Command and Control (7 page)

In theory, the X-unit and the exploding bridgewires would set off thirty-two explosive lenses at once, creating the perfect shock wave and imploding the plutonium core. In reality, these new inventions were unpredictable. Cracked insulation frequently caused the detonators to short-circuit. When that happened, they didn't work. And a week before the Trinity test, an X-unit fired prematurely during a lightning storm. It had been triggered by static electricity in the air. The misfire suggested that a nuclear weapon could be set off by a lightning bolt.

At eighteen past three in the afternoon on July 13, 1945, the plutonium core was delivered to a steel tower a couple of miles from the McDonald Ranch House. The tower rose about a hundred feet above the desert and resembled an oil rig with a small shed on top. The rest of the nuclear device sat inside a tent at the base of the tower, awaiting completion. At first, the
core wouldn't fit inside it. For a few minutes, nobody could understand why, and then the reason became clear. The plutonium was warm, but the housing that it was supposed to enter had been cooled by the shade of the tent. Once the housing warmed, the core easily slid in. At about four o'clock, a thunderstorm threatened, and the tent started to flap violently in the wind. The small group of scientists left the base of the tower and waited for half an hour at the ranch house until the storm passed. When they returned, Kistiakowsky supervised the placement of the last explosive lenses, and at dusk the device was bolted shut. The next morning, as it was slowly hoisted to the top of the tower, surplus Army mattresses were stacked to a height of fifteen feet directly beneath it, in case the cable broke.

The nuclear device was an assortment of spheres within spheres: first, an outer aluminum casing, then two layers of explosives, then a thin layer of boron and plastic to capture neutrons that might enter from outside the core, then more aluminum, then a tamper of uranium-238 to reflect neutrons that might escape from inside the core, then the ball of plutonium, and finally, at the very center, the golf ball–size neutron initiator—a mixture of beryllium and polonium that would flood the device with neutrons, like a nuclear fuse, when the shock wave from the lenses struck. Inside the metal shed atop the tower, the detonators were installed by hand, two for every explosive lens, linked to a pair of X-units. The device now looked like something concocted in a mad scientist's laboratory—a six-foot-tall aluminum globe with a pair of large boxes, the X-units, attached to it and thirty-two thick electrical cables leaving each box, winding around the sphere, and entering evenly spaced holes on its surface.

The Trinity test was scheduled for four in the morning on July 16, but forecasters predicted bad weather. Going ahead with the test could prove disastrous. In addition to the threat of lightning, high winds and rain could carry radioactive fallout as far as Amarillo, Texas, three hundred miles away. Postponing the test had other drawbacks: the device could be damaged by the rain, and President Harry S. Truman was in Potsdam, Germany, preparing to meet with Winston Churchill, the British prime minister, and Joseph Stalin, the general secretary of the Soviet Union's Communist Party. Nazi Germany had recently been defeated, and Truman was about to
demand an unconditional surrender from the Japanese. Having an atomic bomb would make it easier to issue that demand. General Groves argued that the test should go forward, as planned, and Oppenheimer agreed. Both men became increasingly nervous, on the evening of the fifteenth, not only about the weather but also about the risk of sabotage. And so Donald
Hornig was instructed to “babysit the bomb.”

At 9:00
P.M
., Hornig climbed to the top of the hundred-foot tower as rain began to fall. He brought a collection of humorous essays,
Desert Island Decameron
. His reading was interrupted by the arrival of a violent electrical storm. Atop the tower in a flimsy metal shed, Hornig sat alone with the book, the fully armed device, a telephone, and a single lightbulb dangling from a wire. He was twenty-five years old and had recently earned a Ph.D. in chemistry at Harvard. Having designed the X-unit, he knew better than anyone how easily it could be triggered by static electricity. Whenever he saw a lightning bolt, he'd count the seconds—one–one thousand, two–one thousand, three–one thousand—until he heard the thunder. Some of the lightning felt awfully close. At midnight, the phone rang, and Hornig was told to come down. Hornig did so, gladly, in the pouring rain. He was the last person to see the device.

The test was pushed back to 5:30 in the morning, right before dawn. The rain ended, and the weather cleared. The radio frequency used to announce the final countdown was similar to that of a local station. Thanks to interference, at the moment of detonation, Tchaikovsky's
Serenade for Strings
cheerfully played in the control bunker. Kistiakowsky stepped out of the bunker to see the fireball and was knocked to the ground by the blast wave. He was about six miles from where the tower had just stood.
This is what the end of the world will look like, he thought—this is the last thing the last man will see. Victor Weisskopf saw the flash and felt heat on his face from a distance of ten miles. His heart sank.
For a moment, he thought that his calculations were wrong and the atmosphere was on fire. “
The hills were bathed in brilliant light,” Otto Frisch, a British physicist, observed, “as if somebody had turned the sun on with a switch.” General Farrell expressed the mixture of fear, awe, pride, and an underlying attraction that this new power inspired:

The whole country was lighted by a searing light with the intensity many times that of the midday sun. It was golden, purple, violet, gray, and blue. It lighted every peak, crevasse and ridge of the nearby mountain range with a clarity and beauty that cannot be described. . . . It was that beauty the great poets dream about but describe most poorly and inadequately. Thirty seconds after, the explosion came first, the air blast pressing hard against the people and things, to be followed almost immediately by the strong, sustained, awesome roar which warned of doomsday and made us feel that we puny things were blasphemous to dare tamper with the forces heretofore reserved to The Almighty.

Kenneth Bainbridge, the supervisor of the test, turned to Oppenheimer and said, “
Now we are all sons of bitches.” Within minutes the mushroom cloud reached eight miles into the sky.

•   •   •

T
HE
ATOMIC
BOMB
was no longer the stuff of science fiction, and the question now was what to do with it. On September 1, 1939, President Franklin D. Roosevelt had issued a statement condemning
the “inhuman barbarism” of aerial attacks on civilian populations. Nazi Germany had invaded Poland that day, and the Second World War had begun. Aerial bombardment promised to make the trench warfare of the previous world war—long a symbol of cruel, pointless slaughter—seem almost civilized and quaint. In April 1937 the German air force, the Luftwaffe, had
attacked the Spanish city of Guernica, killing a few hundred civilians. Eight months later, the Japanese had
bombed and invaded the Chinese city of Nanking, killing many thousands. An era of “total war” had dawned, and traditional rules of warfare seemed irrelevant. President Roosevelt appealed to the European powers for restraint. “
The ruthless bombing from the air of civilians in unfortified centers of population,” he said, “has profoundly shocked the conscience of humanity.”

Roosevelt's appeal for decency and morality had no effect. The city of Warsaw was soon destroyed by German aircraft and artillery, then London was attacked from the air. The British retaliated by bombing Berlin. New
theories of airpower were applied on an unprecedented scale. Unlike “tactical” strikes aimed at an enemy's military forces, “strategic” bombing focused on transportation systems and factories, the economic infrastructure necessary for waging war. Strategic assets were usually found in the heart of cities.

At first, the British refrained from deliberate attacks on German civilians. The policy of the Royal Air Force (RAF) changed, however, in the fall of 1941. The Luftwaffe had attacked the English cathedral town of Coventry, and most of the RAF bombs aimed at Germany's industrial facilities were missing by a wide mark. The RAF's new target would be something more intangible than rail yards or munitions plants: the morale of the German people. Bombarding residential neighborhoods, it was hoped, would diminish the will to fight. “
The immediate aim is, therefore, twofold,” an RAF memo explained, “namely, to produce (i) destruction, and (ii) the fear of death.” The RAF Bomber Command, under the direction of Air Marshal Arthur “Bomber” Harris, unleashed a series of devastating nighttime raids on German cities. During Operation Gomorrah in July 1943, RAF bombs started a fire in Hamburg with hurricane-force winds.
The first “firestorm” ever ignited by aerial bombardment, it
killed about forty thousand civilians.

American bombers participated in Operation Gomorrah and the subsequent RAF
attack on Dresden, where perhaps twenty thousand civilians died. But the United States Army Air Forces (USAAF) opposed the British policy of targeting residential areas, known as “
de-housing.” Instead of the RAF's nighttime “area” bombing, the strategic doctrine of the USAAF called for
daytime “precision” bombing. Relying on
the Norden bombsight—a device that combined a telescope, a mechanical computer, and an autopilot—the USAAF tried to destroy German factories, ports, military bases, and lines of communication. Precision bombing was rarely precise, and the vast majority of bombs still missed their targets. Nevertheless, American aircrews risked their lives conducting raids in broad daylight to avoid killing German civilians.

In the Pacific War a different set of rules applied. The Japanese were considered racially inferior, often depicted as monkeys or vermin in
American propaganda. The Japanese had attacked the United States without warning. They had treated Allied prisoners of war with brutality, employed slave labor, and launched suicide attacks instead of surrendering. They had
forced as many as two hundred thousand Korean women to serve as prostitutes in military brothels. They had
killed almost one million Chinese civilians with chemical and biological weapons. They had
killed millions of other civilians in China, Burma, Korea, Singapore, Malaysia, Cambodia, Vietnam, and the Philippines, war crimes driven by the Japanese belief in their own racial superiority.

At first, the United States conducted only precision bombing raids on Japan. But heavy cloud cover and high-altitude winds made it difficult to hit industrial targets. On the night of March 9, 1945,
the Army Air Forces tried a new approach. American planes
struck Tokyo with two thousand tons of bombs containing napalm and jellied gasoline. Although a major industrial area was destroyed, the real targets were block after block of Japanese buildings made of wood, paper, and bamboo. Within hours the firestorm consumed one quarter of the city. It
killed about one hundred thousand civilians, and
left about a million homeless. This was truly, in the words of historian John W. Dower, “
war without mercy.”

The firebombing of Tokyo wasn't condemned by President Roosevelt. On the contrary, it was soon followed by the firebombing of Nagoya, Osaka, Kobe, Kawasaki, and Yokohama. By the middle of June, the United States had laid waste to Japan's six leading industrial cities. Then American planes launched incendiary attacks on dozens of smaller cities. The level of destruction varied considerably.
About one quarter of Osaka was destroyed by fire, one third of Kawasaki, more than half of Kobe. Toyama, a city on the Sea of Japan with chemical plants and a population of about 125,000, was hit the hardest. After a nighttime raid by B-29 bombers,
the proportion of Toyama still standing was an estimated 0.5 percent.

As Japanese cities vanished in flames, Leó Szilárd began to have doubts about the atomic bomb. He had been the first to push hard for its development in the United States, but he now opposed its use against Japanese civilians. In June 1945, Szilárd and a group of scientists at the University of Chicago sent a report to the leadership of the Manhattan Project, asking
that the power of nuclear weapons be demonstrated to the world at “
an appropriately selected uninhabited area.” A nuclear attack upon Japan, they contended, would harm the reputation of the United States, make it difficult to secure international control of “
this new means of indiscriminate destruction,” and start a dangerous arms race. But the die had been cast. A committee of presidential advisers had already decided that a public demonstration of an atomic bomb was too risky, because the weapon might not work; that Japan should not be given any warning of a nuclear attack, for much the same reason; that the bomb should be aimed at a war plant surrounded by workers' housing; and that the goal of the bombing would be “
to make a profound psychological impression” on as many workers as possible.

The ideal target of the atomic bomb would be a large city that had not yet been firebombed, so the effects of the new weapon could be reliably assessed. The first four choices of the president's Target Committee were Kyoto, Hiroshima, Yokohama, and Kokura. Secretary of War Henry Stimson insisted that Kyoto be removed from the list, arguing that the city had played too central a role in Japanese art, history, and culture to be wiped out. Nagasaki took its place. The day after the Trinity test, Szilárd and more than sixty-eight other Manhattan Project scientists signed a petition, addressed to the president. It warned that using the atomic bomb against Japan would open the door “to
an era of devastation on an unimaginable scale” and place American cities in “
continuous danger of sudden annihilation.” The petition never reached the president. And even if it had, it probably wouldn't have changed his mind.

Franklin Roosevelt had never told his vice president, Harry Truman, about the Manhattan Project or the unusual weapon that it was developing. When Roosevelt died unexpectedly, on April 12, 1945, Truman had the thankless task of replacing a beloved and charismatic leader during wartime. The new president was unlikely to reverse a nuclear policy set in motion years earlier, at enormous expense, because a group of relatively unknown scientists now considered it a bad idea.
Truman's decision to use the atomic bomb was influenced by many factors, and the desire to save American lives ranked near the top. An invasion of Japan was scheduled for
November 1. Former President Herbert Hoover warned Truman that such an invasion would cost
between “500,000 and 1,000,000 American lives.” At the War Department, it was widely assumed that
American casualties would reach half a million. During the recent battle of Okinawa,
more than one third of the American landing force had been killed or wounded—and a full-scale invasion of Japan
might require 1.8 million American troops. While meeting with the Joint Chiefs of Staff in June 1945, Truman expressed the hope of avoiding “
an Okinawa from one end of Japan to the other.”