After seeing Nolan's 'Oppenheimer,' do you have questions?

Everything you wanted to know about the making of the atomic bomb – with guaranteed surprises and some really scary stuff! (Part 13 of 12, or more!)

[AUTHOR’S NOTE: In Part 12, we focused on the battle within the Manhattan Project between General Leslie Groves and Leó Szilárd: bureaucratic genius versus scientific genius. As we’ll discuss, Groves desperately wanted the bomb to be used in World War II. Meanwhile, Szilárd became the leader of a growing group of scientists who desperately wanted to prevent the bomb from being used.]

Q: When did the Allies know the Germans weren’t going to produce an atomic weapon?

A: “By the end of 1943,” wrote nuclear expert Alex Wellerstein, “the British had concluded that the German program was not going anywhere. They were able to account for [Werner] Heisenberg’s movements all too easily (Heisenberg’s importance to the Nazi bomb program is addressed in Part 2 of this series) … and there seemed to be no efforts to industrialize the work on the scale necessary to produce concrete results in the timescale of the war.” The British shared this intelligence with the United States.

Q: Were the Japanese ever close to making an atomic weapon?

A: No. Nor did American physicists ever expect Japan would be able to do so. The country didn’t have access to a sufficient amount of uranium, nor did it possess the mind-boggling industrial capacity required to enrich uranium or breed plutonium, nor did Japan have a large roster of superstar physicists, like the Germans.

Q: Did General Groves, the person running the Manhattan Project, know that it was unlikely either the Germans or the Japanese were going to produce a bomb?

A: Yes. Groves was aware of British-organized attacks, beginning March 1942, that ultimately destroyed a heavy water plant in Nazi-occupied Norway. The facility was essential for Germany’s work on a nuclear reactor. A final flattening blow in that prolonged sabotage campaign was delivered in September 1943 with a massive U.S. bombing raid by 160 B-17s (a.k.a. the “Flying Fortress”). Around the time of that attack, Groves also created a special “Mission Impossible” team to learn if the Axis nations had weapons of mass destruction – biological, chemical or nuclear.

Q: A WMD “Mission Impossible” team?

A: Yes. As the Allies were preparing to invade Italy, in September 1943, Groves sent a small counterintelligence unit to join the attacking forces. It was headed by Lt. Colonel Boris Pash, who had previously played the chief role in the Army’s security investigation of Robert Oppenheimer (in Oppenheimer, Pash is played by Casey Affleck). As the Dept. of Energy detailed, “Because the members of the team would at times be going into ‘no man's land’ – or even behind enemy lines – in search of information, they were not told any details of the Manhattan Project. This way, if they were captured, they could reveal nothing of use to the Germans.” The unit was codenamed ALSOS, derived from the Greek word for “grove.” (Below, photo of Lt. Col. Pash with Dr. Frédéric Joliot-Curie, in Paris.)

Q: The intelligence unit was named after Groves – the guy in charge of it?

A: Yes.

Q: Did Groves think it was a good idea that a secret atomic bomb unit was named for the guy who was in charge of making the atomic bomb?

A: No. He had a cow. Later, Groves said, “The Manhattan Project always carefully avoided drawing undue attention to its work and to its people. Code names for our projects were deliberately innocuous. Imagine my horror, then, when I learned that the G-2 had given the scientific intelligence mission to Italy the name ‘alsos,’ which one of my more scholarly colleagues promptly informed me was the Greek word for ‘groves.’ My first inclination was to have the mission renamed, but I decided that to change it now would only draw attention to it.”

A: Did the ALSOS team find any evidence the Nazis were close to making a bomb?

A: No.

Q: Did Groves change his view about using the bomb after receiving intelligence that no other nation was likely to produce an atomic weapon?

A: No. Groves didn’t think it was a problem that the bomb was now a “first-strike” weapon – not a “deterrent,” since the Nazis were no longer a threat to make their own bomb. Groves even suggested that the real target wasn’t Germany or Japan. In early 1944, during a dinner party, the general made a memorable remark to James Chadwick and Joseph Rotblat, two of the top British scientists at the Los Alamos Lab. Groves told them, “Of course you realize that the whole purpose of this project is to subdue our main enemy, the Russians.” This comment so disturbed Rotblat that he asked to leave Los Alamos.

Q: Did Rotblat speak about why he wanted to exit the Manhattan Project?

A: Yes. Referencing the remark by Groves, Rotblat said, “It turned out … that what we are working on is not to try to prevent the Germans from using the bomb against us, but actually to help the Americans to build a weapon which they then could use, if need be, against the Russians. And this was certainly not something which I wanted to work on, particularly at the time when the Russians were our allies. And ... we relied upon them, to their enormous sacrifices, to prepare the ground for a victory on our side against the Germans.” (Below, Joseph Rotblat’s identity badge photo for the Los Alamos Lab):

Q: What happened when Rotblat said he wanted to exit the Manhattan Project?

A: As retribution, disinformation was produced. Rotblat learned that Groves’s counterintelligence people “had accumulated an enormous dossier on me, in which they made it out the reason why I decided to go back is because I wanted to go back first to England, then somehow be flown from England across to Poland – Poland was occupied by the Russians … drop by parachute, that sort of thing –  all in order to give all the secrets away to the Russians. This is how they gave the reasons why I wanted to go.” However, Rotblat was able to quickly prove that much of the dossier was “a complete invention.”

Q: After proving that the dossier was fake, was Rotblat allowed to leave New Mexico?

A: Yes. He was permitted to return to Britain with the stipulation that he not talk to anyone about his reasons for leaving. As the Dept. of Energy noted, Joseph Rotblat was “the only wartime Los Alamos scientist to walk away from the project for moral reasons.”

Q: Did others address the new moral calculation in play, once it was clear that the U.S. didn’t have any nuclear rivals?

A: Yes. In fact, Szilárd began having the same doubts as Rotblat. “Initially,” Szilárd wrote, “we were strongly motivated to produce the bomb because we feared the Germans would get ahead of us and the only way to prevent them from dropping bombs on us was to have bombs in readiness ourselves.” Once the enemy nations were no longer a nuclear threat and the Allies seemed headed to victory, Szilárd found it unclear “what we were working for.”

Q: Is it fair to say that the goals of the Manhattan Project shifted?

A: Yes. “If you are making an atomic bomb to stop Hitler,” wrote Alex Wellerstein, “who could argue with that? But if you are making a bomb to use it against a non-nuclear power, to use it as a military weapon and not a deterrent, then things start to get problematic … The degree to which the goals of the atomic bomb program shifted – from building a deterrent to building a first-strike weapon – is something often lost in many historical descriptions of the work. It makes the early enthusiasm and later opposition of some of the scientists (such as Leo Szilárd) seem like a change of heart, when in reality it was the goals of the project that had shifted. It is, in part, a narrative about the shifting of perspective from Germany to Japan.”

Q: When did it start to become clear that United States was going to defeat Japan?

A: In June 1944, as General Dwight Eisenhower was sending 160,000 troops to assault the beaches of Normandy, Admiral Chester Nimitz ⎼ 7,500 miles south and east ⎼ launched an armada of 535 ships and 127,000 troops to eject the Japanese from multiple island strongholds. (Below, from left to right: General Douglas MacArthur, President Roosevelt, Admiral William Leahy, and (standing, with pointer) Admiral Chester Nimitz, at 1944 meeting in Hawaii):

Q: What was the impact of the U.S. Navy attacks on Japanese strongholds?

A: Less than two months after the operation began, the U.S. War Department ⎼ able to intercept top-secret Japanese communications ⎼ saw this August 7, 1944 message from Japanese Foreign Minister Mamoru Shigemitsu to the Japanese Ambassador in Moscow, Naotake Sato: “In the Pacific, the American offensive is becoming violent. The enemy has already broken into our territorial waters and by means of absolute superiority on the sea and in the air is steadily drawing nearer to our homeland itself with the intention of severing our sea communications and destroying our shore installations. This situation will become increasingly serious as German’s military strength diminishes.”

Q: By the way, when does Harry Truman show up in the story about the making of the bomb?

A: Good timing! About now. Truman vaults into history at the 1944 Democratic Convention, held in Chicago, during which a dying President was re-nominated. 

Q: A dying President? Was it clear in 1944 that Franklin Roosevelt was in poor health?

A: Yes, especially to people working in the White House and frequent visitors, like top figures in the Democratic Party. By 1943, the circles under Roosevelt’s eyes had grown darker, his hands shook, and he would nod off while reading mail or dictating a letter. In March 1944, when FDR was in bed with a 104-degree temperature, his daughter Anna insisted that her father be taken to Bethesda Naval Hospital. Undergoing a battery of tests, Roosevelt learned that he had high blood pressure, an enlarged heart, congestive heart failure, and a heart murmur.

Q: Given Roosevelt’s shaky health, was there heightened attention to the 1944 selection for Vice President?  

A: Yes. “As so many of the Democrats who converged on Chicago understood,” wrote Truman biographer David McCullough, “the task of choosing a Vice President had unique importance this time. The common, realistic, and not unspoken view was that they were there to pick not one, but two presidents.”

Q: Who was serving as FDR’s Vice President in 1944?

A: Henry Wallace. He asked Roosevelt to keep him on the ticket and the President told Wallace that he hoped the convention would end with “the same old team.”

Q: Were there other people who approached FDR about being named Vice President?

A: Yes. Jimmy Byrnes.

Q: Who was Jimmy Byrnes? What were his qualifications?

A: Byrnes had dazzled Roosevelt as a pivotal Senate whip during the passage of a bounty of New Deal legislation. As a thank you, Roosevelt appointed Byrnes to the Supreme Court in 1941. Following the Pearl Harbor attack, FDR asked him to leave that cushy lifetime gig and take charge of the Office of War Mobilization. Since the entire nation had mobilized for war, Byrnes was effectively running the domestic economy, earning the unofficial title, “Assistant President.” Having Byrnes mind the home front freed an increasingly overtaxed Roosevelt to manage Churchill and Stalin and, otherwise, win the war and save the world. Byrnes also knew where every penny was being spent in the making of the atomic bomb.

Q: Did Byrnes ask FDR for the VP job?

A: Yes. Days before the July 19, 1944 start of the convention, FDR told Byrnes that he was “the best qualified” and “sure to win.” Believing he had the President’s support, Byrnes conveyed that news to close associate Harry Truman, then a Missouri Senator. According to McCullough, Byrnes asked Truman “if he was serious when he told the newspapers he did not want the vice-presidential nomination.” Truman said yes, he was absolutely not a candidate. Byrnes followed by saying he had been given the “go-sign” by FDR, and asked if Truman would make the nominating speech for him at the convention. Truman agreed. (Below, a Truman longhand note referencing call from Byrnes):

Q: Why did Byrnes ask Truman?

A: There was a real personal tie. When Truman first gained national office, in 1934, he’d won a Senate seat as a failed haberdasher whose subsequent success in politics was tarred by his attachment to Missouri’s corrupt Pendergast machine. Byrnes, at the time a Senate chieftain — South Carolina voters had first sent him to Congress in 1911 — acted as one of Truman’s mentors and, in 1940, funneled much-needed money to his mentee’s re-election campaign, a close contest because Truman was battling guilt by association. His shady political godfather, Tom Pendergast, had finally faced consequences, sent to jail for tax fraud.

Q: Was Roosevelt less than honest with Wallace and Byrnes?  

A: Yes. Both Wallace and Byrnes would learn soon enough that Roosevelt had completely outsourced their fates to unelected and largely unseen powerbrokers. The bosses had convinced FDR to jettison Vice President Wallace because his loudly progressive politics made him vulnerable to being tagged as a closet communist by the Republicans. Byrnes may indeed have been the most qualified, but he was also an anti-labor segregationist from the Deep South, which was fine for the South Carolina voters that had kept him in Congress for 30 years, but much less appealing to union workers and black voters in Northern cities.

Q: What made Truman the “better” choice?

A: Cynical politics. “Roosevelt,” as Gar Alperovitz wrote, “selected Truman as a middle-of-the-road candidate whose state (and views) fell roughly between the liberal Wallace wing of the party and the Southern conservatives who felt more comfortable with Byrnes.”

Q: When did Truman find out the President had been “less than honest” with Byrnes?

A: When Truman was at the convention in Chicago, there were feelers about his interest in being Vice President. He played Hamlet. The feelers became an offer when Truman was summoned to a hotel room full of party bosses.

Q: What happened in the hotel room?

A: At the time, Roosevelt was on his way to Hawaii to meet with the top Pacific generals (as pictured above). Bob Hannegan, a St. Louis power broker and top Truman supporter, called FDR — then in San Diego. Roosevelt’s voice was so loud, Truman was able to hear both sides of the conversation. “Have you got that fellow lined up yet?” Roosevelt asked. “No,” said Hannegan, “he is the contrariest goddamn mule from Missouri I have ever dealt with.” Roosevelt replied, “Well, you tell the Senator that if he wants to break up the Democratic Party in the middle of a war, that’s his responsibility.” For maximum effect, FDR ended the call by banging down the phone.

Q: Did Byrnes have any hard feelings about Truman being chosen over him?

A: Yes. Robert Nixon, a White House correspondent for the International News, said Byrnes “in a sense, despised Truman … He looked upon Truman as an accident of history and not a very good accident at that.”

[NOTE TO READER: In part 14, the author will begin to explain how the choice of Harry Truman as Vice President put the U.S. on the fast track to using the atomic bomb in World War II.]