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 19 of 12, or more!)

[AUTHOR’S NOTE: Chapter 18 was devoted to how U.S. leadership managed to fool itself about the atom bomb. Both Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman decided to keep the Manhattan Project a secret from Joseph Stalin because of a potential short-term benefit. That is, they thought a U.S. atomic monopoly could be used to threaten Stalin and contain his imperial ambitions. However, Stalin’s spies had stolen the secrets of the Manhattan Project. This meant that the Soviet dictator a) knew about the bomb and b) knew that Roosevelt and Truman were never planning to share the weapon with him. This set the stage for a nuclear arms race — a scenario Roosevelt and Truman were warned about, respectively, by Niels Bohr and Leó Szilárd, two brilliant and prescient scientists. As for Szilárd, he refused to be discouraged.]

Q: In Part I7 of the series, you wrote how Szilárd had failed to convince “co-President” Jimmy Byrnes that it was a bad idea to keep the bomb a secret and that it was also immoral to use it on civilians. What more could he really do?

A: In March 1945, Szilárd had tried and failed to speak with Roosevelt, who died before they could meet. That was his first attempt to stop the bomb — or at least stop the rush to drop it. In May 1945, he had tried and failed to speak with Truman, instead being sent to the new President’s surrogate, Jimmy Byrnes, who ignored Szilárd’s advice. That was his second attempt. But the truly irrepressible Hungarian-born scientist made two more efforts to slow the bomb’s use — and also to force deeper thinking about a future with a revolutionary weapon capable of almost instantly ending life on the planet.

Q: What was the third attempt?

A: In early June 1945, Szilárd acted as the driving force behind a committee chaired by fellow Met Lab colleague James Franck, a Nobel laureate and yet another genius Jewish scientist forced out of Germany by Hitler. Like Szilárd, Franck believed scientists bore a moral responsibility for their inventions. On April 21, 1945, he made a personal appeal to former Vice President Henry Wallace: “They [the scientists] cannot help but worry about the fact that mankind has learned to unleash atomic power without being ethically and politically prepared to use it wisely." In a June 5, 1945 memo, Franck wrote, “This explosive was not developed in time to be used against Germany. It will probably not be needed to win the war with Japan.” As Frank von Hippel wrote, “[Franck] may have been sensitized to the ethical and political issues involved in the nuclear weapons project by his participation three decades earlier in Germany’s World War I chemical weapons program.” (Franck is below):

Q: What was the recommendation of the Franck Committee?

A: The seven signees — Franck, Szilárd and five other Met Lab scientists — argued for a warning about the bomb, or a demonstration detonation on an uninhabited area. There was also a line in the report censored by the U.S. government. It read, “We fear [that the bomb’s] early unannounced use might cause other nations to regard us as a nascent Germany.” In 2014, nuclear expert Alex Wellerstein was able to read the blacked-out line after obtaining an original copy of the Franck report from the National Archives. “It is pretty interesting that this sentence was removed,” Wellerstein wrote, “as it had zero security relevance whatsoever in the postwar.” (Below, the censored sentence):

Q: What was the reaction to the report?

A: Secretary of War Henry Stimson took it seriously enough to ask the bomb’s new Scientific Panel what they thought of a warning or demonstration. (The Panel members were Arthur Compton, Enrico Fermi, Ernest Lawrence and Robert Oppenheimer — none possessing Szilárd’s audacity or his innate suspicion of authority.) Responding on June 16, 1945, Oppenheimer wrote on behalf of the panel, “We can propose no technical demonstration likely to bring an end to the war; we see no acceptable alternative to direct military use.”

Q: Was Truman made aware about the idea of staging a demonstration of the bomb?

A: No.

Q: Were the four scientists of the Oppenheimer panel the best experts to evaluate this question?

A: Wellerstein doesn’t think so. “No offense,” Wellerstein wrote, “they were smart guys, but they [were] not experts in psychological warfare, Japanese political thought, much less privy to intercepted intelligence about what the Japanese high command was thinking at this time. That four physicists saw no ‘acceptable alternative’ could just be reflective of their own narrowness, and their opinion sought in part just to have it on the record that while some scientists on the project were uncomfortable with the idea of a no-warning first use, others at the top were accepting of it.”

Q: What was Szilárd’s fourth attempt to stop the bomb?

A: On July 1, 1945, he began circulating a petition addressed to President Truman.

Q: What did it say?

A: It included this paragraph: “… a nation which sets the precedent of using these newly liberated forces of nature for purposes of destruction may have to bear the responsibility of opening the door to an era of devastation on an unimaginable scale.” The petition concluded by asking Truman “to rule that the United States shall not resort to the use of atomic bombs in this war unless the [surrender] terms which will be imposed on Japan have been made public in detail and Japan knowing these terms has refused to surrender.” Szilárd’s petition also inspired scientists at the Oak Ridge uranium enrichment site to create their own version, which recommended to Truman that the weapon’s powers “should be adequately described and demonstrated, and the Japanese nation should be given the opportunity to consider the consequences of further refusal to surrender.” (The Oak Ridge petition is below):

Q: How many people signed the petitions?

A: There were three versions, signed by more than 150 scientists attached to the Manhattan Project. Seventy scientists signed Szilárd’s version of the petition, ultimately dated July 17, 1945. Sixty-seven signed the Oak Ridge version.

Q: What was Oppenheimer’s view of the petition?

A: He did not sign the petition nor did he have any interest in distributing it at Los Alamos. “Oppenheimer,” wrote William Lanouette, “criticized the Chicago scientists in general and Szilárd by name … Scientists had no right to use their prestige to influence political decisions, Oppenheimer complained.”

Q: Did Truman ever see the petition?

A: No. “Szilárd was pressured by colleagues to transmit the petition sheets to the President through official channels,” wrote Manhattan Project scientist Howard Gest, one of the 1945 petitioners. “[Szilárd] reluctantly agreed, and gave them to [Arthur] Compton on July 19, 1945 for delivery to Washington. General Groves, however, devised a circuitous route for the package, namely, Compton to Colonel (later General) Nichols, Nichols to Groves, Groves to [Secretary of War Henry] Stimson. Thus, it arrived in Stimson’s office on August 1, [1945], while Stimson and Truman were still in Europe. Stimson’s assistant, George Harrison, simply put it into the secret file.”

Q: When was the first atom bomb dropped?

A: August 6, 1945, on Hiroshima. But, by August 1, 1945, the dropping of the bomb was already a fait accompli.

Q: When did Truman give the order to drop the bomb on Japan?

A: July 25, 1945.

Q: When did the public learn about the Szilárd petitions?

A: Though the petitions contained no secret information, they were not declassified until 1957. For that matter, classifying anything and everything associated with the bomb quickly became routine. It was considered unpatriotic to expose any serious complications from its use and the death of transparency was a component of the dawn of the nuclear age. The first big atomic cover-up occurred after the “Trinity” test, the first-ever detonation of a nuclear device, on July 16, 1945, at the Alamogordo Bombing Range in the Jornada del Muerto desert, near Socorro, New Mexico. The bang was big, 18.6 kilotons, but it also produced an unanticipated level of radioactive fallout — a fact the U.S. government immediately suppressed.

Q: What information about fallout was covered up?

A: The Manhattan Project scientists had assumed radiation would diminish to harmless levels three miles from the Trinity test site. This notion immediately proved to be very wrong when a paralyzed mule was discovered 25 miles from ground zero. The Pentagon’s censorship office also deleted the majority of a Philadelphia Bulletin article which had revealed that radioactivity from the July 16 test had spread to surrounding towns. “Immediately following the Trinity tests,” wrote Matt Blitz in Popular Mechanics, “the Manhattan Project's chief of radiological safety, Stafford Warren, warned that the tests needed to be conducted at least 150 miles from civilian populations.”

Q: In 1945, how many people in New Mexico were less than 150 miles from the Trinity test?

A: A recent New York Times story, by Lesley M.M. Blume, noted that “census data from 1940 shows that as many as 500,000 people were living within a 150-mile radius of the test site. Some families lived as close as 12 miles away … Yet no civilians were warned about the test ahead of time, and they weren't evacuated before or after the test.” Kodak also discovered that some its film had been destroyed by the bomb’s fallout.

Q:  How was it possible for the blast to affect Kodak film?

A: “The irradiated mushroom cloud also went many times higher into the atmosphere than expected,” Blume wrote in the same Times story, “some 50,000 to 70,000 feet.” At a Kodak paper mill in Tama, Iowa, located on the Iowa River, a production run of strawboard was contaminated by the radioactive fallout from the New Mexico test. The strawboard was being inserted into packaging as a stiffener between sheets of film. The contaminated strawboard fogged the film. The same thing occurred at a mill in Indiana, on the Wabash River. A Kodak physicist, Julian Webb, identified the substance as Cerium-141, one of the more prolific of the fission products from the Trinity device. The radioactive material had been carried north by the wind, and was deposited by rain in the river water next to the paper plants.

Q: Did Webb ever go public with this finding?

A: Yes, but not until 1949, and he did so in an article for an academic organization, the American Physical Society.

Q: How extensive was the radioactive fallout from the Trinity test?

A: Within 10 days of detonation, it had reached 46 states, Canada and Mexico. Two months after the Trinity test, on September 11, 1945, General Groves invited the press to visit “ground zero” at Alamogordo. He wanted to challenge the first reports about the danger of radioactive fallout. One scientist told Groves that journalists should stand at least 100 feet from where the bomb was detonated. Reporters were given “white booties” to protect them from radiation. (Below, Oppenheimer and Groves at ground zero, wearing booties, on September 11, 1945):

Q: Where was President Truman when he heard about the “success” of the July 16, 1945 Trinity test?

A: He had just arrived at the Potsdam Conference, the last of the “Big Three” meetings between the Allied leaders of the U.S., Britain and the Soviet Union.

Q: Where is Potsdam?

A: It’s 16 miles southwest of Berlin’s city center. Stalin arrived at the conference a day later, on July 17, 1945. While waiting for the Soviet dictator to show up, Truman toured Berlin — this was a little more than two months after the Nazis had surrendered, on May 7, 1945. In a letter to wife Bess, the U.S. President wrote about the total devastation: “This is a hell of a place — ruined, dirty, smelly, forlorn people, bedraggled hangdog look about them. You never saw as completely ruined a city.”

Q: What did Truman and Stalin hope to accomplish at Potsdam?

A: “Stalin came to Potsdam assuming that the United States still needed the Soviet entry into the war,” wrote Soviet historian Tsuyoshi Hasegawa, the author of Racing The Enemy: Stalin. Truman and the Surrender of Japan.

Q: Did Stalin want something in return for joining the fight against Japan?

A: Yes. In return, Stalin wanted the Potsdam Conference to conclude with at least these two results. 1) The inclusion of the Soviets in a joint ultimatum to Japan. This would have the effect of letting the Japanese know that, after months of asking the Soviets to mediate a surrender with the U.S., they suddenly faced a lying, nasty new enemy to deal with. More specifically, Stalin wanted the Japanese to realize that a) he had indeed been bullshitting the whole time about being a peacemaker and b) was officially exiting the neutrality pact with Japan and c) would be demanding spoils from any settlement of the war in the Pacific.

Q: What was the second result Stalin was seeking?

A: 2) Stalin also wanted Truman to pressure the Chinese into accepting the Yalta provisions, which, among a number of items, called for China to permit the restoration of territorial rights in the Far East that Russia had lost in the 1904-5 Russo-Japanese War — which meant the Chinese ceding to Stalin real estate that included Port Arthur, on the Korean Peninsula, and large islands north of Japan, Sakhalin and the Kuriles. At Yalta, Stalin had also won agreement to establish an “independent” Mongolia — which was historically controlled by China. But, as with Stalin’s vague and false commitment to Polish autonomy at Yalta, calling for Mongolian “independence” was a cover for establishing another satellite under Moscow’s thumb.

Q: Can we do a quick summary of Stalin’s to-do list at Potsdam?

A: As Hasegawa wrote, “Stalin assumed Truman was as eager as Roosevelt to invite the Soviets to join the war,” and therefore he expected the U.S. President, as a quid pro quo, to officially bring the Soviets into the war against Japan and also convince the Chinese to officially acquiesce on territorial issues. However, as readers of this series know, Truman didn’t want to help with either “obstacle.” Or, as Hasegawa put it, Truman viewed Stalin’s endgame aims as two “irreconcilable dilemmas.”

Q: A reminder: Why where these irreconcilable dilemmas?

A: “The first [dilemma] was how to deal with the Soviets,” Hasegawa wrote. “Truman and his new secretary of State, James Byrnes, [worried] about the implications of the Soviet entry into the war against Japan, which would inevitably expand Soviet influence in Asia. If he could avoid it, Truman would prefer to end the war before the Soviets entered it. Nevertheless, his military advisers argued that even if Soviet participation in the war was no longer necessary to win the war, it would still hasten Japan’s surrender, thereby saving American lives. Truman faced another dilemma over unconditional surrender. Not only was unconditional surrender Roosevelt’s legacy, but this demand was supported by the overwhelming majority of the American people. Truman felt that it was necessary to avenge the humiliation suffered by Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor by bringing Japan to its knees by imposing unconditional surrender.”

Q: How did Truman resolve these irreconcilable dilemmas?

A: Truman didn’t — at least not while he was in Potsdam.

Q: Why didn’t he?

A: As Truman and Byrnes had hoped, the bomb had become a reality just as the Conference opened and they believed the wonder weapon could, in theory, be the answer to their dreams. “General Leslie Groves’ detailed report of the atomic bomb test in Alamogordo reached Truman on July 21, 1945,” Hasegawa wrote. “This was the ‘dynamite’ Truman had eagerly been waiting for. With the atomic bomb, he was confident that the United States could unilaterally force Japan to surrender without the Soviet Union. It became important, therefore, to exclude Stalin from the joint ultimatum to Japan. The atomic bomb also made it possible, he believed, to dictate unconditional surrender to Japan.”

Q: At Potsdam, did the U.S. press the Chinese to complete an agreement with the Soviets on control of Far East territories— as Stalin had requested?

A: No. The U.S. did the opposite. On July 23, 1945, Truman cabled Chinese leader Chiang Kai-Shek to delay any deal with Stalin. Or, as Byrnes would later explain, the Chinese were encouraged “to continue negotiations after the adjournment of the Potsdam Conference.” Byrnes added, “I had some fear that if they did not, Stalin might immediately enter the war.” (Below, Jimmy Byrnes, on the left, and President Truman, traveling to the Potsdam Conference in July 1945):

Q: As we know from this series, Niels Bohr and Leó Szilárd were leading an effort among Manhattan Project scientists to goad U.S. leadership into taking certain steps before the use of the bomb, such as informing Stalin about it and talking in depth about nuclear arms control with the Soviets and the rest of the world. Did Truman ever inform Stalin about the Manhattan Project?

A: Yes, but not in any depth. On July 24, 1945, during a recess at the Potsdam Conference, Truman nonchalantly approached Stalin and told him “we have a new weapon of unusual destructive force.” Stalin replied that he was glad to hear it and hoped the United States made good use of it against the Japanese. Afterward, Truman suspected Stalin did not understand the significance of what he’d been told. But Stalin did, from years of successful espionage (as repeatedly noted in this series). Later, Robert Oppenheimer would say of Truman’s exchange with Stalin: “That was carrying casualness rather far.” The Los Alamos Lab director also made another cogent comment. When nuclear arms control discussions between the U.S. and Soviet Union were finally starting, in 1965, Oppenheimer was asked for his reaction. “It’s twenty years too late,” he said. “It should have been done after Trinity.”

Q: What was Stalin’s “private” reaction to Truman revealing the U.S. had an atom bomb?

A: Reportedly, Stalin told diplomat Andrei Gromyko that he believed the U.S. was going to use its atomic monopoly to restrain Soviet actions in post-war Europe. “Well, that’s not going to happen,” he stated, and cursed “in ripe language.” Stalin also vowed to speed up Soviet production of the bomb.

Q: Did Truman tell Stalin that the U.S. was not going to include the Soviets in the Potsdam joint declaration?

A: No. Wrote Hasegawa, “Truman and Byrnes had been engaged in revising the draft proclamation they had received from [Secretary of War Henry] Stimson on July 2, 1945, and in this revision they had been consulting with the British in strict secrecy behind the backs of the Soviet delegation. They deleted the passage that Stimson had recommended in his original draft that would have allowed the possibility of Japan’s retaining the monarchical system under the present dynasty. Truman and Byrnes also crossed out all references to the Soviet participation in the war that had been included in Stimson’s original draft.” The finished product, signed by China, Great Britain and the United States, demanded unconditional surrender of all Japanese forces and warned that the alternative was prompt and utter destruction. In his diary, Truman would write: “I was not willing to let Russia reap the fruits of a long and bitter and gallant effort in which she had no part.”

Q: When did Stalin learn that the Soviets had not been included?

A: At the same time as the rest of the world. More from Hasegawa: “At 7 p.m. Potsdam time on July 26, 1945 the Potsdam Proclamation was given to the press to be released. At 4 p.m. Washington time, American West-Coast shortwave radio stations began transmitting the text to Japan. After the press release, Byrnes sent a copy of the ultimatum to [Minister of Foreign Affairs Vyacheslav] Molotov as a ‘diplomatic courtesy.’ Caught by surprise, Molotov immediately asked Byrnes to postpone the announcement for two or three days, but Byrnes told Molotov that it was too late, since the proclamation had already been handed to the press.”

Q: What was the Japanese reaction to the Potsdam Proclamation (or Declaration) calling for an unconditional surrender?

A: “By the summer of 1945, a substantial number of the Japanese high command, including the Emperor, were looking for a diplomatic way out of the war,” Alex Wellerstein wrote. “Their problem was that the Allies had, with the Potsdam Declaration, continued to demand ‘unconditional surrender,’ and emphasized the need to remove ‘obstacles’ preventing the ‘democratic tendencies’ of the Japanese people. What did this mean, for the postwar Japanese government? To many in the high command, this sounded a lot like getting rid of the Imperial system, and the Emperor, altogether, possibly prosecuting him as a ‘war criminal.’ For the Japanese leaders, one could no more get rid of the Emperor system and still be ‘Japan’ than one could get rid of the U.S. Constitution and still be ‘the United States of America.’”

Q: When did the Potsdam Conference conclude?

A: On August 2, 1945. Truman would sail back to Washington on a U.S. Navy cruiser, the U.S.S. Augusta. Stalin — who had a fear of flying — traveled back to Moscow on luxury train cars once used by the Tsar. The Potsdam Conference was the first time Truman and Stalin had met face to face. It was also the last time this would occur — even though both men remained in power nearly eight more years. Truman would remain President until January 20, 1953, and Stalin was the Soviet leader until his death, on March 5, 1953. No serious effort was made by either man to limit the production of nuclear weapons. In fact, both were responsible for making an exponentially bigger weapon — the hydrogen bomb.

Q: When was the first hydrogen bomb detonated?

A: It took place near the end of Truman’s second term, on November 1, 1952, using Eniwetok Atoll in the Pacific Marshall Islands. After forcing residents to relocate, the atoll became the staging area for the “Ivy Mike” blast, which had a yield of between 10 and 15 megatons. This was approximately 700 times more powerful than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. Some of the Eniwetok residents were relocated to Rongelap Atoll, 100 miles from the detonation. But, like everyone else on Rongelap, the displaced Eniwetokians were nonetheless exposed to dangerous levels of radiation from the “Ivy Mike” H-bomb. (Clearly, the U.S. wasn’t bothering to adhere to the advisory, made after the widespread fallout from the 1945 Trinity test, of conducting atomic blasts at least 150 miles from a civilian population.)

Q: When did the Soviet Union first detonate a hydrogen bomb?

A: The Soviets began intense work on such a bomb in 1948, and detonated their first hydrogen device on August 12, 1953 — about five months after Stalin’s death.

[NOTE TO READER: On September 12. 1933, while walking in London, Leó Szilárd envisioned how a nuclear chain reaction could be used to annihilate an entire city. In 1939, after landing at Columbia University, Szilárd convinced the U.S. government to begin work on making possible that nightmare scenario because Hitler’s scientists were already doing so. After the defeat of the Nazis, Szilárd decided use of the bomb was morally unacceptable. He was hardly alone in this view, which was not only shared by some of America’s greatest scientists, but also by the majority of the country’s top generals. On August 6, 1945, the catastrophic annihilation Szilárd foresaw in London became a reality in Hiroshima. In the next and final chapter of this series, a few more surprises and scares as “Oppenheimer’s deadly toy” is unleashed on human beings.]