The atomic bomb - 11 August 1995

For at least 30 years, there's been a chronic worldwide controversy about the circumstances under which the decision was taken to drop the Hiroshima bomb. And in this country this past week in places as far apart as the United Nations New York Headquarters and the desert town in New Mexico where the bomb was first tested, there were marches and protest demonstrations, all of them that I've seen more melancholy than militant.

We also had here two television documentaries that while meaning to recount the facts and draw from them a true conclusion, rather advanced a thesis, and then with ruthless and selective energy, produced the pictures and the commentary to prove the original thesis, which asked us to consider the ignorance and hypocrisy of President Truman and his advisors their blind stupidity in not listening to the pleas for peace of a desperate Japan on the ropes and their brutal inhumanity in performing what the maker of one of the documentaries calls: "The totally unnecessary decision to drop the bomb on Hiroshima".

Just 25 years ago, this weekly talk was on the same topic. What I had not read then and have not since is a straight narrative story of how the bomb came to be made here and what President Truman and his two most trusted advisors had in mind before they agreed that the bomb had to be dropped. Let's try again. You could start the American story in several different places and at various times, let us choose a day in the spring of 1938 when a Viennese woman, a physicist, working for years with a famous German physicist Otto Hahn in Berlin suddenly discovered that she was a non Aryan. When Hitler took over Austrian in that spring of '38, she had to go, to the fury of Otto Hahn who interceded with Hitler to no effect, so Lisa Mitna slipped out of Germany and became a refugee in Stockholm.

Thorough that year and on into the summer of 1939, she kept in touch with the scattered international family of physicists who'd been startled out of their fundamental principles, by Hahn's discovery of nuclear fission. But could the discovery be exploited to produce what somebody called, "a massive explosive force"? Einstein years before had thought it extremely unlikely and Lord Rutherford called such talk moonshine. But there was Lisa Mitna in Sweden and in the United States three Hungarian Jewish refugees from Hitler who thought it possible and who moreover heard from friends in Germany that the Nazis were starting themselves to consider a manufacture an actual atom bomb. These three got reports of the mobilising of 50 German physicists, a conference here, a conference there. Now today we know that the Nazi atomic effort was never a threat to the allied project in the United States. Hitler was curiously uninterested in scientific research unless it could produce a weapon he could touch and see. And by the grandest irony of his career, the most eminent physicists who were experts in the subject were mostly Jews who had been driven into exile by him to work as it turned out on the American bomb.

In the summer of 1939 a month or more before the Nazis invaded Poland, Lisa Mitna heard that the Germans had banned all exports of uranium ore from the mines of Czechoslovakia, which of course Germany occupied. Now here was proof that the Nazis were onto uranium as the essential element in nuclear fission, probably meant they were well along with the early stages of the bomb's production. As I say of course it was not so, but when Lisa Mitna sent this information to the three Hungarian colleagues in Manhattan, they felt the time had come to warn the American government how to do it. They were well known in what you might call the expert secret society of the world's atomic physicists but to everybody else, totally nonentities, their names were Leo Szilard, Edward Teller and Eugene Wigner, nevertheless they decided to act.

How to reach Einstein then a refugee professor at Princeton. Wigner was a working associate and friend, all he knew about Einstein that summer was that he'd rented a cottage somewhere down at the end of Long Island and that the place name began with a "P". I've already told, in I hope riveting detail, the story of that horrendous automobile trip before they found Einstein. They'd driven about 100 miles and were ready to give up when a little boy with a fishing rod standing in a drug store where Szilard and Teller had gone for some trifle said: "Dr. Einstein sure, he lives in Dr. Moore's cottage on Nassau Point." The boy went with them to this two mile long little peninsula dropping into the middle of Peconic Bay, found Einstein in his slippers and told him what they knew.

In checking this safari and other details later, Leo Szilard told me that the possibility of a chain reaction had never occurred to Dr. Einstein. Anyway, they came back with a model letter to President Roosevelt, which Einstein signed – he later said he hadn't the remotest idea the letter might spur an American effort to make a bomb, only to alert Americans to Hitler's progress. In sum this is what it said: In the course of the last four months it's been made probable through the work of Joliot in France as well as the Italian refugee Fermi and Szilard in America that it maybe possible to set up a nuclear chain reaction in a large mass of uranium, by which vast amounts of power and large quantities of new radium-like elements would be generated, by which my dear President it might be possible to unleash and immense destructive force, Einstein Nassau Point, Long Island, August the 2nd 1939.

The President didn't get the letter for three months, eventually through a friendly banker. Chain reaction in a large mass of uranium, what did it mean? Nobody in the armed forces, if consulted would have had the slightest idea. Roosevelt thought the letter interesting though mysterious. Not until two years later the fall of 1941 was anything done about it. The president appointed a committee, Vice President Truman, two well known scientists and the two key people Secretary of War Henry L Stimson and General George Marshall, the effective commander and chief of the war of supply in two oceans.

And I think I should say at once that Henry Stimson, an old austere upright Yankee and General Marshall the Virginia soldier who refused to write his memoirs for fear he might hurt living people, were men of honour and conscience and 18 carat integrity to match the characters of all the revisionist historians combined. Well President Roosevelt at first put aside a few hundred dollars for this odd possibly crackpot project, which before the bomb went off in New Mexico had been increased to the tune of over 2 billion dollars had recruited six Nobel Prize winners and in three vast isolated factories, each the size of a city, in three states had gathered over 50,000 workers most of whom had no idea what they were working on.

Now however, we move to the early summer of 1945, the war in Europe is over, the big three: Churchill, Roosevelt, Stalin are going to meet in Potsdam to plan the course of the war in the Pacific. This is normally where the debate begins about the necessity or brutality of dropping the bomb. The theme of the debate is not complex, it turned on two unknowns: the future human cost of an invasion and the present warlike posture of Japan.

I say unknown here, where the revision is taught cockily about Japan being beaten an begging to surrender. The truth is that in the July, the Japanese made a tentative offer through the Soviet Union of a peace treaty, which made the preposterous condition that Japan should keep most of her Asian conquests. The response came from Secretary Stimson. He consulted every authority in the armed forces and the government and proposed to deliver to Japan an ultimatum, which was done at Potsdam. It demanded total surrender or threaten Japan with intensive air and sea blockade, massive strategic fire bombing. By the way, the casualties at Potsdam and again in Tokyo from our fire bombing had been as bad as Hiroshima and Nagasaki followed by an invasion over the outer islands and eventually the home islands all to be done with the combined military power of the United States, Britain and soon the Soviet Union. No mention was made of the bomb.

To avoid this fate, Japan must give up her conquests, and that word should remind us that Japan owned by then, most of the Far East territories, larger and more scattered than Hitler's ownership of Europe. And that brings us to the point. In calculating the point in most disputes, the likely losses on both sides, we tend to think of a million or more fierce fighting Japanese hunkered down in the home islands waiting for the arrival of the island hopping Americans. Not so, the Japanese navy was more or less defeated. But there were just under two million men in the home islands, more than two million men in China, Korea,!!! INAUD and Formosa, half a million in the East Indies and the Philippines, a quarter of a million in French Indochina, today's Vietnam, Thailand and Burma and a 100,000 in many Pacific Islands not all of which could be bypassed by the main invading forces. In other words, there was a Japanese Army of 5 million controlling the vast new Japanese Empire.

The Potsdam ultimatum was turned down by the Japanese prime minister as a document unworthy of consideration. The Stimson Marshal and hence Truman guess at the allied casualties, five million American and allied men would be mobilised was between one and two million. The Japanese, if their appalling tenacity at Okinawa was anything to go on, ten Japanese casualties for every American would likely be much more. These were the considerations that made these honourable men with infinite reluctance and a strong knowledge of the alternative, decide after the power of the bomb was know that perhaps 200,000 Japanese would have to die to spare the much more immense casualties of another 18 months or so of conventional war over the hugest battleground in history.

The surrender on the 15th of August was a surrender to the Potsdam terms with the new enlightened promise that the Emperor would retain his sovereignty, exercised under an allied commander. This was conceded because it occurred to Truman, Stimson and Marshall perhaps a little late that no Japanese admiral or general could successfully order a surrender, but the divine one, the Emperor could and did.

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