WE NEVER IN a million years thought we would find ourselves talking about a governmental report as if it was book club reading. But sure enough, within a week, we were perusing Atomic Energy for Military Purposes: The Official Report on the Development of the Atomic Bomb Under the Auspices of the United States Government, 1940–1945, written by Henry Smyth, chairman of the physics department at Columbia, and just released to the public. We opened it up and our eyes caught on this sentence: The ultimate responsibility for our nation’s policy rests on its citizens and they can discharge such responsibilities wisely only if they are informed. We continued reading, although it was a very technical document that lacked the emotional stories some of us preferred, so we stopped, or we kept at it, because in there were our husbands, and what, exactly, they had done.
HOW COULD WE not have known? How could we not have fully known? In retrospect, there were maybe more hints than we cared to let ourselves consider: back in Chicago, our husband’s colleague told us, Don’t be afraid of becoming a widow, if your husband blows up you will, too. We remembered the excitement in 1939 surrounding the news that a chain reaction was possible—a bottle of Chianti was passed around and signed by all of the scientists involved. Did we turn away from the clues because our questions would be met with silence? Or because in some deep way we did not want to know?
OR PERHAPS WE knew this might happen all along, but we never wanted to admit it.
WE ARGUED SMYTH’S points as well as one another’s. When we read, This weapon has been created not by the devilish inspiration of some warped genius but by the arduous labor of thousands of men and women working for the safety of their country, many of us agreed and some of us thought of ourselves, of the work we did—in the Tech Area, in the home, in the community—and we thought, Well, yes, everyday men and women built this thing, but we had no idea what we were building. Like many who sacrifice something, we felt loyalty toward the outcome. We know how it can sound: how awful that we did not think of the repercussions. But we were not living in hindsight. What many of us saw, and what our husbands saw, was this: what they had been working on for three or more years had worked. It was a relief.
SOME SAID THE report shared too much about how the bombs were made, but many of us appreciated that the military had had the foresight to have so much information ready to share as soon as the bombs were used. The report ended with a call to consider the weight of the situation.
OUR HUSBANDS CROWDED and compressed metals until the close proximity created a surplus of energy, and that energy made grand explosions. From the splitting—fission—of uranium they created Little Boy, and from the separating of a new element, plutonium, they made Fat Man.
A FEW OF our husbands went to Washington to tell congressmen how the bomb they made should be handled, saying that it should be given to the United Nations. They were ignored and our husbands returned, deflated or determined, and said, The U.S. government is a bunch of idiots.
WE READ NEWSPAPER articles to one another that described the areas of large cities that would be destroyed if the U.S. were to be attacked by a nuclear bomb. We said, I’m worried for our children, and we said, I’m worried about what we’ve done, and we said, I’m worried about peace.
THERE WERE BUSHELS of letters for us now—congratulatory letters from our friends and family—sent as soon as they heard the news that we were building bombs. Letters arrived from old friends whose husbands were doing their own covert activities, too, at different locations and in different capacities—Helen’s husband Max was working on something related to that work outside of Richland, Washington, and Joan’s husband Ely was doing something in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. It had not occurred to us that we weren’t the only ones in secret towns doing secret work. How silly our cryptic letters seemed now. We received cards from strangers and even one signed by the President thanking us for our contribution to the war effort. Our children took to calling the new weapon Dad’s Bomb and bragged to one another about how they knew all along what was going to happen, how they were great secret-keepers.
WE ADDED TO the nicknames for this place Lost Almost and Margaret called Los Alamos Alas instead. Some of us thought we saved half a million lives. Some of us thought we, or our husbands, were murderers, that we had helped light a fuse that would destroy the world.