Retribution_ The Battle for Japan, 1944-45 - Max Hastings [307]
Technological determinism is an outstanding feature of great wars. At a moment when armadas of Allied bombers had been destroying the cities of Germany and Japan for three years, killing civilians in hundreds of thousands, the notion of withholding a vastly more impressive means of fulfilling the same purpose scarcely occurred to those directing the Allied war effort. They were irritated, indeed exasperated, by intimations of personal scruple from scientists concerned with the weapon’s construction. As long as Hitler survived, the Manhattan team had striven unstintingly to build a bomb, haunted by fear that the Nazis might get there first. Once Germany was defeated, however, some scientists’ motivation faltered. Their doubts and apprehensions grew about the purposes to which their efforts might be turned.
A group in Chicago formed a “committee of social and political implications” which became known as the Franck Committee. Its members argued in a report submitted to Washington: “The military advantages and the saving of American lives achieved by the sudden use of atomic bombs against Japan may be outweighed by the ensuing loss of confidence and by a wave of horror and revulsion sweeping over the rest of the world and perhaps even dividing public opinion at home.” In May 1945, some Manhattan team members made determined efforts to caution America’s political leaders. Several wrote letters to the president. Leo Szilard, one of the foremost Chicago scientists, paid a personal visit to the White House. Truman’s secretary diverted him to Spartanburg, South Carolina, home of James Byrnes, the president’s personal representative on the bomb committee.
Byrnes enjoyed one of the more unusual careers in American history. Sixty-six in 1945, a self-made man of the humblest origins, he had served as congressman, senator and Supreme Court justice. Critics dismissed him as a mere Democratic Party hack and White House crony, but he wielded extraordinary power as director of the Office of War Mobilization, and was widely described as FDR’s “assistant president.” Embittered by Roosevelt’s refusal to offer him the vice-presidency, in the spring of 1945 he had opted to retire into private life when abruptly recalled by Truman, who intended him for secretary of state. At Spartanburg on 22 May, Byrnes was irked to be confronted by the unsolicited Hungarian emotionalism of Szilard: “His general demeanour and his desire to participate in policy-making made an unfavourable impression on me.” The scientist, in his turn, was dismayed by Byrnes’s unreceptiveness: “When I spoke of my concern that Russia might become an atomic power soon, he said that General Groves…told him there was no uranium in Russia.” Groves hated Szilard, and indeed had claimed to suspect him of being a German agent.
As the scientist made his case against precipitate use of the bomb, Byrnes interrupted impatiently that Congress would have plenty to say if $2 billion proved to have been expended on the Manhattan Project for no practical purpose. “Byrnes thought the Russians might be more manageable if impressed by military might,” recalled Szilard. Nothing could demonstrate this more effectively than the atomic bomb. The Hungarian was disgusted when Byrnes urged him to consider that the bomb might even get Stalin’s legions out of his own country. “Flabbergasted” by his host’s insensitivity, Szilard walked unhappily back to Spartanburg station. It would have been little consolation to him to know that attempts by the great Danish physicist Niels Bohr to convey the same fears