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By Root 1100 0

—55 Communists 106—7 Cuban missile crisis 267—9 German bomb threat 97 hydrogen bomb 255—9, 261—2 and India 297 interwar years 24—7, 83—5 and Japan 96—7, 185—7 monopoly of bomb 248—51 newspaper stories 230 nuclear information sharing 272, 276 nuclear weapons 302 possible atomic bomb 91—4 refugee scientists 95—6 response to bombs 232—6 Second World War 97, 133—45 Strategic Bombing Survey 221—2 uranium 290 war declared 97 see also Manhattan Project uranium

bomb 113, 119 Britain 275, 290 China 293 fission 10, 55 France 284 Joachimsthal 59—60 separation 99, 102, 113—14 Shinkolobwe 61, 63 South Africa 290, 291

supply 112 —13 United States 290 uranium 235:

chain reactions 81 Columbia 99

Frisch—Peierls memorandum 86 Japan 68 Oak Ridge 113 production 102—3, :I5 Simon 38

Soviet Union 237, 243, 245 Uranium Club (Uranverein) 74 Uranium Committee 89, 90 Urey, Harold 99, 114, 149 US see United States Ushijima, Mitsure 139 USSR see Soviet Union

Vajpayee, Atul Behari 299 Valindaba, South Africa 290, 291 Van Kirk, Dutch (Theodore J.) 192 Vandenberg, Hoyt 257 Venona (US codebreaking operation) 239 Vernadskii, VI. 237 Vorster, John 290

Wallace, Henry 94, 98, 249 war 28, 30, 50, 168, 170—1, 173 see also First World War; Second World War Warren, Stafford 222 Warsaw, Poland 52 Warsaw Pact 270 Watson, Edwin ‘Pa’ 85 Weir, William 47 Weizman, Ezer 288 Weizsacker, Carl Friedrich von 13, 69, 75

Wells, H.G., The World Set Free 11, 29, 31—2

Whitney, Courtney 233 Wigner, Eugene 12, 85, 99, 115, 125 Wilson, Robert R. 117, 127, 161 Wilson, Woodrow I6, 25 Wirtz, Karl 80

World Set Free, The (Wells) 11, 29, 31 —2, 34

world’s bomb 5

Yamamoto (Lieutenant General) 197 Yamamoto, Isoroku (Admiral) 67 Yamashiro, Kikuko 196 Yamauchi, Takeo 178 Yasuda, Takeo 67 Yonai, Mitsumasa Big Six 207 settlement favored 180 Soviet war declaration 208

surrender 219

surrender terms 209, 212, 215 Yoneda, Eisaku 225 York, Herbert 262 Yoshihiro, Kimura 196, 201 Yukawa, Hideki 64 Yutaka, Yokota 186-7

Zeldovich, Yakov 237, 243, 260, 263 Zhou Enlai 294, 295 Zoe reactor (France) 284

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements

Contents

Plates

Introduction

ONE - The World’s Atom

1. Dissecting the atom

2. The republic of science

3. The republic threatened: the advent of poisonous gas

4. The ethics of battlefield gas

5. Scientists and states: the Soviet Union and the United States

6. The ethical obligations of scientists

TWO - Great Britain: Refugees, Air Power, and the Possibility of the Bomb

1. Hitler’s gifts, Britain’s scientists

2. The advent of air power

3. War again, and the new doctrine of air bombardment

4. The discovery of nuclear fission, and the bomb reimagined

THREE - Japan and Germany: Paths not Taken

1. Finding uranium

2. The Germans advance

3. Japan’s nuclear projects

4. Germany’s nuclear projects

5. The Americans and British move forward

FOUR - The United States I: Imagining and Building the Bomb

1. The MAUD Committee and the Americans

2. The Americans get serious

3. To war

4. Resolving to build and use the bomb

5. Oppie

6. Groves

7. Centralizing the project

8. Fissions: uranium and plutonium

9. Life and work on ‘The Hill’

10. A different sort of weapon

FIVE - The United States II: Using the Bomb

1. The progress of the war against Germany

2. The allies and the strategic bombing of Germany

3. The war in the Pacific

4. The bombing of Japan

5. The firebombings and the atomic bombs

6. Doubters

7. The dismissal of doubt

8. To Alamogordo, July 1945

9. Truman at Potsdam

10. Why the bombs were dropped

11. Alternatives to the atomic bombs, and moral objections to attacking civilians

12. The threshold of horror: Poison gas

SIX - Japan: The Atomic Bombs and War’s End

1. Japan in retreat

2. Preparing to fight the invaders

3. Preparing to drop Little Boy

4. Mission No. 13

5. The bombed city

6. The bombed people

7. Patterns of response

8. The shock waves from the bomb

9. Soviet entry and the bombing of Nagasaki

10. The Big Six debates