Before the Fallout Read online

  The wooden buildings lining the busy nearby streets housed sports shops, photo studios, bike shops, and stores whose wares ranged from cosmetics, dolls, and ice cream to soy sauce and white miso (a much-loved Japanese flavoring for meats and stews made of malt and boiled soy beans; customers brought small containers to be filled from the barrels in which it was stored). Salugakucho also had many woodworking shops. Their owners welcomed buyers into interiors designed and furnished to show off their exquisite craftsmanship. People also visited the district to buy specialties—the Kadohatsu caterers were famous in Hiroshima for providing the best wedding feasts. Some came to learn skills such as flower arranging and the time-honored ritual of the tea ceremony, both of which were taught by the owner of the Iroha Hotel. On the upper floor of the Ise General Store was a dressmaking business, where seamstresses stitched indigo-dyed kimonos for daily wear or sometimes the elaborate black bridal kimonos, heavily and colorfully embroidered with plants and blossoms such as sho (pine), chiku (bamboo), bai (plum), and other symbols of good fortune and longevity.

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  Aioi Bridge, Hiroshima

  In the last weeks before war, scientists in the United States, Britain, France, and Germany were all actively exploring fission. The publication in June 1939 of a detailed account of a uranium chain reaction by the German theoretical physicist Siegfried Fliigge showed how far German thinking had developed since Hahn and Strassmann had published their tentative conclusions on uranium fission just six months earlier. The article concluded that "our present knowledge makes it seem possible to build a 'uranium device.'" Fliigge, who was a colleague of Hahn's at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute and, like him, no Nazi, had, in fact, published the article because he believed such sensitive information should be shared with the wider world. In this spirit he had also given an interview to the big-circulation newspaper Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung. However, the net effect was to worry the wider scientific community that the Nazis were advancing down the path toward nuclear weapons.

  Leo Szilard recognized the importance of keeping more than ideas out of the grasp of Nazi Germany. Up to this point no one had been much concerned about securing the world's stocks of uranium. However, news came that Germany had forbidden any export of uranium ore from the Joachimsthal mines in Czechoslovakia, which the Nazis now controlled and which decades earlier had supplied Marie Curie with her sacks of pitchblende mixed with pine needles. Europe's only other large stockpile of uranium belonged to the Union Miniere du Haut-Katanga, a Belgian company that owned rich uranium mines in the Belgian Congo. Szilard was worried that the Germans might try to get hold of the Belgian ore. Recalling that Albert Einstein had long been a friend of Queen Elizabeth of Belgium, he decided to ask whether Einstein would be prepared to contact her to seek her help in warning the Belgian government not to export uranium ore to Germany.

  On a hot July day, Szilard and his friend Eugene Wigner set out past the New York World's Fair, with its extraordinary collection of buildings celebrating the theme of constructing the world of tomorrow, to visit Einstein, who was vacationing on Long Island. The sixty-year-old, clad in rolled-up trousers and undershirt, led his visitors to his study, where, talking in German, they explained their mission as they sipped iced tea. According to Szilard, "This was the first Einstein had heard about the possibility of a chain reaction. He was very quick to see the implications and perfectly willing to do anything that needed to be done. He was willing to assume responsibility for sounding the alarm even though it was quite possible that the alarm might prove to be a false alarm. The one thing that most scientists are really afraid of is to make a fool of themselves. Einstein was free from such a fear and this above all is what made his position unique on this occasion."

  Einstein agreed to write a letter but suggested sending it to a member of the Belgian cabinet rather than directly to his friend Queen Elizabeth. Wigner argued that before sending anything to a foreign government it was surely their duty to inform the State Department in Washington of their intentions. The others agreed and decided that, if the State Department was to be involved, their appropriate course of action was to prepare a letter to the Belgian ambassador to be shown in draft to the State Department. Einstein dictated a note in German, warning of the possibility that explosive bombs of unimaginable power could be made from uranium and urging the necessity of keeping stocks of uranium out of enemy hands—by implication German ones.

  The problem was how to ensure that the U.S. government paid attention to the views of three refugee scientists who, despite Einstein's fame, had little entree into the inner circles of government. Szilard had been wondering about trying to enlist the help of the influential aviator Charles Lindbergh. However, a friend of Szilard's, the Viennese refugee economist Gustav Stolper, suggested they approach Alexander Sachs, a Wall Street financier who was a personal friend of the president and one of an intimate group of advisers possessing, as Roosevelt himself had stipulated, "great ability, physical vitality and a real passion for anonymity." The forty-six-year-old Sachs had been following the development of nuclear power for a while and, to Szilard's delight, agreed personally to deliver a letter from Einstein to Roosevelt. No doubt following Sachs's advice, Szilard drafted a letter broader in scope than that originally dictated by Einstein. Addressed directly to the president, rather than the State Department, it not only dealt with the need to safeguard the stockpile of uranium from the Belgian Congo but sought support for the funding and acceleration of nuclear research.

  Szilard mailed the draft to Einstein and in early August 1939 traveled once more to Long Island to discuss it. Since Szilard had never bothered to learn to drive and Wigner was away, his replacement chauffeur was Edward Teller in his 1935 Plymouth. This time Einstein greeted them in an old dressing gown and slippers. Teller served as their scribe, writing down yet a third draft letter per Einstein and Szilard's dictation. Szilard took this new draft back to New York and used it as the basis for two further texts, one comparatively short and the other rather longer, both addressed to the president. He left it to Einstein to decide which he preferred, and he chose the more detailed one.

  In later years, when the question arose of whether Einstein, a declared pacifist, had fired the gun that began the American race for the bomb, he would insist, "I served as a pillar box," nothing more. Sachs, too, would remember Einstein's role as facilitator rather than prime mover, recalling, "We really only needed Einstein in order to provide Szilard with a halo, as he was then almost unknown in the United States. His entire role was really limited to that."

  Sachs finally presented the document to President Roosevelt on 11 October 1939 after repeated calls to the White House to secure an appointment. To ensure the president's full attention, Sachs read to him selected highlights from the letter signed by Einstein. It warned Roosevelt that "the element uranium may be turned into a new and important source of energy in the immediate future." This new phenomenon could "lead to the construction of bombs, and it is conceivable—though much less certain—that extremely powerful bombs of a new type may thus be constructed. A single bomb of this type, carried by boat and exploded in a port, might very well destroy the whole port together with some of the surrounding territory. However, such bombs might very well prove to be too heavy for transportation by air." It urged the need for "watchfulness and, if necessary, quick action on the part of the Administration." Sachs also read out a detailed note of his own composition and further extracts from a pile of technical papers he had brought with him.

  Albert Einstein's letters to FDR (facing page) and FDR's reply (left)

  Roosevelt was not, as Sachs had hoped, electrified. He said politely that the subject matter was interesting but that any government intervention would be premature. However, he invited the disappointed Sachs to join him for breakfast the next day. "That night I didn't sleep a wink," Sachs later wrote. Instead he paced his suite at the Carlton Hotel and several times went out to walk in a small nearby park, trying to marshal
his thoughts. As he sat on a park bench, reflecting that everything was "already beginning to look practically hopeless," suddenly, "like an inspiration, the right idea came to me. I returned to the hotel, took a shower and shortlv afterwards called once more at the White House."

  Sachs found Roosevelt alone at the breakfast table in his wheelchair. The president greeted him with two wry questions, "What bright idea have you got now? How much time would you like to explain it?" Sachs replied that it would not take long and briefly recounted the story of the young American inventor Robert Fulton. During the Napoleonic Wars, Fulton had offered to build Napoleon a fleet of steamships to help him overcome his archenemy, the British. The French emperor, believing Fulton was talking nonsense, impatiently dismissed the visionary young man, who subsequently pioneered the world's first steamships. Sachs reminded Roosevelt of the nineteenth-century British historian Lord Acton's comment that "England was saved by the shortsightedness of an adversary. Had Napoleon shown more imagination and humility . . . the history of the nineteenth century would have taken a very different course."

  The cautionary tale had the desired effect. For several minutes Roosevelt said nothing. Then he scribbled a note and handed it to a servant, who returned bearing a bottle of fine old brandy from Napoleon's time and filled two glasses. Roosevelt raised his, toasted Sachs, and quietly remarked, "Alex, what you are after is to see that the Nazis don't blow us up?" to which Sachs replied, "Precisely." The president summoned his attache, General "Pa" Watson, and consigned to him Sachs's documents with the instruction "Pa, this requires action!"

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  Leo Szilard hoped that the British too would take notice of the nuclear risk. In January 1939 he had reminded the British Admiralty about the chain-reaction patent he had taken out in 1934 and asked them to maintain its secrecy. To his relief, several months later they agreed to do so. For a while, there seemed a real possibility that the British would take the potential military applications of nuclear fission seriously. Frederic Joliot-Curie's experiments demonstrating the release of secondary neutrons through fission had caught the eye of the physicist George Thomson, son of Rutherford's famous mentor at the Cavendish laboratory, J. J. Thomson. Within hours of the Joliot-Curie team's publication of their results in Nature, Thomson began lobbying the British government about the need to secure all possible stocks of uranium. He also began work at London University's Imperial College, where he was professor of physics, to assess the feasibility of using nuclear fission to create a bomb.

  Many, however, remained skeptical about whether such activities were valuable, given competing research priorities like the study of microwaves, key to the development of radar. Winston Churchill was among the doubters. On 5 August he wrote to Sir Kingsley Wood, secretary of state for war, that "the fear that this new discovery has provided the Nazis with some sinister new secret explosive with which to destroy their enemies is clearly without foundation. Dark hints will no doubt be dropped and terrifying whispers will be assiduously circulated, but it is to be hoped that nobody will be taken in by them."

  This view appeared vindicated when on i September 1939, the day Nazi troops invaded Poland and two days before Britain declared war on Germany for its violation of Polish sovereignty, Niels Bohr and John Wheeler published their classic paper presenting the theoretical basis for their hypothesis about the scarce isotope U-235. They explained that fission occurred only in U-235, which was extremely hard to separate from the nonfissionable but prolific U-238, of which natural uranium chiefly consisted. Furthermore, if the bombarding neutrons were slowed down to enhance their chances of smashing into atoms of U-235, this would prevent the tremendously fast reaction needed to spark an atomic explosion. This paper, coupled with early discouraging results from Thomson's work at Imperial College, suggested that pursuing fission for military purposes was not, after all, a priority. Official interest waned, and, in the early months of the war, a relieved minister in the British war cabinet, wrote, "I gather that we may sleep fairly comfortably in our beds."

  NINE

  A COLD ROOM

  IN BIRMINGHAM

  FOR THE SECOND TIME inhis life James Chadwick was in the wrong place when war broke out. On 3 September 1939 he was vacationing with his wife and twin daughters in a remote region of northern Sweden where the trout fishing was good. The news was brought to their farmhouse by a local farmer who had heard it on the wireless. The family at once packed and set off for Stockholm, five hundred miles to the south, only to find all flights to London canceled. While they waited, hoping to find some other way home, Chadwick contacted Lise Meitner, whom he found lonely, depressed, and wondering whether she should accept a post she had been offered at Cambridge University. The Chadwicks managed to get flights to Holland, and James Chadwick just had time to scribble a quick note to Meit­ner before they dashed to the airport. It concluded, "I am ready to do anything to help you," but they would not meet again until the war was over.

  Upon arrival in Holland, the Chadwicks once again found themselves stuck. Another Briton at their Amsterdam hotel was in the same plight: H. G. Wells, whose 1913 novel, The World Set Free, had uncannily predicted not only the discovery of artificial radioactivity but the year—1933. He had also predicted the destruction of cities by nuclear bombs in the 19 cos. The Times Literary Supplement had dismissed his thoughts as "porridge."

  The Chadwicks did not approach Wells. Instead, they hovered nervously about the hotel, afraid of missing a message about a ship or plane that might have room for them. At last they found places on a "stinking, rusty, tramp steamer" which carried them across the North Sea to England. Among those waiting anxiously to greet Chadwick in Liverpool was the impoverished, thirty-year-old Polish-Jewish physicist Joseph Rotblat.

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  As a child during the First World War, Joseph Rotblat had experienced and "witnessed great suffering" and he had become a scientist "as a way of bringing relief, of helping a lot of people." While still in Warsaw, he had read of the discovery of uranium fission and, like Enrico Fermi, Leo Szilard, and Frederic Joliot-Curie, had conducted experiments showing that during fission more neutrons were emitted than absorbed—the conditions for a chain reaction. He had speculated about the potential for an explosive device, but the idea so terrified him that his "first reflex was to put the whole thing out of my mind, like a person trying to ignore the first symptom of a fatal disease in the hope that it will go away. But the fear gnaws all the same, and my fear was that someone would put the idea into practice." His particular fear was that that "someone" would be the Germans: "I had no doubt that the Nazis would not hesitate to use any device, however inhumane, if it gave their doctrine world domination."

  However, Rotblat's reason for coming to Liverpool had nothing to do with his fears about fission. He had "great hopes of building up nuclear science in Poland. I knew I needed a big machine, a cyclotron and Chadwick was building one." Chadwick was indeed determinedly pursuing his construction of a cyclotron and was in close touch with Ernest Lawrence at Berkeley, his mentor and adviser. He was also in frequent contact with his old friend John Cockcroft, who, after Chadwick's departure, had finally convinced Rutherford that the Cavendish must have a cyclotron. A massive donation from the car magnate Sir Herbert Austin had made it possible. Although construction of the Liverpool device was not proceeding as fast as he would have liked—the builders, Metropolitan-Vickers, had become flooded with defense contracts—by 1938 Chadwick had been able to tell the Royal Institution that the machines at Liverpool and Cambridge were nearly ready for use.

  Rotblat had arrived a few months later, in the spring of 1939, supported by a small scholarship which was just enough to cover his expenses but insufficient for his wife to come too. Walking out of Lime Street Station and up the hill toward the university, he was shocked to see "the worst slums you can imagine." It was "not very encouraging generally." Also, his English was poor, "even with people who spoke the King's English," and the Liverpudlian accent
defeated him completely. He found lodgings in a rambling house, full of postgraduate students, whose landlord skimped on the food and watered down the coffee. As he later wrote, he found a remarkable divergence between the England described in the novels of P. G. Wodehouse, which he read to improve his English, and the deprivation and drabness he saw around him in Liverpool.

  Joseph Rotblat as sketched by Otto Frisch

  Rotblat was also dismayed by the primitive conditions of the Liverpool University physics department, which was not the state-of-the-art facility he had anticipated. It was divided into two parts, the teaching side and the research side, which, though "they were co-habiting in the same building," hardly spoke to each other. Rotblat was amazed when he visited the teaching lab "and discovered they had no a.c. [alternating current]." How, he wondered, "could you teach electricity" in such circumstances? It was "almost as though you ran a transportation firm and used a cart and horse."

  Bewildered, disappointed, and isolated by his lack of English, Rotblat nevertheless quickly settled in, helped by an amicable welcome from other members of the physics department. Chadwick was particularly welcoming, despite the fact that, as Rotblat quickly recognized, he was a shy man and "very much liked to be left to himself." The first weekend after his arrival, Rotblat was asked to tea by the Chadwicks and was amazed to learn from other members of the department that he was the only one to be so honored during Chadwick's four years at Liverpool. Rotblat was often invited to join the familv for weekends at their cottage in Wales and to go fishing with Chadwick. He got on well with Chadwick's wife, Aileen, discovering a warmth where others merely found snobbery and chill class consciousness.