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The Decision to Use the Bomb: A Consensus View?

Friday, March 8th, 2013

One of the great historical arguments of the late-20th century was whether the decision to use the atomic bomb was justified or not, and what the real goals of its use were. I’ve sometimes seen this dismissed by partisans (usually in favor of the use of the bomb) as being a recent sort of argument, only made by people who were well distanced from World War II, but this isn’t the case. People were arguing loudly about this almost immediately. The ambivalence about the use of the bomb was nearly immediate, and even the Japanese were aware of such discussions taking place in the United States a month later.

This was why, in 1947, Secretary of War Henry Stimson put his name on an article in Harpers that February 1947 titled “The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb” — it was meant to be the “official” response to the on-going debates and speculation. General Groves, of course, had a heavy role in the composition of the article, not only because he was the guy who had all of the documents at hand, but because it was his legacy on the line, too. In fact, Groves seems to have been fairly responsible for pushing Stimson to publishing something on the subject, even offering up multiple pre-fab drafts drafts for Stimson in November 1946:1

Click the image for the full set of drafts.

Click the image for the full set of drafts.

Personally, I don’t wade into these questions much, professionally, or even here on the blog. They honestly don’t interest me very much. Maybe it’s a sign of how post-post-Cold War I am? I don’t know. To me it has always seemed like splitting very fine hairs, trying to make distinctions without much difference. In my mind, the atomic bombings were plainly not ethically very different than the previous firebombings of Japan or Germany. To argue about whether they were justified or not seems to me to be the wrong question — a question that misleads us into mistaking what the core issue was.

For me, the better question is, under what circumstances do we believe the use of weapons of mass destruction on civilians is justified?  That gets one into much more interesting ethical territory, in my opinion, than asking why the bombs were used, a question that seems to presume that the motivations are somehow the most important thing to ask about. It also keeps us from having the same old discussion that people have been having for nearly 70 years. Maybe it’s my post-postness talking, here, but whether people in the past had better or worse intentions before setting a hundred thousand people on fire seems like the least interesting historical question to pose in the face of such actions.

1945: Tokyo at left, Hiroshima at right. Is there a significant moral difference?

Ruins of 1945: Tokyo at left, Hiroshima at right.

Nevertheless, I do pay some attention to these arguments, mostly because I get asked about this sort of thing from time to time (one of the hazards of being an historian of such matters) and it helps to have a snappy answer or two. So I was really interested to hear, at a workshop in DC a few weeks ago convened by the Atomic Heritage Foundation (more on the workshop and its purpose in a later post), the retired NRC historian J. Samuel Walker give a brief talk on the current state of the historiography over the “decision to use the bomb.” Walker wrote an article on this subject in 1990, a book in 1997, and another historiographical review in 2005.

I hadn’t met Walker before this, but I’ve reviewed two of his books (one on Three Mile Island, another on US nuclear waste policy), and had appreciated and drawn upon his work as an historian. Walker is, as he put it, “a flaming moderate,” and it comes out in his work. Both of those books are great — for TMI, he has a nice balance of technical detail with political/bureaucratic considerations (and a great chapter on the long-term effects on the nuclear industry); for nuclear waste, he does a great job of being strictly factual while pointing out exactly where he saw the US government underestimating the problem and failing to appreciate how much they were losing public faith. As with all moderates, he runs the risk of disappointing partisans of all sides, but that’s the nature of it.

Portraits from Time magazine covers, 1945: Stalin, Truman, Hirohito.

Portraits from Time magazine covers, 1945: Stalin, Truman, Hirohito. Each kind of tacky in their own way, each kind of brilliant in their own way.

Walker mapped out two major poles on the “decision to use the bomb” question. (I should say up front that this is my synthesis of Walker’s synthesis, re-written from memory. So it’s possible I may be inadvertently mangling this a bit, though I don’t think I am. There are other sub-arguments to this debate, of course, but to me this boils it down to the really crucial bits nicely.) The first is the “traditional” argument, which roughly follows the position put forward by Stimson in 1947. At its core, it argues, in brief:

  • that Truman made a decision to use the bomb on the basis of ending the war quickly;
  • the as far as the US was concerned, Japan would not surrender on acceptable terms without either the bomb or invasion;
  • and that of those two options, the bomb was the option that would cost the least number of American and Japanese lives;
  • and, as the Japanese Emperor acknowledged in his surrender statement, the bomb did in fact end the war promptly.

This is, of course, the argument that most people are familiar with. The other pole, according to Walker, is what is often called the “revisionist” take, a term acknowledged as potentially disparaging, and is expressed most forcefully in the work of Gar Alperovitz. At its core, it argues, in brief:

  • that Japan was already defeated at the time the decision to use the bomb was made, and that US intelligence already knew this;
  • that Japan had been suing for peace and was ready to surrender without an invasion;
  • that the real reason the bomb was used was so to demonstrate its power to the Soviet Union, in an attempt to exert more influence on them in the postwar;
  • and that Japanese Emperor’s surrender statement invoked the bomb only as a politically-acceptable “excuse” for his people, when actually he surrendered primarily because of the Soviet invasion of Manchuria.

There are, of course, more details that people have hashed out over the years, including the infamous “how many casualties in an invasion” question. In the 1990s in particular, these were fiercely debated. It was, of course, the immediate post-Cold War, and everybody was still in a mood of assessment of trying to make out what the Cold War’s legacy actually was.

So where are we now, firmly in the 2010s? Walker reported that in his assessment, the scholarly debate had cooled down quite a bit, and that a new consensus was emerging, something that could be visualized firmly in between the two poles. There were problems, he argued, with both the “traditional” and the “revisionist” views. Specifically:

  • It’s not really clear that Truman ever made much of a “decision,” or regarded the bomb/invasion issue as being mutually exclusive. Truman didn’t know if the bomb would end the war; he hoped, but he didn’t know, couldn’t know. The US was still planning to invade in November 1945. They were planning to drop as many atomic bombs as necessary. There is no contemporary evidence that suggests Truman was ever told that the causalities would be X if the bomb was dropped, and Y if it was not. There is no evidence that, prior to the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, that Truman was particularly concerned with Japanese causalities, radiation effects, or whether the bombs were ethical or not. The entire framing of the issue is ahistorical, after-the-fact, here. It was war; Truman had atomic bombs; it was taken for granted, at that point, that they were going to be used. 
  • Defeat is not surrender. Japan was certainly defeated by August 1945, in the sense that there was no way for them to win; the US knew that. But they hadn’t surrendered, and the peace balloons they had put out would have assumed not that the Emperor would have stayed on as some sort of benign constitutional monarch (much less a symbolic monarch), but would still be the god-head of the entire Japanese country, and still preserve the overall Japanese state. This was unacceptable to the US, and arguably not for bad reasons. Japanese sources show that the Japanese military was willing to bleed out the country to exact this sort of concession from the US.
  • American sources show that the primary reason for using the bomb was to aid in the war against Japan. However, the fact that such weapons would be important in the postwar period, in particular vis-à-vis the USSR, was not lost on American policymakers. It is fair to say that there were multiple motivations for dropping the bomb, and specifically that it looks like there was a primary motivation (end the war) and many other “derivative” benefits that came from that (postwar power).
  • Japanese sources, especially those unearthed and written about by Tsuyoshi Hasegawa, make it clear that prior to the use of the atomic bombs, the Japanese cabinet was still planning on fighting a long battle against invasion, that they were hoping to exact the aforementioned concessions from the United States, and that they were aware (and did not care) that such an approach would cost the lives of huge numbers of Japanese civilians. It is also clear that the two atomic bombs did shock them immensely, and did help break the stalemate in the cabinet — but that the Soviet invasion of Manchuria also shocked them immensely, perhaps equally, maybe even more (if you have a choice between being occupied by Truman or occupied by Stalin, the decision is an easy one). But there is no easy way to disentangle the effects of the bombs or the Soviet invasion, in this sense — they were both immensely influential on the final decision. That being said, using the bomb as an “excuse” (as opposed to “we are afraid of Russians”) did play well with the Japanese public and made surrender appear to be a sensible, viable option in a culture where surrender was seen as a complete loss of honor.

So what we’re left with is something that, in my view, looks a lot more plausible than either the “traditional” or “revisionist” options, both of which assume way more prescience than actual historical actors usually have. (Much less Truman, of all people. In my view, even wondering what Truman thought about this is the wrong question to ask — Truman was many things, but he was not a thoughtful guy. He makes Eisenhower look like a French philosopher by comparison.)

One of the more post-modern Time magazine covers — where the atomic bomb unseats Truman as Man of the Year.

One of the more post-modern Time magazine covers — where the atomic bomb unseats Truman as Man of the Year. Or something.

The are genres of historical explanation that people find compelling. This is something that goes a bit beyond the historical facts themselves: it is the superstructure in which we interpret the facts, or, to put it another way, it is how we think about everything that’s going on that doesn’t end up in the archival record.

What I find compelling about Walker’s “consensus” view is that it is much more of a muddle than either the “traditional” view or the “revisionist” view. The “traditional” view makes it look like Truman et al. were making carefully reasoned decisions based on an ethics of the bomb that had not developed, based on questions that were not yet being asked. I don’t really believe for a minute that Truman worried much about the first use of the atomic bomb. But the “revisionist” view makes him still look too clever by half — too scheming, too anticipatory, too prescient about both the Japanese war and the Cold War. That’s not the Truman I know. The “consensus” view is much more human looking: the people in it are half-way acting consciously, half-way caught up in things that had been going on for a long time and were by then out of their active control. Of course, in retrospect, everyone wants to re-write history to make them look better, especially when they’re being criticized for past actions. That’s part of being human, too.

Walker also posited that along with this emerging consensus, there was also a cooling in the tone of the debate. This was immediately proved to be somewhat premature, as Peter Kuznik, another attendee to the workshop (who I consider a friend), vigorously defended the “revisionist” point of view. Well, so it goes — there’s no better way to prove an argument among scholars than to propose that there really isn’t much of an argument anymore. Still, I found Walker’s synthesis a useful way of framing the field of historical argumentation, summing up a number of disparate positions (each with books and books of documents and footnotes debating each tiny point) in a fairly convenient format. And what can I say — I’m a sucker for moderate, synthetic arguments.

Notes
  1. Citation: Leslie R. Groves to Harvey H. Bundy, drafts of “The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb” (6 November 1945), Correspondence (“Top Secret”) of the Manhattan Engineer District, 1942-1946, microfilm publication M1109 (Washington, D.C.: National Archives and Records Administration, 1980), Roll 3, Target 5, Folder 20, “Miscellaneous.” [↩]

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Visions

The Faces of Project Y

Friday, August 31st, 2012

Security badges — identification pieces with photographs on them — are one of the more ubiquitous showings of a security state. In Washington, DC, where I live, they are an extremely common sight: a thick plastic card with a photograph and a name of an agency, strung on a garish lanyard around the neck of someone dressed extremely conservatively. Apparently among those inside this world, it is considered a standard practice to subtly glance down at the badges of other people you see around, comparing agencies, clearances, status.

When did identification badges become so common? I’m not sure. Did they have them, say, in the secret facilities employed during World War I? I’ve never seen one. I’ve seen non-identifying badges — the equivalent of a police shield — but not ones with individual names and photographs. Presumably they had a way of indicating who belonged inside the secret areas and who belonged outside, but whether that was an identification card, a sheaf of papers, or something else, I’ve no clue. The photographic identification badge, worn at all times, seems to have come out of nowhere around the time of World War II, like so many things associated with the modern American security state.

At Los Alamos during the Manhattan Project — Project Y, as it was called — badges served multiple purposes. They said who was allowed inside the facility, sure. No badge, no entry. But they were also color-coded to describe the breadth of your access. Yellow meant that you could go into technical areas of the lab, but could receive no classified information — like guards. Blue was for people who needed classified information but not technical information — clerks and warehouse employees. Red was for people who could get some technical information within a highly compartmentalized state — technicians and secretaries.  White was for those who could know it all — everything that was to be done at Los Alamos. Early on, General Groves had wanted Los Alamos to be considerably compartmentalized, but Oppenheimer and others fought it. The result was that white badgers had the run of the lab, more or less, and could attend laboratory-wide colloquia.

The old Los Alamos badges of yore are declassified and have been digitized. They make for an interesting visual portrait of Los Alamos — one that likely nobody expected would ever be compiled and shared widely. They were internal documents for internal purposes, now opened up to history. It’s tempting to read the character traits we expect into the expressions on the badges. Look at J. Robert Oppenheimer‘s badge, above. He looks small and vulnerable — brilliant but wary, burdened by heavy responsibilities.

By contrast, here is the young Richard Feynman, who looks serenely amused at the entire thing, completely unimpressed, a little bit wicked:

And then we have Klaus Fuchs, that cold fish. The spy who nobody suspected, a man whose mildness — even blankness — in appearance concealed a not-inconsiderable-amount of ideological belief and daring. The guy got beat up fighting Brownshirts in the streets of Germany, but you’d never guess it from his Los Alamos persona:

And the other major physicist-spy, Ted Hall, looks just as bored, irritated, and condescending as we’d expect from the boy-wonder Harvard undergraduate who decided that he alone could determine the fate of world affairs:

In case you’re wondering whether poor Ted “Theordore” Hall was the only one with a really obvious misspelling on his badge photo, look no further:

General Leslie R. Groves, overall head of the Manhattan Project, originally had “Grover” written on his identification tag. Which was apparently unnoticed until after the tag was glued on to the photograph, at which point it had to be corrected by hand. That’s kind of sad. What’s being the head of the Manhattan Project get you, if not some respect?

Sometime back, Los Alamos digitized a huge number of these staff photographs, though they are available only in practically microscopic dimensions online. There are some 1,229 badge photographs on the page — some of famous people, some of infamous people, and some of people that nobody has probably heard of since. It’s a fun feature, though like most people who look at it, I’ve spent most my time hunting for the famous names (Fermi, Teller, Bethe) and ignore most of the others.

But it’s exactly the others that make Los Alamos so interesting. It wasn’t just a small cabal of world-famous physicists — it was a massive collection of physicists, mathematicians, chemists, metallurgists, physicians, engineers, technicians, secretaries, librarians, housekeepers, cleaners, nurses, laborers, and other people who are necessary to make a lab function.

Being a tech-savvy fellow I realized it would actually be pretty easy1 to extract all of the images from the LANL website and turn them into one giant composite image, which I present for you below — click the image to open it up.

You should be able to click on the image to zoom or pan it, or use the controls at the bottom of the screen. It mostly seems to work on the iPad. (It struggles on old computers running old browsers, I’m sorry to say.) I highly recommend the full screen mode, enabled by clicking the little icon in the bottom right corner. The photo names are extracted programmatically from the filenames provided by LANL; there are some obvious typos, mistakes, and so forth that I haven’t tried to correct. If it absolutely won’t work for you, you can look at the full image here, but I warn you that it’s a big file.

They are arranged in alphabetical order. Hunt around and you’ll occasionally find a famous person, in a sea of the unfamous. Look at the sheer diversity of age, gender, and appearance. One is artfully blurred; there are at least two duplicate pairs — one is rather plain, while another shows a change in facial hair. (There is not much diversity in race, unsurprisingly. There are groups of Hispanic men in there — e.g., Lopez, Lopez, Lopez, and Lopez — but other than that, Los Alamos as represented here was a pretty “white” gathering. This is in stark contrast with Hanford and Oak Ridge, which used large numbers of African-American workers.)

I thought this was pretty enough to make a mug out of it. For the mug, I picked out 95 faces — including all of the famous and infamous ones, along with some visually interesting ones — and wrapped them around a mug. There’s no explanatory text, just faces, with an Oppenheimer and a Fuchs peaking out from among the crowd, plus a few people whose faces you probably don’t know, but would be amused to find in there (like Sam Cohen, the “inventor of the neutron bomb”).

If the anonymous crowd isn’t your thing, there is also a mug of The Big Four of the nuclear scene — Oppenheimer, Teller, Groves, and Fuchs — and, just on the off-chance someone other than me would find wearing a Klaus Fuchs t-shirt amusing, some clothing designs with these fellows on them. All proceeds go towards supporting the blog.

Notes
  1. I used DownloadThemAll plus ImageMagick Montage, if you are curious what goes into making this sort of thing. The image viewer was cobbled together from Microsoft’s sadly defunct Seadragon Ajax library. [↩]

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Redactions

Los Alamos and the Smyth Report

Wednesday, August 15th, 2012

Everyone has spent a lot of time talking about the 67th anniversaries of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But last Sunday (August 12) was also another anniversary: the 67th anniversary of the release of the Smyth Report.

Richard Tolman, advisor to General Groves and one of the security editors of the Smyth Report, and Henry DeWolf Smyth, in 1945

The Smyth Report is one of the great documents of the nuclear age. Written by the Princeton physicist Henry DeWolf Smyth, it was an official history of the Manhattan Project that was released to the public only days after the bombing of Nagasaki. From the very beginning of the document you can tell it is playing a very delicate game with regards to openness and secrecy. Let us juxtapose the Introduction, written by Smyth, with the Forward, written by General Groves:

Smyth: The ultimate responsibility for our nation’s policy rests on its citizens and they can discharge such responsibilities wisely only if they are informed. The average citizen cannot be expected to understand clearly how an atomic bomb is constructed or how it works but there is in this country a substantial group of engineers and scientists who can understand such things and who can explain the potentialities of atomic bombs to their fellow citizens.

Groves: All pertinent scientific information which can be released to the public at this time without violating the needs of national security is contained in this volume. No requests for additional information should be made to private persons or organizations associated directly or indirectly with the project. Persons disclosing or securing additional information by any means whatsoever without authorization are subject to severe penalties under the Espionage Act.

What a fun game, eh? “Here is some important information, because it is necessary for democracy and sound policy. Also, if you go even an inch beyond what is written in here, we’ll put you in jail forever.”

Even the title of the report reflects this push and pull of secrecy. On the face of it, it’s got a dull, boring, bureaucratic title (which matches tone of the report itself, which is no great read):

“A General Account of the Development of Methods of Using Atomic Energy For Military Purposes Under the Auspices of the United States Government, 1940-1945.” It doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue, does it? You can see why in the Princeton University Press edition, they dubbed it Atomic Energy for Military Purposes (still a dull title), and everyone just calls it the Smyth Report. (Note: it’s pronounced Smythe but spelled Smyth.)

But here’s a little-known fact: that long, awful title wasn’t meant to be the title. It was supposed to be the sub-title — the actual title was so sensitive that it was going to be stamped on at the last moment before distribution. In the hubbub before its release, the stamp was essentially never used, and the sub-title became the title.

So what was the original title? Recently I found a rare copy in the Manuscripts Division of the Library of Congress that contains the original title with the original stamp:

The original title was ATOMIC BOMBS, to be applied in a bright red stamp. Now how cool is that? In a way, this is Manhattan Project trivia, but really it points towards a deeper truth about the Smyth Report: every single aspect of it — even its title! — was shaped by the question of secrecy. The story of the Smyth Report is a fascinating one, and I spend the good part of a chapter in my forthcoming book talking about it.1 The idea of its creation, the process of its creation, and the debate over whether it should be released at all, much less the consequences of that release, are all completely vital stories in their own right for making sense of secrecy and publicity in the immediate postwar period.

I want to focus on just one little part of that, though: what Smyth did, and didn’t, write about Los Alamos, the most secret site in a system of secret sites.

On February 1, 1945, Smyth sent the first draft of the history of Los Alamos to none other than J. Robert Oppenheimer.2 (As if Oppenheimer didn’t have enough to do.)

“I am at last ready to send you the first draft of what I have written about the project at Y,” Smyth explained. (Project Y was the official code name for the Los Alamos lab.) In the habit of all academics, then and now, he apologized for being a bit tardy. He explained that it would be swell if Oppenheimer could have Richard Feynman take a look at the draft. He also noted that:

You will notice that I have omitted nearly all numerical values for constants. This is a departure from my original intention, but I do not see that their inclusion would really add much to the usefulness of this document and it might necessitate a complete revision before publication.

This is interesting: Smyth’s “original intention” was to write the entire report without any regard for secrecy. Later, after everyone agreed the draft was more or less correct, he’d cut out all of the secret stuff, once it was decided what the secret stuff would be. In this case, though Smyth has pre-censored himself on numerical constants — but still written it as if he hadn’t. A weird genre of writing, no?

Nobody got back to Smyth on this letter; they were too busy. Smyth wrote Oppenheimer again in April 1945, sending another draft.3

He had heard from Groves and James Conant that Oppenheimer “did not like the chapter as a whole” but “were unable to give any report of specific criticisms.” Smyth asked for any that Oppenheimer had, and noted that: “I have not found the writing or this report an easy assignment.”

Smyth also explained some of the major omissions that had been made from the previous draft:

As I anticipated, the critical comment on the choice of the site will be deleted. I may say that I inserted this comment and similar comment in other chapters with the expectation that they would be removed before publication but with the feeling that it was desirable to record the existence of such opinions in the original draft.

All discussion of ordnance work is also to be removed. There is no objection to including the general statement of the ordnance problem and all the other parts of the problem, but the approaches to solution that have been made will be omitted. On the other hand, the feeling is that there is no objection to including the nuclear physics.

The General believes that the metallurgical work and a considerable amount of the chemistry work should be excluded on the ground that it would be extremely difficult for the average scientist to carry out any of this work without supplies and material which would not be available to him. I am not entirely clear how this criterion should be applied, but it probably means the elimination of the metallurgical work on plutonium and at least of some of the chemistry. I shall simply have to write a revised version and discuss it in detail with General Groves and Dr. Conant.

One other general comment which they made is that more names should be included. While this comment applies more forcibly to some other chapters than to that on Y, it is a point to be borne in mind in criticizing what I have written.

I don’t know what the “critical comment on the choice of site” refers to — except maybe to the fact that Los Alamos is in the middle of nowhere, which has its disadvantages as well as its advantages — but the rest is pretty straightforward. Ordnance — the actual work to design the atomic bomb, esp. relating to implosion — was out. Metallurgy and chemistry? Out and out.4 Basic nuclear physics? In!

So let’s get this straight: out of all of the work done at Los Alamos, all that gets past the censor is basic nuclear physics. And the implications of removing metallurgy and chemistry here probably means almost nothing will be written about Hanford, either. The final report has exactly two paragraphs on Hanford, despite it consuming a fifth of the Project resources. Which also meant cutting out the legions of chemists, engineers, and metallurgists who worked on the project in that capacity.

And so one suddenly sees that there is more missing from the Smyth Report than there is revealed in it.

Oh, but also: add more names of people. Why? Because Groves was afraid that scientists (and contractors) would seek credit after the war ended if they didn’t feel it was properly given to them — and in the act of seeking credit, they might give away secrets.

The Smyth Report as published by Princeton University Press.

Oppenheimer finally did write back to Smyth about this draft, apologizing for never writing back to his first letter, in April 1945.5 Oppenheimer wasn’t particularly pleased with it. What’s interesting about his objections and corrections to it are that they are almost completely concerned with things which were cut from the final draft for security reasons anyway. There’s a lot about implosion (what prompted it, who came up with it, etc.), for example, and implosion was completely omitted from the final Smyth Report.

If you’re interested in Los Alamos project history, you might find Oppenheimer’s comments interesting — Oppenheimer’s history of implosion is from a rather unique vantage point, since they hadn’t actually even tested the bomb yet (“In the past months I think we have had the fundamentals of implosion licked, and the future in this field looks bright“). Oppenheimer’s list of corrections has a lot of interesting bomb arcana in it; a selection here to give a flavor for it, along with some of the more interesting corrections:

Page 2, line 9. “December” should be “October.”
Page 3, line 11 (from bottom). “January” should be “November.” [...]
Page 9, line 10. “Mass” should be “radius.”
Page 12. This is the point I have discussed above. The history of implosion is roughly thus:

It was proposed by Neddermeyer at the April conference, and some arguments were given by him to show that it would give a faster assembly than the gun; work was carried out on exploratory basis which gave misleadingly hopeful looking results. The matter was considered again by von Neumann in the Fall of 1943; he expressed the opinion that the implosion would work better with high charge to mass ratio, and might avoid the necessity for extreme purification of plutonium, at least or very small gadgets, because it would give such a rapid assembly. The compression on the material resulting from high velocities was then pointed out by Teller and investigated by Bethe. After much struggle and argument the implosion project was adopted with over-riding priority in late 1943. The later history I have outlined above. [...]

Page 25, line 15. I would use the word “surprise” rather than “setback,” but that is a matter of judgment. [...]
Page 32, par. 3, line 1. The 3000 ft/sec figure always referred to 49. The 25 velocity was not set until firm limits on the spontaneous fission of the isotopes enabled us to take 1000 ft/sec. This occurred early in 1944. [...]
Page 42 line 10. The theoretical behavior is well known, but we are not sure that the theories are right.

The final version of the chapter on Los Alamos, “The Work on the Atomic Bomb,” is comparatively barren, when compared to the nitty-gritty that Oppenheimer went into above. It has a nice, but brief administrative history (why the lab was created, why the site was chosen — no critical comments, who was in charge of it), the world’s most basic discussion of basic bomb design issues (critical mass, tamper, efficiency, and an extremely vague statement on the gun-type design), and then more or less doesn’t advance the timeline beyond April 1943.

Like so many things, it’s clear that Smyth, Oppenheimer, and even Feynman spent a lot of time trying to ferret out all of the facts about Los Alamos — only to see them almost completely, and silently, cut from the final publication.

Notes
  1. I should also note here that there is an in-depth study of the Smyth Report which I’ve benefited a lot from: Rebecca Press Schwartz, “The Making of the History of the Atomic Bomb: Henry DeWolf Smyth and the Historiography of the Manhattan Project,” (Ph.D. diss., Princeton University, September 2008). Rebecca has actually looked at the original drafts of the Smyth Report, which are kept in the archives of the American Philosophical Society. [↩]
  2. Henry D. Smyth to J. Robert Oppenheimer (1 February 1945),  Nuclear Testing Archive, Las Vegas, NV, document NV0125251. [↩]
  3. Henry D. Smyth to J. Robert Oppenheimer (6 April 1945), Nuclear Testing Archive, Las Vegas, NV, document NV0125250. [↩]
  4. Rebecca Press Schwartz’ dissertation, cited above, notes that for many years Smyth received angry letters from chemists and metallurgists in particular complaining that they had been cut out of the official history! [↩]
  5. J. Robert Oppenheimer to Henry D. Smyth (14 April 1945), Nuclear Testing Archive, Las Vegas, NV, document NV0125249. [↩]

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Visions

The Week of the Atom Bomb

Friday, August 10th, 2012

This week is, as you all no doubt know, the 67th anniversary of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. These anniversaries happen to fall on the same days of the week as the original ones. So the bombing of Hiroshima on August, 6, 1945, was a Monday — just as with August 6, 2012. The bombing of Nagasaki, August 9, was a Thursday. The Smyth Report would be released on August 12, a Sunday. Hirohito’s “surrender” message would come on August 15, the next Wednesday.

For some reason, conceptualizing all of this as happening within a few weeks makes it seem awfully short in time. What a week that would have been.

Headline for the New York Times, August 7, 1945.

One of the things I really enjoy doing as an historian is looking through old newspaper front pages. You find so much out about past societies that way — the juxtaposition of related and unrelated articles provides a fascinating kaleidoscope of the day in question. Put a bunch of different newspaper headlines together, from different parts of the country, and you get an even more interesting portrait of a specific time and place.

In closing out the 67th anniversary of the Week of the Atom Bomb, I want to share a number of newspaper front pages with you. I’m limited in what I can conjure up, but I’ve managed to collect some 38 different front pages from newspapers in different parts of the country for the work week of August 6th through August 10th, each of which I thought was interesting or revealing in some way. Some of these newspapers will be immediately familiar to you — the New York Times, the Washington Post — some will be quite obscure — the Big Spring Daily Herald, from Big Spring, Texas, for example. Some represent quite specific markets: the Atlanta Constitution, for example, is an African-American newspaper in the age of segregation, and there are interesting differences between how they cover the issue versus the big city newspapers or the small town newspapers.

One additional point: the headlines are different, but the stories are almost exactly the same. This is because in the first week of the bomb, all of the stories were essentially written by William L. Laurence of the New York Times and released to the press by the Army. Not until the Smyth Report was released, on August 12th, do you start to see much independent reporting. The content of the “official” stories is interesting, but today I just want to focus on the headlines.

In an effort to keep this post from sprawling out forever, I’ve arranged all of the images in a little gallery below. If you are reading this on an RSS feed or an aggregator, you may have to visit the main site to view these.

August 6, 1945: Big Spring Daily Herald, Big Spring, Texas.

"Five Cities Hit, One By New Bomb": I find it interesting here that they've explicitly lumped the firebombed cities in with the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. The subheadline, "Atoms Harnessed for Destruction," is more vivid. But note that far more space is given to the firebombing than the atomic bomb -- likely because they had only just received word of the atomic bomb and had to fit it in later. There is an interesting ambivalence in describing the "helpless Japs" in the headline about the firebombs.

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August 6, 1945: Big Spring Daily Herald, Big Spring, Texas.
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There are two images from the set that I’d really like to draw your attention to. The first is from the August 9, 1945, edition of the Indiana Evening Gazette, from Indiana, Pennsylvania. (A bit confusing, that.) It appears to have been used in a lot of newspapers that day in different parts of the country, so it probably originates on the AP wire service. Anyway, here’s the image:

“DEATH KNOCKS AT EVERY JAP’S DOOR,” the main announcement reads. The caption is completely insane:

The utter desolation facing the Japanese, unless they surrender, as result of development of the atomic bomb is illustrated on the map above. Scientists say that if 1000 of the new weapons were exploded within each of the five circled areas, they would destroy virtually all life and property in the enemy homeland.

It’s not every day that you see small-town American newspapers cheerfully contemplating genocide, is it?

The second detail is a little illustration from the Kingsport Times, in Kingsport, Tennessee, published on August 9, 1945. It attempts, in visual form, to make sense of the force of an atomic bomb as described by President Truman (“ …Ruin from the Air, The Like of Which Has Never Been Seen On Earth”):

On the left, a colorful illustration of an atomic bomb going off under the Empire State building: “The atomic bomb is the most terrible engine of destruction every conceived. One pound of U-235 could blast a great city, like New York, off the face of the map.”

In the middle, a train being blasted to oblivion: “To get a comparable explosion from TNT, you would have to set off 15,000 tons, or 300 carloads of 50 tons each. If U-235 exploded at TNT’s speed, pressure would be 1,000,000 times as great.” I don’t really know what they mean by the last line, there, but going from “trainloads of TNT’ to “an exploding train” is somewhat imaginative.

On the right, a dead fleet — presaging Operation Crossroads. “Exploded amid a great fleet at sea, an atomic bomb would sink most of the ships, send a great tidal wave shoreward. Most tightly compartmented ship would be crushed by air pressure.” Some original typos, there, but you get the picture.

As I’ve mentioned previously, there was a tremendous mixing of exaltation and  anxiety that first week of the bomb. It wasn’t just one thing or the other; it wasn’t all positive. Looking at these front pages, you see a real mixture of expressions, and a real diversity of types of coverage, even given the limitations imposed by secrecy. For some, the story is the secrecy itself — for others, the bomb gets mixed into an existing narrative about firebombing. Out of the mixture of these narratives, our “standard narrative” of the history of bomb is derived. But it’s all too easy to turn that into a condensed, one-size-fits-all assessment of how Americans thought about the atomic bombs, when there was quite a diversity of opinion and expression, even from the start.

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James B. Conant on Trinity (1945)

Monday, July 16th, 2012

This week, you’ll get your weekly document on a Monday, because it’s a special occasion. Today, July 16, 2012, is the 67th anniversary of the first test of an atomic bomb: “Trinity.” 

A photo negative from the first milliseconds of the nuclear age. The bright spots are where the negative was burnt through by the heat. Photo by Berlyn Brixner; scanned from the National Archives Still Pictures Branch, 454-RF-12A (TR84-1).

A lot has been written about “Trinity.” What I thought I’d offer up is a perspective on the test that you’ve probably never seen — the personal account of James B. Conant, President of Harvard and key figure in the Manhattan Project.

The original document isn’t easy to come by — it was withdrawn from the Bush-Conant File when it was microfilmed — but James Hershberg, when writing his great Conant biography (James B. Conant: Harvard to Hiroshima and the Making of the Nuclear Age) managed to get access to it, where it is reprinted as an appendix. It’s one of the more gripping of the many personal accounts of the first bomb test, and as far as I’ve seen, isn’t posted anywhere else on the web.

James B. Conant (fourth from left) at a meeting with Uranium Committee principles at UC Berkeley, March 1940. Left to right: Ernest O. Lawrence, Arthur C. Compton, Vannevar Bush, Conant, Karl Compton, Alfred L. Loomis.

This transcription is Hershberg’s; the original is no doubt in Conant’s impossible handwriting. Any notes italicized in brackets are Hershberg’s, any not-italicized are mine.1

Rather than breaking it up with comments, I’ve added footnotes to highlight little points or add a little depth to things that you might not be familiar with, unless you are a serious Manhattan Project nerd. The footnotes are only visible if you look at this post in “single post” mode, rather than via the main site’s front page. If you don’t see any footnotes, click on the title of this post at the top. The bolding is by me. Any non sic‘d typos are probably by me, too!

Conant and Bush reenact a post-Trinity handshake for the “March of Time” documentary on the atomic bomb. Apparently they were really just in a Boston garage for the reenactment. Via the New York Times.

Notes on the “Trinity” Test Held at Alamogordo Bombing Range

125 miles south east of Alburquerque

5:30 a.m. Monday, July 16

V. Bush, Gen. Groves, and J.B.C. arrived at the Base Camp located 10 miles from the bomb at about 8 p.m. Sunday evening. After dinner at the mess and some brief explanation by [J.R.] Oppenheimer, [R.C.] Tolman, [G.] Kistiakowsky, and [I.I.] Rabbi [sic] in very informal conversation we went to bed. The atmosphere was a bit tense as might be expected but everyone felt confident that the bomb would explode. The pool on the size of the explosion ran from 0 (a few pessimists) to 18,000 (Rabbi [sic]) and perhaps someone at 50,000 [several words censored].2 My own figure was 4400 [tons of T.N.T.] but I never signed up.3 It was a bad night though the weather forecast had been favorable for a clear early morning with light winds (the desired condition). From about 10:30 to 1 a.m., it blew very hard thus preventing sleep in our tent and promising a postponement of the Test. Then it poured for about an hour!

At 1 a.m. General Groves arose and went out to the forward barricade with the key personnel. There were two forward bases located 10,000 yds. N. & S. of the bomb. The [wiring?] from [this?] point to the test and to the camp was fantastic in the [extreme?].4 The instrumentation of the test included a vast array of equipment. At 3:15 a.m., the rain having just ceased, Rabbi [sic]5 came into our tent (V. Bush and JBC) and said that there had been much talk of a postponement because of the weather but reports indicated a 75% chance of going through with it but at 5 a.m. instead of the scheduled 4 a.m.

We got up & dressed and drank some coffee about 4 a.m. and wandered around. The sky was still overcast. It had not rained however at the zero point (the bomb)6 and the [wires? lines?] were O.K. Word then came through about 4:30 that 5:10 would be the time. About 5 p.m. [sic — a.m.] or a little after, word came that the firing would occur at 5:30. Shortly after, General Groves came back to the forward area. We prepared to view the scene from a slight rise near the camp. Col. S[tafford]. Warren [was] in charge of health.7 Tolman, Rabbi [sic], Gen. Groves & J.B.C. were more or less together.8 It was agreed that because of the expected (or hoped!) bright flash and the ultra violet light (no ozone to absorb it) it would be advisable to lie flat and look away at the start, then look through the heavy dark glass.

At 5:20 the sirens blew the 10 min signal then another at 5:25 and I think another 2 mins. before. We lay belly down facing 180 [degrees] away from the spot on the tarpaulin. I kept my eyes open looking at the horizon opposite the spot. It was beginning to be light, but the general sky was still dark particularly in the general direction I was looking. Through the loud speaker nearby I heard [Samuel] Allison counting the seconds minus 45, minus 40, minus 30, minus 20, minus 10. (The firing was done by some kind of timing devices started at minus 45 sec.) These were long seconds! Then came a burst of white light that seemed to fill the sky and seemed to last for seconds. I had expected a relatively quick and bright flash. The enormity of the light and its length quite stunned me. My instantaneous reaction was that something had gone wrong and that the thermal nuclear transformational of the atmosphere, once discussed as a possibility and jokingly referred to a few minutes earlier, had actually occurred.9  Slightly blinded for a second, I turned on my back as quickly as possible and raising my head slightly, could see the “fire” through the dark glass. At that stage it looked like an enormous pyrotechnic display with great boiling of luminous vapors, some spots being brighter than others. A picture from memory is as seen through heavy dark glass.

Trinity fireball drawing by James Conant

Very shortly this view began to fade and without thinking the glass was lowered and the scene viewed with the naked eye. The ball of gas was enlarging rapidly and turning into a mushroom. It was reddish purple and against the early dawn very luminous, though I instantly thought of it as colored [somewhere?]. Then someone shouted watch out for the detonation wave (this was 40 sec after zero time). Still on my back I heard the detonation but was not in a position to notice any blast (there was relatively little felt here). The sound was less loud or startling than I expected, but the shock of sensory impression was still dominant in my mind. Then I got up and watched the spread of the colored luminous gas. There was two secondary explosions, after the detonation wave reached us or just before. The cloud billowed upward when these occurred and very soon thereafter [billowed?] up as would an oil fire, the color became [illegible] and the whole looked more like a [unintelligible] fire (though on an enormous scale). The column of smoke then began to spread and took on a Z form which persisted for some time. The spectacular part must have been confined to about 90 seconds. The phases observed by the eve were as follows from memory.

Conant's drawing of the rising and dissipating mushroom cloud

As soon as I had lowered my dark glass and before rising I shook Gen. Groves hand who said “Well, I guess there is something in nucleonics after all.”10 Tolman as we rose said, that is something very different from the 100-ton TNT shot,11 “entirely differently, there is no question but what they got a nuclear reaction.” Then several people began saying, “Very much larger than expected. Rabbi [sic] said it was 15,000 Tons equivalent at least.”

At about 60 sec. as the cloud billowed up, the assembled group including many MPs’ gave out a spontaneous cheer.

Then the reports began to come in. Oppenheimer arrived in about 5 or 10 minutes and said the equivalent was 2100 Tons which was greeted with great skepticism. It afterwards turned out he had made an error in converting the first blast measurement and the figure showed 7,000 tons.12

The most exciting news was that the steel tower over “Jumbo” 800 yards away had disappeared.13 This was reported by some one with a telescope and verified by all. This was unexpected and showed a very much more powerful effect than expected.

Before we left at noon, the best estimate seemed to be between 10,000–15,000 though Rabbi [sic] maintain 18,000 would yet prove right.14 Careful exploration of the crater showed 1200 yards again more than expected. The toxicity problem proved not serious. Thought at 10,000 [yards] North evacuated in a hurry as their meter went off the scale almost at once and the cloud of smoke seemed to chase them they declared!15 All evacuation was by car, of course. One man at the Camp Site who looked at the explosion without dark eye glasses got a bad eye burn and was given morphine: the prognosis was that he would not lose his sight. G. Kistiakowsky, all [word illegible], came in to report that the shock wave had knocked him down as he stood outside the barricade at 10,000 S.16 There were reports of two others being knocked down at the same spot.

My first impression remains the most vivid, a cosmic phenomena like an eclipse. The whole sky suddenly full of white light like the end of the world. Perhaps my impression was only premature on a time scale of years!

J.B. Conant, Washington, D.C.
July 17, 1945 4:30 p.m.

Notes
  1. Citation: James B. Conant, “Notes on the ‘Trinity’ Test,” (17 July 1945), Bush-Conant File Relating the Development of the Atomic Bomb, 1940-1945, Records of the Office of Scientific Research and Development, RG 227, microfilm publication M1392, National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, D.C., n.d. (ca. 1990), Roll 5, Target 8, Folder 38, “Bush, V. 1944-45.” Reprinted in James Hershberg, James B. Conant: Harvard to Hiroshima and the Making of the Nuclear Age(New York: Knopf, 1993), 758-760. [↩]
  2. The yield estimates are questions of how efficient the fission reaction will be — how much plutonium would fission before the bomb blew itself apart? This itself was a question of how effectively the implosion mechanism worked, and how long the bomb could be held in a supercritical state before full explosion. A rough estimate provided by Richard Garwin is that the complete fissioning of 1 kg of Pu-239 produces 17 kt of yield. The “Gadget” contained  6.2 kg of Pu-239 in its core. So obviously zero yield would mean no significant fissioning at all. 18 kt would mean only 17% of the plutonium fissioned. 50 kt would mean 47% fissioned. Conant’s estimate, 4.4 kt, would mean 4% fissioned. Perfect efficiency — 100% fissioning — would have been 105 kt. Separately, one wonders what Conant would have to say here that would still be censored today. I suspect it has does have something to do with efficiency questions, and his reasoning on them, because those were considered quite taboo by redactors until relatively recently. I suspect if this was re-reviewed by a classification officer today these lines would be cleared. Note that Rabi’s guess was in fact not chosen because of any optimism — he arrived late and it was the only figure left to choose! [↩]
  3. Conant’s estimate looks low today — since we know that the bomb was 18 kt was correct. But for the first test, of course, there was no real barometer. The original estimates for the atomic bomb’s yield were much, much lower than what the bombs turned out to be — when Roosevelt signed off on the Manhattan Project in 1942, it was under the assumption that the first atomic bomb would be only 2 kt in yield! [↩]
  4. These parenthetical sentences are from Hershberg and are likely good interpretations of Conant’s awful handwriting. [↩]
  5. Conant consistently misspells I.I. Rabi’s name. But it is amusing to imagine two New England Yankees like Bush and Conant being visited by a rabbi for the Trinity test. [↩]
  6. “Zero point” was the term for where the bomb was located, sometimes just called “Zero” or, eventually, “Ground Zero.” This was the original usage of the term, well before it became more commonly used for all manner of targets. The zero obviously came from marking out the distances from the bomb blast site — zero would have been the exact site of the bomb exploding. [↩]
  7. Warren was in charge of making sure that nobody got too much radiation exposure at Trinity, especially from fallout. They actually did have a fallout scare, but more on that another time. [↩]
  8. It’s interesting that Rabi was in this group and not any other. Tolman was Groves’ personal scientific advisor; Conant and Bush were high-level policy guys; Rabi was more or less just visiting — he wasn’t heavily involved in the bomb project, just a consultant, and was spending most of his time working on radar at MIT. It may have been his “outsider” status that got him put into the high-policy bunker. Or maybe Bush and Conant just liked him. I don’t know. [↩]
  9. The idea that an atomic bomb might start a thermonuclear reaction in the atmosphere was not quite so seriously considered as a threat as it was later made out to be — and was something that was known to be physically impossible — but it’s not surprising that this unlikely fear came back to Conant in this instant of awe. It’s also worth remembering that nobody had seen an atomic bomb before, so this must have been fantastically more impressive even than later tests, when you had a general idea of what it ought to look like. I’m also reminded of a comment that Harold Agnew made about watching the first hydrogen bomb explosion in 1952, how it kept getting hotter, and hotter, and hotter, and he actually started to get worried that it would never stop. [↩]
  10. “Nucleonics” was a term coined during World War II to designate the field of nuclear technology. It didn’t really catch on. [↩]
  11. The 100-ton TNT shot was a detonation of isotope-laced explosives on May 7, 1945, done as a means of trying to calibrate instrumentation and expectations for the Trinity shot. Read more about it on Carey Sublette’s page. [↩]
  12. Oppenheimer was regarded by all as quite brilliant when it came to the physics of these sorts of things, but poor when it came to the mathematics. But I don’t know that he actually did these equations — it’s unlikely. It’s still interesting that the revised estimate was off by 250%. Still, it was an estimate some 15 minutes after the first test, so let’s cut them some slack. [↩]
  13. “Jumbo” was a massive containment unit that was initially supposed to have the bomb detonated inside of it, so that if it fizzled, the billion-dollars-worth of plutonium would be recoverable. It was not used, however. Details about Jumbo are here. Jumbo itself survived the blast, though its tower was destroyed. [↩]
  14. And Rabi was, indeed, more or less correct — the final yield was just shy of 19 kt. But, again, he chose 18 kt not because he had any good reason to — he did it because it was the only choice left when he showed up. Now an historical question that I’ve never seen the answer to is how much money did Rabi win? Apparently it was only a $1 entry fee, and it was restricted to senior scientists, so it probably wasn’t much. We know that Oppenheimer (0.3 kt), Teller (45 kt), Kistiakowsky (1.4 kt), Bethe (8 kt), and Ramsey (zero) put in. So that’s at least 5 dollars, not counting the one Rabi would have gotten back for admission. (Note that Conant said he did not participate in the pool.) But it must have been more crowded a field than that, given that 18 kt was all that was left to Rabi when he arrived later, and it seems rather arbitrary given the other numbers listed. It may yet be an unsolved mystery… [↩]
  15. This is related to the fallout scare that I mentioned previously — they were somewhat woefully underprepared for fallout issues, though they were aware they might exist. I have a post on this coming up fairly soon… [↩]
  16. So I guess the drawings I posted here weren’t completely far-fetched! [↩]

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