Chapter 12

For me, Hitler was the personification of evil and the primary justification for the atomic-bomb work. Now that the bomb could not be used against the Nazis, doubts arose. Those doubts, even if they do not appear in official reports, were discussed in many private conversations.

—Emilio Segrè, winner of the Nobel Prize in physics

Perhaps an odd thought for a Jew, Oppie reflected, but, then again, he wasn’t much of a Jew. But he was a polyglot, and although the name of the mountains to the east was just a mellifluous phrase to many of those he’d brought here, Oppie couldn’t think of Sangre de Cristo without its attached meaning.

He knew the debate surrounding the naming of this sub-range of the Rockies. Yes, it might have been to acknowledge the reddish hue the peaks often took at sunrise, or later at sunset, but Oppie preferred the story that “Sangre de Cristo” were the final words uttered near here by a Catholic priest mortally wounded by Apaches.

Germany was a largely Christian country—damn near exclusively so, after the Nazi slaughter—and so Oppie had long imagined that when the atomic bomb was finally dropped on one of its cities, many who didn’t die instantly would pass on while mumbling some similar invocation. The German version was instantly in his consciousness: Blut von Christus.

But that wasn’t going to happen now; there would be no atomic-fission fireball over the Fatherland. Hitler and his mistress had committed suicide two days ago, on April 30, 1945.

Oppie’s strength, he knew, was in making connections, but the image of Jean dead in her bathtub that came back yet again was one he could have done without at this moment. He tipped his head, the brim of his hat momentarily eclipsing the jagged mountains, as he tamped down that memory. Other notions, though, weren’t so easily banished.

As young Richard Feynman had said last night, “Damn it, Oppie, Hitler was evil personified. He was the whole fucking point. You told us—everybody told us—that what we were doing here was the key to defeating the Nazis.”

But, in the end, conventional troops pressing in on Berlin—and maybe, Oppie mused, Hitler having learned of Mussolini’s corpse being strung up by its ankles and stoned and spat upon by those who had suffered under his regime—had moved Der Führer to accomplish with a single bullet what Oppie’s multi-million-dollar gadget was supposed to do: end the war in Europe.

Feynman wasn’t wrong, and he was hardly the only Manhattan Project scientist questioning whether they should continue. Leo Szilard in Chicago was telling everyone that there was no need now to go on with bomb development, and although General Groves hated the pear-shaped Hungarian, Oppie was fond of—and, more importantly, respected—Leo.

But if they did continue their work, the target now would be Japan, not Germany. Oppie knew Germany well from his years at Göttingen studying under Max Born, but he didn’t know Japan or its language at all except to say that there were few Christians there. If the bomb were dropped on Tokyo or Kyoto, no one would invoke the blood of Christ as their lives ended. But suddenly, overnight, the notion of killing Germans—in some ways an altruistic venture for Americans, who, after all, had little direct stake in the European theater—had shifted to killing Japanese, an act that had more than a whiff about it of being revenge for Pearl Harbor. Hardly what a graduate of New York’s Ethical Culture School should be striving for. “Deed before creed” indeed!

Yes, the Pacific war was brutal and, yes, it needed to be finished as quickly as possible; American boys were dying over there every single day. But there was no hint that the Japs might have an atomic-bomb program of their own and so no reason to counter it with one of ours.

Oppie took another long look at the Sangre de Cristo mountains then turned and started walking back toward Site Y, the random alphabetic assignment suddenly seeming appropriate: a road with a fork in it—and they were now heading along a new path. His early-morning shadow stretched across the mesa in front of him, long and dark.

Later that May, Oppie traveled to Virginia for the first gathering of what Secretary of War Henry Stimson had dubbed “the Interim Committee,” a nice, non-threatening name for the group that would advise Harry S. Truman—who, as vice president, had been blissfully unaware of the Manhattan Project until he was sworn in a month ago as FDR’s successor—about the first use of atomic weapons.

Leo Szilard of the Chicago Met Lab had gotten wind of the fact that Oppie was out East, although he probably didn’t know why; still, he insisted on a meeting. Robert obliged; he had the use of a small office with sickly yellow walls at the War Department when he was in town. He told Szilard to take the train there; Leo did so, and an MP escorted him to the appropriate room when he arrived.

Szilard had a way of wearing his trench coat unbuttoned that suggested a cape; there was a theatricality to him that some found gauche, but Robert rather enjoyed. As he took off the coat, Leo said, “Did you not get my letter? I wrote you!”

Oppie had indeed received the typed missive back at Los Alamos. Szilard had droned on about his concern that “if a race in the production of atomic bombs should become unavoidable, the prospects of this country cannot be expected to be good,” adding, “I doubt whether it is wise to show our hand by using atomic bombs against Japan.”

There had been no point in signing anything that defined a position except when he had to in official reports for those above him—Groves, Vannevar Bush, Stimson, or the president himself. “I have little time for correspondence.”

Szilard harrumphed, sat himself down on the unpadded wooden chair opposite Robert, and waved away some of the smoke in the air. “Urey, Bartky, and I saw some character called Jimmy Byrnes two days ago. Einstein wrote a letter for us, and—”

“Well, all right, I wrote it, but Albert signed it. And it was enough to get us an appointment to see the new president, this Truman. But when we arrived, they fobbed us off with a—a backwoodsman!” Oppie had heard that Byrnes was about to be appointed Secretary of State, but it wasn’t his place to leak that to Szilard. “Still,” continued Leo, “I tried to make him understand that it would be morally reprehensible to use the bomb against Japanese cities.” He shook his head. “But he knew nothing of morals, this man. He said using the bomb now would make the Russians more manageable after the war. I told him it wasn’t savvy to prod the Soviet bear thus. But he had been listening to Groves—Groves!—who had told him that it would take the Russians twenty years to build their own bomb.”

“Oh, it won’t be that long,” Oppie replied, making a diligent effort to exhale smoke away from Szilard.

“No, no, no, of course not! But that fool Groves had told him there was no uranium in Russia. First, how would he know—how would anyone know, a country that big? And, second, there is uranium in Czechoslovakia! No, I said, if we provoke them, the Soviets will be sure to have the bomb before this decade is out.”

“He dared tell me I should think of Hungary, saying I should not want the Russians to occupy my homeland forever. Hungary? Robert, I am thinking of the whole world! The post-war environment in which we all live ... or die.”

Oppie looked at him for a long moment. “The atomic bomb is shit,” he said flatly.

Szilard’s dark hair was combed back from his wide forehead; his eyebrows climbed toward his hairline. “What do you mean by that?”

“Well, put it this way: it’s a weapon with no military significance. It will make a big bang—a very big bang—but it’s not a weapon that’ll be useful in war.”

Oppie waved his empty hand as he sought a comparison. “It’s like the gas warfare of the Great War: once people saw how ... how unconscionable its use was, they outlawed it. But no one bans the theoretical, only the practical. Surely you can see once we use the bomb against Japan, the Russians will get the point.”

“Absolutely they will get the point—they will get the point only too well.”

“They will feel threatened, don’t you see? Us having such a bomb is one thing, and, yes, since we cannot keep that fact a secret, we should tell the Russians. That will gall them but it won’t galvanize them. But the fact that we are willing to use such a bomb against people? This will trigger an atomic arms race, mark my words.”

“Yes, yes. You, Fermi, Compton, and Lawrence as the scientific contingent. Pointedly, not me or anyone else who will strongly speak against—”

“But we are scientists. Not policy makers or politicians. We’ve no claim to special competence in solving military or political problems.”

“Of course we have special competence! We are learned men, we are thinkers! And, practically alone of all the peoples of the world, we have devoted our thoughts, day in and day out, for years now to the question of atomic bombs.”

“Not all of us have had our heads buried in equations. You know that. Bohr, myself, many others have been deeply contemplating the ethical and political ramifications of this ... this monster we’ve unleashed.”

Oppie lifted his hands slightly. “All I want is to see the war in the Pacific over in the shortest possible time.”

“The war could end today, tomorrow—as soon as the bomb is ready—with a demonstration, as I said in my letter. Show the Japanese; invite a contingent to a remote area. Let them see what the bomb can do.”

“A chance!” Leo threw up arms in disgust. “Bah! When the time comes, you will play ball, Robert. You have become like them” —the special sneer reserved for Groves and his ilk. “You want your ‘big bang.’ You want to use the bomb on a city; you want the whole world to know what you’ve accomplished.”

The words stung. Two years ago, Enrico Fermi, visiting Los Alamos from the Met Lab, had said to Oppie, “My God, I think your people here actually want to make a bomb!”

“The bomb can end the war decisively and quickly. If we don’t use it, there will have to be an Allied invasion of Japan, with huge casualties on both sides.” Oppie had been hearing that daily from Groves and others ever since the fall of Berlin—and the Japanese were fighting on in every jungle hellhole with an insane tenacity, down to the last man.

“Your horizon is too short, Robert—much too short. Japan is finished regardless. You know that; everyone knows that. But if the bomb is used, it’ll start a stone rolling that’ll gather enough poison moss to kill us all.”

“Two billion? And here I thought the going rate was thirty pieces of silver.”

Oppie placed his hands flat against his desktop and took a deep breath. When he felt he could speak again in an even tone, he rose, ending the meeting. “Give my regards to the others back in Chicago.”