| In the photocopies I sent out with The Day After Trinity CD's (for personal use only), page 614 from The Making of the Atomic Bomb refers to other events that occurred on April 12, 1945 besides the death of President Roosevelt The other events were a report from Germany by Allied intelligence officers discussing the first physical evidence that German scientists had failed to develop an atomic bomb, and in Tokyo--where it was Friday, April 13--the burning down due to Allied bombing of the scientific lab where some infinitesimal progress had been made toward a Japanese atomic bomb. Therefore, looking back in historical perspective, as of that date the United States had a monopoly on the Bomb. At the same time, however, the person most likely to wisely use that monopoly--Franklin Roosevelt--died. Also: Hitler's suicide was announced by German radio on May 1. The Germans surrendered on May 7, and within weeks of that date the fierce fighting on the various Pacific islands near Japan was over. The war was then a waiting and bombing game (see below) as the Allies prepared for the invasion of the Japanese home islands. (May 8, 1945 is the official date of the end of the war in Europe, or V-E Day.) As several people discuss in The Day After Trinity, President Truman merely went along with the program that was already in place for dropping the bombs on Japan. Roosevelt might have done things differently, because as Commander-in-Chief of the U.S. military he had full authority over the Manhattan Project from the beginning. One thing he might have done differently: on the day of the Trinity test, he might have announced to the world that the U.S. had successfully exploded the first atomic bomb. Instead, the U.S. Army issued its planned press release saying an ammo dump at Alamogordo had exploded. In the name of secrecy, which was conventionally thought to equate to security, the nuclear age began with a government lie. The main intention of the lie was to keep a military secret during wartime, but the secret was to be given up as soon as the bomb was used, so the main result of not publicizing the Trinity test after it happened was to deprive the American people of having a voice in the use of the bomb against Japan. A secondary result was that the Japanese were not given a chance to surrender before having the bomb dropped on them. By July 1945, the time of the Trinity test, the only fighting going on besides the isolated attacks from Japanese submarines was the unimpeded American bombing of Japanese cities with hundreds of new B-29 'Superfortress' planes. This bombing could hardly be called fighting since the Japanese air force had already been almost entirely destroyed, partly by their own kamakazi attacks on Allied ships. The large numbers of estimated lives saved by the use of the atomic bomb are only the estimated casualties of the future invasion of the Japanese homeland had the atomic bomb not been used. That presumes the Japanese would not have surrendered otherwise, which is a rather big question mark and is related to the Allied demand for "unconditional" surrender, which meant to the Japanese they would have to give up their emperor, whom they considered to have a divine right and responsibility for ruling Japan. After the surrender and the American occupation of Japan, the emperor was left in place anyway, so this very reason the Japanese fought so hard and refused the unconditional surrender demand was in the end not turned into the reality they had feared. (The Japanese soldiers not only fought hard, they fought without mercy. Here's a quote that was to accompany the Hiroshima/Nagasaki 50th anniversary exhibit at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in 1995. Because of complaints by the American Legion and the Air Force Association, the controversial exhibit was dumbed down to make it a simple patriotic exhibit. However, one of the things left out in the process was an accurate historical rendering of Japanese wartime atrocities. This excerpt comes from one of the original, cancelled exhibit labels: "In 1931 the Japanese Army occupied Manchuria; six years later it invaded the rest of China. From 1937 to 1945, the Japanese Empire was constantly at war. Japanese expansionism was marked by naked aggression and extreme brutality. The slaughter of tens of thousands of Chinese in Nanking in 1937 shocked the world. Atrocities by Japanese troops included brutal mistreatment of civilians, forced laborers and prisoners of war, and biological experiments on human victims." I got this excerpt from an article in The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, May/June 1995, by Stanley Goldberg, titled "Smithsonian suffers Legionaires' disease.") The Russians were another issue. The USSR was our ally in WWII but was not allowed any knowledge of the Manhattan Project. This was another secrecy issue that eventually had to be dealt with, but the Russians knew about the Bomb anyway, through espionage, so that part of the huge effort that equated secrecy with security had already failed before the Trinity test. (And the U.S. was aware of the espionage, but not the extent of it.) At the Potsdam conference near Berlin, a few days after Trinity, Truman told Stalin about the successful test of the Bomb, but Stalin was able to brush off the information as of no significance because the Russians were already at work on a bomb of their own. This was in effect the beginning of the Cold War. Announcing the Trinity test to the world at this time would have upstaged Stalin's secret knowledge of the Bomb, but instead Stalin was able to thumb his nose at Truman's uncharacteristic meekness and weakness in sharing the secret with him. Well, perhaps casualness is a better word than either meekness or weakness. Here's an excerpt from The Making of the Atomic Bomb, p. 690: But in fact Stalin already knew about the Trinity test. His agents in the United States had reported it to him. It appears he was not immediately impressed. There is gallows humor in Truman's elaborately offhand approach to the Soviet Premier at the end of that day's plenary session at the Cecilienhof Palace, stripped and shabby, where pale German mosquitoes homing through unscreened windows dined on the sanguinary conquerors. Truman left behind his translator, rounded the baize-covered conference table and sidled up to his Soviet counterpart, both men dissimulating. "I casually mentioned to Stalin that we had a new weapon of unusual destructive force. The Russian Premier showed no special interest. All he said was that he was glad to hear it and hoped we would make 'good use of it against the Japanese.'" "That," concludes Robert Oppenheimer dryly, knowing how much at that moment the world lost, "was carrying casualness rather far." Last but not least, Los Alamos scientists, not the American public, later had to bear the responsibility for the first use of the Bomb on a civilian population. Although that made the scientists heros at the end of the war, it turned them into villians for later generations. One of the scientists at the Trinity test, Kenneth Bainbridge, got it right when he said to the others, "Now we're all sons of bitches." Americans during WWII considered Hirohito, the Japanese emperor, to be the embodiment of evil, something like Osama bin Laden is today, and had they known about the Bomb, they--we--probably would have been happy to nuke the Japanese, so the outcome would likely not have been different, but the "physicists have known sin" legacy would likely not exist. And although the American public would have been happy to nuke Hirohito, the hatred was not reflected in military policy. While nearly all of Tokyo was reduced to rubble by American bombing in early 1945, the emperor's palace was intentionally left untouched. This was mainly a practical matter: We needed Hirohito to declare a surrender, when that point eventually was reached. It's possible to believe that the use of nuclear weapons at Hirsohima and Nagasaki provided the world with an innoculation against future uses of the Bomb, such as during the Korean War, the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Vietnam War. But I see that the instability of the world situation these days, including even the U.S.-Russian situation, points toward the innoculation having worn off. The U.S is going to try to build a nuclear missile defense and Russia, as Vladimir Putin recently warned, is going to attempt to design cruise-type missiles that can dodge the U.S. defense system. China is not being vocal on the issue, but isn't going to twiddle its thumbs while the U.S. builds a nuclear missle shield. Besides that, the risk of an accidental nuclear missile firing is a current problem that is not lessened by political instability in the former U.S.S.R and elsewhere (North Korea mainly) , and this instability or lack of attention to detail in regard to plutonium and enriched uranium also increases the chances of terrorists obtaining a nuclear weapon. Pakistan's notorious Dr. Kahn is an example of how easily things with which to make nuclear weapons can get out of hand. In the future, terrorism may come from places where we aren't expecting it. In any case, terrorism is less of a national security threat than a public health threat, though it's potentially a very big public health threat. The most undesirable future is the use of many nuclear weapons in a short period of time, which only Russia, the U.S. and China can bring about, because of the existence of so many weapons in these particular nuclear arsenals. These arsenals are the biggest security threat in the world today. To close this nuclear essay I'll just mention one other historical April 12 event related to The Day After Trinity. Robert Oppenheimer's security hearing in Washington D.C. began on April 12, 1954, exactly 50 years ago today. Oppenheimer turned 50 ten days later, and you can be sure he didn't have a happy 50th birthday, sitting through a day of testimony. See the link below for an excerpt from the April 22 session. --DWT, begun on April 12, 2004. Last edited on October 13. |
| More Notes, last updated October 4. See the bottom of this page for a journal entry of mine from 10 years ago, just after I'd written a paper for Professor Bruce Hunt's "History of the Atomic Bomb" class. Soon after the papers were turned in and discussed, Hunt showed us some segments from The Day After Trinity. Although the film had been out for 14 years by that time, I'd never seen it. Later I found a CD-ROM copy of it at the Austin library, and then a couple of years later, I found that the Southwest Texas State University library had a 16 mm print of the film. I showed it to the first class I taught at SWT, a conceptual physics class, after asking if any of them knew any physicists. Somebody kindly said "you" but otherwise none of the students personally knew a physicist. So I showed them the film and I have made audio CD copies for family and friends for the same reason. I.I. (Isidor Isaac) Rabi won the physics Nobel prize in 1944 for inventing the "resonance method" of measuring nuclear magnetism, which led directly to today's Magnetic Resonance Imaging. Hans Bethe won the Nobel in 1967 for his 1930s theoretical deciphering of the nuclear fusion reaction that fuels the giant incandescent spheres of hydrogen and helium gas that we call stars. Oppenheimer never won a Nobel prize, although he likely would have (and likely would have changed physics) if the war and the atomic bomb work had not intervened. Frank Oppenheimer founded the Exploratorium in San Francisco. Robert R. Wilson was director for many years of Fermilab, the premier high-energy physics accelerator in the U.S., and was also a physics professor at Cornell University. When I showed the film to the students at SWT, I told them that, of the physicists interviewed, Wilson was the most like physicists I'd met. Of all those interviewed, Robert Serber was probably the closest friend to Robert Oppenheimer. (Here's two alternative links to info about Serber: photo of young Serber; photo of old Serber and on-line obit, direct from Los Alamos website. The "Children of the Manhattan Project" website mentions Serber first hearing Oppenheimer speak at the University of Wisconsin at Ann Arbor in 1934. That should be the U of Michigan at Ann Arbor.) Freeman Dyson is a physicist and writer who recently turned 80. He told me in an e-mail in early May that his son George informed him that there's going to be a centennial Oppenheimer celebration of some kind at the Institute for Advanced Study this fall. (In a more recent e-mail [September], Dyson said October 27 is the date of the Oppenheimer commemoration, and that he was asked if he'd be a part of a panel discusion, and he said yes.) Edward Teller, by the way, declined to be interviewed for Jon Else's documentary. In a January 4, 1980 letter to Else, he said: "The Oppenheimer case has done great damage by exercising a deeply divisive influence. It seems to me that you are trying to repair this damage. Unfortunately, in the nature of things, you cannot possibly succeed. Whatever you do, you are apt to refresh old wounds rather than healing them. My participation would only make things worse." A PBS documentary about Teller, A is for Atom, B is for Bomb aired that same month and it was not to his liking. Teller died September 9, 2003, at the age of 95. |
| Journal entry, 8:40 a.m. Tuesday, April 5, 1994: Right now, I'm looking out the door from my apartment at the misty morning and the people and traffic going into and out of the Sweetish Hill parking lot. I'm thinking about a guy in two of my classes who I think is depressed, and I'm thinking about the positive side of depression. In a way it puts one in touch with the state of the world and with the fundamental human problem, which is that people are all too ready to kill each other when they think they have their security threatened, individually or collectively. I turned in a paper at UT for History of the Atomic Bomb class yesterday--which, the work on it that I accomplished, makes me feel very undepressed--so I've been thinking about this issue of what causes people to think it's okay to kill other people. The secrecy thing came up in A-Bomb class also--yesterday, during a discussion of the papers--when I said my argument was that secrecy of the project should have been given up at the time of the Trinity test. Hunt asked what would have been good about that, a question I couldn't answer immediately even though that is exactly what we were supposed to do in our paper--think of counter-arguments that might arise, and thus have our own arguments laid out nice and neat. I said, after a pause, something about also relaxing unconditional surrender terms--nonsense as far as relating to the question, but another of my points made or argued for in my paper. So, what good would it have done? Well, a girl said something about a "breach of security" being a bad thing, and the discussion kind of went off on that as a tangent. It's not a tangent, really. Giving up secrecy is not necessarily the same thing as giving up security. I think the point I'm trying to get to is that the security of the project would have been enhanced by giving up total secrecy at the time of the Trinity test. There is something of Bohr's complementarity here, the peril and the hope. Maybe the project is imperiled some by giving up secrecy, but the hope of doing the right thing is also increased. Why? The question is, how big of a lie was the government willing to tell? And what effect that would have on people's impression of the project once they--the ones it was supposed to protect--knew about it. The lie ("ammo magazine explosion") was a temporary expedient. But for achieving what? Security! The question is thus what security itself is. |
| The Day After Trinity: Voices These are notes pertaining to Jon Else's documentary film from 1980. The film itself is available as a DVD. |
| Press release about Oppenheimer centennial birthday gathering at the Institute for Advanced Study on October 27. |
| An article from The Weekly Standard, 8 August 2005, challenges the view that Japan would have surrendered without the dropping of the bombs. |