• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1197 0

and experimental—‘big physics’, it was called. University and corporate laboratories ranked with the best in the world. The desperate need to focus on the here and now, to defend against air attacks and detect German submarines, to extend existing technologies—all of which characterized Britain, for example—was absent in the United States, for the country was not yet at war. And yet, because the threat of war seemed real enough, to many Americans and certainly to the President, there ought to have been an incentive to build an atomic bomb. Not everyone wanted war, but, beyond Charles Lindbergh and his isolationist America First Committee, few Americans had the illusion that it might be possible to temporize with Nazism or even Japanese militarism.11

That the US bomb project was on virtual hiatus from the time ofAlexan-der Sachs’s meeting with Roosevelt in October 1939 until the creation of S-i fully two years later indicates that factors to move ahead with the bomb were less compelling than those that acted as obstacles in its way. If the United States was uniquely qualified to build an atomic bomb after the discovery of fission, it was also uniquely remote from the problems that might have demanded, and would eventually come to demand, an all-out nuclear project. Despite recognition of German and Japanese aggression, there remained wishful thinking that the war would bypass the United States, or end, somehow. If it did, an atomic bomb would not be necessary, and it would be terribly expensive, and it might not work, and how would it be dropped? (Even Einstein, Frisch, and Peierls thought a bomb would be so enormous that it might have to be delivered by ship to an enemy’s shores.) Nations not at war and not expecting to initiate war are reluctant to build costly new weapons. Wars seem to catch Americans unprepared, even when it later looks as though they ought to have seen them coming.

Americans, of course, did finally imagine and build and use the atomic bomb. There is no point denying that fact, no point in shifting responsibility for these decisions onto anyone else. President Franklin D. Roosevelt authorized the development of the bomb, its progress was overseen by US government representatives, hundreds of American scientists worked on the bomb, and thousands more Americans staffed the plants that manufactured the components, including fissionable ones, that made the bomb work. American scientists, or rather those working in the United States, saw the bomb successfully tested and knew basically what it would do to a city and its residents. President Harry S. Truman, who succeeded Roosevelt when the latter died in April 1945, authorized the atomic bombings, with the advice and consent of his closest advisers. The United States can be properly credited with having made the decisive weapon in the Pacific War—and it can be rightly blamed for having unleashed upon the world the special destructiveness of nuclear power.

And yet, for all its apparent remoteness and its uniqueness, in fashioning the bomb the United States, and especially its scientific community, remained deeply attached to the rest of the world in all respects of its decision to build a nuclear weapon. Americans alone could not, and would not, have built the bomb. The project required, most obviously, the involvement of scientists who were citizens of other countries, some of whom had arrived so recently in the United States that their thick accents or unusual syntax made them difficult to understand. They were (almost exclusively) men, of a cosmopolitan worldview, deracinated and ironic, and, while convinced that the world was endangered by Nazi aggression, they were frequently dedicated more to abstract principle than to the goals of a particular country, even their adopted one. Disgusted as most were with Werner Heisenberg and the other German scientists who had remained in Germany, they retained a loyalty to the scientific republic and thus a belief that their work transcended any national cause. Impelled as it was by the strategic and economic decisions