By the time we reach the atom bomb, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the ease of access to target and the instant nature of macro-impact mean that both the choice of city and the identity of the victim has become completely randomized, and human technology has reached the final platform of self-destructiveness.2747 The great cities of the dead, in numbers, remain Verdun, Leningrad and Auschwitz. But at Hiroshima and Nagasaki the “city of the dead” is finally transformed from a metaphor into a literal reality. The city of the dead of the future is our city and its victims are—not French and German soldiers, nor Russian citizens, nor Jews—but all of us without reference to specific identity.
“The experience of these two cities,” the Japanese study emphasizes, “was the opening chapter to the possible annihilation of mankind.”2748
On August 24, having recently heard about the man holding an eyeball, Dr. Michihiko Hachiya suffered a nightmare. Like the myth of the Sphinx—destruction to those who cannot answer its riddle, whom ignorance or inattention or arrogance misleads—the dream of this Japanese doctor who was wounded in the world’s first atomic bombing and who ministered to hundreds of victims must be counted one of the millennial visions of mankind:
The night had been close with many mosquitoes. Consequently, I slept poorly and had a frightful dream.2749
It seems I was in Tokyo after the great earthquake and around me were decomposing bodies heaped in piles, all of whom were looking right at me. I saw an eye sitting on the palm of a girl’s hand. Suddenly it turned and leaped into the sky and then came flying back towards me, so that, looking up, I could see a great bare eyeball, bigger than life, hovering over my head, staring point blank at me. I was powerless to move.
“I awakened short of breath and with my heart pounding,” Michihiko Hachiya remembers.
So do we all.
Acknowledgments
These men and women who participated in the events of this book generously made time for interviews and correspondence: Philip Abelson, Luis W. Alvarez, David L. Anderson, William A. Arnold, Hans Bethe, Rose Bethe, Eugene T. Booth, Sakae Itoh, Shigetoshi Iwamatsu, George Kistiakowsky, Willis E. Lamb, Jr., Leon Love, Alfred O. C. Nier, I. I. Rabi, Stefan Rozental, Glenn Seaborg, Emilio Segrè, Edward Teller, Stanislaw Ulam, Eugene Wigner and Herbert York.
Michael Korda took the chance of sponsorship. David Halberstam, Geoffrey Ward and Edward O. Wilson vouched for me to the Ford Foundation. Arthur L. Singer, Jr., saved the day. The Cockefair Chair in Continuing Education at the University of Missouri-Kansas City and its director, Michael Mardikes, lent support. Louis Brown offered physics coaching and wise counsel far beyond the call of any duty and is not responsible for lapses in either regard. Egon Weiss went out of his way to arrange access to the Szilard Papers. The Linda Hall Library of Science and its former director, Larry X. Besant, and the UMKC Library and its former director, Kenneth LaBudde, never failed.
I visited or corresponded with a number of institutions; their staffs guided me with competence and courtesy: American Institute of Physics Niels Bohr Library; Argonne National Laboratory; Bibliothek und Archiv für Geschichte der Max-Planck-Gesellschaft, Dahlem; Columbia University; Department of Terrestrial Magnetism, Carnegie Institution of Washington; Hiroshima Peace Culture Foundation; J. Robert Oppenheimer Memorial Committee; Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory; Library of Congress; Los Alamos National Laboratory; National Archives; Niels Bohr Institute, Copenhagen; The Readers Digest of Japan; United States Air Force Museum, Wright-Patterson AFB; United States Military Academy Library; University of California—San Diego; University of Chicago Library.
Friends and colleagues helped with research, advice, encouragement, aid: Millicent Abell, Hans and Elisabeth Archenhold, John Aubrey, Dan Baca, Roy and Sandra Beatty, David Butler, Margaret Conyngham, Gil Elliot, Jon Else, Susie Evans, Peter Francis, Kimball Higgs, Jack Holl, Ulla Holm, Joan and Frank Hood, Jim and Reiko Ishikawa, Sigurd Johansson, Tadao Kaizuka, Edda and Rainer Konig, Barbro Lucas, Thomas Lyons, Karen McCarthy, Donald and Britta McNemar, Yasuo Miyazaki, Hiroyuki Nakagawa, Kimiko Nakai, Rolf Neuhaus, Issei Nishimori, Fredrik Nordenham, Patricia O’Connell, Gena Peyton, Edward Quattlebaum, P. Wayne Reagan, Edward Reese, Katherine Rhodes, Timothy Rhodes, Bill Jack Rodgers, Siegfried Ruschin, Robert G. Sachs, Silva Sandow, Sabine Schaffner, Ko Shioya, R. Jeffrey Smith, Robert Stewart, Lewis H. Strauss, Linda Talbot, Sharon Gibbs Thibodeau, Josiah Thompson, Kosta Tsipsis, Erma Valenti, Joan Warnow, Spencer Weart, Paul Williams, Edward Wolowiec, Mike Yoshida.
Luis Alvarez and Emilio Segré were kind enough to read the galleys and offered invaluable suggestions.
Mary saw it through.
1. English novelist H. G. Wells. His 1914 novel, The World Set Free, predicted atomic bombs, atomic war and world government.
2. As a young man, Hungarian physicist Leo Szilard dreamed of saving the world. “If we could find an element which is split by neutrons . . .”
3. Pierre and Marie Curie in their Paris laboratory, c. 1900. The elements they first isolated from pitchblende residues, polonium and radium, radiated far more energy than any chemical process could account for.
4. New Zealander Ernest Rutherford discovered the atomic nucleus. James Jeans called him “the Newton of atomic physics.” C. 1902.
5. The Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge, England, the world center of early-20th-century experimental physics.
6. Otto Hahn and Lise Meitner, chemist and physicist, made a productive team in Berlin.
7. Niels Bohr on the threshold of greatness, summer 1911, with his fiancée, Margrethe.
8. October 1912: The Kaiser led the way to dedicate the new institute built on farmland he donated in the Berlin suburb of Dahlem.
9. The Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Chemistry, another measure of burgeoning German power.
10. Chemist Fritz Haber (left) and theoretician Albert Einstein, c. 1914. Haber guided German development of poison gases in the Great War; Einstein spoke out for pacifism and pursued the general theory of relativity. He had already formulated the fateful mass-energy equivalence, E = mc2.
11. Cambridge physicist Harry Moseley, killed at Gallipoli, 1915. A eulogist said his death alone made the war a “hideous” and “irreparable” crime.
12. American soldiers preparing for gas drill, c. 1917. “It was a way of saving countless lives,” Otto Hahn remembers Fritz Haber arguing of poison gas, “ . . . if it meant that the war could be brought to an end sooner.”
13. Niels Bohr’s new Institute for Theoretical Physics in Copenhagen, completed in 1921. The best young physicists in the world pilgrimaged here to work and to learn.
14. Niels Bohr in the 1920s.
15. At Como, Italy, in 1927, Enrico Fermi, Werner Heisenberg and Wolfgang Pauli (l. to r.) heard Bohr define complementarity.
16. Fermi and his group in Rome prepared through the early 1930s for major work and found it bombarding the elements with neutrons to induce artificial radioactivities previously unknown. Uranium was a complex puzzle. L. to r., Emilio Segré, Enrico Persico and Enrico Fermi at Ostia, 1927.
17. The Physics Institute on the Via Panisperna.
18. Cambridge physicist Francis Aston’s mass-spectrograph sorted out isotopes by mass. Their whole-number weights led to an understanding of binding energy, the glue that holds atoms together. “Personally I think there is no doubt that sub-atomic energy is available all around us,” Aston lectured, “and that one day man will release and control its almost infinite power.”
19. The first anti-Jewish law Adolf Hitler promulgated, in April 1933, stripped “non-Aryan” academics of their posts. More than 100 physicists fled Germany.
20. With Europe in turmoil, Bohr’s annual Copenhagen conferences became job forums. In the front row (l. to r.): Oskar Klein, Bohr, Heisenberg, Pauli, George Gamow, Lev Landau, Hendrik Kramers.
21. Frédéric and Irène Joliot-Curie at the Radium Institute in Paris discovered artificial radioactivity but missed the neutron. C. 1935.
22. Identifying t
he third basic constituent of matter fell to Rutherford protégé James Chadwick. The discovery of the neutron in 1932 opened the atomic nucleus to detailed examination. Chadwick’s colleagues hailed him as “the personification of the ideal experimentalist.”
23. At Berkeley in the 1930s theoretician Robert Oppenheimer (left) and experimentalist Ernest O. Lawrence built a great American school of physics.
24. Lawrence’s Nobel Prize-winning cyclotron battered secrets from the nucleus and proved a potent source of neutrons. Here Lawrence examines the vacuum chamber of the 37-inch machine, completed in 1937.
25. Two distinguished Cavendish directors: J. J. Thomson (left) and Ernest Rutherford in the 1930s.
26. Mathematician John von Neumann departed Europe early for a lifetime appointment at the Institute for Advanced Study.
27. Leo Szilard, photographed by Gertrud Weiss at Oxford in 1936. The chain-reaction patent was already a British military secret.
28. After England, the physicists who escaped Nazi Germany emigrated in increasing numbers to the United States. Future Nobel laureate Hans Bethe won appointment at Cornell.
29. His Stuttgart professor’s daughter Rose Ewald followed in 1936. “Rose was then twenty, and I fell in love with her.”
30. The war against the Jews spread to Italy and threatened Laura Fermi. The 1938 Nobel Prize offered the couple escape with financial security; with their children Giulio and Nella they went on from Stockholm to New York. “We have founded the American branch of the Fermi family,” Fermi mocked.
31. Lise Meitner at 59 in 1937. At Christmastime 1938 in Stockholm she heard from Otto Hahn of his stunning discovery with Fritz Strassmann that slow neutrons bombarding uranium made barium—the first evidence that the uranium atom split.
32. Otto Frisch, c. 1938. With Meitner, his aunt, he prized out the revolutionary meaning of the Hahn-Strassmann uranium discovery.
33. Otto Hahn at sixty in 1939. His “barium fantasy” would change the world.
34. One of Hahn’s radiochemistry worktables at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Chemistry.
35. The medieval fortress at Kungälv, Sweden, that looked down upon Frisch and Meitner as they worked.
36. Herbert Anderson at Columbia first demonstrated nuclear fission in the United States in January 1939.
37. At Munich in September 1938, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain agreed to Nazi demands to partition Czechoslovakia. “Peace with honour,” he told the London crowds. “Complete surrender,” Winston Churchill charged.
38. The APO target room at the Carnegie Institution’s Department of Terrestrial Magnetism, Washington, D.C., after the demonstration of fission there on the night of January 28, 1939. L. to r., Robert Meyer, Merle Tuve, Fermi, Richard Roberts, Léon Rosenfeld, Erik Bohr, Niels Bohr, Gregory Breit, John Fleming.
39. Albert Einstein’s 1939 letter to President Franklin Roosevelt reporting the possibility of German atomic bomb research led FDR to appoint a Uranium Committee headed by ineffectual Bureau of Standards director Lyman J. Briggs (left).
40. The leaders of wartime American science, 1940. L. to r, Ernest Lawrence, Arthur Compton, Vannevar Bush, James Bryant Conant, Karl Compton, Alfred Loomis.
41. War came to Europe with the German invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939. Here Polish citizens in Warsaw study Nazi proclamations. Roosevelt appealed to the belligerents to refrain from bombing civilians.
42. Genia and Rudolf Peierls. While American efforts stalled, Peierls and Otto Frisch in England in 1940 worked out the essential theory of a fast-fission uranium bomb fueled with U235 and convinced his British colleagues that it was feasible.
43. Eugene T. Booth (left) and John Dunning (right) decided in 1940 to experiment with gaseous barrier diffusion to separate U235 from U238. The British took the same route.
44. Economist Alexander Sachs had carried the Einstein letter of warning to Roosevelt; he pushed the conservative Briggs committee without success for another year.
45. Nobel laureate theoretician Eugene P. Wigner, the third member of the “Hungarian conspiracy” with Szilard and Edward Teller. Szilard called him “the conscience of the project” from beginning to end.
46. Alfred O. C. Nier separated a sample of U235 with his mass-spectrograph; Columbia used it to confirm the rare isotope’s responsibility for slow-neutron fission.
47. Australian Mark Oliphant visited the United States in 1941 and helped goad the American atomic-bomb program to commitment.
48. Glenn Seaborg, the codiscoverer of plutonium, with his bride-to-be, Helen Griggs, Los Angeles, 1942.
49. Strategic bombing soon bridged the barrier of the English Channel. Here: Coventry Cathedral, destroyed by German bombs.
50. The Japanese surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, December 7, 1941, finally precipitated the entry of the United States into the war against not only Japan but Germany and Italy as well. Immediately U.S. atomic bomb development accelerated.
51. Franklin Roosevelt saw the longterm potential and instinctively reserved nuclear-weapons policy to himself.
52. Louis B. Werner and Burris Cunningham in Chicago the day they isolated the first pure sample of plutonium, August 20, 1942.
53. Chicago Pile Number One, the first man-made nuclear reactor, under construction at the University of Chicago, November 1942. Lower layer holds uranium oxide pseudospheres, unfinished dead layer overlying. Note hammer in foreground for scale.
54. Oak Ridge Alpha I calutron racetrack for electromagnetic separation of U235. Silver-wound magnets protrude like ribs spaced by semicircular mass- spectrometer tanks. Spare tanks in left foreground.
55. K-25 gaseous-diffusion plant, Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Built to monumental scale, the structure is half a mile long with 42.6 acres under roof.
56. William S. “Deke” Parsons and Philip Abelson. Parsons directed ordnance development at Los Alamos; Abelson pioneered liquid thermal diffusion for uranium enrichment.
57. Abelson’s liquid thermal diffusion rack. Steam circulated through an inner pipe, cooling water through an outer, causing U235 to diffuse inward and circulate upward. The resulting enriched material fed Ernest Lawrence’s hungry calutrons.
58. U.S. plutonium-production complex on the Columbia River at Hanford, Washington. Twelve-hundred-ton graphite reactors drilled with 2,004 channels held uranium slugs; neutrons from fission transmuted 250 parts per million of U238 to plutonium. D pile in foreground between water tanks.
59. Pile face showing slug channels.
60. “Queen Mary” plutonium separation plant, Hanford. Dissolved irradiated slugs progressed by remote control through separation stages down the length of this 800-foot concrete building.
61. Interior showing processing cells.
62. The Norsk Hydro hydrogen electrolysis plant at Vemork, Norway, produced heavy water for German uranium research until disabled by Allied bombing.
63. The ferry Hydro on Lake Tinnsjö, Norway, sunk by commandos while carrying the last Norsk Hydro heavy water to Germany.
64. A secret laboratory was established in 1943 north of Santa Fe, New Mexico, on the forested Los Alamos mesa at 7,200 feet. Here scientists and engineers assembled to design and build the first atomic bombs. The Army Corps of Engineers constructed fourplex family apartments for housing.
65. Experiments at Los Alamos determined the critical masses of U235 and Pu239. Adding U235 cubes to a subcritical assembly within blocks of beryllium tamper measurably increased neutron flux.
66. The Los Alamos Tech Area.
67. The guillotine mechanism for studying supercritical assemblies (the Dragon experiment).
68. The first RaLa test. Note Army tanks for observers, lower left.
69. Niels Bohr learned of the U.S. program in 1943. The bomb, he foresaw, would end major war and challenge the nation-states to move toward an open world.
70. Polish mathematician Stanislaw Ulam calculated hydrodynamics at Los Alamos; in 1951 he conceived the essential breakthrough arrang
ement for a workable H-bomb.
71. Hungarian theorist Edward Teller (left) helped make the plutonium bomb work; Navy physicist Norris Bradbury directed its test assembly at Trinity. Teller guided H-bomb theoretical studies at Los Alamos.