The Extraordinary Story of the Atomic Bomb and the 116 Days that Changed the World
By Chris Wallace with Mitch Weiss
But big as it was , the Pentagon paled in comparison to the Manhattan Project. Creating an atomic bomb was a devilishly complex process. First, the country had to produce radioactive fuel. Then it had to figure out how to safely detonate the fission process – setting off an atomic chain reaction at the right moment and in the right place. And it had to pull all of this off in complete secrecy.
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He decided the bulk of the work would take place in three sites, code-named X, Y, and W. Each would specialize in a particular aspect of the project. The massive, secure bases would be custom-built from the ground up. The first, Project X, went up in rural Tennessee, about twenty-five miles northwest of Knoxville. Engineers and contractors swarmed to the area , known as Oak Ridge, in February 1943, and built research laboratories, office buildings, and employee housing, all secured by protective fencing and sentry posts. Project X was an enrichment facility, the source of weapons-grade uranium for atomic bombs. Here work separated tiny amounts of the chain-reaction isotope U-235 from tons of uranium, a time-consuming process. A “jug-sized” block of U-235 required thousands of tons of the raw material. The enriched uranium was stored in a hollowed-out bluff near an abandoned farmhouse. Groves wanted to stockpile as much fissionable nuclear weapons fuel as possible, so he built the world’s first permanent nuclear reactor in Oak Ridge. It used uranium to generate a second source of nuclear fuel in the form of plutonium. Plutonium-239 possessed even greater explosive potential than its parent compound. Plutonium rarely occurs in nature, and fissionable plutonium-239 has no real use other than as a nuclear explosive. In a matter of months, Oak Ridge was generating stockpiles of U-235 and plutonium-239, but the Manhattan Project needed more than Oak Ridge could supply. Site W, another processing facility, went up in Hanford, Washington, in September 1944. Suddenly the United States needed uranium, and lots of it.
The only known deposits in the United States were in the Rocky Mountains, but Colorado didn’t have nearly enough to meet the need. Groves turned to the Belgian Congo. Belgium had surrendered to the Nazis in 1940, but the Congo still remained on the Allied side. In 1943, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers provided free construction services to a Belgian mining company that owned the Congolese uranium mines.
With a fuel supply in place, Groves still needed somewhere to assemble the bomb. Oppenheimer led Groves to Los Alamos, where the scientist spent part of his childhood. The remote site was perfect, and soon became the Weapons and Design Lab-code-named Y.
While Oppenheimer and Groves got along, the general insisted civilian employees in Los Alamos operate in utter secrecy and demonstrate military-like efficiency.
His brusque manner offended many of the independent-minded scientists, who dreaded his visits to Los Alamos. The disdain was mutual. Groves described the scientists as “children, crackpots and prima donnas.”
“I am the impresario of a two-billion-dollar grand opera with thousands of temperamental stars,” Groves said.
Now, on April 25, here in the Oval Office, the “opera” was getting close to its premiere. General Groves handed the president a twenty-four-page report that described S-1 in great detail. Truman read his copy, while Stimson and Groves shared another.
The memo started with the “Purpose of Development”: “The successful development of the Atomic fission bomb will provide the United States with a weapon of tremendous power which should be a decisive factor in winning the present war more quickly with a saving in American lives and treasure.”
Groves detailed the unimaginable power of this new superweapon: “Each bomb is estimated to have the equivalent effect of from 5,000 to 20,000 tons of TNT now, and ultimately, possibly as much as 100,000 tons.”
The Groves report explained the explosive power of atomic fission in considerable technical detail. It described how the bomb was being manufactured. It reviewed the history of the Manhattan Project, from its genesis in 1939, to the transition to the manufacturing phase, to the “extraordinary security measures” that had been taken to keep the entire operation “top secret.”
And the report discussed “foreign activities.” It said since 1943, Russia “evinced a strong interest in our activities and through its diplomatic, information and espionage groups in the United States has made efforts to secure particularized information concerning the project.”
As for Germany, the report noted the number of its scientists in the atomic field and said since 1941, there had been reports Germany was about to use an atomic bomb of tremendous force.” But with the Nazi regime in collapse, it stated, “There would no longer appear to be any possibility that Germany could use an atomic bomb in this war.”
The report concluded: “Atomic energy, if controlled by the major peace-loving nations, should insure the peace of the world for decades to come. If misused it can lead our civilization to annihilation.”
(Wallace and Weiss 2020, 47-49)
The Target Committee had met twice in May at Oppenheimer’s office at Los Alamos. Everyone agreed the first atomic explosion should be sufficiently spectacular for the importance of the weapon to be fully recognized internationally. They looked at places untouched by Allied bombing still – thriving cities the Japanese felt were stable and safe.
They chose five potential targets:
KYOTO: The former capital of Japan was an urban industrial area with a population of one million people, according to a Target Committee memo. “Many people and industries are now being moved there as other areas are being destroyed. From the psychological point of view there is the advantage that Kyoto is an intellectual center for Japan bugs and the people there are more apt to appreciate the significance of such a weapon as the gadget.”
HIROSHIMA: An important army depot and port of embarkation in the middle of an urban industrial area. “It is such a size that a large part of the city could be extensively damaged. There are adjacent hills which are likely to produce a focusing effect which would considerably increase the blast damage.”
YOKOHAMA: “An important urban industrial area which has so far been untouched. Industrial activities include aircraft manufacture, machine tools, docks, electrical equipment and oil refineries.”
KOKURA: Home to one of the largest arsenals in Japan, it was surrounded by urban industry. “The arsenal is important for light ordnance, anti-aircraft and beachhead defense materials.”
NIIGATA: A strategic port city. “Its importance is increasing as other ports are damaged.”
As soon as he saw the list, Secretary of War Stimson saved Kyoto. He had a fondness for the city, which he’d visited long ago and remembered as “the shrine of Japanese art and culture.”
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The committee went back to reviewing the targets. After several hours, the group agreed Hiroshima was the best choice for the first bomb drop. It was home to 285,000 people and 43,000 military personnel. The Second General Army, under the command of Field Marshal Shunroku Hata, was based there. His command force would defend the island of Honshu if and when Allied forces launched an invasion of the Japanese homeland. The surrounding area was dotted with military targets: shipyards, an airport, and an aircraft parts factory. While many of the buildings in the center of the city were built with reinforced concrete, the businesses and homes on the outskirts were mostly framed with wood. So many details still had to be worked out before they could even set a date for the mission. But, like the others, Tibbets knew Hiroshima would be the perfect target.
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Hideko hated the place, even though she knew why her parents were sent away from Hiroshima. Everyone feared the U.S. warplanes. B-29s had firebombed many Japanese cities, but Hiroshima hadn’t been hit yet. It was only a matter of time.
When the government evacuated children from Hiroshima to rural areas for their safety, their parents didn’t protest. While they didn’t want to be separated from their sons and daughters, they understood the risks of staying behind. They comforted themselves with government assurances that evacuees would be well-fed and schooled.
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The country was tired of war. More than three years after the Pearl Harbor attack, every aspect of American life continued to revolve around the conflict. Factories churned out tanks and planes. Schools turned out young men who were still being drafted and deployed overseas. Women and children looked more and more like refugees because food, fabrics, clothes, and household items were still being rationed. There was a flutter of optimism when Germany surrendered. Maybe the war with Japan would be over soon, maybe most of the soldiers and sailors would be home by Christmas…but that hope flickered out a little more each day.
President Truman didn’t mince words when he told Congress, “There is no easy way to win” in Japan. Victory would mean doubling the number of American forces in the Pacific to four million. Allies promised to pitch in, but Truman tamped down expectations. “We have not yet come up against the main strength of the Japanese military force of four million troops under arms and several million additional men of military age who have not yet been called to the colors.”
Truman’s message was a bucket of cold water on the hopes of America. Every time a war-weary citizen opened a newspaper, turned on the radio, or went to the movies, the news was an endless vision of battles, bombs, and casualty reports.
The newspaper on Stimson’s desk reported the grizzled US. Fin Amy, which had spearheaded the drive from Normandy to Berlin, was now being deployed to the Pacific. The American Baptist Foreign Mission found evidence of war crimes: apparently Japanese soldiers had beheaded eleven pastors and a pastor’s nine-year-old son two year earlier in the Philippines. The inside pages enumerated the $280 billion America had already spent fighting the Nazis and the Japanese. Another story focused on Osaka, the latest city to burn in American firebombing raids. The reporter quoted General Curtis LeMay, the man in charge of the relentless air campaign: “No matter how you slice it, you’re going to kill an awful lot of citizens.”
Stimson abhorred this war of massive destruction. He was a soldier, yes, but also a humanist, a diplomat, a champion of international law and morality. He believed that war ” must be restrained within the bounds of humanity. Airpower should be limited to “legitimate military targets.”
But World War II had upended noble rules of engagement, Germany and Japan had ruthlessly targeted civilians in cities and towns and herded “undesirables” into death camps. America wasn’t like that, he maintained Deliberately targeting civilians for mass killing was immoral. But now his country was poised to unleash a weapon that would kill an incalculable number of people. And that was his conundrum: Stimson was both awed by the weapon’s destructive power and appalled. Stimson had called the bomb both “a Frankenstein” and a “means for world peace.”
Stimson had expressed his concerns to Truman. He told the president that the reputation of the United States for fair play and humanitarianism was “the world’s biggest asset for peace in the coming decades. I believe the same rule of sparing the civilian population should be applied, as far as possible, to the uses of any new weapons.”
With the date for the first test of the atomic bomb drawing closer, Stimson rushed to create a new policy, some guidelines for the proper use of nuclear weapons in war, as well as peacetime. With Truman’s blessing, Stimson in early May established an Interim Committee, until a more formal nuclear control organization could be created.
Stimson was the director, and eight prominent industrial, scientific, and political figures filled out the panel, including Vannevar Bush, an electrical engineer who oversaw the government mobilization of scientific research during World War II, and James Conant, president of Harvard University. Four Manhattan Project leaders, including Oppenheimer and Enrico Fermi, represented the scientific community.
General Groves supported Stimson’s idea. The committee would show the world that “the very important decision as to the use of the bomb was not made by the War Department alone but rather that they were decisions reached by a group of individuals well removed from the immediate influence of men in uniforms.”
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After Roosevelt died, Szilard arranged a White House meeting with Truman, but was passed off at the last minute to James Byrnes, the president’s representative on the Interim Committee. Szilard and two colleagues visited Byrnes at his home in Spartanburg, South Carolina. The meeting didn’t go as planned.
Szilard told Byrnes he’d spent many sleepless nights thinking about “the wisdom of testing bombs and using bombs.” Other nations were hard at work on their own nuclear programs , and would likely have bombs of their own in a few years. “Perhaps the greatest immediate danger which faces us is the possibility our ‘demonstration’ of atomic bombs will precipitate a race in the production of these devices between the United States and Russia,” he warned.
But Byrnes, a former U.S. senator and Supreme Court justice, and soon to be Truman’s secretary of state , was a born politician. To him, the atomic bomb represented U.S. power over other nations. It would defeat Japan, he believed, and keep the Soviet Union from expanding its influence in Asia and Europe.
Szilard left the meeting disappointed, saying Byrnes was more concerned about the Soviets’ postwar behavior than the moral price of using a weapon of mass destruction. Szilard didn’t give up. He collected the names of like-minded scientists and went to work persuading the American government not to use the bomb against civilian populations.
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But as keenly as he missed his family, there was something much bigger troubling him – how would he end the war in the Pacific? He had learned about the Manhattan Project and its frightening potential. He had talked with top advisers and generals. He was getting a lot of different advice. He needed to decide on a path forward, even if it was just a placeholder.
Now, at 3:30 on the afternoon of June 18, President Truman convened a meeting of his War Cabinet, which included the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the top civilian officials from the War Department. In the room were some of the giants of mid-twentieth-century America. General of the A War Henry Stimson. Assistant Secretary John J. McCloy, who would go on to George Marshall, who would later serve as secretary of state . Secretary to hold posts ranging from high commissioner for Germany to president of the World Bank to a member of the Warren Commission, investigating the Kennedy assassination.
Other participants were just as accomplished: Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal; Fleet Admiral William Leahy, who served Roosevelt and now Truman as chief of staff; Fleet Admiral Ernest King, who was chief of naval operations; and Lieutenant General I.C. Eaker of the Army Air Forces, representing General Hap Arnold, who was recovering from a heart attack.
The agenda for the meeting was as ambitious as the luminaries in the room: how to force Japan’s unconditional surrender and end World War II. For weeks, Truman had listened to different opinions about the atomic bomb. The Interim Committee recommended using it as soon as possible against Japan – and without warning – “to make a profound psychological impression on as many inhabitants as possible.”
Truman considered another option: staging a demonstration of the weapon prior to using it in combat. But there were two problems with that approach. If the weapon failed to work, it would only fuel Japan’s resolve to fight on. And American prisoners of war might be relocated into the line of fire.
While most military leaders favored using America’s new super weapon, there were notable exceptions. General Douglas MacArthur , commander of U.S. Army Forces in the Pacific believed Japan’s “defeat was inevitable” and it was unwise to unleash such a destructive new weapon of war. General Dwight Eisenhower, supreme commander of Allied forces in Europe, made the same argument.
And then there was the president’s chief of staff, Admiral Leahy, the nation’s highest-ranking military officer, who was firmly on record against the atomic bomb for a different reason: the “damn thing” will never work, he said. He called it “all the biggest bunk in the world.”
It was against this backdrop that Truman called his top military and civilian advisers to order on June 18. The president turned first to General Marshall , who said the situation in the Pacific now was “practically identical” to what they confronted in Europe before D-Day. Marshall had a similar strategy — a major ground invasion of the Japanese proposed homeland , beginning on the southern island of Kyushu on November 1, “cutting to a minimum Jap time for preparation of defenses.”
Marshall turned to projected casualties. He noted the number of Americans killed, wounded, and missing in the first thirty days of Normandy was 42,000. American troops suffered similar casualties in the fierce fighting at Okinawa. But, Marshall said, “There is reason to believe that the first thirty days in Kyushu should not exceed the price we have paid for Luzon,” a major battle in MacArthur’s campaign to retake the Philippines that had cost fewer American casualties: 31,000.
He added, “It is a grim fact that there is not an easy, bloodless way to victory in war and it is the thankless task of the leaders to maintain their firm outward front which holds the resolution of their subordinates.” The proposed invasion of Kyushu already had a code name: “Olympic.” And Marshall had a remarkably precise request for the number of troops that would be needed – 766,700. Truman asked Chief of Staff Leahy for his estimate of casualties. The admiral noted American troops on Okinawa had lost 35 percent in casualties, which would translate to a quarter of a million to invade Japan.
Some estimates of potential losses were even higher. General Mar shall’s staff believed that the full ground campaign to defeat Japan – code name “Downfall” -would cost 500,000 to a million lives. The invasion of the main island of Honshu would not begin until March 1946. In other words, the war would drag on for months, perhaps years.
The president turned to Secretary Stimson. He asked if the secretary believed “the invasion of Japan by white men would not have the effect of more closely uniting the Japanese.” Stimson said it probably would. Secretary Forrestal added that the full operation might take a year, or even a year and a half to complete.
Truman said he hoped to get a firm commitment from Russia to enter the war in August , and perhaps shorten Japan’s resistance, Admiral demand – unconditional surrender by the Japanese – fearing, it would Leahy raised the possibility of accepting less than the current American only make the enemy more determined to fight on and kill more Amen cans.
But the president knew softening the terms for surrender in any way would be politically explosive. He was not ready to try to change public opinion on the matter.
It was clear to Truman just how terrible the cost of invading Japan would be. The current campaign to capture Okinawa was vivid proof, U.S. military planners had predicted it would take two days to seize control of the island. The battle for the eight square miles was now in its seventy-eighth day. Even when the Japanese lost 100,000 of their 120,000 men on the island , and were obviously defeated, thousands of Japanese soldiers kept fighting, in many cases falling on their own grenades rather than surrender. If the enemy fought that fiercely for Okinawa, what would they do to defend their homeland?
Still, the president ended the discussion by ordering the Joint Chiefs to proceed with their plan to invade Kyushu, adding he would “decide as to final action later.”
As the meeting was starting to break up and the War Cabinet was preparing to leave, Truman realized that John M cCloy, his assistant secretary of war, had not said a word yet.
“McCloy,” he said, “nobody leaves this room until he’s been heard from. Do you think I have any reasonable alternative to the decision which has just been made?”
McCloy was a more important figure than his title of assistant secretary indicated. He was a highly respected member of the New York legal community. Stimson brought him to Washington as his troubleshooter, and tried to ensure he got the chance to weigh in on every major decision about the war.
It turned out McCloy had plenty to say. For the last hour, there had been detailed discussions of invasions, troop levels, and casualties. But there had not been a single mention of the atomic bomb, which could potentially end the war more than a year sooner and save hundreds of thousands of American lives.
“Well, I do think you’ve got an alternative,” McCloy told the president. “We ought to have our heads examined if we don’t explore some other method by which we can terminate this war than just by another conventional attack and landing.”
Then he did something no one else in the meeting had done – he brought up the bomb. Even though all of them were thoroughly briefed on the Manhattan Project, there was a deafening silence in the room. “As soon as I mentioned the word ‘bomb’ – the atomic bomb – even in that select circle, it was sort of a shock,” he recalled later. “You didn’t mention the bomb out loud; it was like mentioning Skull and Bones [the secret Yale student fraternity] in polite society at Yale. It just wasn’t done.”
Now McCloy pressed on. “I would tell them [the Japanese] we have the bomb and I would tell them what kind of weapon it is.” If they still refused to surrender, “I think our moral position would be better if we gave them a specific warning of the bomb.”
The pushback was immediate. What if the bomb didn’t work? The United States would be embarrassed, and the Japanese would be more determined than ever. McCloy refused to back down. “All of our scientists have told us that the thing will go off,” he said.
Having now heard from everyone in the room, Truman ended the meeting, saying the group should “discuss this.” He approved plans for a ground invasion deploying 766,700 American troops.
It was clear that no decision would be made about using the atomic bomb until it was tested successfully. For now, it was an ambitious, terrifying science project.
(Wallace and Weiss 2020, 93-98)
And Los Alamos was a security nightmare. Too many people worked together in one place, toward a common goal. To prevent espionage, General Groves insisted the project scientists keep their work compartmentalized, limiting the number of people who knew the overall scope and progress of the effort.
But Oppenheimer took the opposite tack. He encouraged scientists from different departments to meet , share their work, and cooperate. Oppie often moderated these group discussions himself. It fostered creativity, efficiency, and teamwork. But that approach made it easier for spies to gather information. If that happened, Groves knew it would haunt America long after the war was over.
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Most of all, the new president worried about how he would get along with the two leaders. Roosevelt spent more than one hundred days with Churchill, often at the White House. The two men stayed up late into the night, talking about military plans, but also sharing stories about their long and eventful lives. FDR also thought he had developed a good working relationship with Stalin.
Truman was confident in his ability to deal with people. He felt that “complicated” problems really weren’t so complicated. Once people sat down and discussed issues face-to-face, they could work through differences. Still, this was the world’s biggest stage, a stage Truman had never seen before, let alone taken a lead role on.
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Truman had seen destruction as an artillery officer during World War I, but never anything like this. There were long, wandering lines of homeless German civilians – old men, women, and children – pushing or pulling all that was left of their belongings. The younger men were gone, sacrificed to Hitler’s twisted dreams. And everywhere was the overwhelming stench of death in the July heat. But if Truman was shocked by the devastation , he was also clear – eyed. “I never saw such destruction. I don’t know whether they learned anything from it or not.”
The president was waiting for word of the first test of a nuclear bomb, a weapon so destructive that, if it worked, it would change forever the nature of war and man’s ability to destroy his fellow man. It was on his mind as he reflected on what he saw in Berlin.
“I thought of Carthage, Baalbec [sic], Jerusalem, Rome, Atlanta, Peking, Babylon, Ninevah, -Scipio, Ramses II … Sherman, Jenghis Khan, Alexander …. I hope for some sort of peace – but I fear that machines are ahead of morals by some centuries and when morals catch there’ll be no reason for it.”
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On Compania Hill, the white light was so bright and lasted so James Conant thought the “whole world has gone up in flames.” Edward Teller said the burst was like “opening the heavy curtains of a darkened room to a flood of sunlight.” In the control bunker, Kistiakowsky said, “I am sure that at the end of the world in the last milli-second of the earth’s existence, the last man will see what we saw.”
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During lunch, the three men discussed strategy in the Pacific and whether to drop the bomb. Truman gave Bradley the impression that he’d already made up his mind to use the new superweapon. The president didn’t ask either man for advice, but Eisenhower decided to give his anyway.
When Stimson first informed him about the bomb three days before, Eisenhower was engulfed by a “feeling of depression.” Now he told the president about his ” grave misgivings. “First, Japan was already defeated. Using such a fearsome explosive was unnecessary. Second, he thought the United States “should avoid shocking world opinion” by being the first nation to so dramatically escalate the nature of warfare by deploying a true weapon of mass destruction.
Eisenhower also advised Truman to be in no hurry to get Stalin to enter the war. Like other presidential advisers, Ike was worried about what the Soviets would do in the Far East. But Truman still wanted the Russians in the fight.
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As the president listened to Stimson finish the report, he felt “an entirely new confidence.” Stimson had taken the Groves’ dispatch to Churchill the next day. The prime minister responded with his inimitable sense of his and theater: “Stimson, what was gunpowder? Trivial. What was electricity? Meaningless. The atomic bomb is the second coming of wrath.”
But if the bomb gave Truman greater assurance he could end the war on his terms, he continued to hope he would never have to use it. He was still looking for a way out. And that would take the form of a carefully worded ultimatum to Tokyo, to be issued by the three nations at war with Japan – the United States, Britain, and China – as the Potsdam Declaration.
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Truman braced himself. He didn’t know how Stalin would react. Would he be angry the United States had undertaken a major research and development project, created a devastating new bomb, and kept it secret from an ally for years?
Stalin said he was glad to hear it and hoped the United States would make “good use of it against the Japanese.”
That was it. No questions about the nature of the weapon. Nothing about sharing it with the Russians. American and British officials were shocked. The U.S. translator wasn’t entirely sure that Truman’s had gotten through.
Afterward, Churchill came up to Truman and asked, “How did it go?”
“He never asked a question,” the president replied.
But Stalin was interested. He just wasn’t surprised. The Soviets had been conducting their own research for three years. And they had a spy inside the Manhattan Project. A German-born physicist at Los Alamos named Klaus Fuchs had supplied Moscow with valuable information.
Fuchs had been a communist for years, ever since his family was persecuted for speaking against the Third Reich. (His father was sent to a concentration camp and his mother was driven to suicide.) Fuchs joined the German Communist Party because he felt they were the only ones who could effectively oppose the Nazis. Fuchs eventually fled Germany and finished his physics doctorate in England. In 1942, he went with several other British scientists to New York to work with a Manhattan Project team at Columbia University. There he met a Communist Party member named Raymond, a courier for Soviet spies.
Fuchs began working at Los Alamos in 1944. On June 2, 1945 – six weeks before Truman told Stalin about the weapon – Fuchs met Raymond in Santa Fe. Sitting in his car, Fuchs opened his briefcase and handed Raymond an envelope filled with classified details about “Fat Man,” including the plutonium core, initiator, and high explosive leads system. He included a sketch of the atomic bomb itself. Even though Fuchs was welcomed by the American scientists at Los Alamos, he was a true believer in the communist cause. His loyalty was to the Soviet Union, not the United States.
For all of Stalin’s seeming indifference about Truman’s disclosure, a member of the Russian delegation heard Stalin and Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov discuss it that night. Molotov said it was time to “speed things up” in developing a Russian bomb. A historian would later note, “The Twentieth Century’s nuclear arms race began at the Cecilienhof Palace at 7:30 p.m., on July 24, 1945.”
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Truman was driven back to his villa, along with former ambassador Davies. The conference was not going well. Stalin refused to agree to compromises on how to set the course for postwar Europe.
But that was one of many things on Truman’s mind. He was stressed and exhausted. And now he worried about how Congress would react to the lack of progress at Potsdam. If the House and Senate failed to back how he had conducted diplomacy in his first time on the world stage, he told Davies he was thinking of resigning the presidency.
Was it just the conference? Or was it turmoil over the decision he had made about how to end the war in the Pacific? Trying gently to lighten the mood, Davies told the president this would “bear thinking over.”
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In addition to conventional methods, the United States got the message to the enemy in a more direct way. American warplanes dropped 600,000 leaflets across the Japanese homeland.
But, maddeningly, officials in Tokyo did not respond for two days. Finally, on July 28, Prime Minister Kantaro Suzuki announced that his government did not consider the declaration of great importance …. We must “mokusatsu it.” That meant “to kill with silence.” Without knowing it, Japan had rejected its last chance to avoid the fury of the atomic bomb.
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When Captain Charles Sweeney came in, Tibbets told him the Great Artiste would become a flying darkroom. Likewise, Captain Claude Eatherly learned the Straight Flush would be a flying science laboratory. Tibbets liked Eatherly; he was a terrific pilot, but a tad unpredictable. On a mission near Tokyo, Eatherly’s assigned target was obscured by clouds. Instead of turning back, he decided instead to drop a bomb on Emperor Hirohito’s palace. The weather wasn’t great, and no one knew for sure where Hirohito’s palace was, so the bomb missed its mark.
Had it worked, the bombing could have been a strategic disaster, as Hirohito was considered more moderate than his military leaders. He was worshiped by the Japanese people, and if he had been killed, they might never surrender, atomic bomb or not. When Tibbets learned about the escapade, he lit into Eatherly with one of the most “X-rated chewing-outs” he’d ever delivered.
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“If we crack up and the plane catches fire, there is danger of an atomic explosion that could wipe out half this island,” Parsons told the other officers.
Farrell winced. “I pray that won’t happen,” he muttered.
Parsons suggested more than prayers. He volunteered to arm the weapon’s trigger after takeoff, inserting one of the uranium slugs and the explosive charges into the bomb casing while the plane was en route to Hiroshima. If the plane crashed on takeoff, they’d lose only the crew and the airplane, not the bomb or the island.
“Can you do that?” Farrell asked.
“No,” Parsons admitted. “But I’ve got all day to learn.”
“That bomb bay is too small,” Tibbets said.
“I’ll do it,” Parsons said. “Nobody else can.”
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Tibbets knew the significance of this mission. If the bomb worked as advertised, his plane would go down in history. He had to give serious thought to the name. The world’s first atomic bomb couldn’t be dropped from “Aircraft 82.”
He needed something dignified, poetic, but not too heavy.
“What would mother suggest?” he thought. Soon his mind turned to his mother, a courageous redhead whose quiet confidence had been a source of strength for him since he was a child. At the time when he left his medical studies, when his father thought he had lost his marbles , Enola Gay Tibbets had taken her son’s side. “I know you will be all right , son ,” he heard her say.
Enola Gay. It had a nice ring. Tibbets had never heard of anyone else named Enola.
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Jeppson headed back into the bomb bay, alone this time. He clambered down alongside the bomb, removed three green safety plugs, and replaced them with red ones, activating the bomb’s internal batteries. “It’s live,” he said to the intercom.
It was time to share the secret with the crew. Tibbets keyed the inter com. “We are carrying the world’s first atomic bomb,” he announced.
Several of the crew members gasped. Lewis gave a long, low whistle and thought, “Now it all makes sense.”
He felt uneasy. “The bomb is now alive,” he wrote in his log, “It’s a funny feeling knowing it is right in back of you. Knock on wood.”
Beser had brought along an awkward audio recording apparatus. Tibbets told them, “When the bomb is dropped , Lieutenant Beser will record our reactions to what we see. This recording is being made for history up the intercom.”
Meanwhile, Beser carefully monitored radio frequencies. The bomb had three fuses. The radar proximity fuse, responsible for detonating the nuclear weapon above the ground , was the most worrisome. Beser didn’t want to scare anyone, but he knew that the fuse operated on a very obscure frequency. If the Japanese appeared on that frequency right now, they could trigger the bomb.
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From his seat in the tail of the plane Caron could see the shock wave coming, approaching at the speed of sound. It looked like shimmering heat rising from the blacktop on a hot summer day. Holy Moses, here it comes, he thought. He triggered his microphone. “Colonel, it’s coming toward us,” he said.
The shock wave smashed into the plane nine miles east of Hiroshima. The B-29 shuddered and groaned. The crew shouted, wondering if the Enola Gay would break apart in midair. The racket the plane was making minded Tibbets of anti-aircraft shells that exploded near his plane during combat missions in Europe and North Africa . Parsons thought the same thing. “It’s flak!” he shouted, before realizing it was the shock wave. For Lewis, it felt like a giant was beating the plane with a telephone pole.
Then, as quickly as it started , the violent shaking stopped.
Now that the shock wave passed, he tried to describe the scene to the rest. Caron was the only one on the B-29 with a view of the destruction. of the crew. Words failed him. Tibbets turned the plane around so everyone could see. As Hiroshima came into view, a feeling of astonishment and sorrow swept over the men.
A purplish mushroom cloud rose to a height of 45,000 feet, towering over the shattered landscape. Robert Shumard, the assistant flight engineer, knew there was nothing but death in that cloud, maybe all the souls of the victims rising to heaven. Below, the city was covered in black smoke.
Van Kirk said it resembled a “cauldron of burning black oil.” For Tibbets the smoke was an image from Dante’s Inferno, “boiling upward like something terribly alive.” Fires sprang up everywhere below the roiling smoke, “bubbling like hot tar.”
Caron focused on the cloud. With its red core, it “looked like lava or molasses covering the whole city,” he recalled.
Ferebee, the bombardier, could see “parts of things actually moving up in the cloud – parts of buildings, rubbish, boiling dirt.” For Richard Nelson, the cloud was” so huge and so high “it threatened to swallow the plane.
Beser took out his recording device. Everyone made a statement for the record, but no one said anything profound. They were transfixed. Beser put away the machine.
(Wallace and Weiss 2020, 227-228)
On the long flight to Japan, Laurence mused over the people on the ground below. “Does one not feel any pity for the poor devils about to die? Not when one thinks of Pearl Harbor or the death march on Bataan,” he wrote.
(Wallace and Weiss 2020, 241)
But the problems didn’t end there. Bock’s Car was supposed to meet up with the two observation planes, but when it arrived at the rendezvous point, only one was there. Sweeney kept circling, waiting for the third plane, burning fuel. Meanwhile, Ashworth was getting antsy. He urged Sweeney to fly on to Kokura.
But the sky over that target was overcast, and Japanese gunners on the ground were sending up flak. Bock’s Car had no guns to defend itself. Sweeney wanted to circle the city again, to see if bombardier Kermit Beahan could find an opening in the clouds. With the flak and low fuel, the mission should have been scrubbed, but Sweeney felt they’d come too far to turn back. He decided to fly to the alternate target: Nagasaki.
(Wallace and Weiss 2020, 241-242)
When the planes finally returned to Tinian, there was no fanfare. The mission debrief felt like a court – martial as each disturbing detail was dissected . It could have been a disaster in several ways , several times . General LeMay turned to Sweeney, stared him straight in the eye, and said, “You fucked up, didn’t you, Chuck?”
LeMay said he wouldn’t launch an investigation, as it would serve no purpose . They were safely home. The bomb was dropped, although far off target. They all hoped the Japanese would finally come to their senses and surrender, so they would never have to fly another of these hellishly complicated missions.
(Wallace and Weiss 2020, 244)
Once again, Truman said , the choice was up to Tokyo. “We shall continue to use it until we completely destroy Japan’s power to make war. Only a Japanese surrender will stop us.” Truman had been told by the people running the Manhattan Project that they could have another atomic bomb ready within eight days.
Emperor Hirohito had little doubt the United States would continue dropping atomic bombs if his country did not surrender. His military leaders opposed capitulation fiercely, so the emperor began negotiating a surrender on his own.
In his first radio address ever, Hirohito spoke to his nation. His announcement marked the first time ordinary citizens in Japan had heard his voice. “The enemy now possesses a new and terrible weapon with the power to destroy many innocent lives and do incalculable damage. Should we continue to fight, not only would it result in ultimate collapse and obliteration of the Japanese nation, but also would lead to the total extinction of human civilization,” he told his people.
The Japanese had long believed the emperor was the spiritual embodiment of their homeland, and an unconditional surrender would end his rule and erase their cultural identity. On August 10, the Japanese presented a surrender offer to the United States, with a provision that the emperor would remain as the ceremonial head of state.
Truman wrote in his diary, “Our terms are unconditional. They wanted to keep the Emperor [and] we told ’em we’d tell ’em how to keep him, but we’d make the terms.”
The Allied powers accepted Japan’s proposal, making it clear the United States would dictate the conflict’s resolution. Hirohito would answer to the U.S. commander in Japan, Douglas MacArthur.
(Wallace and Weiss 2020, 245-246)
Einstein also regretted his role in the creation of the atomic bomb. He was not part of the S-1 project , after being denied a security clearance in 1940 because of his pacifist beliefs. But he later said of the part he played in bringing the issue to FDR’s attention, “Had I known that the Germans would not succeed in producing an atomic bomb, I never would have lifted a finger.”
In 1954, just five months before his death, Einstein declared, “I made one great mistake in my life, when I signed the letter to President Roosevelt recommending that atom bombs be made.” His only excuse, he said, was his worry that the Germans had their own program.
(Wallace and Weiss 2020, 249)
Truman’s top generals estimated a conventional war against Japan would take a fearsome toll: at least 250,000 Americans killed and 500,000 wounded. The fighting would continue for more than another year. And now Truman had a way to save those lives and end the conflict.
For those who still question his decision, remember that Truman consulted widely, listening to advisers like Eisenhower, who argued against using the bomb. He struggled with the decision through sleepless nights and fierce headaches in the heat of the German summer. And in his apocalyptic writings about “the fire destruction prophesied in the Euphrates Valley Era,” it is clear that he fully understood the stakes.
(Wallace and Weiss 2020, 256)
But a strange thing happened. Many Americans came to see Oppenheimer as a scientist-martyr, a man who paid too dearly for his integrity. He rarely talked in public about Hiroshima, but when he did , he expressed regret. In June 1956, he called the bombing a “tragic mistake.”
In 1963, nine years after the AEC stripped away Oppenheimer’s security clearance, it awarded him its highest honor: the $50,000 Enrico Fermi Award for “his outstanding contributions to theoretical physics and scientific and administrative leadership.” President Lyndon Johnson presented the award.
In early 1966, doctors discovered Oppenheimer had throat cancer; he died the following year. By then, his public image had been restored. On the U.S. Senate floor, J. William Fulbright, a Democrat from Arkansas, eulogized Oppenheimer. “Let us remember not only what his special genius did for us . Let us also remember what we did to him.”
(Wallace and Weiss 2020, 266)
“I think we were all very elated that it worked,” Lilli said late in her life. “But we all carry around some guilt. A lot of people were killed. It’s all difficult in a way. You do feel guilt for all those lives, but of course, the real trouble is war. It isn’t the weapons you use.”
For many scientists, that was the conundrum. Some were so consumed during the Manhattan Project with the challenge of turning theory into a working bomb that they didn’t consider the moral or physical consequences. Afterward many were haunted by the weapon’s destructive power. Some became depressed about the role they played in developing the atomic bomb.
(Wallace and Weiss 2020, 267)
References
Wallace, Chris, and Mitch Weiss. 2020. Countdown 1945: The Extraordinary Story of the Atomic Bomb and the 116 Days That Changed the World. N.p.: Avid Reader Press / Simon & Schuster.
ISBN 978-1-9821-4334-3
Benjamin’s Book Joural 
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