Shockwave

Groves was utterly, almost endearingly shameless in his efforts to persuade people to spy on their friends, and he tried to do just that with Oppenheimer’s secretary, Anne Wilson. She bluntly refused, and wrote subsequently that Groves was almost certainly in love with Oppenheimer. She remembered Groves saying, “he has the bluest eyes you’ve ever seen, and they look right through you.” It was perhaps the shrewdest insight into this peculiar, unholy, extraordinarily productive, and ultimately world-changing partnership.

Now, as these two men stood outside the base camp canteen watching the approaching storm, they needed each other as never before. It was nearly midnight. Away from the madding crowd of scientists, they made a decision. The planned firing time of 0400 was scrubbed. Instead they agreed to meet at 2 A.M., along with the test’s chief meteorologist, Jack Hubbard. A final decision could then be made. And the New Mexico desert might yet see a second sun rising over the mountains.

Groves told Oppenheimer to get some rest. There was nothing to be done until later. The general went off to his tent and fell into a deep sleep. Oppenheimer obediently returned to his own tent. But he did not sleep. He lay wide awake, smoking and coughing his thick, heavy cough, while the lightning lit up the northern horizon and the wind blew dust devils around the camp.

THREE

Monday, July 16, 11 A.M. Little White House, Babelsberg, Near Potsdam, Germany

WHILE GROVES SLEPT and Oppenheimer smoked, Winston Churchill drove over to Truman’s villa in Babelsberg to meet the new president. Together with Jimmy Byrnes, Truman’s dapper, wily, South Carolinian secretary of state, they sat down in the grand drawing room whose German owners had only recently been evicted by the Russians. Despite Truman’s fears, the two men got on immediately. “He is a most charming and clever person,” wrote Truman in his diary that night. For his part, Churchill was attracted by Truman’s “gay, precise, sparkling manner.” He was also impressed by Truman’s immense determination. It was clear the new president was a man of decision. The two-tone shoes and natty suit were not mentioned.

There was no set brief for this meeting. But behind the informal, easy tone lay a deeper agenda: Stalin and the war in Japan. Four years ago, the Russians had signed a nonaggression pact with the Japanese. Technically it still had a year to run. But that was about to change. Back in February, at the last Big Three conference in Yalta, Stalin had made a promise. Within three months of the cessation of hostilities in Europe, he would tear up the pact and join in the war against Japan. On August 8, the three months would be up. In just twenty-three days, time would run out for the Japanese.

It would also run out for the Americans and the British. At this very moment, Stalin was moving more than a million troops toward his southern border with China, ready to pounce on the Japanese who occupied Manchuria. The Soviet leader could soon extend the hammer and sickle deep into China. His promise at Yalta was a harvest just waiting to be reaped. No doubt he would be more than happy to fulfill it.

Back in February, Churchill and Roosevelt had needed the Russians to help win the war against Japan. But the world at Yalta was a very different place from the world today at Potsdam. Back then the atom bomb was still a developing concept. Now it was sitting on a tower in New Mexico, waiting to be detonated in the next few hours. The bomb offered the perfect solution to a very dangerous crisis. It could win the war against Japan and it could win it quickly, before the Russians set so much as a foot inside Japanese territory. Stalin would understand then what a royal flush looked like when it stared him in the face.

As they sat in that sunny drawing room on that Monday morning, Truman and Churchill knew very well what was at stake. This was a dangerous diplomatic game, and it rested on two critical foundations. The first was that Stalin must not be told about the bomb until the last moment. If he knew, he might attack the Japanese even sooner, grabbing what he could before the Americans abruptly ended the war with their very big bang.

The second foundation was perhaps more directly pertinent. The bomb actually had to work.

JACK HUBBARD was running late for his 2 A.M. meeting with General Groves and Oppenheimer. Huddled in a portable hut near Ground Zero, the test’s thirty-one-year-old chief meteorologist was busy taking last-minute readings. The hut was packed with the very latest, state-of-the-art equipment. There were two army air force weather stations, there were radiosondes and pilot balloon wind observing sets. There were fifty years of New Mexico weather reports sitting in Hubbard’s desk and fourteen experienced meteorologists to advise him, including the man who had selected the day for the Normandy invasion. And all these highly trained people, with all their wondrous, cutting-edge technology, told exactly the same story. The weather was lousy.

The latest readings made accurate predictions almost impossible. For one thing, the winds were changing course with almost dizzying speed. Over the past twelve hours, they had shifted through an entire 360 degrees. The implications were potentially disastrous. Once the bomb went off—if it went off—it would almost certainly suck hundreds of tons of debris and dust into a vast and extremely lethal radioactive cloud that would then travel wherever the winds happened to take it. If the winds were moving east, the cloud would head directly toward the towns of Roswell and Carrizozo. If they were moving northwest, Socorro could be hit. The only chance of this great radioactive ball not unloading its contents on top of the sleeping inhabitants of any sizable conurbation was if the wind was moving northeast. Apart from the odd rancher, a few thousand cattle, plus an unknown number of rattlesnakes, tarantulas, and jackrabbits, there were no towns up that way.

Right now, Hubbard could not predict with any certainty what the winds were going to do in the next few minutes, let alone the next few hours. At 11 P.M., they were going north, threatening Socorro. At 1:15 A.M., they were heading south, directly over the control bunker and base camp. A few weeks earlier, the test’s director, Kenneth Bainbridge, had set out by jeep to chart possible escape routes out of the Jornada in case of catastrophe. He found just three: a poor road that ran southwest toward Elephant Butte, a new access road that ran north, and an old Spanish-Indian trail that meandered south through a pass in the mountains called Mockingbird Gap. To the personnel in the control bunker and base camp, Hubbard’s 1:15 A.M. finding was of more than academic interest. It meant that one of their key escape routes was now closed.

And the winds were only part of the problem. There was the lightning too, which—as Don Hornig knew only too well—could accidentally detonate the bomb. Perhaps most dangerous of all, there was the rain. Only two months earlier, on May 11, Oppenheimer himself had written a highly classified memo to General Groves about the perils of exploding an atomic bomb in what he called “conditions of high humidity.” The result, he wrote, might be to create a radioactive downpour in which “most of the active material will be brought down by the rain in the vicinity of the target area.” The language may be dry, but the message was brutal. Explode the bomb in these conditions, and the result would almost certainly be a deadly radioactive cocktail just waiting to dump its poison straight back onto the ground. Oppenheimer’s words were not lost on Hubbard as he cowered in his portable weather hut. Nor would they be lost on the people of Hiroshima who would experience the exact same phenomenon in just three weeks. Except their language would be more direct. They called it black rain.

To prevent the same catastrophe affecting millions of Americans, teams of fallout monitors were now stationed across the Jornada and beyond. Some of them were driving jeeps so they could chase the radioactive cloud whichever way it happened to go. All of them were in radio contact with one another, using code names borrowed from The Wizard of Oz. The chief monitor was the Tin Woodsman, based in Carrizozo, in the northern Jornada. There were monitors as far away as San Antonio and Fort Sumner, as well as in all three concrete bunkers positioned 10,000 yards from the tower. Headquarters were at base camp, where the test’s senior medical officer would man a command post. He would also keep an open telephone line to a deputy waiting 160 miles north in a Santa Fe hotel room. If the bomb or the radioactive cloud wiped out base camp, this deputy would automatically take command. He would also direct any major evacuations from towns and cities.

The army was out there too. Twenty security officers were positioned within a 100-mile radius to coordinate those evacuations should they be necessary. One hundred twenty-five military policemen were detailed to guard the site during the test, blocking off all access routes. Another 160 men, equipped with trucks, jeeps, and extra rations, were now sitting in the rain north of Trinity, ready to rescue any remote farming communities if the fallout cloud happened to go that way. The base commanders at Alamogordo and Kirtland airports were ordered to establish relief shelters, stockpiled with food and hundreds of cots, in case larger evacuations were required. They were never told why. Nor were they told why they were required to halt all civilian and military air traffic throughout the night.

Now, across the state of New Mexico, an entire population of Americans slept through this stormy night, utterly unaware of the potential dangers surrounding them. Unaware, but not entirely unprotected. After all, nobody wanted this American bomb to kill Americans. The purpose, in the end, was to kill Japanese.

FOUR

Monday, July 16 Japanese Embassy, Moscow

NAOTAKE SATO was drinking heavily these days. The Japanese ambassador to the Soviet Union knew every movement he made was watched day and night by the secret police. Technically his country was still at peace with the Soviets, but the warmth that had once existed between the two nations had cooled to freezing point. Japan was losing the war. Its cities were in ruins, its empire was crumbling, its armies were on the run. It was obvious to Sato that the Russians had little to gain from their nonaggression pact with Japan.

Two days ago, Stalin and his foreign minister, Vyacheslav Molotov, had departed for Potsdam. The writing was on the wall. As Sato worked in his office near Moscow’s Red Square on this humid morning, the conclusion was inescapable: the Soviet leader knew exactly where his future interests lay. And they were not with Japan. All of which made the growing pile of cables from Tokyo on his desk depressing reading. They had been arriving almost every day, and sometimes more than once. Their author was Shigenori Togo, Japan’s foreign minister, a canny, sixty-two-year-old ex-diplomat whom the emperor had brought back from retirement for one purpose: to seek an honorable way out of the war. The key would be the Russians.

Just four days earlier, on July 12, the emperor had received a former prime minister and close political ally in the Imperial Palace. His name was Prince Fumimaro Konoye, and he was quickly ushered into the emperor’s private apartments. The prince bowed low to the man worshipped throughout Japan as a god: the Emperor Hirohito, Son of Heaven and descendant of the Sun Goddess Amaterasu, the divinity who had inaugurated his reign in 1926 as the era of Showa, of Enlightened Peace. But the man standing before Prince Konoye did not look like a god now. He looked like what he was: an exhausted, emaciated, frightened forty-four-yearold insomniac with a twitching right cheek, a powerless and reluctant divinity living amid the ruins of his beloved city.

The emperor was unusually direct. He requested Prince Konoye travel to Moscow as his imperial envoy. Konoye’s duty was clear: he must do everything possible to persuade the Russians to mediate in the war. The emperor’s name would underwrite his efforts, sealing his authority and guaranteeing his plea. The Russians would understand the imperial envoy meant business. Perhaps they would agree to broker a peace from which the emperor and his people could still emerge with their honor intact.

It was a very risky strategy. There were powerful elements in the cabinet who still believed the war should be fought to the bitter end—even if this meant the mass suicide of the Japanese people. To these people, the men who espoused peace were objects of hatred. They were constantly watched by the Kempei, the Japanese secret police. Their lives were in danger. But to the emperor, to his foreign minister Togo, and to Prince Konoye, there had to be an alternative. The search for peace was becoming more desperate with each bomb dropped on a Japanese city. And the bombs were dropping every day.

The cables sitting on Sato’s desk in Moscow represented Togo’s latest efforts to get the Russians on board. Konoye was still waiting to leave Tokyo. Again and again, Togo urged Sato to persuade the Russians to grant the prince an audience. But the Russians were stalling. Just three days ago, on July 13, Sato had met Alexander Lozovsky, the Russian deputy foreign minister, in the Kremlin. He had presented Lozovsky with a letter directly from the emperor, requesting consent to Konoye’s mission. Lozovsky had responded evasively. The Soviet government, he said, was unclear about the terms of the visit. They needed greater clarification. Moreover, he added, all the key Soviet ministers were leaving that very night for Potsdam. A decision would have to wait.

Sato returned to his office, dejected. Behind Lozovsky’s diplomatic niceties lay a stark and simple truth: the Russians were not interested. The sixty-three-year-old diplomat had been in the game too long not to recognize the realities facing his country. He understood the world outside Japan perhaps better than anybody. He had served as ambassador in innumerable European capitals. He was a tiny man, barely five feet tall, but his capacity for plain speaking was both legendary and atypically Japanese. He had never liked this war, and he did not like it now. Togo’s cables were a step in the right direction, but they did not go far enough. They were too tentative, and they missed the point. There was only one way to make peace in Sato’s mind: unconditional surrender. Sato had already explained this to Togo in his last cable. “The war,” he had written, “has brought us to a real extremity. The government should make the great decision.” If his government did not make the great decision, the consequences for Japan would be terrible. But not even Sato could imagine just how terrible.

IN HIS apartment across the lake from Truman’s villa in Babelsberg, Henry Stimson examined the files on his desk. The American secretary of war was seventy-seven years old and his eyes were not what they used to be, but the message in the files was clear enough. Each one was headed “MAGIC” DIPLOMATIC SUMMARY with a number and a date. Inside each was a sheaf of typewritten papers: a carefully decoded, meticulously translated copy of every secret cable Shigenori Togo and Naotake Sato were sending to each other across the world.

The Americans had long since broken the Japanese diplomatic codes. They were now following every move of the game. Togo’s drive for Russian mediation, Sato’s failures with Lozovsky, all the machinations of this desperate telegraphic communication were laid bare and exposed. Every two or three days, the “Magic” summaries were updated and sent to the president and his key advisers, including the secretary of war. The question was, what to make of them?

As he sat at his desk on that summer’s morning in July, Stimson cut a curiously incongruous impression for a secretary of war. He looked every inch the old-school gentleman, almost the paradigm of old-fashioned American values, with his carefully combed white hair and fine, aristocratic features. Yet this man, born just two years after Lincoln’s assassination in 1865, had spent the war years nursing the most revolutionary weapon in history. The career diplomat who had been secretary of war in 1911 under President Taft was today one of the key architects of the atomic bomb. He was the bridge between the president and General Groves, the critical link in a chain of command that stretched from Potsdam all the way back to the bomb makers now waiting for the rain to stop in New Mexico. As chairman of the innocuously named Interim Committee—inaugurated by Stimson to decide America’s atomic policy—he had unhesitatingly recommended using the bomb on the Japanese. A key meeting of the committee had taken place in Stimson’s Pentagon office on May 31, just six weeks ago. Its eight core members were drawn from a mix of leading government figures and distinguished scientists—men who had been associated with the bomb project almost since its inception. Included was the president’s own special representative, Jimmy Byrnes, the tough, hard-line South Carolinian who would shortly be appointed Truman’s secretary of state and would later accompany him to Potsdam. A four-man scientific panel was also invited, one of whose members was Oppenheimer. The military were there, too: General George Marshall, the chief of staff, perhaps the most powerful figure in the U.S. Army; and of course General Groves. An interesting addition was Arthur Page, head of public relations at AT & T. Even at this stage, the publicity impact of the bomb was a central concern.

The committee’s conclusions had been blunt and uncompromising. Stimson, with typical concision, summed them up: Japan, he said, should be bombed without warning. The target should not concentrate on a civilian area, but it should be chosen to “make a profound psychological impression on as many of the inhabitants as possible.” Nobody pointed out the possible contradiction inherent in these two statements. Not even when James Conant, the president of Harvard, suggested that “the most desirable target would be a vital war plant employing a large number of workers and closely surrounded by workers’ houses.” Nothing was said about the families of those workers. The alternative of first demonstrating the bomb to the enemy was discussed just once—over lunch. It was rejected. There was always the danger the Japanese might fail to be impressed, especially if the device turned out to be a dud.

The following day, at the end of another session of the committee, Byrnes reported its conclusions to the president. Truman accepted its findings. “While reluctant to use this weapon,” recalled Byrnes later, he “saw no way of avoiding it.” A critical step had been taken toward the final order to drop the bomb; and it was Stimson who had helped to make it happen.

But Stimson also hated the bomb. In the notes to his opening speech at the May 31 meeting, he described it as a Frankenstein monster that could devour mankind. Its very existence threatened the civilized values of the world he had grown up in, and loved. With remarkable acuity for a man of his generation, he grasped the essential point about the bomb: that it changed everything, even the very nature of man’s relationship to the universe. If there were the remotest chance of not using it, it would be inhuman not to seize it. Perhaps the pile of secret cables now sitting on his desk offered just that chance.

Unlike almost all the politicians and diplomats who surrounded the president, Stimson knew his Orient. As a former governorgeneral of the Philippines, he had visited Japan twice in the 1920s. He did not belong to the ranks of Americans who saw the Japanese as a monolithic race of half-alien fanatics. He believed there were liberal elements in the country, civilized, decent people like himself who were sickened by the killing and who wanted a way out. The Japa-nese foreign minister’s pleas offered a tantalizing glimpse into that possibility. “His Majesty,” Togo had cabled Sato four days earlier on July 12, “is deeply reluctant to have any further blood lost on both sides. It is his desire for the welfare of humanity to restore peace with all possible speed.” Unconditional surrender was the single obstacle to that peace. Should the Allies continue to demand it, Japan had no alternative but to “fight on with all its strength for the honor and existence of the Motherland.”

Even now, hours before the bomb was due to be tested in New Mexico, a window for peace might exist. Everything depended on the terms the Japanese were offered. The key, as Stimson understood very well, was their god. Guarantee them their emperor, he believed, and they would surely give the Americans their victory. Nor was he alone in his thinking. His assistant secretary, John McCloy, pressed the same point: “We should have our heads examined,” he said, “if we don’t consider a political solution.” The undersecretary of the navy, Ralph Bard, had even resigned from the Interim Committee over the issue. “The stakes are so tremendous,” he wrote in his resignation note on June 27. “The only way to find out is to try it out.”

In the next few days, Truman would issue his ultimatum to the Japanese government. McCloy had already drafted a clause that permitted postwar Japan a “constitutional monarchy under the present dynasty.” Stimson now had to persuade the president to accept that clause—and quickly. Let the Japanese keep their emperor, he had urged Truman in a memorandum just two weeks before, and “it would substantially add to the chances of acceptance.” No invasion, no bomb, no monster.

Stimson was sleeping badly and he had pains in his chest and he was worried about his wife, Mabel, who had recently had a serious fall. But his duty was clear. The old reluctant secretary of war would pursue the peace he prayed was still possible. Before Frankenstein’s monster devoured them all.

FIVE THOUSAND miles away, some of the men who had created that monster were also fighting to destroy it. As the bomb makers in New Mexico waited through the stormy night, a Manhattan Project scientist in the University of Chicago was desperately circulating a petition among his colleagues for signatures. The substance of the petition was a passionately argued appeal to stop atom bombs from ever being used. What made it unusual was that it was addressed directly to the president himself.

Its author was Leo Szilard, a squat, pot-bellied, forceful fortyseven-year-old Hungarian Jewish exile, a brilliant nuclear physicist who lived his life out of suitcases and believed he had a mission to change the world. Szilard’s opposition to the bomb was positively messianic, but what made it especially ironic was that on September 12, 1933, just twelve years earlier, he had first conceived the idea of the atomic bomb in the time it took for a traffic light on a London street to change from red to green.

The idea horrified him. What horrified him even more over the following decade was that the Germans might have had the same idea. By 1939, he was instrumental in persuading the United States government to build their own bomb. With Albert Einstein, he drafted a letter to Roosevelt warning of the acute Nazi danger. There was evidence, he wrote, that the Germans were developing an atomic program. Hitler would have no compunction about using nuclear weapons. The only answer to a German bomb was an American bomb. Roosevelt was persuaded. “Pa,” he said to his secretary, Brigadier General Edwin “Pa” Watson, “this requires action!” The driving force for what later became the Manhattan Project was in place: it rested, fundamentally, on the possibilities of a German nuclear threat. Japan, with only a very fledgling atomic program, never entered into it.

By the spring of 1945, all that had changed. The Germans were effectively defeated. It was also clear that they did not have an atomic bomb. Hitler’s loathing for what he called “Jewish physics” had blinded him to the temptations of almost unlimited power. The Manhattan Project’s own agents had swept into Germany behind the Allied troops: the Nazis, they discovered, were years behind the Americans. At the very moment the scientists in New Mexico were busy preparing for Trinity, the whole reason for having nuclear weapons was fast disintegrating. Or so it seemed to Leo Szilard. From being the bomb’s greatest apologist—indeed, one of its prime movers—he suddenly became its implacable enemy. He crusaded to stop it altogether. And other scientists joined his crusade.