Not all scientists supported the bomb

Some tried to save Hiroshima, Nagasaki

They did not want to build it.

Of the many legends from the creation of the first atomic weapons, 75 years ago, one important truth has been lost. Many scientists involved in the Manhattan Project did not want to build the bomb. They especially did not want it to be used on people. Many military and civilian leaders dismissed these concerns, with repercussions that echo in the world today.

Whenever humanity has invented a new tool of war — the trebuchet, gunpowder, the airplane — our species has not hesitated to use it against enemy armies. Weaponizing the atom was different, because the bomb does not discriminate between soldier and schoolteacher, warrior and infant. It kills everyone in reach.

Initially, many new recruits into the Manhattan Project had no idea what its goal was. Some didn’t even know where they were going. Memoirs by scientists’ wives humanize these unknowns: What kind of house would they live in? ( Ramshackle.) Would there be a school for their kids? ( An improvised one.) What was their spouse’s job? ( If he told, it would be treason.)

After the physicists, chemists and others realized what they were building, they held debates at their lab in Los Alamos, New Mexico. They appealed to project Director Robert Oppenheimer, who conceded that what they were building would be called a “Gadget.” The nickname, which fooled no one, stuck all the way to Nagasaki.

‘ This path of ruthlessness’

Leo Szilard, a physicist who invented the nuclear reactor, the cyclotron and the electron microscope, appealed to President Franklin D. Roosevelt: “Our Air Forces, striking at Japanese cities, are using the same methods of warfare which were condemned by American public opinion only a few years ago when applied by the Germans to the cities of England. Our use of atomic bombs in this war would carry the world a long way further on this path of ruthlessness.”

James Franck, a Nobel Prize winner in physics, led a group of scientists whose report declared atomic weapons a civilian policy issue rather than a military one: “We found ourselves … a small group of citizens cognizant of a grave danger for the safety of this country as well as for the future of all the other nations, of which the rest of mankind is unaware.”

Arthur Compton, another Nobel laureate, polled 150 project division chiefs. Nearly three- quarters of them supported a public demonstration of the bomb, which they believed would cause Japan to surrender. Only 15% supported direct military use of the bomb.

Toward the end of 1944, when it was clear that Germany did not have an atomic bomb, senior physicist Joseph Rotblat called for an end to the project. Japan had no atomic program worth fearing. His concerns dismissed, he resigned. Eventually, some in the military had qualms. Undersecretary of the Navy Ralph Bard wrote to Secretary of War Henry Stimson: “Japan should have some preliminary warning.”

Stimson did not delay the Trinity Test in Alamogordo, New Mexico. On July 16, 1945, a few ounces of plutonium proved to have the explosive power of 21,000 tons of TNT. The next day, Szilard appealed to President Harry Truman. Using the bomb, he wrote, might bring “an era of devastation on an unimaginable scale.” Dozens of senior researchers co- signed the letter.

Their petition was moot. The USS Indianapolis had already set sail, bearing the components for Gadgets to be dropped on Japan. That Aug. 6 and 9, the bombs worked as intended on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Combined fatality estimates range from 129,000 to 226,000 people.

Where next?

The world has never used an atomic weapon on people again. Over the years, however, the binary threat between the United States and Russia has multiplied. Could there be a nuclear exchange between Israel and Iran? Might the conflict between India and Pakistan over the region of Kashmir escalate to the ultimate weapons?

Inventing the bomb was one of the fastest and greatest scientific achievements in history. By annihilating two cities, the United States saved innumerable lives that would have been lost in battle. But neither argument erases the scientists’ misgivings.

What about after the war? Szilard, when diagnosed with bladder cancer, invented cobalt radiation therapy and used it on himself.

Rotblat founded the Pugwash Conferences, which contributed to the partial Test Ban Treaty of 1963, the Nonproliferation Treaty of 1968 and the Anti- Ballistic Missile Treaty of 1972. In 1995, Rotblat and Pugwash shared the Nobel Peace Prize.

Even Oppenheimer joined the call for an international body to oversee nuclear weapons. For this, he was stripped of his security clearance and found guilty of communist associations. “The time will come,” he predicted, “when mankind will curse the names of Los Alamos and Hiroshima. The peoples of this world must unite or they will perish.”

Stephen P. Kiernan, author of “Universe of Two,” a historical novel set during the development of the atomic bomb, is the winner of the George Polk and Scripps Howard Awards.