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By Root 1221 0

was not so sure. Goudsmit had served with Boris Pash’s Alsos team that knifed into Germany late in the war searching for evidence of a Nazi nuclear weapons program. They found only reassurance, but his brush with this threat and his own extensive knowledge of how the weapons worked had left Goudsmit shaken. His young physicist colleagues went off to atomic-bomb tests in the Pacific as ‘jaunty’ as if on a ‘holiday’. They returned not sobered by what they had seen but ‘full of jolly little reminiscences’ about the enormous blasts. This was a kind of hubris Goudsmit found unsettling; it was hardly so wonderful as Rabi proclaimed.11

The American people for the most part reacted favorably to the bombings, believing they had ended the war and thus saved their soldiers’ lives. A Gallup poll in late August 1945 found 85 percent approval for the use of the bombs; that fall, a Roper poll indicated that 53.5 percent of those questioned thought the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki had been just right, while nearly 23 percent more wished the military had dropped more atomic bombs ‘before the Japanese had a chance to surrender’. (Doubt and even disapproval of the bombings rose over the next two years.) American culture did what cultures do when they feel nervous or threatened: it incorporated the bomb into its language and forms, demystifying and co-opting and even making fun of it. There were Atomic Cocktails (Pernod and gin) and an ‘Atomic Bomb’ dessert, served in Boston. Life magazine ran a photo of a model in a two-piece bathing suit—‘Miss Anatomic Bomb’. (Reduced versions of such suits would soon be called bikinis, named after the atoll where the first postwar a-bomb tests took place in July 1946.) There were atomic brooches and earrings, ‘atomic sales’ at department stores, and a child’s ‘Atomic Bomb Ring’ available for 15 cents and a boxtop from Kix cereal, offering a ‘sealed atom chamber’ in which the owner could ‘see genuine atoms split to smithereens!’ There were songs—‘When the Atom Bomb Fell’, ‘Atom Buster’, and ‘Atom Polka’—dances, and poems:

The power to blow all things to dust

Was kept for people God could trust,

And granted unto them alone,

That evil might be overthrown.

A disgruntled fan of the Philadelphia Athletics baseball club urged that team members be administered atomic vitamins.12

Anxiety about the bomb largely resulted from fears that others, less trusted by God than Americans—the Soviets especially—would soon learn how to build one. Publicly, at least, leading US statesmen declared themselves unworried by this prospect. In this, they took their cues from Groves, who, as in all else, tended to substitute his own appetites and wishes for careful analysis of scientific evidence, or even plain logic. In the spring of 1945 Groves had told the Interim Committee that it would take the Russians up to twenty years to develop the bomb; in this estimate he simply gainsaid the views of many scientists, who thought it might take three to five years. James Byrnes chose to believe Groves, reporting to Szilard in May 1945 that ‘there is no uranium in Russia’ (not true), and behaving through that summer and fall as though the US nuclear monopoly was a thing assured. ‘When will the Russians be able to build the bomb?’ President Truman asked Oppenheimer in 1946. ‘I don’t know,’ replied Oppenheimer. ‘I know,’ Truman said. ‘Never.’ Truman would later tell a senator that he doubted ‘those Asiatics’ would ever solve the mysteries of the bomb. This was not the position of experts from the newly created US Central Intelligence Agency in 1947. But agency analysts nevertheless concluded that it was ‘doubtful that the Russians can produce a bomb before 1953 and almost certain they cannot produce one before 1951 ’. ‘There existed toward the end of 1947’, Gregg Herken has written, ‘a remarkable complacency in the military and in the Truman administration concerning the durability of the atomic secret and of the US monopoly of atomic bombs.’13

2. The early Soviet nuclear program

Such complacency was sharply at odds