Shockwave

Copyright

William Collins

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF WilliamCollinsBooks.com This eBook first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2020 Copyright © Stephen Walker 2005, 2020 Cover image © Galerie Bilderwelt / Getty Images Stephen Walker asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins Source ISBN: 9780008372552 Ebook Edition © July 2020 ISBN: 9780008372569 Version: 2020-08-04

PRAISE FOR

Shockwave

“Dramatic … an important page-turner Walker’s admirably even-handed and smoothly written history records the countdown from the explosion of the first atomic bomb at Los Alamos in July 1945 to the incineration of Hiroshima, Japan, three weeks later.”

Entertainment Weekly (Grade: A-)

“A meticulous, emotionally devastating portrait of both sides. … [Walker] creates an arresting feeling of suspense, but also the structure adds an overwhelming sense of the personal, individual impact the bomb would have.”

Atlanta Journal-Constitution

“Those who revere John Hersey’s Hiroshima as a classic piece of reporting about an act unprecedented in human history-the instantaneous annihilation of tens of thousands of civilians by human agency-may approach a new book on the subject with lowered expectations. But in Shockwave: Countdown to Hiroshima, Stephen Walker has painted on a larger canvas.”

Washington Post

“As the sixtieth anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima approaches, this book offers a fascinating look at a moment in history that for many of us has become distant and unimaginable. The book has the feel of a suspense novel, unfolding with such tension and drama that we must remind ourselves that we know what will happen Like John Hersey’s Hiroshima, Shockwave brings to life one of history’s most profound events. Don’t miss it.”

Arizona Republic

“Electrifying…. The tension and concentration of Walker’s thriller-like prose elicits a visceral response, but he also raises complicated and urgent questions about our continued harboring and development of nuclear weapons.”

Chicago Tribune

“A gripping tale which takes us back to 1945-allowing readers to appreciate the spectacular scientific effort that created this tool of doom and see how war blurs moral landscapes.”

News & Observer

“Shockwave is a stunning book, among the most immediate and thrilling works of history I have ever read.”

Irish Times

“Uniquely readable, immediate, and human…. Every account of the destruction of Hiroshima is dramatic, but historian and filmmaker Walker has created an exceptionally taut and revealing chronicle.”

Booklist (starred review)

“Walker takes readers on a roller-coaster ride through the memories of American servicemen, Japanese soldiers and civilians, and the polyglot team of scientists who participated in the Manhattan Project…. Invite[s] comparison with John Hersey’s still-classic Hiroshima.”

Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“Superb…. Walker writes with a sense of urgency and high drama … engrossing [and] saddening.”

Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“Telling the inside story of the scientists, the pilots, and not least the victims, [Stephen Walker] constructs a factual thriller that grips the reader from the first page to the last.”

Die Zeit (Germany)

“Stephen Walker’s meticulous reconstruction of events enables us to learn virtually unknown details about the three weeks between the Alamogordo experiment and the launch of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima.”

Il Tempo (Italy)

“The author reconstructs the story with all the power of a very highquality documentary film.”

Asahi Shimbun (Japan)

For Sally, whose love, spirit, and indomitable courage inspired every word

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Praise for Shockwave

Dedication

Preface to the 2020 Edition

Introduction

A Note on Time

Prologue: Twelve Hours Before Zero

Act I: Three Weeks Earlier

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Act II: Decision

Eight

Nine

Ten

Eleven

Twelve

Thirteen

Fourteen

Fifteen

Sixteen

Act III: Delivery

Seventeen

Eighteen

Nineteen

Twenty

Twenty-One: Six Hours Before Zero

Twenty-Two: Two Hours Before Zero

Twenty-Three: One Hour Before Zero

Twenty-Four: Thirty Minutes Before Zero

Twenty-Five: Three Minutes Before Zero

Twenty-Six: Forty-Five Seconds Before Zero

Act IV: Impacty

Twenty-Seven: Zero Plus One Minute

Twenty-Eight: Zero Plus Fifteen Minutes

Twenty-Nine: Zero Plus One Hour

Thirty: Zero Plus Three Hours

Thirty-One: Zero Plus Twelve Hours

Thirty-Two: Zero Plus Eighteen Hours

Epilogue

Picture Section

Acknowledgments

Endnotes

Sources and Bibliography

Permissions

Also By Stephen Walker

About the Publisher

PREFACE TO THE 2020 EDITION

ON A SEPTEMBER day in 1933, the Hungarian-German physicist Leo Szilard was about to cross a street in London when, in the time it took for the traffic lights to change from red to green, he suddenly conceived the principle of an atomic bomb. The idea horrified him, so much so that by July 1945, with the war against Nazi Germany won, he desperately tried to stop the United States from even testing such a weapon, let alone using it in anger. In a petition circulated among fellow scientists he wrote that “a nation which uses these newly liberated forces of nature for purposes of destruction may have to bear the responsibility of opening the door to an era of devastation on an unimaginable scale.”

His petition was ignored. History took its course and the names of two Japanese cities were permanently branded on the world’s consciousness. But the force of Szilard’s words has not been lost in the decades after he wrote them. Since 1945, our planet has existed beneath a Damocles’ sword of near-total destruction. That was the case when I wrote Shockwave in 2005 on the sixtieth anniversary of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki; but it is alarmingly more so on this seventy-fifth anniversary, fifteen years later.

There are, by some estimates, almost 14,000 nuclear weapons in the world today. Approximately 90 percent of these are Russian and American; between them the two nations have the potential to unleash the destructive power of more than 300,000 Hiroshimasized bombs, enough to obliterate almost all life everywhere.

Such numbers, though shocking and unimaginable, are actually lower than they were when this book was first published, thanks to the 2010 New START (Strategic Arms Talks) agreement between the US and Russia. But in the meantime the world has changed. A president currently sits in the White House about whom almost nothing is predictable except his unpredictability. A leader sits in the Kremlin whose grip on the levers of power is far more ruthless than it once was. The actions of Vladimir Putin in the Crimea and Syria have sparked fears of a new cold war, founded on deep mutual suspicion and mistrust. If the West is perceived by many Russians as a genuine threat to the integrity of its borders, Putin’s Russia is perceived by the West as increasingly aggressive, more confident and much more dangerous. In 2019, President Trump unilaterally withdrew from a long-standing intermediate range nuclear weapons treaty with Russia on the grounds that the Russians were breaking the rules. The Russians accused the Americans of doing the same. But the reality is that both sides are developing radically new weapons to replace their ageing stockpiles. In such a climate, there are no guarantees that New START, the sole remaining nuclear arms control treaty between the two nuclear superpowers, will survive its expiry date of 2021. After that it’s anyone’s guess what will happen next.

The world has changed in other ways too. The US and Russia may have reduced the numbers of their nuclear weapons since this book was originally published; other nations, unconstrained by arms control treaties, have increased them. China, a political and economic powerhouse of a different order from fifteen years ago, is now the globe’s second-largest arms exporter, with a rapidly growing—and rapidly modernizing—nuclear arsenal of its own. India and Pakistan have more than doubled, and very possibly tripled, their weapon totals. North Korea joined the party long ago, exploding its first atomic bomb in 2006 followed by a further five tests of ever bigger bombs, in conjunction with an active missile program. It remains at best only a matter of time before President Trump’s “Rocket Man” has the potential to deliver nuclear terror to any part of Europe and to the entire United States.

And, as I write this, the story is taking new, darker twists. Trump’s policy of engaged hostility toward Iran has ripped holes in the 2015 treaty designed to contain that country’s nuclear ambitions. Now its government is actively enriching uranium, the core substance required to make a nuclear weapon, in explicit breach of the treaty’s restrictions. If Iran gets the bomb, the Saudis say they will build their own. Turkey’s president has openly argued that it is his country’s right too to develop nuclear weapons. And with Israel already a substantial nuclear power in a region simmering with instabilities, the stage could be set for a performance far beyond our worst nightmares.

It may all of course be just that: a nightmare and never a reality, a terror that we will always wake up from. When it comes to discussing nuclear holocausts, it is sometimes easy to lose your bearings. There may be plenty of bombs out there, but the fact is that nobody has used them since 1945. The very scale of their destructive power is, as everyone knows, the best reason why: use them, and you can be pretty certain they will be used on you. That, at least, has been the guiding principle of peace since the Soviets first tested their own bomb in 1949. But as other nations join the nuclear club, or increase their stockpiles, international efforts to keep the beast firmly chained in the very back of its cave are harder to secure. Some governments, perhaps threatened with their own extinction, might perceive the risks of using nuclear bombs rather differently than traditional strategic thinking suggests.

And not just governments. A recent Harvard report claims, with disturbing evidence, that the dangers of nuclear terrorism are “very real.” Over the last quarter century, there have been at least twenty seizures of stolen weapons-grade material, and there is more of the stuff out there that has never been recovered. Modern experts bandy euphemisms such as “radiological dispersal devices;” but what they really mean are dirty, crude, unstable, and—most crucially—easily concealable bombs that could shatter entire cities and kill huge numbers of people. The fear of such weapons goes back a long way. Even in 1946, only a year after the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs, J. Robert Oppenheimer, technical director of the Manhattan Project and one of the key figures in the pages that follow, told a closed Senate hearing that there would come a time when just a few people could smuggle a nuclear device into New York and destroy it. When asked by one shocked senator, “What instrument would you use to detect an atomic bomb hidden somewhere in a city?” Oppenheimer answered, “a screwdriver”—to open every crate.

This, I think, is the truly frightening impact of Szilard’s words seventy-five years ago: that once one nation starts building a bomb, the pattern is set for others—and not just nations—to follow. The process is unstoppable. The box has been opened and, one fears, can never be closed. For all these reasons, it seems more valuable than ever to reacquaint ourselves with how it all began, and why. It is of course impossible for words to capture the true scale of what happened in Hiroshima on that hot August morning in 1945—or in the days, months, years, and decades afterwards. But the witnesses to that event, both in the air and on the ground, elderly women and men who generously invited me into their homes and told me their stories—they surely deserve to have those stories repeated, and especially now.

When I researched Shockwave their numbers were fast dwindling. Today, almost all of my witnesses are gone. A few of the people I met in Hiroshima who experienced the horror as children are still alive; but the crew of the Enola Gay, the aircraft that dropped the bomb, have all passed away. The last member of the committee which selected Hiroshima as the bomb’s target and whom I interviewed in 2004 has also died, as have all the scientists and every actor in the political drama which this book describes. On the sixtieth anniversary, I wrote that we were “slipping from a twilight of memory into history.” Today, fifteen years later, the twilight is almost entirely behind us; but the record these witnesses left behind will always be precious.

Stephen Walker

London, February 2020

INTRODUCTION

TWELVE MILES NORTH of Santa Fe, New Mexico, Highway 502 breaks westward from Route 285 at a little junction called Pojoaque. Take the turn, and you quickly find yourself climbing into the cool heights of the Pajarito mountains. The road snakes upward, higher and higher, winding past the ancient Indian settlements with their resonant Spanish names: Jaconita, El Rancho, San Ildefonso Pueblo. The air becomes perceptibly brighter and clearer. The heady scent of ponderosa pines permeates through the open car window. The view is utterly, enticingly glorious. To the east lie the distant peaks of the Sangre de Cristo range; to the south a wide basin, rich in yellows and pinks and greens, rolling back toward the haze of Santa Fe; to the west, the high mesa of the Jemez Plateau, and a small town that once harbored one of the world’s biggest secrets: Los Alamos, the place where the first atomic bombs were built.

I was there in May 2004, to meet a contributor as part of the research for this book. But halfway up the road I stopped to take in the view. It was midday and despite the altitude—over 7,000 feet—the sun burned the asphalt, creating shimmering pools of air back along the way I had come. The silence was overwhelming. With a sudden shock, I realized that on this very same stretch of highway, fifty-nine years ago, on a sunny summer’s morning just like this one, a closed black truck escorted by seven carloads of security guards crawled down the mountain from Los Alamos, past the old Indian pueblos, past the place where I had now parked my car, down into the plains of Santa Fe. The date was Saturday, July 14, 1945. Inside the black truck, sitting in a sealed lead bucket, was the uranium projectile for an atomic bomb. That afternoon, it was flown from Albuquerque to San Francisco. Two days later it sailed beneath the Golden Gate Bridge in the USS Indianapolis on its way across the Pacific. Twenty-three days later it was carried in the bomb bay of the B-29 Superfortress Enola Gay to the city of Hiroshima, where it exploded, killing at least 80,000 people. The journey started here, in these beautiful mountains with their limitless horizons. It ended there, at 9:16 A.M. on August 6, 1945, some 6,000 miles away, on the other side of the world. I was standing on a piece of history.

That journey became my journey. Over the following weeks and months, I followed in the bomb’s footsteps. I visited extraordinary places, I met extraordinary people. I spoke to men who had flown the mission to Hiroshima, to scientists who had built the bomb, to people who had survived it. I had tea with old ladies in Hiroshima hotels who told me stories of pain, despair, and courage beyond any imagining. I had dinner in a Chinese restaurant in California with the man who navigated the Enola Gay and its weapon over 1,500 miles of the Pacific. I sat in a Cambridge, Massachusetts, living room with the nuclear physicist who carried the core of the world’s first atomic bomb, tested in New Mexico three weeks earlier, in a suitcase on the backseat of his car.

I traveled from one coast of the United States to the other, to several cities in Japan, and finally to the tiny, remote island of Tinian in the western Pacific from where Enola Gay departed one tropical night on its mission to Hiroshima. On the way I collected odd pieces of physical evidence that sit in my study as I write: a piece of faintly radioactive trinitite, the strange, greenish, bombblasted earth that still surrounds the site of the first atomic test in New Mexico; a shard of crushed coral, still gleaming white, from the abandoned, jungle-rotted runway where Enola Gay took off six decades ago; a handful of rubble from the Peace Dome in Hiroshima, the one building in the city preserved exactly as it was on the day the bomb fell.

My journey has encompassed moments whose meanings I will always struggle to comprehend. I have been shocked, disturbed, thrilled, appalled, entranced, amazed, and deeply moved. In listening to people’s stories, and in the many accounts I also read, I found myself struck again and again by the confluence of events: the revelation of experiencing the same episode from so many different points of view. This became the core of my book. In moving between eyewitnesses on various parts of the globe I have tried to present one of the most decisive moments in history as it was experienced by people famous and obscure, powerful and ordinary, who lived it in the moment. We know what happened on that August morning in 1945. They did not.

The first atomic bomb was tested in the New Mexico desert on July 16, 1945—two days after that closed black truck with its lead bucket rode down the twisting highway from Los Alamos on the first leg of its trip across the world. Just three weeks separated the test from the destruction of Hiroshima. Only the resources of the richest and most powerful nation of earth could achieve something so colossal so quickly. Those three weeks, from the bomb’s dress rehearsal to its delivery, define the framework of this book. Inevitably any attempt to circumscribe an historical event—especially one as consequential and controversial as this—is bound to be flawed. There are so many roads leading to it. One can start anywhere, even as far back as Leucippus, the Greek philosopher who first proposed the idea of the atom in the fifth century B.C. I chose this brief period in the summer of 1945 because it seemed to me to contain almost every element which makes the story comprehensible, if not always complete. The world really did change in those three weeks, and forever.

What follows is the narrative of those weeks. As I wrote I tried always to keep to one key rule: that every event, incident, character trait, encounter, even piece of dialogue was, as far as possible, accurate and verifiable. Such errors of fact or judgment as there may be in a subject of this magnitude and complexity are of course entirely my responsibility. But this is not a piece of fiction.

Sixty years afterward, the events of July and August 1945 are slipping from a twilight of memory into history. Some of the people I interviewed have since died. Others will pass from us in the months and years to come. The witness they have left is infinitely precious: as a record, as an example, as a warning. In the kind of world we live in today, perhaps there has never been a better time to unfold the years, and return to the moment when it all began.

Stephen Walker

London, April 2005

A NOTE ON TIME

THE EVENTS in this book take place in a number of different time zones around the world. To avoid repetition and potential confusion, I have removed all time zones from the datelines that head the chapters. All times given are local, with one exception: Japan. In the summer of 1945, Japan War Time was one hour behind Guam War Time—the time used by the crewmembers of the Enola Gay on its mission to Hiroshima. For purposes of consistency, I have kept all events in Japan and the western Pacific on Guam War Time.

PROLOGUE TWELVE HOURS BEFORE ZERO

Sunday, August 5, 1945 Shukkeien Garden, Hiroshima

FOR THE REST of his life, Sunao Tsuboi would never forget how beautiful the garden looked that night. The trees, the lake, the little rainbow bridge, the ancient wooden teahouses dotting the banks, the smell of fresh pine, the white heron sleeping on the rock. The perfect stillness of it all. Outside, beyond the garden walls, the city slept in the darkness. In the blackout, it was almost possible to believe there was no city out there at all, no houses, no army, no war. As if he and Reiko, lying together under the stars, were the only people alive in the world. That is how he remembered it the night before the bomb.

They had entered the garden at dusk. There were four of them at first, but the other couple soon drifted away, leaving Sunao and Reiko alone. They wandered slowly along the little secret pathways, they sat in green hidden corners and listened to the cicadas and watched the turtles splashing in the water. At this time in summer the garden was full of flowers, and their scent carried on the night air. Even now, in this fifth year of war, when so many cities had been bombed to destruction, it was wonderful how the Shukkeien Garden survived intact. Designed by a seventeenth-century master of tea ceremonies, its miniaturized landscape idealized a perfect, ordered, peaceful world. The war had simply overlooked it.

As always, they had to be discreet. The authorities, not to mention their own families, disapproved of unmarried couples spending frivolous hours in each other’s company. These were times of self-sacrifice and denial. Every day the newspapers in Hiroshima urged its citizens to work harder and longer and faster, to focus all their energies and spirit on the single goal of victory. Japan was facing its greatest test in history. This was no moment for love.