Hiroshima_ The World's Bomb - Andrew J. Rotter [79]
They were enraptured by their technically sweet and Promethean mission to build the bomb. And they hated Nazi Germany. The moral implications of what they were doing, especially with regard to the insidious killing power of radioactivity, paled unto disappearance when they contemplated the evil of Nazism. (Japan, as we will see, was for some of them another story.) They willed away their scruples because they came to believe that anything that would destroy Hitler’s Germany was morally admissible. The world had rushed to condemn the use of poison gas after the First World War, and in the early 1940s most continued to regard it as abhorrent, a touchstone of the inconceivable even in a world gone mad with otherwise-total war. In December 1941, just as the United States entered the war, the Princeton physicists Henry DeWolf Smyth and Eugene Wigner issued a report in which they compared radiation to ‘a particularly vicious form of poison gas’. The comparison proved an inspiration to Edward Teller, who, in the spring of 1943, contemplating the worrisome prospect that an atomic bomb might not be possible, suggested instead spraying fission products from Hanford over 100 square miles of German territory, killing its inhabitants and leaving the area a no man’s land. Enrico Fermi also raised with Oppenheimer the possibility of using radioactivity as a weapon against Germany; Oppie replied, casually, that plans existed to poison ‘food sufficient to kill a half million men’, though how he planned to prevent women and children from dying instead he did not say. Ernest Lawrence embraced radiological warfare after 1945 as a way to make war more humane. Bands of radioactivity, he declared, would create a ‘cordon msanitaire’ around the people and territory one wished to protect.
Convinced of their rectitude, absorbed by the project and hope of saving lives by quickly ending the war, willing to work on behalf of the US military and the government if not always on the military’s terms, their minds at least temporarily closed against moral doubt, the scientists and engineers at Los Alamos, supported by thousands of men and women in Chicago, Berkeley, Oak Ridge, and Hanford, built the bomb between 1943 and 1945. It was America’s bomb, of course, authorized by the President and paid for, albeit unwittingly, by American citizens. It was also the world’s bomb. Its fabricators and components, the ideas that enabled it, came from everywhere. Its victims would be mainly Japanese, but also Koreans, Chinese, and even some Americans, luckless enough to be caught in Hiroshima in early August 1945. Like the republic of science that produced it, and like the radiation that issued from it, the bomb’s impact would respect no boundaries.
FIVE - The United States II: Using the Bomb
In the months and years after the atomic bombs were dropped on Japan in August 1945, those in some way involved in the decision offered a variety of reasons for their actions. Let us begin this pivotal chapter with statements from four such people. We can start with Robert R. Wilson, the young Princeton physicist who came to Los Alamos in 1943 imagining himself as Hans Castorp arriving at Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain. Why test, then drop the bomb? Wilson’s reminiscence here came nearly a quarter century after the Pacific War had ended:
Perhaps events were moving just too incredibly fast. We were all at the climax of the project—just on the verge of exploding the test bomb in the desert. Every faculty, every thought, every effort was directed toward making that a success. I think that to have asked us to pull back at that moment would have been as unrealistic and unfair as it would be to