Road to Hiroshima
(P.R.Vishwanath)

It is not known how avid a reader Albert Einstein was of magazines, let alone the elite New Yorker. But what is known is that he ordered thousand copies of an issue of this magazine in Aug 1946. The specialty of that particular issue was that it was bereft of its regular articles and entirely devoted to one particular subject. Hiroshima, by 34 year old John Hersey became an instant classic. Hersey’s book traces the experience of six people affected by the atomic blast. In the first chapter he narrates: At exactly fifteen minutes past eight in the morning, on August 6th, 1945, Japanese time, at the moment when the atomic bomb flashed above Hiroshima .. .the bookcases right behind her(Miss Sasaki) swooped forward and the contents threw her down .. a human being was crushed by books. George Orwell , in an article written two months after Hiroshima, said “ It is commonplace that history of civilization is largely the history of weapons”. This is a story of events leading to the making of the bomb and destruction of Hiroshima.
The scientific history of the atom bomb has to really start with the concepts of atom in India and Greece with a detour through alchemy which gave birth to experimental practices of modern Chemistry. However, we skip several centuries to reach early 20th century England where the great Ernest Rutherford had fulfilled in 1919 the age old dream of alchemists by converting one element (nitrogen ) into another(oxygen). He was also probably the first to guess that atom is a storehouse of energy: "There is reason to believe that an enormous store of latent energy is resident in the atoms of radioactive elements “. Arthur Eddington, the brilliant British astrophysicist , in his 1920 presidential address to the British Association for the Advancement of Science had a prescient insight that this power could be used for the well-being of the human race---or for its suicide.
The third year of the third decade of the 20th century began ominously with Adolf Hitler becoming the Chancellor of Germany in January.. What was later termed as Hitler’s gift - the exodus of artists, scientists and other intellectuals - was growing in numbers . The first concentration camp had come up at Dachau. This was the year when a German newspaper had this heading :Good news from Einstein- He is not coming back! This was also the year when belligerent Japan invaded parts of China.. America would start getting used to a long rule under Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
The Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge had a monopoly of discovering the constituents of the atom. The legendary Thomson had discovered the electron in 1897. Later Rutherford, Thomson’s successor , had discovered the hard core at the center of the atom and christened it as nucleus. And Chadwick, Rutherford’s successor, discovered the neutron in 1932. However, the very concept of atomic energy was ridiculed by none other Rutherford in 1933:” Anyone who expects a source of power from...atoms is talking moonshine”. The detection of neutrons had given fillip to experiments on artificial trasmutation which were taking place in 1934 in France and Italy. In the same year Leo Szilard , a Hungarian scientist, obtained a patent for the concept of an atom bomb. In a combination of series of good experiments( by Otto Hahn, Strassman, Enrico Fermi, Irene Curie and others) and deep theoretical insights (by Lise Meitner, Otto Frisch, Niels Bohr and others) the scientific community realized that an immense amount of energy is released when Uranium, the heaviest naturally occurring element, is bombarded by neutrons of the right energy. on 26th January 1939, the great Danish scientist Niels Bohr ( described by some as Einstein’s altar ego ) visiting America announced the discovery of what came to be known as ‘nuclear fission’ at a conference in Washington, DC.
On the political front the Axis Alliance was created by a pact between Germany, Japan, and Italy in 1937. In March 1938, Austria was declared part of the Reich and soon Czechoslovakia would also share its fate. When Hitler finally invaded Poland in September 1939 , the second World War started. America remained neutral and Roosevelt appealed to the warring nations not to launch aerial attack on citizens.: Ruthless bombing from the air of civilians in unfortified centers of population during the past few years has sickened every civilized person.
While Leo Szilard was gratified that he was proved right by the experiments on fission, what spurred him on in 1939 was that Germany had suddenly banned all exports of uranium ore from Czechoslovakia. This made him wonder about German intentions and the ramifications of a German bomb. He, and fellow ex-patriate Eugene Wigner tracked down Albert Einstein in July in a place called Peconic in a remote corner of Long Island, NY. They convinced Einstein to write a letter to Franklin Roosevelt, the President of the United States of America. The letter read : “"Sir, … the element uranium may be turned into a new and important source of energy in the immediate future… it may become possible to set up a nuclear chain reaction in a large mass of uranium by which.. it might be possible to unleash an immense destructive force." Not much action was taken and Einstein reminded the president again in 1940. By the end of 1940 all the Scandinavian countries and France had fallen to Hitler.
The scientific progress went on at breakneck speed. While the idea of nuclear fission was accepted by all scientists, questions about the amount of uranium necessary and the self sustaining nature of the reaction had to be answered. By 1940, the former question had been answered by Otto Frisch and Rudolf Peierls who had come away from Germany and were living in the UK. By July 1941 plutonium, a new artificial element, was also shown to be fissile material. In April 1942, Fermi and Szilard began design of the world’s first nuclear reactor. After several months of hard work, on December 1, 1942,the reactor went ‘ critical’ and the first nuclear chain reaction had been achieved. The bomb was only few steps away!
American government was catapulted into action when Japan bombed Pearl Harbour in Dec 1941 and "The Manhattan Project" was inaugurated in August 1942. .Col. Leslie Groves was made chief of the project and immediately a large quantity of Uranium was ordered. Soon Groves asked Robert Oppenheimer a professor of physics at Berkeley,to head the project which was to start at Los Alamos, New Mexico. The project used services of some of the best scientists of all time. The group included 5 people who had already won the Nobel Prize and three who were to do so later! Los Alamos began its operations in 1943 March. At its height of operation , the laboratory employed 50000 scientists and the cost of the project was 2 billion dollars. After two years of intense efforts, by the start of 1945 the Manhattan Project had 'turned the corner'. The uranium bombs seemed assured of success in a matter of months. The prospects for the plutonium bomb were also looking up .
The enormous destructive power of the proposed bomb had made some scientists think deeply about its impact. In 1944, there was concerned correspondence between Bohr and Einstein . Bohr actually talked to both Roosevelt and Churchill without any success. Szilard had again approached Einstein to write a letter to Roosevelt which was to reach the president through Mrs Roosevelt, but the president died suddenly of a brain hemorrhage on 12th April 1945. The new president Truman learned for the first time of the existence of atomic bomb development from Secretary of War Henry Stimson. Time had come to think of military uses of the bomb.
During May and June of 1945 there was hectic activity in Los Alamos on several fronts. A committee met in Oppenheimer’s office to decide on possible targets. It was stressed that the bombing when done should have enormous psychological significance. Apart from forcing Japan to surrender , the international community also had to be dazzled by the the enormous devastating power of the weapon. Two prime targets were considered : (a) Kyoto, the former capital of Japan with a special place in the heart of the Japanese. (b) Hiroshima , with important army depots . Adjacent hills of Hiroshima were likely to produce a focusing effect which would considerably increase the blast damage. Henry Stimson, secretary for war, ruled out Kyoto since he felt smashing Japanese cultural center was wrong. One of the original rules of warfare that ‘ as far as possible steps should be taken to spare edifices devoted to religion, art, science etc’ saved Kyoto. Hiroshima had inched up to the top of the list!
On the peace front , several scientists including Leo Szilard came up with a 16 page report, The Franck Report: “ Nuclear power … has staggering possibilities as a means of political pressure in peace and sudden destruction in war.… a demonstration of the new weapon may best be made before the eyes of representatives of all United Nations, on the desert or a barren island. ..We believe .. the use of nuclear bombs for an early, unannounced attack against Japan inadvisable. To sum up, we urge that the use of nuclear bombs in this war be considered as a problem of long-range national policy rather than military expediency”. The idea of international control which was to come up soon after the war had its genesis in this report. Scientists who tried to see that the use of the bomb would be curtailed were bound to raise suspicion among the authorities. Winston Chruchill questioned Bohr’s motives, Vannevar Bush a high ranking American official, did not want to trust Einstein with secrets and Groves probed Leo Szilard’s past!
A committee of four prominent physicists was asked to give its opinion about the use of the weapon. The committee met on 15th June and gave the following recommendations : “ The opinions of our scientific collegues .. range from … proposal of a purely technical demonstration to that of the military application best designed to induce surrender .. we find ourselves closer to the latter views…we as scientific men have no proprietary rights ... We have no special competence in solving the political, social , military problems which are presented by the advent of atomic energy.” It was around this time that Henry Stimson who was uncomfortable with the bomb , wrote in his diary “ ..a means for world peace..or Frankenstein .. “
After Hitler’s suicide on 30th April, Germany had surrendered on 8th May and the only enemy left was Japan. Henry Stimson told President Truman that a carefully timed warning could be given by stressing that Japan is not a nation composed wholly of mad fanatics. Bard, the undersecretary of the Navy , also gave similar suggestion. However, the president preferred to rely on Byrnes, his secretary of state who ruled out any negotiations with the Japanese. Some of the best estimates put together by the experts were that an invasion would require five million American men and that it would probably not succeed until 1947. However, it seems that generals like Eisenhower and Macarthur knew that the Japanese would have surrendered soon.
A 6 kilogram sphere of plutonium exploded over the New Mexico desert at 0530 on July 16, 1945, with a force equal to approximately 20,000 tons of TNT an energy several times greater than that expected. The cloud column mass and top reached a phenonenal height, variously estimated as 50,000 to 70,000 feet. It remained towering over the northeast corner of the site for several hours. The light intensity was sufficient at nine miles to have caused temporary blindness. Even 32 kilometers (20 miles) away, observers felt the heat of the explosion on exposed skin. The explosion was visible for more than 200 miles and audible for 40 miles and more. This ‘Trinity test’ was termed a spectacular success.
On July 24th Truman met with Churchill and Stalin at Potsdam . Truman told Stalin about the ‘new weapon of unusual destructive force’. Stalin , it seems , just smiled and wished luck. The President told his diary a day later :” This weapon is to be used against Japan between now and August 10th…. The target will be a purely military one . It seems to be the most terrible thing ever discovered, but it can be made the most useful...”. Dwight Eisenhower, a genral at the time of WW II andTruman’s successor said later : I voiced to (Sec. Of War Stimson) my grave misgivings, .. on the basis of my belief that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary
The written order for the use of the atomic bomb against Japanese cities was issued on 25th July: “The… Air Force will deliver its first special bomb as soon as weather will permit visual bombing after about 3 August 1945 on one of the targets: Hiroshima, Kokura, Niigata and Nagasaki. .. Additional bombs will be delivered on the above targets as soon as made ready by the project staff”.On 6th August 45 at two in the morning Groves called Oppenheimer to tell him that ‘ it went with a tremendous bang ‘. A British military pfficer said ‘ Man had obtained control of nature before he could get control of himself’.
It was left to Mahatma Gandhi to speak sadly about the tragedy of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. "The atomic bomb has deadened the finest feelings which have sustained mankind for ages. There used to be so-called laws of war which made it tolerable. Now we understand the naked truth. War knows no law except that of might. The atomic bomb brought an empty victory to the Allied armies. It has resulted for the time being in the soul of Japan being destroyed. What has happened to the soul of the destroying nation is yet too early to see." A year later, Einstein admitted that it was a blunder on his part to have initiated work on the atom bomb. Ronald Clarke , a biographer of Einstein, quotes Vannevar Bush, ‘ the show had been going long before Einstein’s letter’. Clarke goes on to say that America would have built the bomb without Einstein but it might have not been ready in time.

In the last pages of his book Hersey quotes report of a Jesuit priest : ”It seems logical that he who supports total war in principle cannot complain of a war against civilians. The crux of the matter is whether total war in its present form is justifiable, even when it serves a just purpose..” Wars, however, will accompany man till the end of civilization. We end with the introduction to Hersey’s article in the New Yorker :”.. few of us have yet comprehended the all but incredible destructive use of this weapon and that everyone might well take time to consider the terrible implications of its use”.