons—21 kilotons.²⁴⁶⁸ Fermi knew from his paper experiment that it was at least 10 KT. Rabi had wagered 18. Later that morning Fermi and Herbert Anderson would don white surgical scrub suits and board the two lead-lined tanks to drive near Zero. Fermi’s tank broke down after only a mile of approach and he had to walk back. Anderson clanked on. Through the periscope the young physicist studied the crater the bomb had made. The tower—the $20,000 winch, the shack, the wooden platform, the hundred feet of steel girders—was gone, vaporized down to the stubby twisted wreckage of its footings. What had been asphalt paving was now fused sand, green and translucent as jade. The cup strung to Anderson’s rocket scooped up debris. His later radiochemical measurements confirmed 18.6 KT.²⁴⁶⁹ That was nearly four times what Los Alamos had expected. Rabi won the pot.

Fermi experienced a delayed reaction, he told his wife: “For the first time in his life on coming back from Trinity he had felt it was not safe for him to drive.²⁴⁷⁰ It had seemed to him as if the car were jumping from curve to curve, skipping the straight stretches in between. He had asked a friend to drive, despite his strong aversion to being driven.” Stanislaw Ulam, who chose not to attend the shot, watched the buses returning: “You could tell at once they had had a strange experience. You could see it on their faces. I saw that something very grave and strong had happened to their whole outlook on the future.”²⁴⁷¹

A bomb exploded in a desert damages not much besides sand and cactus and the purity of the air. Stafford Warren, the physician responsible for radiological safety at Trinity, had to search to discover more lethal effects:

Partially eviscerated dead wild jack rabbits were found more than 800 yards from zero, presumably killed by the blast. A farm house three miles away had doors torn loose and suffered other extensive damage. . . .²⁴⁷²

The light intensity was sufficient at nine miles to have caused temporary blindness and this would be longer lasting at shorter distances. . . . The light together with the heat and ultraviolet radiation would probably cause severe damage to the unprotected eye at 5–6 miles; damage sufficient to put personnel out of action several days if not permanently.

The boxes of excelsior Frank Oppenheimer had set out, and the pine boards, also recorded the coming of the light: they were charred beyond 1,000 yards, slightly scorched up to 2,000 yards. At 1,520 yards—ninetenths of a mile—exposed surfaces had heated almost instantly to 750°F.²⁴⁷³

William Penney, the British physicist who had studied blast effects for the Target Committee, held a seminar at Los Alamos five days after Trinity. “He applied his calculations,” Philip Morrison remembers. “He predicted that this [weapon] would reduce a city of three or four hundred thousand people to nothing but a sink for disaster relief, bandages, and hospitals. He made it absolutely clear in numbers. It was reality.”²⁴⁷⁴

Around the time of the Trinity shot, in the predawn dark at Hunter’s Point in San Francisco Bay, a floodlit crane had loaded onto the deck of the Indianapolis the fifteen-foot crate that carried the Little Boy gun assembly. Two sailors carried aboard the Little Boy bullet in a lead bucket shouldered between them on a crowbar. They followed the two Los Alamos Army officers to the cabin of the ship’s flag lieutenant, who had vacated it for the voyage. Eyebolts had been welded to its deck. The sailors strapped the lead bucket to the eyebolts. One of the officers padlocked it into place. They would take turns guarding it around the clock for the tenday voyage to Tinian.

At 0836 Pacific War Time, four hours after the light flung from the Jornada del Muerto blanched the face of the moon, the Indianapolis sailed with its cargo under the Golden Gate and out to sea.²⁴⁷⁵