Whirlwind - Barrett Tillman [110]
Certainly there were eccentrics. Szilard, who held patents for refrigerators and microscopes, conceived the idea of a nuclear chain reaction while waiting for a London traffic light to change.
Given the professional rivalries amid some immense egos, personality clashes were inevitable. Physicist Seth Neddermeyer, who made the crucial recommendation for an implosion trigger for plutonium, could not get along with his section head, Commander William S. Parsons. The Navy ordnance officer had alienated Neddermeyer by denigrating implosion in favor of the gun assembly that would be used in the Hiroshima bomb. To keep the project moving, Oppenheimer replaced Neddermeyer with George Kistiakowsky, an imposing Harvard chemist and explosives expert. But the new arrangement worked no better—Parsons and the Ukrainian-born Ph.D. took vastly different approaches to problem solving.
However, at least “Deke” Parsons got along well with his military colleagues. Almost nobody got along with Edward Teller. His enormous talent was largely wasted during the war, as he could not be diverted from his obsession with “the super,” the hydrogen bomb finally tested in 1952.
Manhattan’s first two products were named “Little Boy” (uranium) and “Fat Man” (plutonium). Because the uranium bomb’s gun assembly was relatively simple, it was deployed to combat without testing. The plutonium weapon, requiring exquisite symmetry in its implosion trigger, required proof of concept. That proof was delivered at the New Mexico “Trinity” site on July 16, 1945. Its yield, some 20 kilotons, proved perhaps 40 percent greater than Little Boy.
By then the Manhattan targeting committee had already selected six Japanese cities as candidates for nuclear incineration.
The Road to Total War
President Harry Truman’s decision to use the atomic bombs was based upon two related principles: a desire to end the war as quickly as possible; and the demonstrated willingness of Japan’s population to resist to the last man, woman, and child. The enemy’s military ferocity was well known, but the scenes of Japanese mothers throwing their infants off Saipan’s cliffs, and the bitter resistance at Okinawa provided additional convincing arguments.
Furthermore, by spring of 1945, U.S. intelligence knew the full extent of Tokyo’s measures as the war had forced itself upon the population far beyond closed shops and rare commodities. In March, school classes were canceled above the sixth grade, presumably until victory ensued. Meanwhile, students and teachers were assigned vital tasks from growing food to moving supplies and preparing defenses. That same month the war cabinet established the Patriotic Citizens Fighting Corps, a “volunteer” mobilization involving civilian males from fifteen to sixty and females seventeen to forty.
Consequently, in July the U.S. 5th Air Force inserted a note in its Weekly Intelligence Review: “The entire population of Japan is a proper Military Target . . . THERE ARE NO CIVILIANS IN JAPAN. We are making War and making it in the all-out fashion which saves American lives, shortens the agony which War is and seeks to bring about an enduring Peace. We intend to seek out and destroy the enemy wherever he or she is, in the greatest possible numbers, in the shortest possible time.”
Total war had come of age.
For years Japanese civilians had been force-fed an unrelenting diet of propagandistic pap as victory claims escalated from optimistic to absurd. Even faced with mounting evidence of a losing battle (naval blockade, frequent air attacks, loss of the Marianas, Philippines, Iwo Jima, and the invasion of Okinawa), some senior Japanese officials maintained a state of denial. At a POW camp in Manchuria, captives were told that the outcome would be “a matter of generations.” After the war a colonel