The Target Committee (Kindle Single) (2 page)

As one of Groves’ most trusted deputies and ablest engineers, Farrell was responsible for overseeing the delivery of the “vial of wrath” (as he would later describe the atomic bomb, in a postwar press release) to Japan. On the Target Committee and on Tinian Island, Farrell would serve as Groves’ deputy in all atomic matters, anointing himself, with characteristic humility, “General Grove’s handyman.”
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Groves

Although he did not attend their meetings, Major General Leslie Groves hovered over the Target Committee with a sort of godlike omnipotence. From his Manhattan redoubt and offices scattered through his empire, Groves saw and heard everything that went on, chiefly through Farrell.

If access to information is power, Groves was among the five most powerful people in America in May 1945. His security clearance scaled the heights of the military and political establishment. He knew the likely destiny of Japan – insofar as nuclear weapons might decide it – ahead of senior politicians and military commanders. The state department was unaware of the bomb until February that year, when Groves chose to let them in on the secret; General Douglas MacArthur was not officially informed until mid-1945; and fleet admirals Ernest King and Chester Nimitz, respectively commander-in-chief of the United States fleet and commander-in-chief of the Pacific fleet, were only told, on Groves’ recommendation, in early 1945.
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By then, Groves had been working on the bomb for three years. His power over the project was complete. Anyone who opposed his will found themselves mysteriously sidelined
or smoothly removed. Few questioned the project’s purpose; their very awareness of the bomb’s development implied their approval of its use. And Groves had powerful champions, chief among them the new president, Truman, and James Byrnes, who would be appointed secretary of state on July 3, 1945. In May 1945 these three men saw Japan as the immediate target, but Russia as America’s future enemy. “There was never . . . any illusion on my part but that Russia was our enemy, and the project was conducted on that basis,” Groves later wrote.
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Groves achieved a widespread reputation as a great brute of a man, tyrannical and unyielding, but his positive qualities are not as well recognized. Groves’ mastery of industrial engineering, his iron self-discipline and astonishing organizational skills qualified him as possibly the only man willing to attempt to build an atomic bomb in the time available. His working hours (around the clock), his dismissal of anyone not up to the job, and his pachydermatous indifference to criticism – often remarked on by his colleagues – further recommended him. His superiors wanted a man able to withstand the pressure of one of the most difficult jobs of the war effort.

To his detractors, Groves seemed ruthless, possibly cruel; to his admirers, such as his deputy Colonel Ken Nichols, he was “outstanding.” Nichols famously described his boss as “the biggest S.O.B. I have ever worked for,” going on to say:

He is most demanding. He is most critical. He is always a driver, never a praiser. He is abrasive and sarcastic. He disregards all normal organizational channels. He is extremely intelligent. He has the guts to make difficult, timely decisions. He is the most egotistical man I know . . . And in summary, if I had to do my part of the atomic bomb project over again and had the privilege of picking my boss I would pick General Groves.
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Groves was the third son of four children to an austere Presbyterian army chaplain, “for whom thrift was one of the godliest of virtues,”
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and a gentle, sickly woman worn down by the weight of constant travel and hard work. The family was always on the move, following Chaplain Groves’ service itinerary. Biblical remonstrations pursued the boy and Sunday Sabbaths were strictly observed.

Groves grew into a tall, athletic young man, not yet the obese figure of his middle years. As a student at Massachusetts Institute of Technology he kept his own counsel, self-absorbed and diligent. The premature death, from pneumonia, of his elder brother Allen, his parents’ favorite, stung young Leslie to action. Defying his father’s wishes, he enrolled in 1916 in the US Military Academy at West Point. His arrogance won him few friends there: He had inherited his father’s tight-fistedness and refused to pay for his laundry, earning him the nickname “Greasy,” an appellation that followed him through life. He graduated fourth in his class.

Lonely and unpopular, he rose through sheer grit and intelligence, not relying on the personal charm or good humor that smoothed the advancement of less talented men. As a young captain, he “gave the impression of a man of great latent power, who was biding his time,” observed his biographer Robert Norris.
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As a military engineer he took on huge projects that would have overwhelmed most men. After successfully overseeing the construction of the Pentagon, Groves was an obvious candidate to command the Manhattan Engineer District (MED), the official title of the atomic bomb project. Groves was reluctant at first to accept the job. He had not seen active service in the First World War and had hoped for a combat role this time – but he was open to persuasion. “If you do this job right, it will win the war,” Lieutenant General Brehon Somervell, commanding general of US Army Service Forces, had told him. If further
persuasion were needed, Major General Wilhelm Styer, a member of the Military Policy Committee that oversaw the development of atomic energy, reassured Groves that his appointment would transform the war effort.
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If his recruiters meant to fan his ego, they misunderstood the burly engineer. To a man of Groves’ self-worth and overweening ego, personal success was a given. “If I can’t do the job, no one man can,” he later confided in his memoirs.
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Yet despite this confidence in himself, Groves had hesitated before accepting the job, wanting assurances that the bomb
could
be built. At the time, the budget was a mere $85 million (it would balloon to more than $US2 billion – or about US$26 billion in 2014 figures); the science seemed vague and unformed; and his then rank of colonel did not exert the necessary authority. He need not have worried: The army met his needs immediately. He was promoted on the spot to brigadier general, and granted his other key demands – top-level security clearance, a virtually unlimited budget and total operational control. Groves accepted the job in August 1942.

One of his first priorities was to corner the supply of fissile material. Within his first year in the position, Groves sent this message to senior officials:

On May 11, 1943, the MED entered into a fixed-fee ($1.00) cost contract with Union Mines Dev Corp to determine the world resources of uranium and, to the extent possible, bring such resources under the control of the US Government.
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Groves thus commandeered the world’s available supplies of yellowcake.

The general’s secret empire grew rapidly between 1942 and 1944, to embrace city offices, university laboratories and secret factories on remote prairies, from Oklahoma to Manhattan. Weekly, Groves’ private train shot through the dark fields of the Midwest towards another trembling recipient of his wrath. His baleful stare and snap decisions left a trail of anxiety. His memos were brief and abrupt, regardless of the seniority of the recipient. He had no time for small talk or pleasantries. He never shouted or swore. He led by quiet intimidation; those who angered him received “the silent treatment.”
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He closed meetings when he decided they were finished, even meetings with superiors. At his first meeting with President Roosevelt, he impertinently announced that he had to leave early.

The Scientists

The rest of the committeemen who entered Oppenheimer’s office that day were chiefly civilian scientists, with the exceptions of Colonel Lyle Seeman, Groves’ liaison officer at Los Alamos; Dr. Joyce C. Stearns, a scientist representing the US Army Air Forces; and Major Jack Derry, who wrote the summary notes of each meeting.

To call the scientists “experts” would be grossly to underplay their reputations in their chosen fields. Consider a sample:

Charles Lauritsen was a Danish émigré who had pioneered the development of radiation therapy for cancer patients in the 1930s. In the 1940s he worked on rocket systems and was closely involved in the creation of “pumpkins,” the mock-atomic bombs that the 509th Composite Group would use for target practice in Wendover Field, Utah.

David Dennison was a molecular scientist who had studied under Niels Bohr and who, before the war, had solved critical problems in physics that led to the creation of the first molecular microwave spectrograph. During the war Dennison specialized in the development of the VT (“variable time”) proximity fuse, a critical discovery that enabled the detonation of an explosive device at a predetermined distance from its target.

The physicist William Penney led the small British team at Los Alamos, which included the spy Klaus Fuchs (who would pass on atomic secrets to the Soviet Union).
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Penney was
already regarded as one of the finest British mathematical physicists of the 20th century. He excelled in the mathematics of wave dynamics, chiefly in shock and gravitational waves. His special contributions to the atomic project were to model and predict the physical damage likely to be generated by the blast wave, and to calculate the height at which the bomb should be detonated to maximize its destructive power.

John von Neumann had already earned so many accolades that even his Los Alamos colleagues stood in awe of the great Hungarian-American mathematician. Prior to the war he had formulated a series of mathematical theorems (chiefly game and set theory), and published his masterpiece (one of his several),
Mathematical Formulation of Quantum Mechanics
. Von Neumann was intimately involved in the development of the atomic bomb, chiefly in mathematically modeling the explosion, assessing the likely death rate and solving the problem of how to detonate “Fat Man” – the weapon that would be tested in the New Mexico deserts in July and subsequently dropped on Nagasaki – by compressing its plutonium core. After the war, von Neumann became a founding father of the computer and, with Dr. Edward Teller, one of the leading scientific exponents of the hydrogen bomb.

The Target Committee Meets

The May 10 meeting was the Target Committee’s second. (There had been an agenda-setting discussion on April 27.) It was two days after Germany had surrendered. That did not mean, however, that Japanese cities automatically replaced German ones as targets for an atomic bomb. Japan had been the designated target for almost two years, since Churchill and Roosevelt signed the secret Hyde Park Agreement on September 18, 1944. It was Churchill who had named the target, noting that when the bomb was finally available, “it might perhaps, after mature consideration, be used against the Japanese.”
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Only Churchill and Roosevelt knew of this agreement; war secretary Henry Stimson and General George Marshall were not apprised of it until after the war. Yet the idea that Japan would be the target was uppermost in Groves’ and other senior officials’ minds towards the end of 1944, when the success of D-day and the Russian advance spelled Germany’s inevitable defeat.

For this reason, the committeemen were not expected to debate questions of “why” or “who” – those had been answered. Japan was the target. They were expected to draw up a list of the Japanese cities that best matched Groves’ criteria, and to decide how and when the chosen city or cities should be attacked. The critical questions related to the size and shape of the city, to what extent it had been preserved from conventional air raids (or firebombs), and whether it had any military installations. There were also technical details to be considered, such as the height of detonation and the risk of radiation to the delivery crews, but the key question was this: Which city would most effectively demonstrate the destructive power of an atomic bomb and shock Japan into submission?

Groves had been ruminating on the question since late 1944. At the April 27 meeting he had drawn up a short list. Major cities Tokyo and Yokohama were considered along with Yawata, in Fukuoka, Kyushu, but they were thought unsuitable – Tokyo was described as “all bombed and burned out” and “practically rubble, with only the palace grounds still standing.”
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Other cities seemed more promising. Hiroshima was “the largest untouched target,” having remained off the list of cities open to conventional attack drawn up by US Air Force General Curtis LeMay, who directed the strategic air raids over Japan. It also had special significance as the “jumping-off point” for many regiments leaving for the Pacific War, and earlier wars against China and Russia. “It should be given consideration,” the meeting concluded. The ancient Japanese capital Kyoto was also on the list. Groves regarded it as eminently suitable to show off the power of an atomic bomb: It was in pristine condition
and heavily populated.

In sum, the committee agreed, the ideal target city for an atomic bomb should:

                
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possess sentimental value to the Japanese so its destruction would “adversely affect” the will of the people to continue the war

                
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have some military significance – munitions factories, troop concentrations, etc.

                
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be mostly intact, to demonstrate the awesome destructive power of an atomic bomb

                
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be big enough for a weapon of the atomic bomb’s magnitude.
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Hiroshima and Kyoto met these specifications; however, the final decision would await the May 10 meeting.