In the photocopies I sent out recently to friends and family members, page 614 from The Making
of the Atomic Bomb refers to
other events that occurred on April 12, 1945 besides the death of President
Roosevelt. The other events were a report from Germany by Allied intelligence
officers discussing the first physical evidence that German scientists had
failed to develop an atomic bomb, and in Tokyo--where it was Friday, April
13--the burning down due to Allied bombing of the scientific lab where some
infinitesimal progress had been made toward a Japanese atomic bomb. Therefore,
looking back in historical perspective, as of that date the United States had a
monopoly on the Bomb. At the same time, however, the person most likely to
wisely use that monopoly--Franklin Roosevelt--died. Also: Hitler's suicide was
announced by German radio on May 1. The Germans surrendered on May 7, and
within weeks of that date the fierce fighting on the various Pacific islands
near Japan was over. The war was then a waiting and bombing game (see below) as
the Allies prepared for the invasion of the Japanese home islands. (May 8, 1945
is the official date of the end of the war in Europe, or V-E Day.)
As
several people discuss in The Day
After Trinity, President Truman
merely went along with the program that was already in place for dropping the
bombs on Japan. Roosevelt might have done things differently, because as
Commander-in-Chief of the U.S. military he had full authority over the Manhattan
Project from the beginning. One thing he might have done differently: on the
day of the Trinity test, he might have announced to the world that the U.S. had
successfully exploded the first atomic bomb. Instead, the U.S. Army issued its
planned press release saying an ammo dump at Alamogordo had exploded. In the
name of secrecy, which was conventionally thought to equate to security, the
nuclear age began with a government lie. The main intention of the lie was to
keep a military secret during wartime, but the secret was to be given up as soon
as the bomb was used, so the main result of not publicizing the Trinity test
after it happened was to deprive the American people of having a voice in the
use of the bomb against Japan. A secondary result was that the Japanese were
not given a chance to surrender with knowledge of the Bomb before having it dropped on
them.
By July 1945, the time of the Trinity test, the only fighting
going on besides the isolated attacks from Japanese submarines was the unimpeded
American bombing of Japanese cities with hundreds of new B-29 'Superfortress'
planes. This bombing could hardly be called fighting since the Japanese air
force had already been almost entirely destroyed, partly by their own kamakazi
attacks on Allied ships. The large numbers of estimated lives saved by the use
of the atomic bomb are only the estimated casualties of the future invasion of
the Japanese homeland had the atomic bomb not been used. That presumes the
Japanese would not have surrendered otherwise, which is a rather big question
mark and is related to the Allied demand for "unconditional" surrender, which
meant to the Japanese they would have to give up their emperor, whom they
considered to have a divine right and responsibility for ruling Japan. After
the surrender and the American occupation of Japan, the emperor was left in
place anyway, so this very reason the Japanese fought so hard and refused the
unconditional surrender demand was in the end not turned into the reality they
had feared.
(The Japanese soldiers not only fought hard, they fought
without mercy. Here's a quote that was to accompany the Hiroshima/Nagasaki 50th
anniversary exhibit at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in 1995.
Because of complaints by the American Legion and the Air Force Association, the
controversial exhibit was dumbed down to make it a simple patriotic exhibit.
However, one of the things left out in the process was an accurate historical
rendering of Japanese wartime atrocities. This excerpt comes from one of the
original, cancelled exhibit labels: "In 1931 the Japanese Army occupied
Manchuria; six years later it invaded the rest of China. From 1937 to 1945, the
Japanese Empire was constantly at war. Japanese expansionism was marked by naked
aggression and extreme brutality. The slaughter of tens of thousands of Chinese
in Nanking in 1937 shocked the world. Atrocities by Japanese troops included
brutal mistreatment of civilians, forced laborers and prisoners of war, and
biological experiments on human victims." I got this excerpt from an article in
The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, May/June 1995, by Stanley Goldberg,
titled "Smithsonian suffers Legionaires'
disease.")
The
Russians were another issue. The USSR was our ally in WWII but was not allowed
any knowledge of the Manhattan Project. This was another secrecy issue that
eventually had to be dealt with, but the Russians knew about the Bomb anyway,
through espionage, so that part of the huge effort that equated secrecy with
security had already failed before the Trinity test. (And the U.S. was aware of
the espionage, but not the extent of it.) At the Potsdam conference near
Berlin, a few days after Trinity, Truman told Stalin about the successful test
of the Bomb, but Stalin was able to brush off the information as of no
significance because the Russians were already at work on a bomb of their own.
This was in effect the beginning of the Cold War. Announcing the Trinity test
to the world at this time would have upstaged Stalin's secret knowledge of the
Bomb, but instead Stalin was able to thumb his nose at Truman's uncharacteristic
meekness and weakness in sharing the secret with him. Well, perhaps casualness
is a better word than either meekness or weakness. Here's an excerpt from
The Making of the Atomic Bomb,
p. 690:
But in fact
Stalin already knew about the Trinity test. His agents in the United States had
reported it to him. It appears he was not immediately impressed. There is
gallows humor in Truman's elaborately offhand approach to the Soviet Premier at
the end of that day's plenary session at the Cecilienhof Palace, stripped and
shabby, where pale German mosquitoes homing through unscreened windows dined on
the sanguinary conquerors. Truman left behind his translator, rounded the
baize-covered conference table and sidled up to his Soviet counterpart, both men
dissimulating. "I casually mentioned to Stalin that we had a new weapon of
unusual destructive force. The Russian Premier showed no special interest. All
he said was that he was glad to hear it and hoped we would make 'good use of it
against the Japanese.'" "That," concludes Robert Oppenheimer dryly, knowing how
much at that moment the world lost, "was carrying casualness rather far."
Last but not least,
Los Alamos scientists, not the American public, later had to bear the
responsibility for the first use of the Bomb on a civilian population. Although
that made the scientists heros at the end of the war, it turned them into
villians for later generations. One of the scientists at the Trinity test,
Kenneth Bainbridge, got it right when he said to the others, "Now we're all sons
of bitches." Americans during WWII considered Hirohito, the Japanese emperor,
to be the embodiment of evil, something like Osama bin Laden is today, and had
they known about the Bomb, they--we--probably would have been happy to nuke the
Japanese, so the outcome would likely not have been different, but the
"physicists have known sin" legacy would likely not exist. And although the
American public would have been happy to nuke Hirohito, the hatred was not
reflected in military policy. While nearly all of Tokyo was reduced to rubble
by American bombing in early 1945, the emperor's palace was intentionally left
untouched. This was mainly a practical matter: We needed Hirohito to declare a
surrender, when that point eventually was reached.
In any case, terrorism is less of a national security threat than a public health threat, though it's potentially a very big public health threat. The most undesirable future is the use of many nuclear weapons in a short period of time, which only Russia, the U.S. and China can bring about, because of the existence of so many weapons in these particular nuclear arsenals. These arsenals are the biggest security threat in the world today.
To close this nuclear essay
I'll just mention one other historical April 12 event related to
The Day After Trinity.
Robert Oppenheimer's security
hearing in Washington D.C. began on April 12, 1954, exactly 50 years ago today.
Oppenheimer turned 50 ten days later, and you can be sure he didn't have a happy
50th birthday, sitting through a day of testimony. See below for an
excerpt from the April 22 session.
---DWT, April 12, 2004. Updated once (October 13, 2004). Oppenheimer was born April 22, 1904
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
| "In the Matter of J. Robert
Oppenheimer, Transcript of Hearing before Personnel Security Board, Washington
D.C., April 12, 1954 through May 6, 1954." The hearing took place at the Atomic Energy Commission,
Building T-3, Room 2022.
Usually 7 or 8 people were in the
room, including the Board, two lawyers for the AEC, and Oppenheimer and his two
or three lawyers. The
Personnel Security Board consisted of Gordon Gray, Ward T. Evans (a chemistry
professor) and Thomas A. Morgan. The following is an excerpt from testimony
given on April 22 by Norris Bradbury, a Navy physicist who worked on the
Manhattan Project during the war, and who became director of Los Alamos after
Oppenheimer resigned in October 1945. Like most of the witnesses, he testified
in favor of Oppenheimer, but the testimony got a little weirder than usual--the
hearing itself in retrospect was titanically weird--about 12 pages into the
transcript for April 22. The part that is not unusual for the hearing, and is
likely to again be a contentious issue in these times of the PATRIOT Act, is the
question of loyalty to one's country versus loyalty to
friends. ... Dr. EVANS. Do you think that scientific men as a rule are rather peculiar individuals? The WITNESS. When did I stop beating my wife? Mr. GRAY. Especially chemistry professors? Dr. EVANS. No, physics professors. The WITNESS. Scientists are human beings. I think as a class, because their basic task is concerned with the exploration of the facts of nature, understanding, this is a quality of mind philosophy--a scientist wants to know. He wants to know correctly and truthfully and precisely. By this token it seems to me he is more likely than not to be interested in a number of fields, but to be interested in them from the point of view of exploration. What is in them? What do they have to offer. What is their truth. ... Therefore I think you are likely to find among people who have imaginative minds in the scientific field, individuals who are also willing, eager, to look at a number of other fields with the same type of interest, willingness to examine, to be convinced and without a priori convictions as to rightness or wrongness, that this constant or that curve or this or that function is fatal. I think the same sort of willingness to explore other areas of human activity is probably characteristic. If this makes them peculiar, I think it is probably a desirable peculiarity. Dr. EVANS. You didn't do that, did you? The WITNESS. Well--- Dr. EVANS. You didn't investigate these subversive organizations, did you? The WITNESS. No. Perhaps my interest lay along other lines. I don't think one has to investigate all these political systems. Dr. EVANS. Do you go fishing and things like that? The WITNESS. Yes, I have done a number of things. Some people, and perhaps myself among them, I was an experimental physicist in those days, and I was very much preoccupied with my own investigations. Dr. EVANS. But that didn't make you peculiar, did it? The WITNESS. This I would have to leave to others to say. Dr. EVANS. Younger people sometimes make mistakes, don't they? The WITNESS. I think this is part of people's growing up. Dr. EVANS. We all do. ... Dr. EVANS. You spoke of loyalty. Would you put loyalty to your country above loyalty to your friends? The WITNESS. I would. Dr. EVANS. That is all I have. REDIRECT EXAMINATION By Mr. SILVERMAN: [one of Oppenheimer's lawyers] Q. Doctor, from your knowledge of Dr. Oppenheimer, today, do you think he would put loyalty to his country above loyalty to a friend? A. I believe he would. Mr. SILVERMAN. That is all. ... (This excerpt is from pages 491 and 492 of the 992-page transcript.) |
