Making of the Atomic Bomb

  With fifty-three people aboard including the concert violinist the Hydro sailed on time. Forty-five minutes into the crossing Haukelid’s charge of plastic explosive blew the hull. The captain felt the explosion rather than heard it, and though Tinnsjö is landlocked he thought they might have been torpedoed. The bow swamped first as Haukelid had intended; while the passengers and crew struggled to release the lifeboats, the freight cars with their thirty-nine drums of heavy water—162 gallons mixed with 800 gallons of dross—broke loose, rolled overboard and sank like stones. Of passengers and crew twenty-six drowned. The concert violinist slipped high and dry into a lifeboat; when his violin case floated by, someone was kind enough to fish it out for him.

  Kurt Diebner of German Army Ordnance counted the full effect on German fission research of the Vemork bombing and the sinking of the Hydro in a postwar interview:

  When one considers that right up to the end of the war, in 1945, there was virtually no increase in our heavy-water stocks in Germany . . . it will be seen that it was the elimination of German heavy-water production in Norway that was the main factor in our failure to achieve a self-sustaining atomic reactor before the war ended.1961

  The race to the bomb, such as it was, ended for Germany on a mountain lake in Norway on a cold Sunday morning in February 1944.

  * * *

  Despite Pearl Harbor and the subsequent Japanese sweep across a million square miles of Southeast Asia and the western Pacific, the Pacific theater commanded less attention in the United States in the earlier years of the war than did the European. Partly that neglect was a result of the deliberate national policy that gave priority to Europe. “Europe was Washington’s darling,” Pacific Fleet Admiral William F. Halsey would write in a memoir, “the South Pacific was only a stepchild.”1962 But Americans also found it difficult at first to take seriously an Asian island people who were small in stature and radically different in culture. Reporting from the Solomon Islands east of New Guinea late in 1942, Time-Life correspondent John Hersey found the typical U.S. marine “very uneasy about what he feels is Washington’s ignorance of the Pacific. Sure, he argues, Hitler has to be beaten, but that doesn’t mean we have to go on thinking of the Japs as funny little ring-tailed monkeys.”1963 The U.S. Ambassador to Japan at the time of the Pearl Harbor attack, Boston-born Joseph C. Grew, confronted a similar skepticism when he returned from Japanese internment and battled it by traveling the nation lecturing:

  The other day a friend, an intelligent American, said to me: “Of course there must be ups and downs in this war; we can’t expect victories every day, but it’s merely a question of time before Hitler will go down to defeat before the steadily growing power of the combined air and naval and military forces of the [Allies]—and then, we’ll mop up the Japs.” Mark well those words, please. “And then we’ll mop up the Japs.”1964

  Grew thought such bravado ill-advised. “The Japanese have known what we thought of them,” he told his audiences—“that they were little fellows physically, that they were imitative, that they were not really very important in the world of men and nations.”1965 To the contrary, said Grew, they were “united,” “frugal,” “fanatical” and “totalitarian”:1966

  At this very moment, the Japanese feel themselves, man for man, superior to you and to me and to any of our peoples. They admire our technology, they may have a lurking dread of our ultimate superiority of resources, but all too many of them have contempt for us as human beings. . . . The Japanese leaders do think that they can and will win. They are counting on our underestimates, on our apparent disunity before—and even during—war, on our unwillingness to sacrifice, to endure, and to fight.1967

  So far Grew’s lecture might have been merely exhortation. But he went on to emphasize a phenomenon that Americans fighting in the Pacific were just then beginning to encounter. “’Victory or death’ is no mere slogan for these soldiers,” Grew noted. “It is plain, matter-of-fact description of the military policy that controls their forces, from the highest generals to the newest recruits. The man who allows himself to be captured has disgraced himself and his country.”1968

  Which was exactly what Marine Major General Alexander A. Vandegrift was finding at the time, late 1942, in the Solomons at Guadalcanal. “General,” he wrote the Marine Commandant in Washington, “I have never heard or read of this kind of fighting. These people refuse to surrender. The wounded will wait until men come up to examine them . . . and blow themselves and the other fellow to death with a hand grenade.”1969

  It was frightening. It required a corresponding escalation of violence to combat. John Hersey felt the need to explain:

  A legend has grown up that this young man [i.e., the U.S. marine] is a killer; he takes no prisoners, and gives no quarter. This is partly true, but the reason is not brutality, not just vindictive remembrance of Pearl Harbor. He kills because in the jungle he must, or be killed. This enemy stalks him, and he stalks the enemy as if each were a hunter tracking a bear cat. Quite frequently you hear marines say: “I wish we were fighting against Germans. They are human beings, like us. Fighting against them must be like an athletic performance—matching your skill against someone you know is good. Germans are misled, but at least they react like men. But the Japs are like animals. Against them you have to learn a whole new set of physical reactions. You have to get used to their animal stubbornness and tenacity. They take to the jungle as if they had been bred there, and like some beasts you never see them until they are dead.”1970

  As an explanation for unfamiliar behavior, bestiality had the advantage that it made killing a formidable enemy easier emotionally. But it also, by dehumanizing him, made him seem yet more alien and dangerous. So did the other common attribution that evolved during the war to explain Japanese behavior: that the Japanese were fanatics, believers, as Grew had preached, “in the incorruptible certainty of their national cause.”1971 The historian William Manchester, a marine at Guadalcanal, argues more objectively from a longer perspective postwar:

  At the time it was impolitic to pay the slightest tribute to the enemy, and Nip determination, their refusal to say die, was commonly attributed to “fanaticism.” In retrospect it is indistinguishable from heroism. To call it anything less cheapens the victory, for American valor was necessary to defeat it.1972

  Whether bestiality, fanaticism, or heroism, the refusal of Japanese soldiers to surrender required new tactics and strong stomachs to defeat. In his best-selling 1943 book Guadalcanal Diary war correspondent Richard Tregaskis reported those tactics from the first land battles of the Pacific war at Guadalcanal:

  The general summarized the fighting. . . . The toughest job, he said, had been to clean out scores of dugout caves filled with Japs. Each cave, he said, had been a fortress in itself, filled with Japs who were determined to resist until they were all killed. The only effective way to finish off these caves, he said, had been to take a charge of dynamite and thrust it down the narrow cave entrance. After that had been done, and the cave blasted, you could go in with a submachine gun and finish off the remaining Japs. . . .

  “You’ve never seen such caves and dungeons,” said the general. “There would be thirty or forty Japs in them. And they absolutely refused to come out, except in one or two isolated cases.”1973

  The statistics of the Solomons campaign told the same story: of 250 Japanese manning the garrison on Guadalcanal when the marines first landed only three allowed themselves to be taken prisoner; more than 30,000 Japanese shipped in to fight died before the island was secure, compared to 4, 123 Americans. Similar patterns obtained elsewhere. The proportion of captured to dead Japanese in the North Burma campaign was 142 to 17, 166, about 1:120 when a truism among Western nations is that the loss of one-fourth to one-third of an army—4:1—usually bodes surrender. Paralleling Japanese resistance, Allied losses grew.

  As the slow, bloody push up the Pacific toward the Japanese home islands gained momentum through 1943, the question the behavior of
Japanese soldiers raised was whether such standards applied not only to the military but to the civilians of Japan as well. Grew had sought to answer that question in his lectures the year before:

  I know Japan; I lived there for ten years. I know the Japanese intimately. The Japanese will not crack. They will not crack morally or psychologically or economically, even when eventual defeat stares them in the face. They will pull in their belts another notch, reduce their rations from a bowl to a half bowl of rice, and fight to the bitter end. Only by utter physical destruction or utter exhaustion of their men and materials can they be defeated. That is the difference between the Germans and the Japanese. That is what we are up against in fighting Japan.1974

  In the meantime the United States manufactured flamethrowers to burn Japanese soldiers from their caves. A seasoned journalist who had traveled in Japan before the war, Henry C. Wolfe, called in Harper’s for the firebombing of Japan’s “inflammable,” “matchbox” cities. “It seems brutal to be talking about burning homes,” Wolfe explained. “But we are engaged in a life-and-death struggle for national survival, and we are therefore justified in taking any action that will save the lives of American soldiers and sailors. We must strike hard with everything we have at the spot where it will do the most damage to the enemy.”1975

  The month Wolfe’s call to aerial battle appeared in Harper’s—January 1943—Franklin Roosevelt met with Winston Churchill at Casablanca. In the course of the meeting the two leaders discussed what terms of surrender they would eventually insist upon; the word “unconditional” was discussed but not included in the official joint statement to be read at the final press conference. Then, on January 24, to Churchill’s surprise, Roosevelt inserted the word ad lib: “Peace can come to the world,” the President read out to the assembled journalists and newsreel cameras, “only by the total elimination of German and Japanese war power. . . . The elimination of German, Japanese and Italian war power means the unconditional surrender of Germany, Italy, and Japan.”1976 Roosevelt later told Harry Hopkins that the surprising and fateful insertion was a consequence of the confusion attending his effort to convince French General Henri Girard to sit down with Free French leader Charles de Gaulle:

  We had so much trouble getting those two French generals together that I thought to myself that this was as difficult as arranging the meeting of Grant and Lee—and then suddenly the Press Conference was on, and Winston and I had had no time to prepare for it, and the thought popped into my mind that they had called Grant “Old Unconditional Surrender,” and the next thing I knew I had said it.1977

  Churchill immediately concurred—“Any divergence between us, even by omission, would on such an occasion and at such a time have been damaging or even dangerous to our war effort”—and unconditional surrender became official Allied policy.

  16

  Revelations

  “How would you like to work in America?” James Chadwick asked Otto Frisch in Liverpool one day in November 1943.1978

  “I would like that very much,” Frisch remembers responding.

  “But then you would have to become a British citizen.”

  “I would like that even more.”

  Within a week the British had cleared the Austrian emigré for citizenship. Following instructions “to pack all my necessary belongings into one suitcase and to come to London by the night train” Frisch made the rounds of government offices with other emigré scientists in one crowded day—swearing allegiance to the King, picking up a passport, collecting a visa stamp at the American Embassy—and hurried back to Liverpool, where the delegation would board the converted luxury liner Andes the next morning. Headed by Wallace Akers of ICI, the British group included the men General Groves would ask to review barrier development as well as men going to Los Alamos: Frisch, Rudolf Peierls, William G. Penney, George Placzek, P. B. Moon, James L. Tuck, Egon Bretscher and Klaus Fuchs among others. Chadwick would join them, as would the hydrodynamicist Geoffrey Taylor.

  Akers maneuvered around the transport shortage by loading them for the Liverpool pier in black mortuary limousines; a hearse for the luggage completed the cortege.1979 On the Andes Frisch had an entire eight-berth cabin to himself. Unconvoyed they zigzagged west. America was luxury; traveling up from Newport News Frisch’s train stopped in Richmond, Virginia:

  I wandered out into the streets. There I was greeted by a completely incredible spectacle: fruit stalls with pyramids of oranges, illuminated by bright acetylene flares! After England’s blackout, and not having seen an orange for a couple of years, that sight was enough to send me into hysterical laughter.1980

  Groves in Washington lectured them on security. A succession of trains delivered them into a fantastic landscape—Frisch and another man in December, the larger group early in 1944—and there in the bright sunlight of a pine-shouldered mesa was Robert Oppenheimer smoking a pipe and shading his close-cropped military haircut with a pork-pie hat: “Welcome to Los Alamos, and who the devil are you?”1981, 1982, 1983

  They were Churchill’s flying wedge. The bomb had been theirs to begin with as much as anybody’s, but more immediate urgencies had demanded their attention and now they were couriers sent along to help build it and then to bring it home. America was giving the bomb away to another sovereign state, proliferating. Churchill had negotiated the renewed collaboration at Quebec in August:

  It is agreed between us

  First, that we will never use this agency against each other.

  Secondly, that we will not use it against third parties without each other’s consent.

  Thirdly, that we will not either of us communicate any information about Tube Alloys to third parties except by mutual consent.

  Niels Bohr and his son Aage followed next as consultant to the Tube Alloys directorate and junior scientific officer, respectively; the British were paying their salaries. Groves’ security men met father and son at dockside, assigned them cover names—Nicholas and James Baker—and spirited them off to a hotel, there to discover NIELS BOHR stenciled bold and black on the Danish laureate’s luggage. At Los Alamos, warmly welcomed, Nicholas and James Baker became Uncle Nick and Jim.

  The first order of business was Heisenberg’s drawing of a heavy-water reactor, which Bohr had previously revealed to Groves. Oppenheimer convened a conference of experts on the last day of 1943 to see if they could find any new reason to believe a pile might serve as a weapon. “It was clearly a drawing of a reactor,” Bethe recalled after the war, “but when we saw it our conclusion was that these Germans were totally crazy—did they want to throw a reactor down on London?” That was not Heisenberg’s purpose, but Bohr wanted to be sure. Bethe and Teller prepared the consequent report, “Explosion of an inhomogeneous uranium-heavy water pile.”1984, 1985 It found that such an explosion “will liberate energies which are probably smaller, and certainly not much larger, than those obtainable by the explosion of an equal mass of TNT.”

  If Heisenberg’s drawing told the physicists anything it ought to have told them that the Germans were far behind; it depicted sheets of uranium rather than lumps, an inefficient arrangement Heisenberg had clung to for a time even when his colleagues had argued the advantages of a threedimensional lattice. Samuel Goudsmit, a Dutch physicist in America who would soon lead a front-line Manhattan Project intelligence mission into Germany, remembers a more convoluted conclusion: “At that time we thought this meant simply that they had succeeded in keeping their real aims secret, even from a scientist as wise as Bohr.”1986

  Oppenheimer appreciated the salutary effect of Bohr’s presence. “Bohr at Los Alamos was marvelous,” he told an audience of scientists after the war. “He took a very lively technical interest. . . . But his real function, I think for almost all of us, was not the technical one.”1987 Here two texts of the postwar lecture diverge; both versions illuminate Oppenheimer’s state of mind in 1944 as he remembered it. In unedited transcript he said Bohr “made the enterprise which looked so macabre seem hopeful”
; edited, that sentence became: “He made the enterprise seem hopeful, when many were not free of misgiving.”1988, 1989

  How Bohr did so Oppenheimer and even Bohr had work to explain. Oppenheimer outlines an explanation in his lecture:

  Bohr spoke with contempt of Hitler, who with a few hundred tanks and planes had tried to enslave Europe for a millennium. He said nothing like that would ever happen again; and his own high hope that the outcome would be good, and that in this the role of objectivity, the cooperation which he had experienced among scientists would play a helpful part; all this, all of us wanted very much to believe.1990

  “He said nothing like that would ever happen again” is a key; Austrian emigré theoretician Victor Weisskopf supplies another:

  In Los Alamos we were working on something which is perhaps the most questionable, the most problematic thing a scientist can be faced with. At that time physics, our beloved science, was pushed into the most cruel part of reality and we had to live it through. We were, most of us at least, young and somewhat inexperienced in human affairs, I would say. But suddenly in the midst of it, Bohr appeared in Los Alamos.1991

  It was the first time we became aware of the sense in all these terrible things, because Bohr right away participated not only in the work, but in our discussions. Every great and deep difficulty bears in itself its own solution. . . . This we learned from him.

  “They didn’t need my help in making the atom bomb,” Bohr later told a friend.1992 He was there to another purpose. He had left his wife and children and work and traveled in loneliness to America for the same reason he had hurried to Stockholm in a dark time to see the King: to bear witness, to clarify, to win change, finally to rescue. His revelation—which was equivalent, as Oppenheimer said, to his revelation when he learned of Rutherford’s discovery of the nucleus—was a vision of the complementarity of the bomb. In London and at Los Alamos Bohr was working out its revolutionary consequences. He meant now to communicate his revelation to the heads of state who might act on it: to Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill first of all.