Making of the Atomic Bomb Read online

  PRAISE FOR

  THE MAKING OF THE ATOMIC BOMB

  “A great book. Mr. Rhodes has done a beautiful job, and I don’t see how anyone can ever top it.”

  —LUIS W. ALVAREZ,

  Nobel Laureate for Physics, 1968

  “ . . . what I read already impressed me with the author’s knowledge of much of the history of the science which led to the development of nuclear energy and nuclear bombs and of the personalities which contributed in the U.S. to the development of these. I was particularly impressed by his realization of the importance of Leo Szilard’s contributions which are almost always underestimated but which he fully realizes and perhaps even overestimates. I hope the book will find a wide readership.”

  —EUGENE P. WINGER,

  Nobel Laureate for Physics, 1963

  “I found The Making of the Atomic Bomb well written, interesting and one of the best in the great family of books on the subject. It is fascinating as a novel, and I have learned from it many things I did not know. Mr. Rhodes has done his homework conscientiously and intelligently.”

  —EMILIO SEGRÈ,

  Nobel Laureate for Physics, 1959

  “Mr. Rhodes gives careful attention to the role which chemists played in developing the bomb. The Making of the Atomic Bomb strikes me as the most complete account of the Manhattan Project to date.

  —GLENN T. SEABORG,

  Nobel Laureate for Chemistry, 1951

  “The Making of the Atomic Bomb is an epic worthy of Milton. Nowhere else have I seen the whole story put down with such elegance and gusto and in such revealing detail and simple language which carries the reader through wonderful and profound scientific discoveries and their application.

  The great figures of the age, scientific, military, and political, come to life when confronted with the fateful and awesome decisions which faced them in this agonizing century. This great book dealing with the most profound problems of the 20th century can help us to apprehend the opportunities and pitfalls that face the world in the 21st.”

  —I. I. RABI,

  Nobel Laureate for Physics, 1944

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  Contents

  Foreword

  Part One: Profound and Necessary Truth

  Chapter 1: Moonshine

  Chapter 2: Atoms and Void

  Chapter 3: Tvi

  Chapter 4: The Long Grave Already Dug

  Chapter 5: Men from Mars

  Chapter 6: Machines

  Chapter 7: Exodus

  Chapter 8: Stirring and Digging

  Chapter 9: An Extensive Burst

  Part Two: A Peculiar Sovereignty

  Chapter 10: Neutrons

  Chapter 11: Cross Sections

  Chapter 12: A Communication from Britain

  Chapter 13: The New World

  Chapter 14: Physics and Desert Country

  Chapter 15: Different Animals

  Chapter 16: Revelations

  Chapter 17: The Evils of This Time

  Part Three: Life and Death

  Chapter 18: Trinity

  Chapter 19: Tongues of Fire

  Acknowledgments

  Photographs

  Photo Credits

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Index

  In memory

  John Cushman

  1926-1984

  The author acknowledges with gratitude

  the support of the Ford Foundation

  and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation in

  the research and writing of this book.

  Taken as a story of human achievement, and human blindness, the discoveries in the sciences are among the great epics.

  Robert Oppenheimer

  In an enterprise such as the building of the atomic bomb the difference between ideas, hopes, suggestions and theoretical calculations, and solid numbers based on measurement, is paramount. All the committees, the politicking and the plans would have come to naught if a few unpredictable nuclear cross sections had been different from what they are by a factor of two.

  Emilio Segrè

  Foreword to the

  25th Anniversary Edition

  More than seven decades after its conception under the looming storm front of the Second World War, the Manhattan Project is fading into myth. The massive production reactors and plutonium extraction canyons at Hanford, Washington; the half-mile-long uranium enrichment factory at Oak Ridge, Tennessee; the several hundred thousand workers who built and operated the vast machinery while managing to keep its purpose secret, disappear from view, leaving behind a bare nucleus of legend: a secret laboratory on a New Mexican mesa, Los Alamos, where the actual bombs were designed and built; a charismatic lab director, the American physicist Robert Oppenheimer, who rose to international prominence postwar until his enemies brought him low; a lone B-29 bomber incongruently named for the pilot’s mother, Enola Gay; a devastated city, Hiroshima, and poor ruined Nagasaki all but forgotten.

  Almost mythical too are the weapons themselves, except when an enemy seeks to acquire them. New nuclear powers are a threat, we are warned; old nuclear powers keep the peace. A young scholar, Anne Harrington de Santana, has discerned that nuclear weapons have acquired the status of fetish objects; like the coin of the realm in relation to commodities, our glittering warheads have become markers of national power: “Just as access to wealth in the form of money determines an individual’s opportunities and place in a social hierarchy, access to power in the form of nuclear weapons determines a state’s opportunities and place in the international order.” That’s why most industrial nations have considered acquiring nuclear weapons at one time or another since 1945 even as none has dared to use them. If the bombs were ever actually used, the walls would come tumbling down.

  The danger of use was one reason I decided in 1978 to write the history of the development of the first atomic bombs. (Another reason was the declassification of the bulk of Manhattan Project records, which made it possible to support the story with documents.) Nuclear war seemed more imminent then than it does now. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, when I researched and wrote this book, the nuclear arms race between the United States and the Soviet Union appeared to be accelerating. I, and many others, worried that accident, inadvertence, or misunderstanding would lead to catastrophe.

  The Soviets were at war in Afghanistan and appeared to President Jimmy Carter to be thrusting down toward the Arabian Sea and the oilrich Middle East—something Carter swore the United States would not allow even if it meant nuclear war. The Soviets were determined to enlarge their nuclear arsenal to match ours—a decision they made in the aftermath of the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, when President John F. Kennedy was able to back them down by threatening nuclear war—and the closer they came to parity the more belligerently the American right howled for blood. Ronald Reagan, elected president in 1980, proceeded to more than double the U.S. defense budget while coining such provocative characterizations of the other nuclear superpower as “the evil empire” and “the focus of evil in the modern world.” The Soviets shot down a Korean airliner that had wandered into their airspace, killing all aboard. A 1983 NATO field exercise, Able Archer, which included a trial run-up to nuclear war in which heads of government participated, very nearly scared the Soviet leadership under an ailing Yuri Andropov into launching a nuclear first strike.

 
Disturbing as these events were, I found it hard to believe that a species as clever and adaptable as ours would voluntarily destroy itself, even though it had voluntarily manufactured the means to do so. I wondered if, back at the beginning, before the first bombs burned out those two Japanese cities and fundamentally changed the nature of war, there had been alternative pathways to the present, pathways different from those which we and the Soviets had followed. Why seventy thousand nuclear weapons between us when only a few were more than enough to destroy each other? Why a primarily military confrontation across the Cold War when nuclear weapons made direct military conflict between the superpowers suicidal? Why, on the other hand, despite all the rhetoric and posturing, had not one nuclear weapon been exploded in anger since Nagasaki? It seemed to me that if I went back to the beginning, even to before the beginning, when releasing the enormous energies held latent in the nuclei of atoms was simply an interesting and challenging physics problem, that I might rediscover abandoned pathways which could, if reilluminated, lead toward an outcome different from the looming threat of nuclear apocalypse.

  Those alternative pathways did exist. I did find them, as others had before me, hidden in plain sight. By placing them at the center of this book I tried to reilluminate them. The Making of the Atomic Bomb has become the standard prehistory and history of the Manhattan Project. It has been translated into a dozen languages and published around the world. I’ve heard from enough people in government, in the United States and abroad, to know that it has been widely read in pentagons and white houses. In that way it has contributed to a general understanding of the paradox of nuclear weapons. I don’t mean the paradox of deterrence, which partakes of the fetish object delusion that Harrington de Santana delineates. I mean the paradox which the great Danish physicist Niels Bohr first articulated: that, though nuclear weapons are the property of individual nation-states, which claim the right to hold and to use them in defense of national sovereignty, in their indiscriminate destructiveness they are a common danger to all, like an epidemic disease, and like an epidemic disease they transcend national borders, disputes, and ideologies.

  I included so much Manhattan Project prehistory in this book—the history of nuclear physics from the discovery of radioactivity at the end of the nineteenth century up to the discovery of nuclear fission in Nazi Germany in late 1938—partly because I believed I had to understand the physics, as well as a layman can, if I hoped to understand what was revolutionary about the bombs, and assumed readers would wish to do so as well. I had one lecture course in physics in college, no more, but I learned there that nuclear physics is almost entirely an experimental science. Which means that the discoveries that led to the bombs were the consequence of the physical manipulation of objects in the laboratory: this metal box, fitted with a radiation source, a sample inserted, measured using this instrument, with this result, and so on. Once I’d mastered the jargon, it was possible to read through the classic papers in the field, visualize the experiments, and understand the discoveries, at least where their application to making bombs was concerned.

  Later, I realized that reviewing the history of nuclear physics served another purpose as well: It gave the lie to the naive belief that the physicists could have come together when nuclear fission was discovered (in Nazi Germany!) and agreed to keep the discovery a secret, thereby sparing humankind the nuclear burden. No. Given the development of nuclear physics up to 1938, development that physicists throughout the world pursued in all innocence of any intention of finding the engine of a new weapon of mass destruction—only one of them, the remarkable Hungarian physicist Leo Szilard, took that possibility seriously—the discovery of nuclear fission was inevitable. To stop it, you would have had to stop physics. If German scientists hadn’t made the discovery when they did, British, French, American, Russian, Italian, or Danish scientists would have done so, almost certainly within days or weeks. They were all working at the same cutting edge, trying to understand the strange results of a simple experiment bombarding uranium with neutrons.

  Here was no Faustian bargain, as movie directors and other naifs still find it intellectually challenging to imagine. Here was no evil machinery that the noble scientists might have hidden from the politicians and the generals. To the contrary, here was a new insight into how the world works, an energetic reaction, older than the earth, that science had finally devised the instruments and arrangements to coax forth. “Make it seem inevitable,” Louis Pasteur used to advise his students when they prepared to write up their discoveries. But it was. To wish that it might have been ignored or suppressed is barbarous. “Knowledge,” Niels Bohr once noted, “is itself the basis for civilization.” You cannot have the one without the other; the one depends upon the other. Nor can you have only benevolent knowledge; the scientific method doesn’t filter for benevolence. Knowledge has consequences, not always intended, not always comfortable, not always welcome. The earth revolves around the sun, not the sun around the earth. “It is a profound and necessary truth,” Robert Oppenheimer would say, “that the deep things in science are not found because they are useful; they are found because it was possible to find them.”

  Those first atomic bombs, made by hand on a mesa in New Mexico, fell onto a stunned pre-nuclear world. Afterward, when the Soviet Union exploded a copy of the Fat Man plutonium bomb built from plans supplied by Klaus Fuchs and Ted Hall and then went on to develop a comprehensive arsenal of its own, matching the American arsenal; when the hydrogen bomb increased the already devastating destructiveness of nuclear weapons by several orders of magnitude; when the British, the French, the Chinese, the Israelis, and other nations acquired nuclear weapons, the strange new nuclear world matured. Bohr proposed once that the goal of science is not universal truth. Rather, he argued, the modest but relentless goal of science is “the gradual removal of prejudices.” The discovery that the earth revolves around the sun has gradually removed the prejudice that the earth is the center of the universe. The discovery of microbes is gradually removing the prejudice that disease is a punishment from God. The discovery of evolution is gradually removing the prejudice that Homo sapiens is a separate and special creation.

  The closing days of the Second World War marked a similar turning point in human history, the point of entry into a new era when humankind for the first time acquired the means of its own destruction. The discovery of how to release nuclear energy, and its application to build weapons of mass destruction, has gradually removed the prejudice on which total war is based: the insupportable conviction that there is a limited amount of energy available in the world to concentrate into explosives, that it is possible to accumulate more of such energy than one’s enemies and thereby militarily to prevail. So cheap, so portable, so holocaustal did nuclear weapons eventually become that even nation-states as belligerent as the Soviet Union and the United States preferred to sacrifice a portion of their national sovereignty—preferred to forego the power to make total war—rather than be destroyed in their fury. Lesser wars continue, and will continue until the world community is sufficiently impressed with their destructive futility to forge new instruments of protection and new forms of citizenship. But world war at least has been revealed to be historical, not universal, a manifestation of destructive technologies of limited scale. In the long history of human slaughter that is no small achievement.

  In the middle years of my life I lived on four acres of land in Connecticut, a meadow completely enclosed within a forested wildlife preserve. It teemed with creatures: deer, squirrels, raccoons, a woodchuck family, turkeys, songbirds, crows, a Cooper’s hawk, even a pair of coyotes. Except for the hawk, every one of those animals constantly and fearfully watched over its shoulder lest it be caught, torn, and eaten alive. From the animals’ point of view, my edenic four acres were a war zone. Only very rarely does an animal living under natural conditions in the wild die of old age.

  Until recently, the human world was not much different. Since we are predators, at
the top of the food chain, our worst natural enemies historically have been microbes. Natural violence, in the form of epidemic disease, took a large and continuous toll of human life, such that very few human beings lived out their natural lifespans. By contrast, man-made death—death, that is, by war and war’s attendant privations—persisted at a low and relatively constant level throughout human history, hardly distinguishable in the noise of the natural toll.

  The invention of public health in the nineteenth century, and the application of technology to war in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, inverted that pattern in the industrialized world. Natural violence—epidemic disease—retreated before the preventive methodologies of public health to low and controlled levels. At the same time, man-made death began rapidly and pathologically to increase, reaching horrendous peaks in the twentieth century’s two world wars. Man-made death accounted for not fewer than 200 million human lives in that most violent of all centuries in human history, a number that the Scottish writer Gil Elliot vividly characterizes as a “nation of the dead.”

  The epidemic of man-made death collapsed abruptly after the Second World War. Losses dropped precipitously to levels characteristic of the earlier interwar years. Since then, chartered violence has smoldered along, flaring in guerrilla conflicts and conventional wars on the nuclear periphery, accounting for an average of about 1.5 million lives a year—a terrible number, to be sure, but the average before 1945 was fully a million lives higher; and the peak, in 1943, 15 million.

  Man-made death became epidemic in the twentieth century because increasingly efficient killing technologies made the extreme exercise of national sovereignty pathological. And it was evidently the discovery of how to release nuclear energy and its application to nuclear weapons that reduced the virulence of the pathogen. In a profound and even a quantifiable sense, the weapons that counseled caution these past seven decades at the level of deep nuclear fear served as containers in which to sequester the deaths they held potential, like a vaccine made from the attenuated pathogen itself. It required three tons of Allied bombs to kill a German citizen during the Second World War. By that quantitative measure, the strategic arsenals of the United States and the Soviet Union at the height of the Cold War held latent some three billion deaths, a number that corresponds closely to a 1984 World Health Organization estimate, arrived at by other means, of potential deaths from a full-scale nuclear war.