Hiroshima_ The World's Bomb - Andrew J. Rotter [146]
Robert Oppenheimer wrung his hands in Truman’s office after the bombs had been dropped. When he left Los Alamos that fall, honored with a certificate of appreciation from Stimson via Leslie Groves, he warned: ‘If atomic bombs are to be added as new weapons to the arsenals of a warring world, or to the arsenals of nations preparing for war, then the time will come when mankind will curse the names of Los Alamos and of Hiroshima.’ So, he added, ‘the peoples of the world must be united, or they will perish’. Many physicists shared this hope, that their ‘traveling seminar’ would now be reconstituted, that Niels Bohr’s model of sharing scientific information without regard for inconvenient national borders would rekindle trust and ensure peace. Along with Oppenheimer and Bohr, Enrico Fermi, Leo Szilard, Albert Einstein, and James Franck all agreed with Eleanor Roosevelt, who several days after Hiroshima told a radio audience that the bomb had been made by ‘many minds belonging to different races and different religions’, a fact that ‘sets the pattern for the way in which in the future we may be able to work out our difficulties’. Secrecy in science was artifice, a sham made temporarily necessary by world war but ultimately doomed to failure. There were no atomic secrets; physicists everywhere, properly funded and sufficiently motivated, would quickly learn how to build a bomb. Arthur Compton, predictably, found religious meaning in the bomb’s discovery. It was ‘God’s will’ that America had secured atomic power, and the bomb had been used appropriately to win the just war. He cautioned, however, that humankind must undergo ‘a rapid growth in moral stature’ if it was to avoid destruction.9
There was drift in the scientific community, perhaps an inability to grasp the implications of what it had helped to do. Attending a conference of scientists, philosophers, and religion specialists in late August 1945, a reporter for the New York Times was astonished to find the experts seeming to avoid all mention of the bomb, ‘fiddl[ing],’ he said, ‘while the world burned’. At loose ends once Oppenheimer had left the desert, Edward Teller and metallurgist Cyril Smith gathered a group of Taos Pueblo Indians and addressed them concerning the mysteries of the atom. There was much talk, among scientists and others, of the peaceful uses of atomic energy, the hope that from devastation would spring innovation, efficiency, clean energy, and solutions to nearly every problem modernity posed. Physicists found themselves having to disabuse the public of at least the wildest of these schemes. (An Arkansas farmer wrote to scientists at Oak Ridge to ask if they had any atom bombs the right size for blowing stumps out of his fields.) Otto Frisch cautioned that atomic-powered automobiles were not in prospect: ‘A few minutes’ ride in this car would be enough to kill you.’ Bemused by the postwar hype, Fermi said, of atomic power, ‘it would be nice if it could cure the common cold’. But the bomb’s success also conferred status on the physicists, and status translated into lavish federal funding for their atomic projects. I. I. Rabi and Norman Ramsey built a nuclear research laboratory at Brookhaven, Long Island. Leslie Groves provided $170,000 from the Manhattan District for Ernest Lawrence and his brother-in-law Edward McMillan to build at Berkeley a new generation cyclotron, called by McMillan a synchrotron. By the end of the 1940s, notes Daniel Kevles, the number of university physics majors had doubled since the years before the war, and the field was regarded as the most exciting among the sciences.10
‘Isn’t physics wonderful?’ gushed Rabi as the grants rolled in. Samuel Goudsmit