Hiroshima_ The World's Bomb - Andrew J. Rotter [93]
Niels Bohr was an early advocate of informing the Soviet Union about the bomb project, thereby hastening a return to the republic of science and an ‘open world’ of information exchange. Bohr had traveled to Los Alamos in 1944 and had there advocated, in his elliptical way of speaking, the use of the bomb as a symbol of international hope and an opportunity for international cooperation. He did not, apparently, recommend specifically against using the bomb in Japan, but he stressed the singular evil of Hitler and told Oppenheimer confidently that ‘nothing like’ Nazism ‘would ever happen again’. Leo Szilard went further. Szilard had energetically promoted the bomb, and to him belongs a good deal of credit for harassing US authorities into taking the project seriously early in the European war. Gradually, however, Szilard’s gifts as a scientist became less relevant to the task of crafting the bomb itself. In early 1945, as Germany’s defeat loomed, Szilard decided to talk to Roosevelt about the urgent need for postwar control of nuclear weapons. He solicited a letter of introduction from Albert Einstein, gained permission to take his cause to the President from Arthur Compton, and secured, through Eleanor Roosevelt, an appointment at the White House—for 8 May 1945. When FDR died on 12 April, Szilard managed to reschedule with Truman. He got as far as the office of Truman’s appointment secretary Matthew Connelly, who assured Szilard that his boss took him seriously, then shunted him off to South Carolina for a meeting with James Byrnes, the man who was soon to be secretary of state, though Szilard did not know this.28
Szilard took Harold Urey and University of Chicago dean Walter Bartky along for support; the men arrived by train in Spartanburg on 28 May. Szilard presented Byrnes with Einstein’s letter and read a memo, which suggested that dropping a bomb on Japan would probably move the Soviets more quickly toward making a bomb of their own. Byrnes remonstrated. Groves, he said, had told him that there was no uranium in the Soviet Union. Having spent $2 billion on the bomb, not to use it against Japan would ultimately dismay Congress and make it difficult to get funding for nuclear research in the future. And, Byrnes implied, the Soviets, who seemed to him up to no good in the East European nations they had liberated from Germany, might be easier to deal with if the United States dropped an atomic bomb. At this point, Szilard remembered, ‘I began to doubt that there was any way for me to communicate with Byrnes in this matter.’ Szilard and his colleagues took their leave in a fog of depression.29
Szilard returned to the Met Lab and discovered he had, as he often had, generated controversy. The Army was angry that Szilard had been permitted to get to Connelly and especially Byrnes. Bartky was reprimanded by Groves and scolded for giving Szilard’s memo to Byrnes; Groves considered Szilard ‘an opportunist’ with ‘no moral standards of any kind’. Compton loyally backed his scientists, and, as the high-level Interim Committee began its deliberations, he deputed James Franck, the head of Met Lab’s chemistry section, to write a report examining the probable consequences of the bomb’s use. Franck had serious reservations about using the bomb, and had in fact exacted a promise from Compton, in 1942, that, if an American bomb was ready before Germany or another nation had one, Franck could object to its use at the highest level of government. Franck, who was fondly called ‘Pa’ by his co-workers and had a reputation for rectitude, rushed to his conclusions, and sent his thirteen-page report to Secretary of War Stimson on 11 June—though, as things turned out, it did not reach Stimson’s desk.30
Franck knew the reasons why many were promoting the use of the bomb, or he anticipated them with remarkable acuity. Some said that using bombs would end the war quickly and thus save American lives. Franck doubted that the first generation