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By Root 1239 0

science adviser to the Air Force on Tinian Island, whence the atomic bombers took off for both their missions, affirmed that ‘the people who made the decision to drop the bomb made it on the assumption that all casualties would be standard explosions casualties... Any person with radiation damage would have been killed with a brick first.’ Oppenheimer himself told the membership of the Interim Committee, formed to advise President Truman on how (not whether) to use the atomic bomb, that the ‘neutron effect of the explosion would be dangerous to life for a radius of at least two-thirds of a mile’—an assertion more open-ended than those made earlier by Serber and later by Ramsey, but one that nevertheless implied that radiation damage would be circumscribed by the scope of the blast. Groves claimed, in his postwar memoir, that he ‘had always insisted that casualties resulting from direct radiation and fallout be held to a minimum’, and that he had decided on an airburst, above the target cities, for that reason; the radioactivity from the bomb would disperse in the air, rather than spreading over the ground or pushing into the earth, like H. G. Wells’s Carolinum, and thus contaminating much of the surrounding area.

Groves, then, was well aware of the potential impact of radioactivity, and the Interim Committee, whose members included not only Secretary of War Stimson but Bush, Conant, near-future Secretary of State James F. Byrnes, and Army Chief of Staff George C. Marshall, heard Oppenheimer’s judgment about the ‘neutron effect’. Stimson briefed Truman on committee deliberations. But it is not clear how much Truman, or for that matter his predecessor, knew about the potential for human damage by radioactivity from the bomb. In his 1961 memoir, Clement Attlee, who became British Prime Minister in late July 1945, claimed that neither he nor Churchill nor Truman knew anything about ‘the genetic effects of an atomic explosion’ or about ‘fall-out and the rest of what emerged after Hiroshima’. Attlee’s view is not authoritative, since he hardly knew about the bomb until he became Prime Minister, and it is telling that he conflates radioactivity’s ‘genetic effects’ with ‘fall-out and the rest’. These are not the same thing. There were, in fact, several ways in which bomb-borne radioactivity could injure or kill human beings. First, radiation could affect those who were not killed by blast or fire; Serber and the others were wrong to think that the blast would cover more ground than the radioactivity. This was ‘direct radiation’. It was possible, second, that radioactivity could remain in the bombed area, potent enough to sicken those who came into it hoping to help or in search of loved ones in the days after the bomb had been dropped; this was ‘indirect radiation’. Finally, either those immediately exposed or those affected later might, while remaining alive, carry cellular radiation damage to children as yet unborn or conceived.

Gowing finds little evidence that scientists anticipated the genetic effects of radiation on a bombed population. She notes that experiments had shown, in 1928, that radiation distorted the genes of plants and insects, but the studies apparently stopped there. With one exception: during the war a British doctor raised the possibility that human mutations would occur should the Germans attack Britain with ‘radioactive fission products’ in some form. It would not have been a great intellectual leap to the conclusion that an atomic bomb might produce the same effects. Evidently, no one made the leap. The first volume of the official account of the atomic bomb, written on behalf of the US Atomic Energy Commission and 655 pages long, contains but a single paragraph on radioactivity, and it concerns Compton’s worries about exposing Met Lab workers.

Were the scientists and statesmen ignorant about radioactivity? Probably so. To what extent was their ignorance willful, predicated, that is, on a desire not to know about the harm that radioactivity could do? That is a harder question to answer. To read about