THE CUTTING EDGE: COMPUTING / TECHNOLOGY / INNOVATION : Team Did Grasp A-Bomb’s Power
In the scores of television documentaries and newspaper and magazine articles flowing out of the 50th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima, there has been enough Monday morning quarterbacking to make any coach ill. Some of it is enlightening, and there cannot be too much discussion of an event that altered human history in such a tragic way.
But some of it is a little weird. For example, there is a subtle suggestion that surfaces often: that scientists who developed the atomic bomb were themselves surprised by the terrible forces they had released upon an unsuspecting planet. My suspicion is that the theme is partly the unintended fallout of comments made by the scientists themselves as they watched a fierce ball of fire rise over the pre-dawn New Mexican desert on July 16, 1945.
Stunned by the power of the moment, Robert Oppenheimer, the charismatic theoretical physicist who had guided the scientific team, is said to have repeated a line from Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad-Gita: “I am become Death, the shatterer of worlds.” It could be easy to believe that he did not intend to leave such a legacy.
Others present at the birth of the Nuclear Age have expressed astonishment at the dazzling brilliance of the fireball and the fury they had helped unleash. As Oppenheimer himself noted, they had known sin.
Some time later, Kenneth Bainbridge, chief of operations at Los Alamos, where the bomb was developed, put it less elegantly but more bluntly when he told Oppenheimer, “Now we’re all sons of bitches.”
In the sympathy people normally feel for others who have shouldered enormous burdens, it might be convenient to believe that the scientists who developed the bomb had underestimated the potential of their work. These sensitive and educated people would not have given birth to such a terrible weapon if they had known how devastating it would be.
Hogwash.
They did it out of fear that our adversaries might do it first. And it is a cop-out to suggest that judgment of their work should be tempered by the fact that others would have done it if they had not. As the Danish physicist Neils Bohr put it recently, to have created such a weapon was a sin.
They may have been surprised on that historic morning, but if so, they were surprised that it had worked at all. The first atomic weapons were at least as difficult technologically as they were scientifically, and the scientists had plenty of reasons to wonder if the unsung heroes of the Trinity test--the engineers--had done their work well.
But they had no reason to doubt that if the “gadget” worked, it would release enormous amounts of energy. That was clear in the formulas that had led them to that point.
They knew it before the first scientist was assigned to the desolate outpost in the hills of New Mexico. A few years earlier, Enrico Fermi, who went on to win a Nobel Prize, had been studying a report that German and Austrian scientists had determined that uranium atoms split upon impact from neutrons.
Fermi knew that would release enormous energy, and a simple computation could tell him how much bang he could get with a given amount of uranium. He put down the report and gazed across Manhattan from his lab at Columbia University.
According to a colleague who shared the office with Fermi, the physicist cupped his hands to form a ball and noted that an atomic bomb that small would make the Manhattan skyline disappear.
One of the things I have always admired about Edward Teller, who despises the accolade “Father of the H-bomb,” is that he has never tried to pretend that nuclear weapons were more destructive than scientists had expected. On that dark morning in New Mexico, standing 20 miles from ground zero, Teller was wearing suntan lotion and two sets of sun glasses. He knew.
Teller and his colleagues knew that if a nuclear bomb was detonated over a Japanese city, tens of thousands would die.
They never made the decision to use the bomb. That was left to others, and some of the scientists, including Oppenheimer, campaigned long and hard against ever using the weapon again. But once they had unleashed the tools of their trade, they no longer had the final word.
The burden of whether to drop the first bomb came to rest on the shoulders of Harry Truman, and the revisionists are busy remaking his image as well. It was not necessary to drop the bomb, many argue today, because the war was already nearing an end.
Perhaps. We will never know for sure.
But I am reminded of a day, long ago, when Truman came to the Midwestern college where I was an undergraduate. At the end of a brief talk, the then-former President opened the meeting to questions.
From the back of the room came a query from a foreign exchange student. “Mr. President,” the student asked, “do you think you were justified in dropping the atomic bomb on Hiroshima?”
Silence fell across the audience, because in those days students were supposed to be polite above all else. But if Truman was angered at the question, he didn’t show it.
“I can answer that in four words,” he said. “It ended the war.”
The buck stopped there.
Harry Truman knew what he had done. So did the scientists at Los Alamos. Their burden cannot be lifted.
Lee Dye can be reached via e-mail at 72040.3515@compuserve.com.
