Big Science by Michael Hiltzik

Author:Michael Hiltzik [Hiltzik, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Fourteen

* * *

The Road to Trinity

The course of the war had outrun work on the bomb, rendering the Allied scientists’ concerns about a Nazi bomb program increasingly irrelevant. The entry of America into the European war, with its stupendous resources, made an Allied victory seem almost inevitable by mid-1943, notwithstanding earlier tactical setbacks in North Africa and the Balkans. The Normandy invasion launched on June 6, 1944, heralded a final Allied push toward Berlin, interrupted chiefly by the six-week winter counterattack by German forces known to Allied military historians as the Ardennes Counteroffensive and in the popular mind as the Battle of the Bulge.

For the physicists of the atomic bomb program, Germany’s surrender on May 7, 1945, complicated the moral and ethical issues connected with the device they had invented. Those issues had seemed comparatively straightforward while the Allied war effort remained primarily focused on the Nazi regime. The terrifying thought that Adolf Hitler might beat the Allies to exploitation of the atom’s destructive capacity had prompted many eminent scientists, including numerous refugees from Nazi Germany, to participate willingly in the Manhattan Project. In 1942 and 1943, the uncertain course of the war pushed doubts about building and using an atomic bomb to the background. Given the existential threat posed by a German bomb, few harbored any qualms about the Allies using theirs first.

Japan presented an entirely different case, at least to the scientists. Japan’s technological capabilities appeared to be far inferior to those of Germany, and the Japanese regime’s threat to the world of a much more limited order. Although only a handful of the Manhattan Project scientists were fully aware of the state of progress on the bomb—chiefly those working on the device itself at Los Alamos and those with high-level clearance, such as Ernest Lawrence—the experts at the program’s far-flung laboratories perceived that a successful conclusion to their work was drawing near. This sharpened the feelings in the physics community and among the program’s civilian leadership that discussions about the deployment of the bomb and postwar management of its technology should be urgently stepped up.

Leo Szilard felt deeply the difficulty of balancing the imperative to build the bomb with humanitarian concerns about its use. The refugee Hungarian physicist had placed the very notion of atomic weaponry on the federal government’s radar in 1939, when he prompted Albert Einstein to alert Franklin Roosevelt to the military potential of nuclear fission. Szilard’s views on the program he midwifed had traveled a tortuous path. For four dispiriting years, he had hectored government officials to place the program on the fast track. Yet by May 1945, he was urging those same officials that the best hope for averting a postwar nuclear arms race lay in “not using the bomb against Japan, keeping it secret, and letting the Russians think that our work on it had not succeeded.” After the German surrender, he brought one more argument to the table: using the bomb on Japan would fatally compromise America’s moral and humanitarian standing, undermining any efforts to create a workable international control regime.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.