Before the Fallout
BEFORE THE
FALLOUT
ALSO BY DIANA PRESTON
The Road to Culloden Moor:
Bonnie Prince Charlie and the '45 Rebellion
A First Rate Tragedy:
Robert Falcon Scott and the Race to the South Pole
The Boxer Rebellion:
The Dramatic Story of China's War on Foreigners
That Shook the World in the Summer of 1900
Lusitania:
An Epic Tragedy
A Pirate of Exquisite Mind:
Explorer, Naturalist, and Buccaneer:
The Life of William Dampier (with Michael Preston)
BEFORE THE
FALLOUT
from MARIE CURIE to HIROSHIMA
DIANA PRESTON
Copyright © 2005 by Preston Writing Partnership
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the Publisher.
First published in the United States of America in 2005 by
Walker Publishing Company, Inc.
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from this book, write to Permissions, Walker & Company,M
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Art Credits
Title page spread Children of the Manhattan Project/Joseph Paplia Collection. Science Photo Library, London. CORBIS. Musee Curie, Paris. American Institute of Physics, Emilio Segrè Visual Archives. Hiroshima City Archives & Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum. Artists' Rights Society, NY/Museo Nacional Centro De Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid. What Little I Remember, by Otto Frisch (Cambridge University Press, 1979) Sketches by Otto Frisch. Norwegian Resistance Museum, Oslo. Norwegian Industrialworkers Museum, Vemork. Cal-Tech Photo Archives. The Sports Museum of New England, Boston. Boston Herald Library/Archives. Michael Preston.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
available upon request
eISBN: 978-0-802-71819-8
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Printed in the United States of America
2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 1
To Michael,
my husband
and
writing partner
Our imagination is stretched to the utmost,
not, as infction, to imagine things which are not really there,
but just to comprehend those things which are there.
—Richard Feynman
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
Prologue
ONE. "Brilliant in the Darkness"
TWO. A Rabbit from the Antipodes
THREE. Forces of Nature
FOUR. "Make Physics Boom"
FIVE. Days of Alchemy
SIX. Persecution and Purge
SEVEN. "Wonderful Findings"
EIGHT. "We May Sleep Fairly Comfortably in Our Beds"
NINE. A Cold Room in Birmingham
TEN. Maud Ray Kent
ELEVEN. "Hitler's Success Could Depend On It"
TWELVE. "He Said 'Bomb' in No Uncertain Terms"
THIRTEEN. "We'll Wipe the Japs Out of the Maps"
FOURTEEN. "V. B. OK"
FIFTEEN. "The Best Coup"
SIXTEEN. Beautiful and Savage Country
SEVENTEEN. "Mr. Baker"
EIGHTEEN. Heavy Water
NINETEEN. Boon or Disaster?
TWENTY. "This Thing Is Going to Be Very Big"
TWENTY-ONE. "Germany Had No Atomic Bomb"
TWENTY-TWO. "A Profound Psychological Impression"
TWENTY-THREE. "An Elongated Trash Can with Fins"
TWENTY-FOUR. "It's Hiroshima"
TWENTY-FIVE. "Mother Will Not Die"
TWENTY-SIX. "A New Fact in the World's Power Politics"
Epilogue
Notes and Sources
Glossary
Bibliography
Index
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
First I should acknowledge the collaboration of my husband, Michael, in both the research and the writing of this book. Without him I could not have undertaken it.
I am also indebted to many others: Hans Bethe, Robert Christy, Bertrand Goldschmidt, Philip Morrison, and Sir Joseph Rotblat for talking to me about their personal experiences of working on the Allied bomb program; Lorna Arnold, formerly the U.K. Atomic Energy Authority's official historian, for her generous help and advice; and Arnold Kramish and Carl-Friedrich von Weizsacker for corresponding with me and answering my questions.
In the United Kingdom the staff and archivists of many libraries and organizations gave me their help: the BBC Written Archives Centre; the Bodleian Library, Oxford; the British Library; the Cambridge University Library; the archives of Churchill College, Cambridge; Liverpool University Physics Department (and Peter Rowlands in particular); the London Library; the U.K. National Radiological Protection Board; the Royal Society; and the U.K. National Archive.
In the United States I must thank the staff of the American Institute of Physics, in particular Julie Gass, for their generosity in sending me transcripts of oral interviews; the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration; the Library of Congress; and the Bancroft Library of the University of California.
Elsewhere I am grateful to the Niels Bohr Archive in Copenhagen, and especially Finn Aaserud, for making the recently released postwar letters from Niels Bohr to Werner Heisenberg so accessible; to Aubrey Pomerance of the Judisches Museum, Berlin, for information about Fritz Strassmann's concealment in his apartment of the Jewish pianist Andrea Wolffenstein; to Yad Vashem in Jerusalem for a copy of the citation acknowledging Strassmann's courage; and to the Deutsches Museum in Munich for access to formerly secret documents about the German atom bomb project from 1938 to 1945.
I have made every effort to contact holders of copyright, but with a story covering fifty years this is not an easy task. I hope that anyone I failed to find will accept my sincere apologies.
In Japan, I was touched by the kindness and hospitality of the many people we met there: Miho Nakano for translation and research and for welcoming us to her city; Kazuhiko Takano, deputy director of the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, for insights into the prewar life and history of the city; Yoko Kono for guiding us around the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum; Emiko Ono for sharing with us her family history; Masanori Ishimoto of the Hiroshima City Museum of History and Traditional Crafts for telling us about the city's artisans; Jun Fujita and Toshie Kawase for their childhood reminiscences; and Margaret Irwin of the Radiation Effects Research Foundation's Archive Office, Hiroshima, for information about the early history of radiology in Japan.
I must also thank family and friends: Ulrich Aldag, Rhys Bidder, St. John Brown, Clinton Leeks, Kim Lewison, Graeme Low, Neil Munro, and Oliver Strimpel for their insights on the text; Eric Hollis for the loan of books; my aunt Lily Bardi-Ullmann for newspaper research in the United States; and my mother and parents-in-law for their support.
Lastly the help of our agents, Bill Hamilton and Michael Carlisle, was invaluable, and it has been a pleasure working with Michele Hutchison and the team at Doubleday in London and with George Gibson and his colleagues at Walker & Company in New York.
BEFORE THE
FALLOUT
PROLOGUE
ON 6 AUGUST 1945, the Christian Feast of the Transfiguration, the Festival of Light, a young mother, Futaba Kitayama, looked up to see "an airplane as pretty as a silver treasure flying from East to West in the cloud
less pure blue sky." Someone standing by her said, "A parachute is falling." Then the parachute exploded into "an indescribable light."
The American B-29 bomber, Enola Gay, had just dropped "Little Boy," a four-ton bomb which detonated with the explosive power of 15,000 tons of TNT over the Japanese city of Hiroshima. Pilot Paul Tibbets, who had the day before named his plane after his own mother, struggled to hold it steady as the first shock waves hit. Bathed in a bright light, he looked back and saw "a giant purple mushroom boiling upward like something terribly alive." He switched on the intercom and announced to his shaken crew: "Fellows, you have just dropped the first atomic bomb in history."
In Hiroshima, Futaba Kitayama felt her face become strangely damp: "When I wiped my face the skin peeled off." Her eyes began to mist over and close as her face swelled. "Suddenly driven by a terror that would not permit inaction," she staggered past writhing, flayed bodies as she tried to escape. To a doctor the pervasive stench of burned flesh was like "dried squid when it is grilled—the squid we like so much to eat." By December 1945, about 140,000 inhabitants of Hiroshima would be dead, either as a result of the blast and the fires that followed, or of the insidious, silent effects of nuclear radiation.
When news of the bombing was announced, young Allied soldiers preparing for the invasion of Japan "cried with relief and joy. We were going to live. We were going to grow up to adulthood after all." President Harry Truman told a group of sailors aboard the cruiser on which he was returning from the Potsdam Conference: "This is the greatest thing in history."
Winston Churchill struck a more reflective note: "This revelation of the secrets of nature, long mercifully withheld from man, should arouse the most solemn reflections in the mind and conscience of every human being capable of comprehension." Only three days after Hiroshima, and within days of giving birth to her second son, a New York mother wrote, "Torturing regrets that I have brought children into the world to face such a dreadful thing as this, have shivered through me. It seems that it will be for them all their lives like living on a keg of dynamite which may go off at any moment."
Soon worries were widespread that the invention of the bomb had unleashed a Frankenstein monster capable of striking back at its creators in a wholesale and indiscriminate fashion. Although over the past sixty years such concerns have wavered in intensity and the source of the perceived threat has varied, the fear that a single plane or a single person with a suitcase can obliterate a city haunts us today. *
The destructive flash that seared Hiroshima into history was the culmination of fifty years of scientific creativity and more than fifty years of political and military turmoil. Generations of scientists had contributed to that moment in physics. Yet, when they first began to tease out the secrets of matter not even future Nobel Prize winners could have predicted how their pioneering insights would combine with exterior events to produce such a defining moment in history. Like all in this story, they were only human.
· · ·
For the scientists of many nations, the journey of discovery had begun in the i 890s. Dedicated researchers like Marie Curie, working alone or in small teams with rudimentary equipment, intent on achieving a fuller understanding of nature, started to identify the minute building blocks forming the world around them. Blinding discoveries were matched by blind alleys. People rushed to publish their results, not for profit or for national prestige and power, often not even for personal glory but rather for the pure joy of knowledge.
For a long time no one realized their work could unlock immense energy to furnish a devastating new weapon or, indeed, if properly harnessed, to provide a city with electricity. At the beginning of the twentieth century, radioactivity was seen as only producing benefits to health through the use of x-rays for diagnosis and the use of radioactive materials to treat many diseases, including cancer. Physics was a new subject. The 1910 Encyclopaedia Britannica devoted fifty pages to chemistry, but physics did not feature. Around that time there were, perhaps, one thousand physicists worldwide, of whom maybe 10 percent were engaged in the study of radioactivity. Consequently, all those involved knew each other. At a time of intense national rivalries and of competition for empire, trade, and natural resources, results were pooled internationally, as further pieces in a communal jigsaw puzzle for which no one had the master picture or pictures. Scientists studied at one another's institutes. North Americans and Japanese visited Germany; Germans came to Britain; Britons went to North America; Russians studied in France. Colleagues skied, hiked, and made music together. Allegiances and rivalries stemmed from where and with whom people had studied, rather than from nationality or race.
All met at conferences where results were shared, contacts maintained, and gossip exchanged. Albert Einstein called them "witches' sabbaths." Few conferences were as marked by gossip as that in Brussels in 1911, when Marie Curie was forced to withdraw † as a result of an alleged affair with Paul Langevin, a close colleague and a married man. However, personalities were strong and debate often heated. This was particularly the case when entirely novel concepts, such as relativity or quantum theory, were discussed—concepts that undermined the Newtonian notion of a predictable, mechanical world whose ordered processes could be measured and whose future behavior could be as accurately forecast as its past could be determined.
Those involved were, as they recalled, undertaking "wholly new processes of thought beyond all the previous notions in physics" and "filled with such tension that it almost took [their] breath away." "It was an heroic time . . . not the doing of any one man" but "the collaboration of scores of scientists from many different countries . . . a period of patient work in the laboratory, of crucial experiments and daring action, of many false starts and many untenable conjectures. . . . It was a time of creation."
Yet when in 1933, despite the great advances already made, one of the world's leading physicists, Ernest Rutherford, dismissed the idea of harnessing energy from atoms as "moonshine," the physicists' world was changing. Adolf Hitler was in power. Scientists who had once traveled simply to where the best science was, were now compelled to flee his and other totalitarian regimes because of their race or political views. Ernest Rutherford himself became one of those who did the most to welcome them and find them work. Their knowledge and brainpower were to prove vital to their hosts in the impending conflict.
In Berlin in 1939, on the eve of the long-feared war, German scientists, with considerable secret help from one of their exiled Jewish former colleagues, Lise Meitner, discovered nuclear fission—a way to unleash the power of the atom. Scientists across the world recognized that an atomic weapon might be a possibility. The personal experience of the emigres gave added urgency to their efforts to stimulate the democracies to action so that Germany could not blackmail the wrorld into submission by its possession of a unique and uniquely destructive weapon. The success of their advocacy meant that what had for more than forty years been an open quest for knowledge became, almost overnight, a race between belligerent nations, working in secret with large teams, for high and sinister stakes, using all available means of sabotage, espionage, and disinformation to thwart their opponents.
The scientists' fears of their German colleagues' potential led one British physicist, during the Blitz in 1940—41, surreptitiously to take a Geiger counter from his laboratory to monitor bomb craters in case the enemy had mixed radioactive materials with conventional explosives to contaminate whole areas and poison their inhabitants. Allied scientists remained so concerned about what are now called "dirty bombs" that they warned General Dwight D. Eisenhower that the Germans might well use them against the Allied troops under his command during the D-Day landings in Normandy in June 1944.
· · ·
Well before D-Day, nuclear physics had become big science and big engineering. No other country was able to replicate the resources put into the American Manhattan Project. It cost $2 billion and was as big as the U.S. car industry. The project employed 130,000 peopl
e, from American and British scientists to security guards and process workers, not counting the military and government staff and politicians.
A fortnight after Hiroshima an editorial in Life magazine commented, "Our sole safeguard against the very real danger of a reversion to barbarism is the kind of morality which compels the individual conscience, be the group right or wrong. The individual conscience against the atomic bomb? Yes, there is no other way. No limits are set to our Promethean ingenuity provided we remember that we are not Jove."
The very success of the bomb project in its own terms retrospectively sharpened the moral searchings among those involved. To some it came to symbolize science's loss of innocence. Sound sense and acute sensibility coexisted uneasily in the character of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the scientific leader of the Manhattan Project. For as long as it took to complete his task, he subdued his humanist principles to achieve the most inhumane of weapons, but he would later state that "physicists had known sin" and that he, personally, was "not completely free of a sense of guilt." Another leading scientist said that the bomb had "killed a beautiful subject."
However, even before the bomb was dropped, their sense of individual responsibility had compelled other key staff to speak out. Joseph Rotblat, a future winner of the Nobel Prize for Peace, actually left the Manhattan Project when he realized that the weapon would become a permanent part of military arsenals which politicians were prepared to contemplate using against their then ally Russia, as well as against Germany. The Dane Niels Bohr and the Hungarian refugee Leo Szilard both argued for international cooperation and control of the discovery, for a demonstration of the bomb's explosive power before all nations, rather than its immediate use in combat.*