"was the a-bomb necessary"
Saint Francis College Fall 2005 Lecture Series: WWII at Sixty 1945-2005
Peter Parides, PhD
Assistant Professor of History, New York City College of Technology,
CUNY
Wednesday, October 5, 2005
I. Introduction
• The general issues of debate
• Was the decision to use the A-Bomb necessary?
• Was the decision to build the A-Bomb a good decision?
• Was it the right decision?
• Was it a moral decision?
II. The debate over casualty figures
• Did the bomb save lives?
III. The decision to build the A-Bomb: The historical background
• Preventing a Nazi A-Bomb
• Achieving global dominance
IV. Conclusion
• The A-Bomb’s unintended consequences
Was the A-Bomb Necessary (October 5, 2005)
Few historical events have provoked as many questions as the dropping of the first
atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. Did the use of the atomic bomb save
the lives of upwards of one million American soldiers destined to launch an invasion of
the Japanese home islands in November 1945? If so, was this motive paramount in the
minds of those who decided to use this weapon? If not, was Harry S. Truman’s
principal motive to intimidate the Soviet Union? Such questions have caused enormous
outpourings of emotion over the past few decades.
One of the most recent examples of this emotional outpouring is the conflagration
caused by the Smithsonian Institution’s decision to commemorate Hiroshima’s fiftieth
anniversary in 1995. When the Smithsonian, the nation’s “official” museum, decided to
display an exhibit that would focus in part on the damage that the atomic bomb caused
to the city of Hiroshima and its people, veterans groups like the VFW (the Veterans of
Foreign Wars), immediately began to criticize the Smithsonian for what they believed
was a revisionist exhibit that would be too critical of the United States. As importantly,
veterans groups believed that the Smithsonian exhibit would portray the Truman
administration’s use of the atomic bomb as unnecessary and worse yet, barbaric.
Was the A-Bomb necessary? This is an incredibly tough question for anyone to
answer. As difficult as this question is for me to answer — and my answer is yes, for
Harry Truman, at that moment in time, the A-Bomb was necessary — a far more
important and complex set of questions are: 1) Was building and using the A-Bomb a
good decision and 2) Was it a morally correct decision?
There are obviously no right or wrong answers to these questions. I will not try to
answer these questions today. What I will try to do is discuss why, for the past 50 years,
historians, veterans groups, politicians, and the general public has debated the question
“Was the A-Bomb necessary?”
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One of the first and most important points of argument focuses on the number of
casualties that Harry S. Truman believed would result from the American invasion of
Japan had he not ordered the use of the atomic bombs in August 1945. The American
military’s initial planning for the invasion of Japan began in June 1944. The Japanese
invasion plan, which was code-named OPERATION OLYMPIC, predicted that an
amphibious assault of Japan would not achieve the unconditional surrender of Japan
until possibly at least 1947. On August 30, 1944, the Joint Planning Staff of the Joint
Chiefs of Staff concluded that “it might cost us half a million American lives and many
times that number wounded…in the home islands” of Japan.
Ten months later, the US military cut the predicted death toll in half. On June 18,
1945, in a meeting between Truman and his military advisers, the president pointedly
asked General George Marshall, the Army’s chief of staff, how many American soldiers
would die in an invasion of Japan. According to the transcript of that meeting, Marshall
told Truman that within a month and a half of the initial landings, 766,700 American
troops would be in Japan. Based on the casualty rates from the battle of Okinawa,
which were being used as a model to formulate casualty figures for OPERATION
OLYMPIC, the Army anticipated a total casualty rate of 35%. Based on a total troop
level of 766,700, a 35% casualty rate would amount to 280,000 dead Americans. In 1953,
Truman recounted that during the Potsdam Conference of July 1945, Marshall again
told him that the invasion of Japan was likely to cost the United States the death of at
least a quarter of a million troops, and up to as many as a million. Since Truman
reinforced the 250,000 casualty figure, as first told to him by Marshall in June 1945, we
can reasonably conclude that the president, when he ordered the atomic bombings of
Hiroshima and Nagasaki, believed he might be saving at least a quarter of a million
American lives.
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Was the A-Bomb Necessary (October 5, 2005)
In various venues between 1945 and 1953, Truman repeated the conclusion that the
use of the atomic bomb had saved a quarter of a million American lives. But on April
28, 1959, Truman told a gathering of students at Columbia University that “the
dropping of the bombs stopped the war, saved millions of lives.” Some historians point
to this speech and claim that it is evidence of Truman exaggerating casualty estimates to
justify his decision to drop the bomb.
Perhaps this is true, but an equally plausible analysis is that Truman was not just
speaking of American military deaths. After the war, Truman consistently claimed that
the atomic bombs not only spared Americans from death and wounds, but as
importantly, they spared the deaths of Japanese soldiers and civilians. True, thousands
of Japanese died in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but, according to Truman, many more
would have died in an invasion of Japan, which the American military believed would
have lasted until at least 1947. It is entirely possible that Truman honestly believed that
the use of the atomic bomb was the not only the right thing to do, but the moral thing to
do.
Was it the right and moral thing to do? I believe that given the situation he was in at
the time, Truman had no choice but to use the atomic bomb. Whether Truman honestly
believed that using the atomic bombs would save millions of lives, 1 million lives, a half
a million lives, a quarter million lives, or even just one life, the use of the atomic bomb
did save American lives. And it probably also saved Japanese lives.
But even if the dropping of the atomic bomb cost more Japanese lives than would
have died in an American invasion, the fact that it saved American lives made
Truman’s decision understandable, acceptable, and right. As commander-in-chief,
Truman had no other choice but to order the use of the atomic bombs
Just think of what would have happened if the United States had invaded Japan and
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lost countless number of soldiers. Then, imagine that after the war, Congress and the
American public had discovered that Truman could have used a new weapon that had
been built super-secretly with $2 billion appropriated by a Congress that had no idea
where the money was going; and that using this weapon might have saved American
lives. Harry Truman would have been impeached faster than you can say Monica
Lewinsky. The Republicans would have had him for lunch. Veterans would have
marched on the White House. The Democratic Party would have been mortally
wounded. Truman had no choice but to use the atomic bombs.
But, was the decision to build the bomb a good and right decision? Did the US have
to build the A-Bomb? Was it necessary to do this? Why did it do this? Again, my
answer is yes — at the time the American government decided to pursue the
development of an atomic weapon, the US government had no choice but to pursue the
development of an atomic weapon. This was the case because, in 1939, every serious
atomic scientist in the world believed that Nazi Germany was actively trying to build its
own atomic weapon.
The birth of the nuclear age actually began in a laboratory in Germany ten months
before the beginning of World War II. In December 1938, Otto Hahn and Fritz
Strassman, researchers at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Chemistry, began to bombard
a single uranium atom with a single neutron. They wanted to explore the potential
applications of artificial radioactivity, the 1895 discovery that produced a revolution in
the study of modern physics. Specifically, they wanted to manufacture radium, an
element a bit lighter than uranium. Hahn and Strassman believed that when a neutron
struck a uranium atom, a few electrons from that atom would break away, leaving
radium in its place. Instead of producing radium, however, the neutron literally split
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the uranium atom altogether. In January 1939, the journal Nature published the results
of Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassman’s experiment, which were described as “atomic
fission”.
The declaration that an atom could be caused to rupture created a tremendous
amount of excitement within the international physics community. Scientists from all
over the world began to speculate about the possible ramifications of this discovery.
One conclusion was quite clear. Because an atomic nucleus is maintained by great
amounts of force, and since the mass of a nucleus exceeds the sum of the masses of each
individual nucleic part, the splitting of an atom must release a huge amount of energy.
Because the barium atom that Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassman were left with was lighter
than the uranium atom that ruptured, the loss in mass had to represent a corresponding
amount of energy release.
Atomic fission quickly became a cottage industry for the international physics
community. Research began in all the world’s great powers to see if a self-sustaining
chain reaction could be achieved. When a neutron hit a uranium atom, many believed
that a multiple number of neutrons would be released from that atom. They in turn
would hit more uranium atoms, which would release even more neutrons, which
would split even more uranium nuclei, and so on, setting into motion a self-sustaining
chain reaction. If one could govern this process, once would be able to produce
unprecedented amounts of energy.
The thought of such potential power was exciting. If used for military purposes, it
could destroy an opponent quickly and decisively. This point had great significance in
the spring of 1939, with Europe on the brink of war. George Thomson, the chairman of
the Physics Department at London’s Imperial College of Science and Technology, was
particularly concerned. He, like many of his British colleagues, believed that the concept
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of an atomic weapon was something to fear, especially since Adolf Hitler might be
pursuing this goal.
Thomson believed that his government needed to take definite steps to prevent the
possibility of a German atomic weapon. The first, and least costly initiative, would be to
restrict the availability of uranium metal to any buyer. To do so would be simple since
most uranium came from the Belgian Congo. In early May 1939, the British government
purchased one ton of uranium oxide from the Congo for £700. The Belgian government
also promised to inform the British of any inquiries regarding the purchase of uranium.
British physicists then turned to the question of the feasibility of actually building an
atomic bomb and what role their government should take in atomic research. In June
1939, the government, following the advice of British scientists, centralized atomic
research in the hands of the Air Ministry, to be conducted on a day-to-day basis by the
Committee on the Scientific Survey of Air Defence.
Thomson supervised the main body of experiments with the able assistance of Mark
Oliphant, the chair of the physics department at Birmingham University. In July 1939,
Oliphant invited Otto Frisch, one of the co-authors of the January 1939 Nature article, to
England. Frisch was living in Denmark at the time. Fearing a possible German invasion
of Denmark, Frisch wished to continue his work on fission with his British colleagues.
Oliphant was more than glad to arrange an auxiliary lectureship for Frisch at
Birmingham University. Frisch wanted to conduct experiments designed to confirm the
belief that only the incredibly rare and lighter Uranium235 isotope, and not the more
common and heavier Uranium238 isotope, was fissionable. If this theory turned out to be
correct, as Frisch assumed it was, then he would seek to produce that isotope in
quantity.
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Frisch found an able and trusted friend when he reached Birmingham, a fellow
emigré named Rudolf Peierls. Born in Germany in 1907, Peierls went to England in 1933
on a Rockefeller Fellowship. Fearful of returning to Hitler’s Germany, Peierls chose to
stay in England and become a British subject. In the summer of 1939, he and Frisch were
formally classified by the British government as enemy aliens. Emigrés like Peierls and
Frisch were greatly welcomed by the British. Nearly all of Britain’s best scientists, like
Mark Oliphant, were busy working on other, more important projects, principally
radar.
When Frisch first arrived in Birmingham, he had an idea about how he could extract
U235 from U238. He believed that this could be done by using a gaseous thermal diffusion
method developed by the German physicist Klaus Clusius. Frisch would start with a
long glass tube with a heated rod running down its center. He would fill the tube with a
gaseous form of uranium metal. Frisch believed that if he cooled the tube by simply
placing the glass under running water, the lighter U235 would rise to the top of the tube
while the heavier U238 isotope would rest on the bottom. Frisch found it difficult to
begin his experiments, because the physics laboratory’s glassblower did not have the
time or extra glass to fashion a suitable tube for him. The glassworker had to devote all
his time and material to the radar project, which Frisch and Peierls, as enemy aliens
were not supposed to know about, even though they did.
Frisch did not let radar keep him from thinking about uranium. When his adopted
homeland went to war with Germany in September 1939, Peierls and Frisch were more
determined than ever to figure out how much U235 would be needed to produce a selfsustaining chain reaction. At the end of February 1940, Frisch and Peierls concluded
that only a few kilograms, perhaps even less than a kilogram of U235, would be needed
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to produce a self-sustaining chain reaction. “Good heavens,” Peierls later said, “if one
could ever have this, it would be such a powerful weapon that it really would justify
making a considerable effort to get that.” Frisch and Peierls summarized their
conclusion in a memo for the Committee for the Scientific Survey of Air Defence.
Sir Henry Tizard, the committee’s chair, acted on Frisch and Peierls’ conclusions by
initiating, in April 1940, a full-scale British atomic bomb project under the auspices of a
Uranium sub-committee of the Committee for the Scientific Survey of Air Defence.
Tizard, a physicist, chose to take the incredibly bold step of initiating a British atomic
bomb project after consulting James Chadwick, a physicist who played a major role in
discovering the existence of neutrons in atomic nuclei.
It is absolutely surprising that Tizard and Chadwick acted on Frisch and Peierls’
assumptions, and assumptions are all they were, by initiating a full scale effort to
produce an atomic bomb. When Britain declared war on Germany in September 1939,
Tizard and Chadwick doubted greatly that an atomic bomb could be built. They were
absolutely sure that one could not be built before the war with Germany ended. Before
he read the Frisch-Peierls Memorandum, Chadwick sought the opinion of Edward
Appleton, the director of the British Department of Scientific and Industrial Research,
and Sir John Anderson, the Home Secretary. Appleton and Anderson were both
themselves physicists. Appleton and Anderson told Chadwick that they did not think it
was possible to build an atomic bomb. Anderson told Chadwick directly that he “was
quite sure that a uranium bomb was not a serious danger.”
So why then did Tizard and Chadwick act on the Frisch-Peierls Memorandum by
initiating a full-scale British atomic bomb project? They did not change their minds
about the possibility of building an atomic bomb because of any new scientific data
contained in Frisch and Peierls’ Memorandum that was not essentially available in
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September 1939. The Frisch-Peierls Memorandum did not contain any new scientific
data. Otto Frisch and Rudolf Peierls were theoretical physicists and their memorandum
contained just theories. Sir Henry Tizard and James Chadwick decided to initiate a fullscale atomic bomb program in April 1940 because Britain’s political situation was much
more precarious in April 1940 than it was in September 1939. In April 1940, the Battle of
Britain was well underway. British cities were under the constant bombardment of the
German air force, the Luftwaffe. If Germany succeeded in building the world’s first
arsenal of atomic bombs, then Germany would surely use them to obliterate every
British city and accomplish its goal of conquering all of Europe. Tizard and Chadwick
concluded that Britain needed to devote and divert massive resources to create an
atomic bomb even if it was just for the purpose of discovering that an atomic bomb
could not be built. They could not let Germany beat them to the punch. And if Germany
did manage to create an atomic bomb, Britain’s only defense would be its own arsenal
of atomic bombs.
This latter point was made quite clearly in a political analysis attached to the
technical portion of the Frisch-Peierls Memorandum. In this political analysis, Frisch
and Peierls wrote the following: “If one works on the assumption that Germany is, or
will be, in the possession of this weapon, it must be realised that no shelters are
available that would be effective and could be used on a large scale. The most effective
reply would be a counter-threat with a similar weapon.” In April 1940, Frisch and
Peierls recommended that Britain begin the massive project of building an atomic bomb
not because they were sure that one could be built, but because they were sure that
Germany was trying to build one.
Throughout the war British and American policymakers chose to initiate and
advance their atomic bomb programs based on political calculations [How will the
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bomb enhance our national security status?], not on scientific calculations [Does the
science tell us that we can actually build this thing?]. As I’ve said before, no one on
either side of the Atlantic believed that an atomic bomb could be built in time to use
against Germany in the present war. To be even more precise, no one was sure that an
atomic bomb could even be made to work before the first atomic bomb was exploded in
the New Mexico desert in July 1945, two months after Germany’s surrender.
Given these last points, when Tizard and Chadwick decided, in April 1940, to
initiate a full-scale British atomic bomb project, they consciously resolved to divert
much needed money, material, and human intellect from the British radar project, a
scientific venture which had already proven itself to be both scientifically feasible and
useful in the field of battle, the Battle of Britain. The Battle of Britain was not won by
atomic power. The Battle of Britain was not won by military power at all. Britain
successfully defended itself against the German air force because it had radar. In April
1940, Sir Henry Tizard knew full well what radar meant to Britain, since it was his
Committee for the Scientific Survey of Air Defence that developed it.
In making their decision to initiate a full-scale atomic bomb project, Sir Henry Tizard
and James Chadwick also consciously dismissed another point that Frisch and Peierls
made in their political analysis. In their memo, Frisch and Peierls questioned whether
an atomic weapon could be a “moral” weapon. “Owing to the spreading of radioactive
substances with the wind,” they wrote, “the bomb could probably not be used without
killing large numbers of civilians, and this may make it unsuitable as a weapon for use
by this country.” Tizard and Chadwick dismissed the morality question because of
something that Frisch and Peierls themselves wrote at the beginning of their political
analysis. “As a weapon,” Frisch and Peierls wrote, “the super-bomb would be
practically irresistible.” In other words, Britain should spare no effort in trying to obtain
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one. In the words of one atomic historian, “That early in 1939 and 1940, the nuclear
arms race began.”
Since we know that Tizard and Chadwick realized that initiating a full-scale atomic
bomb project would divert much needed resources from the radar project, and since we
know that no one in Britain believed that an atomic bomb could be built in time to use
against Germany, we can conclude, and I do conclude, that Tizard and Chadwick
initiated a full-scale atomic bomb project in April 1940 because they believed that
atomic weapons would enhance Britain’s post-war national security.
At every critical point between 1940 and 1945, British policymakers consistently
made decisions regarding the atomic bomb project based not on scientific calculations
[Did the science justify spending more money and utilizing more resources to build a
weapon which will not help us win this present war], but rather on political calculations
[What will an atomic bomb mean to us from a strategic political sense?]. Britain’s atomic
policymakers engaged in this very type of political calculus in the summer of 1941
while they debated whether or not, and where, to build a large-scale uranium
enrichment engineering plant that could produce enough fuel to arm an arsenal of
atomic weapons.
Even though no significant technological advancements were achieved between
April 1940 and August 1941, Lord Cherwell, a member of the British War Cabinet and
Prime Minister Winston Churchill’s most trusted science adviser, advised the Prime
Minister to authorize the construction of a large-scale uranium enrichment plant in
Quebec, Canada, at an enormous cost to the British war effort. In making his
recommendation to Churchill, Lord Cherwell wrote that although “the reasons [against
building the plant] are obvious…whoever possesses such a plant should be able to
dictate terms to the rest of the world.” Once again, British policymakers decided to
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divert massive resources to the atomic bomb project in order to pursue long-term
strategic geo-political gain.
American atomic policymakers engaged in the same sort of political calculus.
America’s chief atomic policymaker was Vannevar Bush, whom President Franklin
Roosevelt put in charge of the Office of Strategic Research and Development in May
1941. The United States’ government’s drive to the atomic bomb actually began in
August 1939, when Albert Einstein wrote a letter to Roosevelt recommending that the
President authorize the start of atomic research. To be accurate, Leo Szilard wrote the
letter. Einstein agreed to sign it so that Roosevelt would pay attention to it.
Roosevelt did pay attention to it. On October 11, 1939 he instructed Lyman Briggs, a
physicist at the Department of Commerce, to assemble an Advisory Committee on
Uranium within the National Bureau of Standards. Briggs staffed the committee with
civilian scientists from both inside and outside the government, as well as with military
scientists. Although Roosevelt felt so strongly about atomic research that he ordered the
creation of the Uranium Committee, he did not feel strongly enough about atomic
research to spend any money on it. The President failed to give the committee an
operating budget. In order to do the little work it did, the Committee borrowed
$102,300 from the US Naval Research Laboratory. The Committee’s first report to
Roosevelt in November 1939 was highly skeptical of the belief that an atomic bomb
could be built. The Committee was skeptical, and Roosevelt was apathetic, because in
November 1939, the United States was still deeply entrenched in the isolation that it
retreated into after the end of the First World War.
America’s isolation ended abruptly in June 1940 with the fall of France. The United
States Congress responded to the French surrender by increasing the defense budget
ten-fold and by instituting the nation’s first-ever peacetime draft. Roosevelt also issued
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an Executive Order creating the National Defense Research Committee and started it off
with a $6.3 million budget. Roosevelt appointed Vannevar Bush, a former MIT
Professor of Engineering and President of the Carnegie Foundation, as director of the
NDRC. In its first year, the NDRC spent $187,000 on atomic research, its biggest single
expenditure for that year. Just as in Britain, the exigencies of war propelled atomic
research to the forefront.
And just as in Britain, American atomic policymakers, Bush especially, discounted
scientific calculations in favor of political calculations time and time again in order to
devote and divert massive resources to build an atomic bomb. The most profound
example of this calculus in America’s drive to build an atomic bomb occurred in the
spring of 1941, when Bush asked Frank Jewett, the president of the National Academy
of Sciences, to conduct an independent review of the atomic research conducted to that
point. In a letter that Bush wrote to Jewett on April 15, 1941, Bush wrote the following:
“The British are apparently doing fully as much as we are, if not more, and yet it seems
as though, if the problem were of great importance, we ought to be carrying most of the
burden in this country.” Bush feared that the British were farther ahead in the race to
build an atomic bomb and he wanted the National Academy of Sciences to give him a
favorable analysis that he could use to persuade the board of directors of the National
Defense Research Committee to approve a more aggressive push toward building an
atomic bomb. Bush was anxious because he received a letter on March 17, 1941 from the
president of MIT, Karl Compton, which warned that the British were farther ahead than
the US in the pursuit of an atomic bomb. Since October 1940, the Americans and British
were sharing information on basic atomic research in their countries.
The National Academy of Sciences Uranium Committee assembled for its first
meeting on April 30, 1941. Its conclusions were based solely on the science to that date.
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The members agreed that there was very little likelihood of building an atomic bomb
because it would be almost impossible to achieve a self-sustaining chain reaction using
uranium. Therefore, the NAS Committee recommended that no expansion of American
atomic research was warranted. Unlike the British, and unlike Vannevar Bush, the NAS
committee did not consider political calculations in their deliberations because they
were pure scientists conducting their work in a period when the United States, unlike
Britain, was not yet at war.
Quite astonishingly, the NAS Committee reversed itself just one week later. On May
5, 1941, it proposed a wholesale reorganization of atomic research in the United States
so that the effort to build an atomic bomb could be accelerated. The NAS Committee
did not make this proposal because some great technical breakthrough was achieved in
the week since it proclaimed skepticism as to whether an atom bomb could be built.
There was no technical breakthrough during the previous week. During that previous
week, the NAS Committee had reviewed a letter that Kenneth Bainbridge, a Harvard
physicist, had written to Vannevar Bush from London. Bainbridge was in London as an
American observer to Britain’s atomic research. In the letter, Bainbridge informed Bush
that the British “believe there is some possibility that an explosive might be developed
within two years.” As soon as Bush received this letter, he was shocked. He had no idea
the British felt that they were that close to building a bomb. Bush immediately sent a
copy of the letter to Arthur Haley Compton, the chair of the NAS Committee. Bush
made the letter available to Compton because he hoped that it would have the intent
that it did, which was to influence the committee to reverse its first decision and
recommend the acceleration of atomic research in the United States, but not at the level
Bush had hoped for.
Bush’s effort to use political considerations to get the NAS Committee to continue
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recommending the acceleration of atomic research even more received a possible deathblow in the summer of 1941 when his own deputy, James B. Conant, a chemist and
former President of Harvard University, began to have doubts about whether the
United States should be pursuing atomic weapons in a time of global war. “Wasn’t this
a development for the next war, not the present one?”, Conant asked in a meeting of the
department heads of the National Defense Research Committee. From a scientific
standpoint, Conant was probably correct at the time. But he was thinking in terms of
immediate defense strategies, unlike Bush, who had long-term national security
strategy in mind. Later that summer, a disconcerted Bush wrote to Frank Jewett, the
president of the National Academy of Sciences, to complain that, “I am getting to the
point where I feel that I am being blocked very decidedly.” Bush concluded his
lamentation by exclaiming that “the pressure is rising very rapidly.”
It seems clear what Bush meant by “pressure.” Even though he had been, and still
was, unconvinced that an atomic weapon could be devised, especially within two years,
Bush felt that, for strategic and political reasons, the United States needed to continue
on an expanded course so that it could at least confirm that British assessments were
wrong. The risk of not doing so was the possibility of the British having an atomic
arsenal before the Americans. If this were to happen, the balance of power would tip in
Britain’s favor. America’s influence in Europe might be severely diminished. If the
British gained a nuclear weapon before the United States, blame would rest primarily
with him. Bush wanted Jewett and the NAS Committee to take this pressure off him. He
wanted the NAS Committee to support the claim that an atomic bomb could be built
quickly so that he could convince his board of directors to approve a more ambitious
atomic bomb program. Exasperated by the NAS Committee’s inaction, Bush decided to
go straight to the top in the fall of 1941.
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President Franklin Roosevelt authorized the more ambitious program that Bush
sought on October 9, 1941. In persuading the President to give his assent, Bush told
Roosevelt that the British were far ahead of the United States in thinking about atomic
weapons as political and strategic tools. This logic no doubt had a great impact on
Roosevelt. I contend that America’s position in the war also had great influence on
Roosevelt. In October 1941, Roosevelt clearly saw war with Japan on the immediate
horizon. On October 9, 1941, Roosevelt told Bush that he would instruct the War
Department to transfer $5 million for his use during the next fiscal year, which ran to
June 30, 1942. Roosevelt could have approached Congress to request a direct
appropriation to the Office of Scientific Research and Development, but he and Bush
agreed that this matter was too sensitive to be made public. From that point until the
first bomb was dropped, Congress, which appropriated nearly $2 billion to make the
atomic bomb, knew almost nothing about what Bush was doing. And so here, I
contend, lie the origins of the Cold War imperial Presidency and the ultra-secretive
National Security State. The whole world was entering a new world order.
This new world order, which I contend began even before the United States formally
became a combatant on December 8, 1941, required a shifting of alliances. On January 7,
1943, the United States government informed its British ally that it would no longer
share the atomic engineering information that Britain might use to build an atomic
weapon. This policy of restricted interchange was formally codified by Roosevelt and
Churchill on August 19, 1943 in the form of the Quebec Agreement. Because of the
extraordinary advances in American research enabled by Roosevelt’s October 9, 1941
decision and the United State’s subsequent formal entrance into the war, the United
States, by 1943, no longer needed to rely on British science. Given the political and
strategic value that sole possession of an atomic arsenal would have, the United States
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quickly moved to isolate Britain and make it a junior partner in the trans-Atlantic
alliance.
The British were naturally upset at being shut out of a game they had started. In the
fall of 1944, Sir John Anderson, who by then had risen to the position of Lord President
of the Privy Council (which is tantamount to the US National Security Adviser) and
Wallace Akers, the technical director of the British atomic bomb program, attempted to
react to the American policy of restricted interchange by contravening the Quebec
Agreement without consulting Winston Churchill or the British War Cabinet. Anderson
and Akers went so far as to initiate their own private foreign policy based on forming a
strategic atomic alliance with the newly liberated French government of Charles de
Gaulle. Although the United States and Britain never fully discovered what Anderson
and Akers were up to (Anderson and Akers repeatedly lied to Churchill about their
activities), the discussions that Anderson, Akers, and their agents had with the French
government during the fall of 1944 and the winter of 1945 insured that Britain would
not exit the war as an atomic power. The United States formally became an atomic
power on July 16, 1945, the day it successfully exploded its first atomic bomb in New
Mexico. Britain did not become an atomic power until 1953, four years after the Soviet
Union successfully tested its first atomic bomb.
The United States Army went to great lengths to delay the Soviet Union’s atomic
prospects. As the war with Germany wound to an end in May 1945, the politics of the
atomic bomb also dictated United States military strategy toward its other Grand
Alliance partner, the Soviet Union. In the fall of 1943, the US Army assembled a group
of military intelligence officers and civilian scientists to undertake what was codenamed the ALSOS mission. The ALSOS team was charged with following American
advance units as they swept eastward from France towards Germany. The ALSOS team
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Was the A-Bomb Necessary (October 5, 2005)
was the second group of Americans to cross into Germany, right behind forward units
of the United States Army’s 85th Reconnaissance Squadron, which entered Germany at
6:05 pm on September 11, 1944. As soon as it entered Germany, the ALSOS team
searched for all evidence related to a German atomic bomb project. In February 1945,
the ALSOS team ruled out the possibility that Germany possessed an atomic bomb. But
it did confirm the existence of several atomic research plants in eastern and southwestern Germany, the parts of Germany that were scheduled to be occupied by France,
Britain and the Soviet Union, as per the Yalta Agreement of February 1945.
Brigadier General Leslie Groves, who at this time was the commanding officer of the
Manhattan Project, which was responsible for engineering a working atomic bomb,
quickly asked Army Chief of Staff General George C. Marshall to order General Dwight
Eisenhower, the Supreme Commander of Allied Forces-Europe, to destroy all the
German atomic research plants located in what were to be the British and Soviet zones
of occupation. On April 25, 1945, two American armored divisions and one airborne
division entered was what to be the French zone of occupation just twelve hours ahead
of French forces. The Americans secured the town Tailfingen, the location of the home
of Otto Hahn, whose radioactivity experiments in December 1938 led to the discovery
of atomic fission. American forces took Hahn into custody, interrogating him and
seizing his research papers. Later that day, American forces in Hechingen discovered a
stock of uranium and heavy water that Walter Heisenberg, the head of the German
atomic energy program, had hidden before fleeing. Operation HARBORAGE, as the
American incursion into southwestern Germany was called, was designed to insure that
the United States could maintain its monopoly of atomic weapons indefinitely.
But, as history has showed us time and again, no nation can monopolize a
technology indefinitely, as North Korea and Iran are presently telling us. So while I
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Was the A-Bomb Necessary (October 5, 2005)
contend that the United States government was right to build the atomic bomb to
subsequently use it against the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, there is no disputing
the fact that those decisions have created consequences that were unintended and
unforeseeable by the men who made those decisions. The legacy of World War II is also
the legacy of those unintended consequences, and they deserve every bit as much of our
attention and reflection.
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