Historical Context Chart

Scientists D A V I D H . FRISCH

and the Decision to Bomb Japan What did scientists do and

what could we have done about the decision to drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima without hav- ing an almost harmless demon- stration first? What can we learn that will help in applications of future technical developments?

Such historical adventurism and didacticism should really come from one who was close t o the leadership of the Office of Scientific Research and Develop- ment of one of the Manhattan District laboratories; I was only a graduate student a t Los Ala- mos. Although my special ex- periences were quite limited, Los Alamos was a rather intimate community, so I hope t o have in reasonable perspective the feel- ings of many who were there. But that is a small part of the larger picture, for which I am relying mainly on published histories. Several people kindly talked about these matters with me, but they will not mind not being thanked by name for help in rak- ing over these old coals. I have not gone back to the original ma- terial or re-interviewed the sur- viving principals.

There is no way t o test the ap- pealing idea that “history will show” that a more lasting peace was made on account of Hiroshi- ma. A different decision about the first use of the bomb might well have been a worse one in the long run. But if 1945 could somehow have happened with even a few of the many scientists in the Manhattan District Proj- ect having had 25 years more pre- vious experience of governmental decision-making, I believe we would have wanted - and been able - to have had one demon- stration of the bomb without large loss of Japanese lives. Per- haps a demonstration would have

I ‘ . . . Yet I believe that, ac- companied by clear informa- tion, it alone-without another A-bomb-would have brought the war to an end in a few days.” David H. Frisch, a graduate student at 1 0 s Ala- mos during the development of the atomic bomb, is profes- sor of physics at the Massa- chusetts Institute of Technol- ogy.

been followed by too short a pause before a very destructive bombing to allow the Japanese government time to absorb the facts, as Hiroshima seems to me to have been followed too closely by Nagasaki. But that is another question, not so dependent on the particular experiences and perceptions of the scientists in the Project.

Even in January 1945, it was not clear whether Germany or Japan would be defeated first, and up t o about the beginning of April of 1945 there was the possi- bility, though increasingly re- mote, that Germany would get nuclear bombs. Thus detailed planning about the first use of nuclear weapons against Japan lacked definiteness until about April. By the beginning of June the decision not to give a demon- stration w a s thoroughly en- trained.

J a p a n had no offensive strength left by June. This meant that the time scale of military and diplomatic actions could be set entirely by us, subject t o the external pressures of the expected entry of the Soviet Union into Manchuria and the re-entry of the British, French and Dutch into Southeast Asia, along with

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the internal pressures for ending the war as soon as possible with minimum loss of life and wealth, but with some sort of humiliation of the enemy. “Unconditional surrender” was our firm public goal; its exact meaning was under intense debate among a few of our high government officials. Since to break Japan would ap- parently require a bloody inva- sion, it was necessary somehow to use the atomic bomb on Japan.

Let us assume here that this train of thought or feeling, wheth- er sound or not-and no matter what parts of it were dominant among decision-makers-was be- yond the control of the scientists in the Project. One thing we should remember in this connec- tion, however, is that the passion- ate desire to get rid of the Em- peror was strongly felt among Western intellectuals, including almost all scientists, and that this public pressure on our diplomatic leaders was one of the main im-

107 Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists

pediments t o a possible (not necessarily probable) earlier Jap- anese surrender. I M P O N D E R A B L E S

But were the bombs ready? The implosion design had been tested at Trinity, but only that once. The gun design seemed quite predictable, but no real nu- clear explosion had been made with it. Mounting and arming a bomb in a plane involved much that was not tested a t Trinity. The planned rehearsals of the bombing and observation runs a t Trinity, with the bomb on the tower rather than in the plane, were not successful because of bad weather. A dud or other fail- ure in delivery thus still seemed possible.

The production rate was rising toward an expected rate of an implosion design bomb every few weeks and a gun design every few months, but this was to come from complicated processes which had so far given only very small integrated yields. As seen even as late as mid-July, only two bombs were to be ready in the first weeks in August, with a third bomb due about August 20. It was thus quite possible that “wasting” a bomb in a demon- stration might cause a lengthen- ing of the war by several weeks or, much less probably, even months. These insecurities about bomb availability, delivery and performance were acutely felt by the people involved in making the detailed decisions.

From July 16 to August 6 was a very short time for the observers of the Trinity test and the others who heard any details about it- comparatively few people and mostly still greatly occupied with technical work-to re-examine the question of a demonstration.

With various degrees of inter- est, intensities of worry and time t o spend, most scientists in the Project had been thinking pri- marily about ( 1 ) international control of nuclear weapons; ( 2 ) national control of peaceful ap- plications of nuclear energy; and ( 3 ) the postwar role of the gov- ernment in research, especially 108

a t the Manhattan District Lab- oratories. Similarly, most respon- sible government officials were occupied with ( 1 ) whether an invasion would be necessary to insure a permanently peaceful Japanese government-it is easy now to forget that Japan had had a long, intensely totalitarian ex- perience then; ( 2 ) the emerging balance or imbalance of power- reaction to Soviet pushiness was a dominant consideration a t Pots- dam-and its relation to inter- national organization; and ( 3 ) military manpower and economic reconversion in the United States. F I R S T USE

Thus the choice of method of first use of the bomb ranked low in almost everyone’s priorities for worry and was often entangled with these other problems even by those closest t o atomic pro- blems.

Nevertheless, the narrow ques- tion, “What is the most humane first use that can get the Japa- nese to quit unconditionally?” was clearly asked occasionally of themselves or of their close friends by perhaps 200 scientists. On the highest government levels, perhaps a score of official scien- tific, political and military ad- visers of Secretary of War Henry Stimson did indeed address them- selves occasionally to this limited problem. Stimson himself took it as a major responsibility over a period of months.

One point has been discussed often: Wasn’t the fire-bombing of Dresden and Tokyo (of the order of 100,000 deaths each) so terrible by comparison with the casualties expected from the atomic bomb (perhaps 10,000 deaths rather than the actual 70,000) that the question of first use of the atomic bomb did not present a new moral decision in any case? I believe that the atomic bomb was always treated by Stimson and his associates, especially including Chief of Staff General George Marshall, as requiring a new decision. Al- most everyone directly involved in developing the atomic bomb, military men included (except

Admiral W. D. Leahy and per- haps some of the Air Force gen- erals in the Pacific), understood a t the time that the 1945 atomic bombs were just a beginning t o a development of destructiveness far beyond that of even the fire- bombings of Dresden and Tokyo.

As far as many scientists were concerned, the facts of Dresden and Tokyo were not that widely understood a t the time. At least I can’t remember discussion a t Los Alamos of the exceptional number of civilian casualties. Even if known in detail, I don’t believe the horrors of “conven- tional” warfare would have put off most Project scientists from proposing a more humane alter- native t o the atomic bombing of a densely populated city. Thus I believe it seemed t o some of the military men and many of the closely involved civilians that the first use of the atomic bomb against cities required a serious moral decision.

The catalog of proposals by scientists about alternatives for first use of the bomb is not a long one. I will describe only those very few which had suffi- ciently wide or high-level circu- lation to be potentially effective.

The official group appointed by Secretary Stimson t o advise him on the Manhattan Project was the “Military Policy Com- mittee,” begun formally in Sep- tember, 1942, with Vannevar Bush as chairman, J. B. Conant his alternate, and Admiral W. R. Purnell and General W. D. Styer; General Leslie R . Groves was in effect the executive officer. At a comparatively early stage, in May 1943, the Military Policy Committee recommended that the Japanese fleet concentration then a t Truk be the target for the first bomb used against the Japanese. Then Bush and Co- nant wrote to Stimson in Septem- ber 1944 suggesting a demonstra- tion over either enemy territory or our own.

I n late April 1945 a “Target Committee” of a few civilian scientists and Air Force officers was set up t o advise the Military

Policy Committee on the ques- tion of choice of targets. (Alter- natives t o airborne delivery were studied technically and dis- carded.) Although our present interest is in tracing the influ- ence of scientists, we know that the senior military officers close t o the Project were expected t o be, and were, comparably influ- ential in choosing the first use of the bomb. To them it was very important to prove the bomb a successful weapon, justifying its great cost, and therefore to use the bomb first where its ef- fects would not only be political- ly effective but also technically measurable. Indeed, the bomb might prove that future world wars would be intolerable. Since the larger military targets, such as the fleet concentration a t Truk, were no longer available, and since much of the industrial plant of Japan was spread out among many small enterprises in the cities, a previously undam- aged city was wanted as a target, and one large enough for the bomb damage t o be contained en- tirely in it. The quotation from General Groves’ book, “Now It Can Be Told,’’ indicates his thinking :

. . . Our most pressing job was to select bomb targets. This would be my responsibility. . . .

I had set a s the governing fac- tor that the targets chosen should be places the bombing of which would most adversely affect the will of the Japanese people to continue the war. Be- yond that, they should be mili- tary in nature, consisting either of important headquarters or troop concentrations, or centers of production of military equip- ment and supplies. To enable us to assess accurately the ef- fects of the bomb, the targets should not have been previously damaged by air raids. It was also desirable that the first tar- get be of such size that the dam- age would be confined within it, so that we could more definitely determine the power of the bomb. . . .

The sites that the Target Com- mittee finally selected, all of which General Groves approved, were ( 1 ) Kokura Arsenal, a mu- nitions plant whose dimensions

were about 2,000 by 4,000 feet, located next to railway yards and industrial plants; (2) Hiroshima, a major military port, naval con- voy and troop embarkation point, and industrial center; ( 3 ) Niiga- ta, a center of heavy industry; and (4) Kyoto, the largest of these, with about a million peo- ple, including many displaced persons and industries moved in- to it as other areas were de- stroyed. Again, to quote Groves:

. . . I particularly wanted Kyoto as a target because, as I have said, it was large enough in area for us to gain complete knowledge of the effects of a n atomic bomb. Hiroshima was not nearly so satisfactory in this respect. I also felt quite strong- ly, as had all the members of the Target Committee, that Kyoto was one of the most im- portant military targets in Ja- pan.

I N T E R I M C O M M I T T E E Partly as a result of pressures

by Bush and Conant over a long period, an Interim Committee of the War Department, was set up in May 1945 to deal with the broader range of problems conse- quent on the success of the Man- hattan Project. The Interim Committee superseded the Mili- tary Policy Committee. The eight-man committee was chaired by Stimson, who had been and continued to be the recognized decision-maker, and included Marshall, James Byrnes and three scientists-Bush, K. T. Compton and Conant. I t s depu- t y chairman was the insurance executive George L. Harrison. I n addition, a Scientific Advisory Panel-A. H. Compton, Enrico Fermi, E. 0. Lawrence and J. Robert Oppenheimer-was ap- pointed.

The Interim Committee met May 31 to June 1. It was as- sumed by everyone that there was the greatest urgency to use the bomb in the way best calculated to end the war without the blood- shed of the planned invasion. Working from the summary min- utes of the meeting as well as from several autobiographies and some recorded interviews, Her-

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bert Feis could reconstruct only fragments of discussion of a de- monstration, a discussion which in part took place over lunch with the people sitting a t separate ta- bles (H. Feis, “The Atomic Bomb and the End of World War 11,” Princeton University Press, 1966; reprinted by permission of Prince- ton University Press) :

According to one, Stimson asked Compton whether some sort of demonstration might serve our purpose. According to another, Byrnes enlisted the at- tention of the group to the sug- gestion by asking Lawrence for his opinion. T h a t scientist was skeptical. So was Oppenheimer, who said he doubted whether any sufficiently startling demon- stration could be devised that would convince the Japanese that they ought to throw in the sponge; since the Japanese had gone through the ghastly fire raids of Tokyo, were they like- ly to be impressed enough by any display of the weapon? Byrnes mentioned that the Japanese might bring American prisoners in the demonstration area. Then, the query was asked, what if the test should fail, if the bomb should be a “dud?” Byrnes’ fears of the ef- fect of a failure were grave. . . . No one advocated a particular

form of demonstration, so after lunch the talk went on t o the most effective use of the bomb as a weapon.

. . . Oppenheimer stressed the fact that the effects produced by an atomic bomb would differ from those produced by air at- tacks with other explosives; its visual display would be stupend- ous, and it would spread radia- tion dangerous to life for a radius of a t least two-thirds of a mile. . . .

. . . Stimson’s summary [was] that we should not give the Japanese any informative warn- ing; that we ought not to con- centrate on a civilian area but we should seek to make a deep psychological impression - to shock as many Japanese as pos- sible. When Conant remarked that for this purpose the bomb should be aimed at a vital war plant surrounded by houses, Stimson agreed. No one ob- jected. Not Marshall, who the day before had told Stimson that he wondered whether we might first use the bomb against a military target that was whol-

Bulletin o f the Atomic Scientists 109

ly military, as for example, a naval installation. Nor any member of the Scientific Panel; if some had qualms, they kept quiet about them at this critical juncture.

After finishing other work the next day, the Committee end- ed with three recommendations about the first use of the bomb: it should be used (1) as soon as possible; (2) on a military instal- lation surrounded by houses or other buildings most susceptible to damage; and ( 3 ) without ex- plicit prior warning of the nature of the bomb. While everyone ap- parently agreed to Stimson’s summary a t the time, June 1, one Interim Committee member, Un- der Secretary uf the Navy Ralph Bard, thought it over and wrote a letter of dissent to George Har- rison on June 27.

P R I O R W A R N I N G We cannot be sure what “real-

ly” happened. As Feis indicates, there was a blurring of ideas: warning” and “information”

were coupled, so that the value of giving detailed information to the Japanese right after an ex- plosion (whether a demonstration or an attack) was apparently not explored; “warning” and “de- monstration” were also usually coupled, so that although a sur- prise demonstration was dis- cussed, Byrnes’ summary implied that the phrase “without explicit prior warning” necessarily meant “no demonstration”; finally, “de- monstration” and “dud” were coupled, implying that failure of a demonstration would be worse than failure of a Hiroshima-type bombing.

Note that the detailed advice of the Target Committee did not have to be re-examined because the Interim Committee con- firmed the Military Policy Com- mittee’s objectives for first use of the bomb. To my knowledge, no comparably detailed study of a possible demonstration was ever commissioned.

By this time - early June - strong feelings about many as- pects of atomic energy were being formulated in writing by scien-

L(

tists a t Chicago and Oak Ridge. At Los Alamos, where the pace of work in those last few months gave very little time for political discussion, there also were many people seriously concerned; but to my knowledge, there were no sustained discussions of a demon- stration, nor were any of the Los Alamos discussions summarized in writing. At the other quasi- academic laboratories involved - the Substitute Alloy Materials Laboratory a t Columbia and the Radiation Laboratory at Berke- ley - there apparently was no widespread discussion.

The first written suggestion from a scientist (other than from Bush, Conant and perhaps Comp- ton and Oppenheimer) to reach Stimson was a private letter ad- dressed to President Truman dat- ed May 24 and received by Stim- son within a few days, from 0. C. Brewster, an engineer with Kel- lex Corporation. As part of a larger plan to limit the spread of nuclear weapons Brewster urged that the bomb not be used on Japan without a demonstration. The fervor of his letter moved Stimson to talk about it with - and perhaps show it t o - Tru- man as well as Marshall. But Brewster never got t o advocate to even the Scientific Advisory Panel, let alone t o Stimson or Truman, any particular plan he may have had in mind.

On May 28 Leo Szilard and Walter Bartky, both from Chi- cago, and Harold Urey, from Co- lumbia, went to Spartanburg, South Carolina, t o talk t o James Byrnes, then personal advisor to Truman and soon to be Secretary of State. It was a confused and unsympathetic exchange, and the chance for a sharp examination of a demonstration was lost. My impression is that in any case the scientists had not analyzed the possible choices carefully in advance; a demonstration was not the most important idea they wanted to discuss. This, then, was the highest level (and t o my knowledge, the only) face-to- face discussion between scientists and government officials other

than the discussions of the In- terim Committee and its Scientif- ic Advisory Panel. F R A N C K R E P O R T

The next, and potentially most effective, approach was the fa- mous Franck Report, drafted by Eugene Rabinowitch for a com- mittee of scientists led by James Franck a t Chicago. It was left for Stimson by Franck and N. Hilberry in Washington on June 12, in the company of A. H. Compton, who tried to arrange for a meeting of these men with Stimson but failed because Stim- son was out of town. This docu- ment suggested a demonstration before international observers in an uninhabited area.

On June 16, the second day of a two day meeting of the Scien- tific Advisory Panel t o the In- terim Committee a t Los Alamos, Compton was asked by phone by the deputy chairman of the In- terim Committee, George L. Har- rison, to have the Panel reconsid- er a demonstration and report back before the whole Inter- im Committee reconsidered the question in the light of the Franck Report. The Scientific Advisory Panel wrote, according to Stimson (“Harper’s Maga- zine,” February 1947) :

The opinions of our scientific colleagues on the initial use of these weapons are not unani- mous: they range from the pro- posal of a purely technical de- monstration to that of the mili- tary application best designed to induce surrender. Those who advocate a purely technical de- monstration would wish to out- law the use of atomic weapons, and have feared that if we use the weapons now our position in future negotiations will be prejudiced. Others emphasize the opportunity of saving Ameri- can lives by immediate military use, and believe that such use will improve the international prospects, in that they are more concerned with the prevention of war than with the elimina- tion of this special weapon. We find ourselves closer to these latter views; we can propose no technical demonstration likely to bring an end to the war; we see no acceptable alternative to di- rect military use. [Italics Stim- son’s.]

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Note that Fermi and Lawrence - unlike Compton and Oppen- heimer - had not been at the earlier Interim Committee meet- ing where it was unanimously agreed to have no demonstration. These were two men fully under- standing of the nature of a nu- clear explosion, open to such ideas as a demonstration, and not easily dissuaded from courses they were clear on.

While the Franck Report did not change the opinions of the seven scientists on the Interim Committee or on its Advisory Committee, it may have been what caused the Under Secretary of the Navy t o change his. As noted above, Bard wrote a dis- sent to Harrison on J u n e 27, in which he asked to give the Japa- nese several days warning, includ- ing some information about the nature of atomic power, but he did not ask for a demonstration.

U N E A S Y M E N

The unrest among scientists over the decision to use the bomb without warning or demonstra- tion was great in Chicago, and Compton asked Farrington Dan- iels, Director of the Metallurgi- cal Laboratory, to take a secret poll without previous discussion. The professional physicists, chem- ists, biologists and metallurgists were asked on July 12 t o choose which of the following five pro- cedures came closest to their choice as t o the way in which any new weapons should be used in the Japanese war:

1. Use them in the manner that is from the military point of view most effective in bring- ing about prompt Japanese sur- render at minimum human cost to our armed forces.

2. Give a military demonstra- tion in Japan to be followed by renewed opportunity for sur- weapon is employed.

3. Give an experimental de- monstration in this country, with representatives of Japan present; followed by a new op- portunity for surrender before full use of the weapon is em-

4. Withhold military use of the weapons, but make public

. , ployed.

experimental demonstration of their effectiveness.

5. Maintain as secret as pos- sible all developments of our new weapons and refrain from using them in this war.

The results were: Choice

1 2 3 4 5 Number Voting .......... 23 69 39 16 3 Per Cent of Votes ...... 15 46 26 11 2

No definition or amplification of these choices was made a t the time of the poll, and according to Alice K. Smith, in “A Peril and a Hope: The Scientists’ Move- ment in America, 1945-47”:

. . . complaints were made aft- er the poll was taken that in- sufficient time was allowed for answering and that the ques- tions were not clear. What was meant by a “military demon- stration in Japan”? Did it mean full combat use? Or did it mean using the bomb in the way sug- gested by the petition Szilard was then circulating? The cri- tics claimed that at least some of the 46 per cent who voted for the second alternative made the latter assumption.

Since Compton felt these results supported the way the bomb was actually used, these ambiguously formulated opinions gave him no cause to re-open discussion with Stimson or others.

At the same time Szilard was circulating a petition asking es- sentially that the President make a humane decision about the use of the bomb. This was circulated widely a t Chicago (55 signers), to a lesser extent a t Oak Ridge, and to only a few people a t Los Alamos, where Oppenheimer had convinced us that the decisions were in the hands of wise and humane people and were not ours to influence directly. I n Chica- go and Oak Ridge there grew out of the Szilard draft other, more specific, statements: a Chicago statement (18 signers) ask for 66 convincing warning,” and the Oak Ridge statement (68 signers) that “before use without restric- tion, its powers should be ade- quately described and demon- strated.”

The Compton-Daniels Poll, June 1970

1 HIROSHIMA BOMB 14 Kiloton I

I 14 Kiloton

1 - 30 Megaton these various statements, and two pro-bomb use letters from Oak Ridge were sent by Colonel K. Nichols on July 25 to General Groves in Washington. The de- cision had long since been made and there was no new proposal in these documents. S O M E C H O I C E S

Quarter-century quarterback- ing is of course likely to be seri- ously out of perspective. I will try to minimize distortion by using only information that was fairly well known, and risks that might reasonably have been tak- en, as of August 1945. The single set of choices presented below are those I think were the most ob- vious, and I haven’t tried to ex- plore any others. (Note in this connection that the Kokura Arse- nal, which was the first site se- lected by the Target Committee, would presumably have had no children in it.) I believe that a t least one of the set given here would have been advocated both by the Target Committee in Washington and by scientists a t Los Alamos if the problem had been put to them directly in June or July of 1945.

The following is my retrospec- tive attempt to list the conditions that it was felt the first use of the bomb would have to meet.

The conditions are given in de- scending order of importance to President Truman, Secretary Stimson and General Marshall. I believe General Groves and the Air Force men in the Marianas

111 Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists

would have ranked five and seven nearer the top:

L I S T OF C O N D I T I O N S 1. Clearly and quickly show

the Japanese decision-makers that it is a uniquely powerful type of weapon.

2. Deliver by surprise, so the Japanese wouldn’t be able to discount its significance by ad- vance propaganda, and wouldn’t get a big psychological lift if a n announced bomb turned out to be a dud. Also, delivery on a n announced place in Japanese territory would have run grave risks that the attack would be intercepted and that American prisoners of war would be put there.

3. Deliver in such a way a s to indicate that we already had, or would get soon, a whole ar- senal of such bombs - ideally, several bombs delivered in a salvo.

4. Minimize civilian Japanese casualties.

5. Minimize danger to the American airmen delivering the bomb onto target.

6. Damage war production, or fortifications or ships, etc., a s an appreciable part of the war of attrition, apart from the par- ticular nature of this bomb.

7. Make damage which is clearly measurable for under- standing the military use of atomic bombs in the future.

The relevant properties of the proposed bombing targets are in- dicated in the table. The targets are also shown on the map of Tokyo Bay.

The Hiroshima bombing was badly done in respect to condi-

tion “4” and t o a n important part of condition “1.” The de- fect in “1” was that Hiroshima was so far from Tokyo that it took almost three days - almost to the very hour of Nagasaki - for sure information t o be gath- ered and relayed with sufficient authentication t o the senior ad- visers, the Cabinet and the Em- peror. These men in Tokyo must have had a hard time trying to imagine the horror of the bomb- ing from mostly second-hand de- scriptions.

Above all, Hiroshima was al- lowed to speak almost completely for itself; no technical informa- tion was given to the Japanese a t all. The only official help given the Japanese in evaluating their situation in the face of this new type of bombing was Truman’s quite general statement and threat. A heroic but belated im- provisation was the unofficial let- ter parachuted into Nagasaki as the bomb fell. In it, Luis Alvarez, Robert Serber and Philip Morri- son warned a former colleague, the Japanese scientist Ryokichi Sagane, that this was an atomic bomb and “we have more.”

The nature of the Hiroshima bombing would probably have been authenticated a day sooner by the Tokyo government, and the threat of more bombings made more convincing, if photo- graphs and technical results of the Alamogordo test, and some

measure of the size of our urani- um and plutonium production plants, had been dropped over Tokyo shortly after Hiroshi- ma. The signatures of Bohr, two Comptons, Einstein, Fermi, Franck, Lawrence and Urey, to name only a few, could have been used t o indicate the vast scien- tific resources that had been brought to bear. Note also that sufficient information was al- ready prepared for declassifica- tion in the Smyth Report.

This brings us t o alternatives t o Hiroshima. The main problem in seeking an alternative was whether a harmless demonstra- tion would be sufficiently impres- sive. The power of the bomb could be displayed by actual blast and radiation damage, or with- out much actual damage if the potential destruction and the light, heat, sound, radioactivity and other effects could be readily inferred. As far as I can find out, it was assumed that any demon- stration would be completely harmless to life and property.

Our first alternative, Tokyo Bay, would perhaps have given one-thousandth of the expected casualties of the Hiroshima bomb- ing. Yet I believe that, accom- panied by clear information, it alone - without another A-bomb - would have brought the war to an end in a few days. I t s sole failure would have been on con- dition “6,” in that it would not

Proposed Bombing Targets Compared by Relevant Properties

M I L E S FROM DOWNTOWN

TOKYO ALTITUDE OF ( I M P E R I A L

ALTERNATIVE DETONATION PALACE) DEATHS PHYSICAL DAMAGE

0.

1.

2A.

2B.

2 c .

Hiroshima-Expected: 1,850’ 500 10,000 Very Large

-Actual: 1,850’ 500 70,000 Immense

Tokyo Bay 5,000’ 6 10 Very small, possibly with a very few striking examples

striking examples

striking examples

striking examples

Haneda Airport 4,000’ 9 1,000 Medium, with

Yokosuka Airport 1,850’ 26 1,000 Medium, with

Futtsuno J e t t y 1,850’ 26 100 Medium, with

112

have directly damaged Japanese warmaking equipment or killed soldiers. This would not, I be- lieve, have been a controlling ob- jection.

Tokyo Bay would probably have been particularly effective because a bomb detonated so close t o the center of govern- ment would very likely have been observed in some detail first-hand by many people on a political level high enough, even in war- time Japan, t o report directly to the Emperor. The Bay is six miles from downtown Tokyo. That was about the distance from the tower to the control bunker a t Trinity. Another possible tar- get, Haneda airport, was 9 miles from the Imperial Palace, the distance from our control tower to our base camp a t the Trinity site. If the bomb had been dropped in the evening after sun- down, the visual effect would have been staggering. Many peo- ple would have been dramatically aware of the bomb from its light and sound even without a direct view. TZDAL WAVE?

The suggestion that a demon- stration bomb should be exploded high over Tokyo Bay was made in a t least one of the Project laboratories, by Edward Teller a t Los Alamos. I remember one meeting of the whole scientific staff a t which the bombing of Japan was discussed by A. H. Compton, Oppenheimer and Tel- ler, among others. There was a question of whether a bomb dropped over water might fail’ to detonate until impact, causing a terribly destructive tidal wave. I recall that this led to the thought that tidal destruction might be the most convincing use. It should have been clear then that there would not have been great tidal damage in Tokyo from a surface detonation a t Tokyo Bay.

I n later years Oppenheimer blamed himself for underestimat- ing, before the Trinity test, the effect of a demonstration a t night. However, simple calculations by nonspecialists a t Chicago, as well

Map of Tokyo Bay showing proposed targets.

as by specialists a t Los Alamos, could have shown in advance enough of the bomb’s spectacular effects a t night that it would have been recognized as a sufficiently powerful psychological weapon, if a thorough search for an alterna- tive had been made. Then the Tri- nity test would have given rough confirmation of the estimate of the psychological effects of the light, blast and radioactivity.

With instruction from us, the Japanese could have estimated the potential blast and radioac- tivity damage from the sound, the light and the radar image a t distances up to perhaps 50 miles or so. ( I have not studied this in detail.) I n addition, there would

June 1970

have been a few convincing sam- ples of blast and heat damage, and probably even a few deaths, directly under a bomb dropped even as high as a mile over Tokyo Bay.

Note that the intent of deto- nating almost a mile high would be to avoid killing large numbers of people even if the targeting were off by four miles or more (the two-mile radius shown on the map was very conservative then, even bombing by radar and even with a ballist,ically clumsy bomb). This would have been an especially important consid- eration because incapacitating the Emperor might prolong the war. A t a slightly greater dis-

113 Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists

tance from the Palace, a some- what lower altitude, say 4,000 feet, could conservatively have been chosen, making almost cer- tain some deaths and giving more drastic examples of blast and heat damage.

Other targets were the Haneda and Yokosuka airfields in the Tokyo Bay area, and a t Futt- sun0 jetty, which is a peninsula a t the entrance to Tokyo Bay, all with detonation a t Hiroshima al- titude. The airfield a t Yokosuka, the naval base for Tokyo, was considered an example of a tar- get comparatively distant from the Palace but likely to impress Japanese military leaders. The deaths estimated for strikes against airfields assume that the targeting would be accurate to perhaps half a mile; a miss by two miles could result in many more, or many fewer, deaths.

It is interesting to compare these possibilities with one which was apparently rejected by the Scientific Panel as not sufficient- ly impressive. Admiral Lewis Strauss, a t that time Special As- sistant to Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal, urged that a bomb detonated above a forest some 40 miles from downtown Tokyo would lay out these J a - panese redwoods from the cen- ter like matchsticks. My guess is that this display of the blast alone would indeed not have been sufficiently impressive, but, when combined with the visual display, some damage to buildings and some deaths, would have been more effective than Hiroshima.

I don’t know enough to recon- struct the operational American and Japanese military circum- stances, let alone to figure out exactly what the scene would have been like in downtown Tokyo and on the Bay a t the time of such bombings, or how the news would circulate in Japanese government circles. I have inquired enough, however, to believe that the bombing run would not have been unusually difficult, and that a t least in the Yokosuka airport area there were still standing some large, lightly constructed 114

buildings which could have shown heavy bomb damage.

The main factors that led to the first use of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima rather than to a demonstration were (1) the pres- sure from military men t o use the bomb in its militarily most im- pressive way, with special empha- sis on measurement of its maxi- mum effects, and ( 2 ) the lack of pressure from scientists for a de- tailed study of the alternatives. The first was quite natural pro- fessional behavior, and in any case is not our concern here. The second was a serious professional failure. Two other factors which I believe were not controlling in the limited choice of first use, as distinct from the broader ques- tions of ultimate use, were: ( 3 ) the pressure of political events, for example, the coming Soviet entry into the war; and (4) in- tellectual or moral insensitivity among decision-makers. Stimson, Marshall and our scientific lead- ers were exceptionally thoughtful and humane. If a poorly thought through decision was made with such unusually good people in command, we will have to look elsewhere to ensure careful deci- sion-making in the future.

Why wasn’t there more wide- spread pressure for alternatives? First, the compartmentalization of information and the inhibitions of free travel between labora- tories, imposed for normally valid security reasons, cost heavily. Close friends who would have stimulated each other’s thinking were cut off from discussion. The people a t Chicago, particularly, mho by that time had had plenty of time to think but were further from the problems of the bomb. would have forced their harried colleagues a t Los Alamos into more searching discussion.

In addition to the direct effect of security regulations, there was an indirect effect of the nature of the work on the styles of vari- ous key people. I believe Op- penheimer was much less aggres: sive in seeking suggestions and more repressive of discussion even within the Los Alamos commun- ity than he would have been if

there had not been the inevitable pressure to restrict the discus- sion of first use to high-level peo- ple designated for that particular purpose and to urge others to get on with their jobs. At Chi- cago, the indirect effect of secur- ity pressures was in part to sub- limate efforts from more substan- tive matters into fighting the sys- tem. For example, Szilard’s nor- mally great preoccupation with methods of communication was even greater than usual, quite possibly a t the expense of a more effective formulation of alterna- tives.

Second, and most important, there were so many major prob- lems and such a small chance of any one person’s initiative affect- ing critically ‘the outcome of any one problem, that the natural tendency to finish the job and hope that someone a t a higher level would think things through won out, especially with such a fevered pace of work.

I remember very clearly how depressed my friends and I were by the talks a t the one big meet- ing a t Los Alamos, and how we felt a need to complain about the horrors of the coming world armed with nuclear weapons, but we simply did not conceive of getting to work on the narrower question of a demonstration and preparing a challenge to our lead- ers on it. It seems t o me that scientific leaders will almost in- evitably be too closely involved in keeping up the momentum of the work, and too busy, t o filter out the small amount of signal from the huge noise in these cir- cumstances. The burden of ini- tiating serious discussions must fall on those others who are more distant from the decision-making, usually the younger people.

While it is unlikely that a sit- uation with so dramatic a focus on the action to be decided will come again, there are many very imDortant technical-political de- cisions being made all the time in which scientists are experiencing the same doubts and difficulties as to their roles. (The same is true of other professionals in their various relations with social is-

sues; this is not to claim anything special about physical scientists’ problems.) Of course a great part of morality cannot be formalized, but some of it can (e.g., the Ten Commandments) and we need all the help we can get. As William James said in his “Talks to Teachers” :

If, then, you are asked, “Zn what does a moral act consist when reduced to its simplest and most elementary form?” You can make only one reply. You can say that it consists in the e f f o r t of attention by which we hold fast to an idea which but for that effort of attention would be driven out of the mind by the other psychological tenden- cies that are there.

Among the mechanisms which have been suggested to guide sci- entists and government officials are (1) that scientists take in- dividual pledges not t o do war work, or not to do anti-social work of any sort; (2) that a spe- cial government agency be creat- ed to process and referee techni- cal-political decisions; and ( 3 ) that a sort of court be set up, with prominent scientists serving as judges, t o establish a t least the facts of situations that call for political decisions about tech- nical questions.

A P E R S O N A L P L E D G E The exceptionally dramatic and

consequential case we are study- ing doesn’t fit any of these pos- sibilities very neatly. I would like t o advocate here yet another mechanism, quite independent of the three just listed, and quite limited in its usefulness. This would be a personal pledge just about the formulation and ex- pression of opinion. Optimistical- ly, all scientists and their em- ployers would subscribe together to something like this pledge on taking any job with an antici- pated outcome intended to have immediate social impact: “I take on this work with the under- standing that before the immed- iate applications of this research are decided on, I will be able to make my opinions known directly in writing, and also through a rep- resentative of my own choosing,

to ..................................... T o en- courage this, the management promises to make a forum in which t o bring together people with conflicting opinions to argue them out face to face, and also in writing. I will make every effort, in my own formulation, t o concede valid objections, and to factor out my various assump- tions so that the final decision may be made without accepting or rejecting all my opinions.’’

The blank representing the ap- propriate levels of management to be reached directly is one of the hardest parts of such an arrange- ment to give life to. Indeed, James Franck went to work for the Project a t Chicago only after making an agreement with Comp-

ton that his voice would be heard a t a very high level. When the time came, Compton tried man- fully t o redeem his pledge by passing on Franck’s letter to the Interim Committee, by trying to tell Franck’s views to them, and by taking Franck to Washington in an unsuccessful effort to see Stimson. It remains unclear whether the Franck letter got adequate circulation for Commit- tee use. It is also possible that the indirect representation of Franck’s views suffered from the same confusion of thought shown in the illogical formulation of choices in the Compton-Hilberry Poll.

I n any case scientists never got to argue their cases against high-

June 1970

ly-placed opposition, and so never were under pressure t o modify de- tails or to factor out the separ- ate components of their thinking for selected use. My guess is that if Franck had appeared before the full Interim Committee, Bard and he together would have fo- cused on a demonstration; a con- frontation with someone who had strong positive reasons for a high- ly destructive first use would have been arranged; Stimson would have been forced to choose among several clearly defined courses; and neither Hiroshima nor Nagasaki would have been bombed. NOT A P A N A C E A

A pledge about the formula- tion and expression of opinion would be acceptable, I believe, to almost every PhD in science, in- dependent of his politics, as a professional constraint on his work. It hardly needs repetition that such a pledge would not be a panacea for the use of scientific developments by society.

While we don’t need yet an- other reminder of the seriousness of our social responsibilities, we often need encouragement that our individual efforts can count. T o that point, the following pas- sage from Feis is particularly hard to forget:

[There was singular history1 . . . in the chance events which fostered Stimson’s determination not to permit the bombing of Kyoto. T h e Secretary had not known of the distinction of Kyo- to as former capital of Japan. But one evening during the early spring of 1945, a young man in uniform, son of an old friend, who was a devoted stu- dent of Oriental history, came to dinner with the Stimsons. T h e young man fell to talking about the past glories of Kyoto, and of the loveliness of the old im- perial residences which re- mained. Stimsori was moved to consult a history which told of the time when Kyoto was the capital and to look through a collection of photographs of scenes and sites in the city. Thereupon he decided that this one Japanese city should be preserved from the holocaust. To what anonymous young man may each of the rest of us owe our lives?

Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 115

1. 026_006_109_052402084345:
2. 026_006_115_052402084627: