A Nuclear Family’s Legacy

For Mary Palevsky, ground zero wasn’t a remote test site in far off New Mexico but the living room of her Long Island home.

It was there as a 9-year-old, confronted by photographs of the first atomic blast, that she began asking her parents what they did during the war.

She was troubled by the answers--answers that led to a book and now a major Japanese documentary.

For the past month, a camera crew from the nationally-owned Japan Broadcasting Corp. trailed the Oak View woman as she retraced her father Harry’s path from bomb maker to peace advocate.

Harry Palevsky, a physicist, helped build the trigger mechanism that detonated the second atomic bomb--code-named Fat Man--over Nagasaki, Japan, on Aug. 9, 1945, three days after the first bomb leveled Hiroshima. Her mother, Elaine Sammel, helped design the lenses for cameras used to photograph the first atomic explosion at the Trinity test site near Alamogordo, N.M.

The two atomic bombs killed about 105,000 people in the initial blasts and perhaps 150,000 more by radiation poisoning, and forced the unconditional surrender of Japan.

They also forever changed Harry Palevsky. He spent the rest of his life brooding over the bomb, saying it should have been demonstrated for the Japanese before being detonated above two crowded cities. He fought nuclear proliferation, joined the liberal American Federation of Scientists and vowed never again to work on an atomic weapon. Elaine Sammel left science altogether. Both are now dead.

“My father had deep feelings but I wouldn’t say it was guilt,” Mary Palevsky said. “It was a lingering sense of regret. He felt if the bomb had been demonstrated no one would have been hurt.”

For her book, Palevsky interviewed 26 scientists who were part of the secret Manhattan Project--the name of the American atomic weapons program--to see what moral dilemmas they faced after making the bomb. Some had regrets while others said invading Japan would have cost more lives.

These interviews and her family history led Palevsky to write “Atomic Fragments: A Daughter’s Questions,” published last year by the University of California Press.

The book caught the eye of documentary producer Yoshihiko Muraki.

“Although 50 years have passed, this gap between America’s view of the past and Japan’s stays the same,” he said, relaxing between takes in Palevsky’s living room recently. “It is one way to fill the gap.”

Americans tend to see the use of the bombs as a quick end to the war while the Japanese believe they were barbaric attacks on civilians, he said.

The film crew followed Palevsky back to her Long Island home and also to Boston, Boulder, the University of Chicago (where her parents worked) and to New Mexico. They filmed her walking across the Trinity test site and asked her to explain how she felt. They also spent hours interviewing surviving Manhattan Project scientists.

“It’s been an amazing experience,” Palevsky said. “I think my parents would have loved this.”

Before beginning her research, Palevsky was strongly against the use of the atomic bomb. But after interviews with scientists such as Hans Bethe, who headed the theory division at Los Alamos National Laboratory during the war, she questioned her earlier assumptions. Bethe was an advocate of nuclear disarmament but maintains that the bomb was necessary to end the war.

Herb York, another Manhattan Project physicist interviewed for the documentary, said most of those who worked on the bomb supported its use.

“Everyone knew it would cause an enormous amount of damage but we didn’t talk about it, we focused on our part to end the war,” said the 80-year-old York, who helped make the enriched uranium 235 needed to fuel a nuclear blast.

“There were some people who worried about it in advance of its use but almost nobody said they wouldn’t use it,” York said. “Some, like Mr. Palevsky, said they would never work on it again. The normal pattern was to think it was necessary and they wouldn’t want to do it again.

“When anybody looks back at the end of World War II, the first thing they learn is we won and the second thing they learn is we killed one-quarter of a million people with atomic bombs,” York also said. “For those of us who lived through the war, the last thing we knew was how it would end and we knew we were losing for the first two years. We did not see history backward, we saw it forward.”

Palevsky, 51, said she found it hard to rebut such arguments.

“The reality of war is you end it as soon as possible,” she said. “But I am a softy. I come out on the side of those who say something else could have been done.”

Palevsky hopes the documentary, which airs Aug. 4 in Japan, doesn’t become a propaganda tool for the Japanese government, which has been historically reluctant to admit its wartime atrocities but eager to assume the role of victim.

“I will be upset if I am portrayed as a guilty American,” she said.

The book and film helped Palevsky better understand her father and those who worked on the bomb.

“Looking at all I have looked at, I have a tough time making a judgment,” she said. “I can’t answer if it was right or wrong, but the strong need I had to ask questions is gone.”