Hiroshima_ The World's Bomb - Andrew J. Rotter [96]
Some members of the committee had talked at lunch, for around ten minutes, about the possibility of using a non-combat demonstration of the bomb to convince the Japanese to give up. Arthur Compton later said he raised the issue with Stimson, who put it to the others seated at the table. (Another account has Byrnes taking the initiative with Lawrence.) In either case, everyone hearing the argument objected to it. The Japanese could attack the demonstration site or the plane delivering the bomb. The bomb might be a dud. Even if it exploded, Japan’s ‘determined and fanatical military men’, in Compton’s words, might be unimpressed. America’s war prisoners might, somehow, be placed in the demonstration area. The element of surprise, crucial to shock the Japanese, would be lost. And, finally, someone added, would the threat of the bomb or its noncombat display move a people whose cities had already been firebombed? The Interim Committee had been treating the atomic bomb as something special, but its membership still was not sure that in every respect it was, or that its victims would see it so.36
The committee met several more times in June and July. On 1 June it was joined by four leading industrialists, whose firms had been involved in plant construction and other projects concerning the bomb, and whose postwar involvement in the nuclear industry was deemed to be vital. That afternoon, after the industrialists had left, the committee agreed that ‘the bomb should be used against Japan as soon as possible; that it be used on a war plant surrounded by workers’ homes; and that it be used without prior warning’. That decision was reaffirmed at the next meeting on 21 June in response to Arthur Compton’s report of Szilard’s protest movement at the Met Lab. At this session the members also discussed at some length how to treat publicly news of the dropping of the bomb, and unanimously agreed to the revocation of Clause Two of the Quebec Agreement with the British, which required the ‘mutual consent’ of the signatories before the bomb could be used against a third party; no one at this stage wished to ask the British for permission to drop an atomic bomb on Japan. The committee also agreed that, when Truman met Josef Stalin at Potsdam later that summer, the President should tell Stalin that the United States was ‘working on this weapon’ with optimism for its success ‘and that we expected to use it against Japan’, but that Truman should rebuff any further Soviet enquiries concerning the weapon’s ‘details’. More discussion of this forthcoming exchange followed when the committee convened again on 6 July, and the members revisited the language of statements to be issued following the bombing, particularly in the light of suggestions made in the meantime by British scientists. The committee met a final time on 19 July, three days after the bomb had been successfully tested in New Mexico, with Truman, Stimson, and Byrnes in Potsdam, and without its scientific advisers. Once more the focus was on the future, with discussions concerning continuing nuclear research, a memo by Bush and Conant recommending that the new United Nations establish some ‘mechanism’ for international control of atomic energy, and a lengthy consideration of Congressional legislation regarding both these matters and others. In the light of the recent bomb test, the committee agreed to send a letter of congratulation to Oppenheimer. No date was set for the next meeting, and as it happened no other meeting was held.37
James F. (he was called ‘Jimmy’) Byrnes had been Franklin Roosevelt’s Director of War Mobilization. It was an important position for a powerful man known as ‘the assistant president’; indeed, Byrnes was passed over for the vice-presidential nomination in 1944, which would have made him Roosevelt