Fallout

‘I realized then [1941] that a bomb was not only possible–it was inevitable.’

–Sir James Chadwick, the most senior British scientist in the Manhattan Project, speaking to an interviewer shortly before his death in 1974

‘The Allies won [the Second World War] because our German scientists were better than their German scientists.’

–Sir Ian Jacob, military secretary to Winston Churchill

‘Atomic weapons can hardly be used without spelling the end of the world.’

–Joseph Stalin

‘When you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it and you argue about it only after you have had your technical success. That is the way it was with the atomic bomb.’

–J. Robert Oppenheimer, scientific director of Los Alamos

‘Don’t bother me with your conscientious scruples. After all, the thing’s superb physics.’

–Enrico Fermi, creator of the first sustainable nuclear chain reaction

‘The first atomic bomb was an unnecessary experiment… [the scientists] had this toy and they wanted to try it out, so they dropped it.’

–Admiral William ‘Bull’ Halsey, commander of the Third Fleet

‘Chadwick’s discovery of the neutron marked the unintentional first step towards man’s loss of innocence in the field of nuclear energy.’

–Andrew Brown, James Chadwick’s biographer

‘When the righteous sin, they add the force of their virtue to all the evil that they do.’

–Lewis Mumford, paraphrasing Ezekiel 18:24

Fallout

1. Radioactive particles that are carried into the atmosphere after a nuclear explosion and gradually fall back as dust or in precipitation.

2. The adverse results of a situation or action.

Preface

Cover-Up: ‘When the Righteous Sin’

Albert Einstein’s famous realisation that E=mc², that matter and energy are essentially different aspects of the same phenomenon, may be the most rapidly consequential idea in human history. He first published his theory of nuclear energy in May 1905, refining it–with the help of others–until 1917 in the middle of the First World War. Twenty-eight years later–a single generation in human terms–on 6 August 1945, Hiroshima and Nagasaki were each destroyed by an atomic bomb, bringing an end to the Second World War.

History shows that while ideas can be consequential–the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Scientific and Romantic revolutions were real enough–it is not always so easy to identify the exact role they played. What were the intellectual origins of the French Revolution? Why did a Marxist revolution occur in Russia when Marx himself expected it to happen in England? Why did modernism emerge in France first–if, indeed, it did?

But with atomic energy–nuclear energy–the chronology is known with an exactitude that is rare in the history of ideas. Beginning in 1898 with the identification of the electron, soon followed by the discovery of the structure of the atom in 1907, and then the realisation of the existence–and importance–of the neutron in 1932, giving rise to the possibility of a chain reaction, the pieces of this jigsaw were put together in a remarkably swift period, the ‘heroic age of physics’ as Ernest Rutherford, the director of the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge, called it.

As someone who has published several books on the history of ideas, this crowded chronology has always fascinated me. Reading into the subject, however, it soon became clear that the story also involves a highly dramatic–even uniquely dramatic–human dimension. The heroic age of physics during the interwar years comprised an elite community of no more than a few dozen physicists, chemists and mathematicians from a limited number of nationalities–British, German, French, American, Danish, Italian, Russian and Japanese–who all knew each other. They studied at the same small number of European institutions in Berlin, Cambridge, Copenhagen and Göttingen, worked together, attended the same conferences, holidayed together, attended each other’s weddings, published their work in the same small number of professional journals, co-operating and competing in an impressive array of scientific advances, that were recognised by the award of numerous Nobel Prizes. A case can be made for saying that the 1920s and 1930s were the most exciting and consequential decades not just in physics but in all of science.¹

But the 1920s and 1930s were notable for something else, no less consequential and no less dramatic: the rise of Nazism in Germany and Fascism in Italy.

From the discovery of the neutron in the year before Hitler came to power in Berlin, some scientists were aware of the theoretical possibility that the massive energy wrapped up in the nucleus of the atom could be unlocked, but hoped against hope that it would never prove practical. And then, over Christmas/New Year 1938/9, on the very eve of war, four scientists from Germany confirmed that they had split–fissioned–the nucleus of uranium, the heaviest element in the periodic table and the most unstable. The possibility of nuclear weapons came a frightening step nearer.

One German scientist, Werner Heisenberg, arguably the most brilliant of all, who had won the Nobel Prize in 1932, aged thirty-one, was much later to say that had a handful of physicists got together in 1939 and refused to do any more work on nuclear weapons, there was nothing the politicians could have done, and the whole nuclear arms race would have been stillborn.²

Instead, that year a very small number of highly trained individuals suddenly found themselves in possession of knowledge and skills that could, at least in theory, decide the outcome of war, should it come to pass, which seemed increasingly likely. What could be more dramatic than that–an idea so powerful that it could determine the outcome of a world war? Einstein himself was distraught.

Six years later Einstein’s remarkable insight was fully realised. On Monday 16 July 1945 at 5.29 a.m., the first test of an atomic bomb was successfully carried out at the so-called Trinity site in the Alamogordo desert in New Mexico. Though he was told the noise had been heard in three states, Leslie Groves, the general in charge of the project, insisted the test be kept secret. ‘Can you give us an easy job, general,’ an aide remarked, ‘like hiding the Mississippi River?’ The very next day, President Harry Truman sat down for his first and only face-to-face meeting with the Soviet premier Joseph Stalin in a suburb of Berlin near Potsdam.³

Three weeks later, on 6 August, also a Monday, Einstein’s idea was again deployed when Hiroshima was bombed. Two days after that, on 8 August, the Soviet Union declared war on Japan. The very next morning, the Red Army’s tanks rolled across the Manchurian border.

These events were hardly coincidences. In recent years, the view has become established–among historians at least if not yet the general public–that the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were not needed to end the Second World War but had another purpose.

In some ways it is surprising that this view is not more widespread. One early distinguished sceptic about the bomb’s use was General Dwight D. Eisenhower, supreme commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force, who directed Allied operations in Europe against Hitler, and was later president of the United States. At the height of the Cold War, and soon after his famous farewell address as president, in which he drew attention to the risks posed by the ‘military-industrial complex’, he recalled the moment when the secretary of war, Henry Stimson, told him that the atomic bomb was to be used against Japanese cities:

Admiral William ‘Bull’ Halsey’s Third Fleet was meeting almost no resistance as it bombarded Japanese coastal installations, and Admiral Wagner, in charge of air search-and-patrol, found that in all the millions of square miles on the East Asian seas and coasts ‘there was literally not a single target worth the powder to blow it up’. Halsey later, echoing Eisenhower, said: ‘The first atomic bomb was an unnecessary experiment… It was a mistake to ever drop it… [the scientists] had this toy and they wanted to try it out, so they dropped it… It killed a lot of Japs, but the Japs had put out a lot of peace feelers through Russia long before.’⁵

Perhaps even more telling, less than a year after the bombings an extensive official study by the US Strategic Bombing Survey published its conclusion that ‘Japan would likely have surrendered in 1945 without atomic bombing, without a Soviet declaration of war, and without an American invasion.’⁶

Leo Szilard, a Hungarian Jewish émigré who had escaped the Third Reich by the skin of his teeth and had later been the first to conceive the idea of the nuclear chain reaction, had met with James F. Byrnes, President Truman’s personal representative on atomic matters and subsequently secretary of state, at his home in Spartanburg, South Carolina in May 1945. In a memoir, Szilard wrote:

This much was obvious to the Russians at the time. To Vyacheslav Molotov, Soviet foreign minister during the whole of the Second World War, the two bombs ‘were not aimed at Japan but rather at the Soviet Union. They [the Americans] said, bear in mind you don’t have an atomic bomb and we do, and this is what the consequences will be like if you make the wrong move!’⁸

These and other conclusions and observations have led a raft of mainly American scholars to examine the whole process of the decision to use the bomb in more detail as more documents have been declassified and become available. The general consensus is now clear. The decision to use the bomb against Japan, in August 1945, was indeed unnecessary–the Japanese were ready to surrender once an agreed face-saving form of words was found that would let them keep the emperor as a constitutional monarch. (This was not popular in America–a third of the respondents in an opinion poll wanted him executed immediately.) It is also agreed that the primary reason for dropping the bomb was to end the war before Russia could come into the Far East as a belligerent and thereby make several territorial demands, and as a show of superior force designed to impress the nuclear advantage the Western Allies had over the Soviet Union, so that her behaviour would be more amenable to Western interests in the immediate post-war period.⁹

This later research also shows that the decision to use the bomb was made by a small number of individuals, some of whom tried to cover over their real reasons for acting as they did (‘clear evidence of outright lying’), advocating instead a pretence that the bombs were dropped to save American and Japanese lives.¹⁰

These unedifying manoeuvrings that led to the decision to use the atomic bomb on Japan are not, however, the main focus of this book. Instead it covers an earlier period of the war when the original reason for building a bomb–because it was thought Hitler’s scientists were working towards one–was discovered to have no basis in reality. But this knowledge was not properly assimilated, still less shared by the intelligence services, and was then covered up by some of the same people who misled the world about the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Using a close reading of recently released archives in different countries–Britain, the United States, Germany, Denmark, Russia–this book presents a new chronology, or a new narrative, of the construction of the bomb and shows how, if important intelligence on atomic matters had been quickly shared, as it surely should have been, the atomic bomb need never have been built in the first place, nor the world thrust into the threatening and precarious balancing act that we still inhabit. Not everyone felt as James Chadwick did, that once a bomb became possible, it also became inevitable. Errors were made–and lies were told–to bring us a weapon that was not needed.

At the heart of this story are two individuals–Niels Bohr and Klaus Fuchs–who, each in his own very different way, foresaw how the bomb threatened to change the post-war world and sought to do something about it. One failed, the other succeeded.

This book faces squarely the fact that, for some people in this narrative, once it became clear that a bomb could be built, they ensured that it would be built. Bohr and Fuchs both feared this inevitability, but they also knew that, in wartime, more than at other times, chronology is crucial. In wars, events–life-threatening events–follow on one another very quickly and important decisions with momentous consequences have to be taken rapidly. In such circumstances, as this book shows, even the seemingly inevitable is not necessarily inevitable.

The history of atomic bomb wartime intelligence–which is what this book essentially is–presents us with the unmistakable conclusion that a series of momentous mistakes were made, and lies told, by the French, by the Germans, by the British and by the Americans, with the result that the world stumbled, even blundered, unnecessarily into the nuclear age. A world war was raging, the right hand very often didn’t know what the left was doing, individuals were overworked in life-and-death situations, very few had access to all the information they ideally needed. Nonetheless, from the latest evidence we now have, we can conclude that, with different personnel in certain key positions, and if they had shared what intelligence they had, they may well have concluded that there was no need to build an atomic bomb and we would all have avoided the knife-edge that we now call peace.

The place of nuclear weapons in our lives continues to be as nerve-racking as ever. More than seventy years after Hiroshima we seem no nearer to controlling the use or even the spread of these fearsome weapons. Worldwide there are now 9,500 nuclear warheads. According to scientists this is sufficient to destroy the planet 100 times over.¹¹ Our predicament is as absurd as it is dangerous and, with recent developments in Iran and North Korea in mind, it risks becoming even more so.

In setting out this new chronology of the way the atomic bomb came into being, which in certain important respects is at variance with the orthodoxy, I am wary of deriving too-easy lessons from it. The world has moved on.

There is one observation worth making, however, because it underlines the seriousness of the new situation we now face.

The main characters in this story–Presidents Roosevelt and Truman, Vannevar Bush and General Leslie Groves, who between them helped to create and then manage the atom bomb project on the American side, and Prime Minister Winston Churchill, Chancellor of the Exchequer Sir John Anderson and James Chadwick, the discoverer of the neutron, on the British side–were all sophisticated men of the world, mature individuals, highly intelligent, vastly experienced, and extremely well informed, with many practical achievements to their name that improved millions of lives. Compared with our leaders today, they were giants.

Nevertheless, they got the atom bomb wrong. Between them, and for what they convinced themselves were the highest motives, they maladministered us into a world that could have been avoided. And this brings us back to Heisenberg’s argument: had the scientists known what the intelligence agencies and their political masters knew in the run-up to Hiroshima, would they have agreed to take part in the building of the bomb? Readers will draw their own conclusions from the evidence presented here. The atom bomb disaster is an instructive story but it underlines above all the fact that, now as then, the chain reactions between people are even more important than the immense forces of nuclear physics.