Nuclear weapons have changed everything, except our modes of thought.
Albert Einstein
Some of those who first saw the release of nuclear energy did not understand what it could mean. Lord Rutherford spoke to the British Association in September 1933. The Times quoted him as saying, ‘it was a very poor and inefficient way of producing energy, and anyone who looked for a source of power in the transformation of atoms was talking moonshine’.1
There was no single moment when the policy of developing the atomic bomb for use against Japan was adopted. As with the British bombing of German civilians, moral doubts were weakened by the decision being phased.
The decision to develop the bomb was taken to deter a possible atomic threat from Nazi Germany. The decision to use it against Japan was arrived at in a different climate. Policy-makers had become hardened to devastating conventional bombing. And the new climate was partly created by the very fact of the bomb’s development.
During the Second World War four atomic bomb programmes were started. In addition to the ultimately successful American-British programme, there were Soviet and Japanese programmes, neither of which came near success during the war. But, in Britain and the United States, there was fear of the German atomic programme.
In 1939, when atomic energy began to seem a serious possibility, Leo Szilard was one of the first to think of the danger of a Nazi bomb: ‘I thought that if neutrons are in fact emitted in fission, this fact should be kept secret from the Germans.’2
In 1940 Otto Frisch did a calculation about the amount of uranium-235 needed for an explosive chain reaction: ‘To my amazement it was very much smaller than I had expected; it was not a matter of tons, but something like a pound or two.’ Frisch discussed this at once with Rudolf Peierls, and together they calculated that it would take only weeks to produce: ‘At that point we stared at each other and realized that an atomic bomb might after all be possible.’3
Frisch and Peierls saw the ethical objections to using an atomic bomb. The possibility of a German bomb led them to invent the idea of nuclear deterrence:
the bomb could probably not be used without killing large numbers of civilians, and this may make it unsuitable as a weapon for use by this country … The most effective reply would be a counter-threat with a similar bomb. Therefore it seems to us important to start production as soon and as rapidly as possible, even if it is not intended to use the bomb as a means of attack.4
A government committee supported this case. The report was shown to Roosevelt, who gave instructions to start exploratory work on an atomic bomb. Leo Szilard, Edward Teller and other physicists supported an atomic programme.
In Germany, Werner Heisenberg used heavy water from Norway for experiments on the possibility of a chain reaction, which led him to take the idea of a bomb seriously. He went to Copenhagen to consult the strongly anti-Nazi Danish physicist Niels Bohr about the implications of this. Heisenberg felt he had to speak cautiously, as he knew that the German authorities were watching Bohr, whose later remarks might be passed back to Germany. He gave Bohr a drawing of the reactor he was trying to build.
Heisenberg later gave an account of the conversation. He asked whether it was right for physicists to do nuclear research in wartime.
Bohr understood the meaning of this question immediately, as I realized from his slightly frightened reaction. He replied as far as I can remember with a counter-question: ‘Do you really think that uranium fission could be utilized for the construction of weapons?’ I may have replied: ‘I know that this is in principle possible, but it would require a terrific technical effort, which, one can only hope, cannot be realized in this war.’ Bohr was shocked by my reply, obviously assuming that I had intended to convey to him that Germany had made great progress in the direction of manufacturing atomic weapons. Although I tried subsequently to correct this false impression I probably did not succeed in winning Bohr’s complete trust … I was very unhappy about the result of this conversation.5
Accounts of Heisenberg’s visit derived from Bohr were very different. On one account Heisenberg expressed his hope and belief that if the war lasted it would be won by German nuclear weapons.6 Bohr also had the impression that Heisenberg was trying to find out what he knew. His response combined reticence with indignation that Heisenberg might perhaps hope for his co-operation with Germany.
The conversation was a disaster. If Heisenberg was appealing for cooperation to avert the development of nuclear weapons, he only succeeded in conveying the frightening message that Nazi Germany was working on the bomb.
In 1942 Heisenberg and other physicists won funding for the German programme by winning over Bernhard Rust, the Minister for Education. The dangerous physical work was partly done by slave labour: the uranium plates used in the attempt to build an atomic reactor were made by 2,000 women from the camp at Sachsenhausen.
In 1943 Niels Bohr escaped to Scotland, taking with him Heisenberg’s drawing of a reactor. It seemed vital to cut off the German supply of heavy water. The Germans had enlarged the Norsk Hydro plant at Rjukan in Norway to produce larger quantities of heavy water.7 Commandos had wrecked the plant once, but it had been back in production until it was put out of action again by a bombing raid. The Nazis now decided to dismantle the plant and to take it and the heavy water to Germany.
It was vital to stop the heavy water reaching Germany, but there was no time for a full-scale raid on the plant. Only one trained commando, Knut Haukelid, was available locally, who could not destroy the plant. The water would go by train, crossing a lake by rail-ferry. The train would be hard to blow up and would be crowded with passengers. The ferry carried fewer people, but blowing it up would still kill passengers. And killing the guards would lead to reprisals against civilians. Haukelid was told that the results were important enough to justify these losses.
The plant’s transport engineer supported the plan, but was concerned to keep loss of life to a minimum. He saw that the water went on the relatively uncrowded Sunday ferry. Haukelid and others blew up the ferry, killing twenty-six of the fifty-three people aboard, but also sending all the heavy water to the bottom of the lake. Kurt Diebner, a physicist in the Ordnance Department of the Wehrmacht, later said, ‘right up to the end of the war, in 1945, there was virtually no increase in our heavy water stocks in Germany … it was the elimination of German heavy water production in Norway that was the main factor in our failure to achieve a self-sustaining atomic reactor before the war ended’.8
This was not the only factor inhibiting the German atomic programme. Because of scientific advice that the ‘uranium project’ would take three or four years to develop, it was shelved, but the Allies did not know this until nearly the end of the war, when captured documents about the German project showed how far away from success it was. In the meantime, the Manhattan Project, the American and British atomic programme, was continuing to counter the threat of a Nazi bomb.
What were the attitudes of the German atomic physicists? In 1939 the German army had set up a nuclear power research programme. Advice that results would take years led to it being shelved. Was this advice given in good faith? Were the scientists influenced by the terrible nature of atomic weapons, and appalled by the idea of a world dominated by a victorious Nazi nuclear state? Did they deliberately frustrate the project?
There is no single answer to this question. Physicists disagreed about the project. After the war the German nuclear physicists were interned at Farm Hall, a country house near Cambridge, where British Intelligence bugged their conversations on hearing the news of Hiroshima.
Otto Hahn, whose work had shown that nuclear fission was possible, was against the project. The commanding officer of Farm Hall described his reaction to Hiroshima:
Hahn was completely shattered by the news and said he felt personally responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people, as it was his original discovery which made the bomb possible. He told me that he had originally contemplated suicide when he realized the terrible potentialities of the discovery and he felt that now these had been realized and he was to blame.
He was recorded as saying, ‘I thank God on my bended knees that we did not make an uranium bomb.’ And, when Heisenberg said that Walther Gerlach had been committed to the project because he was working for Germany, Hahn replied that he too loved his country and that, strange as it might appear, it was for this reason that he had hoped for her defeat.9
Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker was recorded as having a similar view to Hahn. He said, ‘if we had all wanted Germany to win the war we would have succeeded … We must admit that we didn’t want to succeed’.10
When the bomb started to look possible, Werner Heisenberg chose Niels Bohr as the person to consult. The choice of Bohr, a man known for his moral integrity and for his open anti-Nazism, is consistent with Heisenberg either being opposed to making the bomb, or at least wanting real discussion of moral doubts about it. Bohr’s suspicion that Heisenberg might be trying to find out about the state of Allied atomic progress, or even to enlist his co-operation in a Nazi project, seems engagingly lacking in self-knowledge. Heisenberg would hardly choose Bohr with either of these ends in mind.
Heisenberg seems to have had doubts about the bomb project and may have deliberately dragged his feet. He told Speer that the results would be too far off to help the war. Heisenberg had refused to join the Nazi Party, and had been attacked for his defence of the ‘Jewish physics’ of Einstein.
The picture of Heisenberg deliberately but subtly killing the German atomic bomb project has plausibility, but there is some evidence on the other side. Heisenberg wanted German victory. He caused offence at Bohr’s institute by his pleasure at German military successes, and by saying war was a biological necessity.11
The Farm Hall transcripts make it clear that, early on, Heisenberg had helped to persuade the authorities that the bomb could be made, but the transcripts contain other passages which suggest reluctance. He said that ‘although we were not 100 per cent anxious to do it, on the other hand we were so little trusted by the state that even if we had wanted to do it, it would not have been easy to get through.’ Talking of the diversion of the German programme from a bomb to a nuclear reactor, he said, ‘at the bottom of my heart I was really glad that it was to be an engine and not a bomb, I must admit that’. And he said that they might have succeeded with the bomb but for the fact that they did not want Hitler to win.12
Heisenberg was in two minds. He wanted and did not want Germany to win the war. He convinced Rust that the bomb was possible and then convinced Speer that it was not. Being in two minds, Heisenberg was representative of many of the German atomic physicists. With a few exceptions like Otto Hahn, they were sleepwalking through the moral decision they had to take. It was not moral heroism. Heisenberg’s phrase ‘not 100 per cent anxious to do it’ seems to get it right. But the missing few per cent may have saved the world from the Nazi bomb.
The Allied atomic project, started in response to the possible Nazi threat, was continued with a new aim. Its eventual use against Japan was defended by citing the need to end the war quickly. Part of this defence is relatively easy to accept: a prolonged war would have had terrible human costs.
What is more debatable is whether the bomb had to be used to end the war. Critics say that a harmless demonstration in an empty place might have ended the war without the horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. They also say that the Japanese government was seeking peace and would have admitted defeat if the Allies had dropped their demand for unconditional surrender. These alternatives were considered and rejected.
Both these decisions, to reject a harmless demonstration and to insist on unconditional surrender, seem to have been taken by sleepwalkers. They were taken with one eye on other matters, and were not thought about with the necessary energy and clarity.
When the war was over in Europe, a prolonged struggle in the Pacific seemed likely, the human cost of which would be great. Japanese occupation of Asian countries was bloody and cruel. People were beheaded, or cut in half from top to bottom, and put on display to frighten others. People from China, India and Malaya, as well as Allied prisoners, were used as forced labour for such projects as the Burma–Siam Railway. Deep-rooted bamboo had to be torn out by hand and with ropes, earth had to be cleared by hand, and immensely heavy lengths of steel rail had to be lifted, positioned and nailed onto wooden sleepers. The slave labourers were given little food. At night they were plagued by mosquitoes. In the day they were driven to work themselves literally to death under the hot sun. It was estimated that for every sleeper on the line one man died. Many others suffered from illnesses and injuries which lasted for the rest of their lives.
The cruelty of the Japanese went beyond slave labour. Eric Lomax was one of a group who made a radio to hear news of the war. For this they were made to stand to attention in the blazing sun, with nothing to drink, for twelve hours. Then each in turn was beaten. They were knocked down with a heavy blow on the back from a pickaxe handle. Then they were beaten again and again, all over the body, with pickaxe handles until they were unconscious. Eric Lomax afterwards remembered boots stamping on the back of his head, crunching his face into the gravel, breaking his teeth. He remembered hearing the cracks when his bones broke.
In the period that followed, they were kept in cramped cages, trying to crouch in ways that would do least damage to their broken bones. Lomax was beaten and tortured. His head was held under water repeatedly. A jet of water from a hose was repeatedly forced down his nose and throat. Again and again he nearly drowned as the water filled his windpipe, lungs and stomach. After all this torture, he was sent to prison. The regime there was total silence and extreme hunger. The prisoners developed revolting skin diseases. ‘This was a place in which the living were turned into ghosts, starved, diseased, creatures wasted down to their skeletal outlines.’13 Any slow end to the war would prolong all this.
An invasion of Japan would also mean enormous casualties on both sides.
Early in 1945 General Curtis LeMay took command of the American air assault on Japan. His strategy for speeding up the end of the war against Japan was similar to that of Air Marshal Harris against Germany. He ordered a huge fire-bombing raid on Tokyo, which killed about 100,000 people in one night. (General LeMay later talked of the people of Tokyo being ‘scorched and boiled and baked to death’.)14 This was followed up by the fire-bombing of Nagoya, Osaka and Kobe. After all this, the bloody struggle still seemed set to continue.
A longer war would have cost many more American and Japanese lives. The capture of Saipan in 1944 had been at the cost of 3,000 American and 30,000 Japanese military casualties. In addition, 22,000 Japanese civilians had committed suicide by hurling themselves from cliffs. The capture of Iwo Jima had cost nearly 7,000 American and 20,000 Japanese lives. (Little more than 1,000 Japanese soldiers were taken prisoner.) Okinawa had cost 12,500 American and 100,000 Japanese lives.
The case for shortening the war was overwhelming. But, at the time, some questioned whether this required using the bomb, or whether even this end would justify its use. General Dwight Eisenhower was a sceptic on both grounds: ‘First, the Japanese were ready to surrender and it wasn’t necessary to hit them with that awful thing. Second, I hated to see our country be the first to use such a weapon.’15 He failed to persuade President Truman.
It was suggested that Japan might be induced to surrender by a harmless demonstration of the bomb. The case for this was partly the obvious humanitarian one. Niels Bohr strongly believed that the atomic bomb was so dangerous that it should be brought under international control. Leo Szilard argued that its military use might make it difficult for countries to resist following the precedent. A bomb on Japan might be ‘opening the door to an era of devastation on an unimaginable scale’.16
The decision to reject the harmless demonstration in favour of destroying Japanese cities was formally taken by President Truman, and was partly delegated to the ‘Interim Committee’, chaired by the Secretary of War, Henry Stimson.
The Interim Committee considered the idea of a harmless demonstration apparently for about ten minutes over lunch, and rejected it.17 Stimson later explained that they did not think it would make Japan surrender and there was a danger that the demonstration bomb would not work. There were also too few bombs for one to be diverted to this use. The committee reported, ‘We can propose no technical demonstration likely to bring an end to the war; we see no acceptable alternative to direct military use.’18
Truman was in a weak position to check military drift. The Manhattan Project, set up to counter the threat of a Nazi bomb, had taken on a life of its own. General Groves, who commanded the project, was described by one scientist close to him as obsessed by the fear that the war would be finished before his bomb was ready. Even after the capitulation of Germany, he urged that ‘we must not lose a single day’. And Groves queried Truman’s claim that his ‘yes’ decided the issue of dropping the bomb: ‘Truman did not so much say “yes” as not say “no”. It would indeed have taken a lot of nerve to say “no” at that time.’19
Whether a harmless demonstration of the bomb could end the war was not the only consideration in Truman’s thinking. He and his administration had half an eye on the impression different choices would make on the Soviet Union. Despite Churchill’s strong pressure for a mid-June meeting with Stalin, Truman postponed it until mid-July when the bomb would have been tested. Truman’s influential representative on the Interim Committee, James Byrnes, discussed the bomb with Leo Szilard and other scientists. He did not argue that the bomb was needed to defeat Japan, but that ‘our possessing and demonstrating the bomb would make Russia more manageable in Europe’.20
Those who played a part in the decision did not always give full attention to the central question: whether a quick end to the war could have been brought about in a less terrible way.
Might Japan have surrendered without the bomb being dropped? The Japanese government was known to have asked the Soviet Union to act as an intermediary with the Allies.
The Japanese War Cabinet was divided. Even after the second bomb on Nagasaki, half the War Cabinet wanted to continue the war, but the Emperor himself and some senior ministers wanted to end it. The War Cabinet might have accepted a negotiated surrender but not the Allied demand for unconditional surrender. Resistance to unconditional surrender was linked to their fear that their Emperor would be forced to step down.
The Foreign Minister, Shigenori Togo, sent cables to the Japanese ambassador in Moscow (of which some were intercepted by American intelligence) about negotiating a surrender. But one of the cables also said, ‘if the enemy insists on unconditional surrender to the very end, then our country and His Majesty would unanimously resolve to fight a war of resistance to the bitter end. Therefore, inviting the Soviet Union to mediate fairly does not include unconditional surrender; please understand this point in particular.’21
The demand for unconditional surrender had arisen virtually by accident. Roosevelt and Churchill had discussed unconditional surrender at Casablanca in 1943, but it was not agreed. When Roosevelt spoke at the press conference, the phrase slipped out: he demanded the unconditional surrender of Germany, Italy and Japan. Roosevelt later said that he had been thinking that getting the French Generals Giraud and de Gaulle to see each other was as hard as arranging a meeting between Generals Grant and Lee. ‘And then suddenly the press conference was on, and Winston and I had had no time to prepare for it, and the thought popped into my mind that they had called Grant “Old Unconditional Surrender”, and the next thing I knew I had said it.’ Churchill was taken by surprise, but supported Roosevelt to avoid public disunity.22
In July 1945, at the Potsdam Conference, Churchill argued for more flexibility. The Potsdam declaration issued to Japan did not use the phrase, but it still laid down non-negotiable terms, and did not say that Japan could keep the Emperor. It urged Japan to surrender in order to avoid ‘prompt and utter destruction’. The Japanese Prime Minister rejected it on 29 July.
On 2 August the Japanese ambassador in Moscow was instructed to approach the Russians again to act as mediators for peace, but the Russians wanted the advantages of joining the war and the ambassador was told that Stalin and Molotov were unavailable.
Early on the morning of 6 August 1945, the atomic bomb called ‘Little Boy’ was dropped from an American bomber called the Enola Gay on Hiroshima.
The explosion released light, blast, heat and nuclear radiation.
One doctor described the effects of the light: ‘Those who were watching the plane had their eye-grounds burned. The flash of light apparently went through the pupils and left them with a blind area in the central portion of their visual fields. Most of the eye-ground burns are third-degree, so cure is impossible.’23
The blast started at a speed of two miles a second. One boy was in a room looking out at the river:
As the house fell apart he was blown from the end room across the road on the river embankment and landed on the street below it. In that distance he passed through a couple of windows inside the house and his body was stuck full of all the glass it could hold. That was why he was completely covered in blood like that.24
The temperature at the centre reached 5,400°F. Many people were burnt to a cinder. A group of construction workers were doing gymnastics when they were killed. A survivor who saw them said to Dr Michihiko Hachiya, ‘A human being who has been roasted becomes quite small, doesn’t he? Those people all looked like little boys after the explosion.’25
People had their hair burnt off. Many were blackened and severely blistered by the burn of the flash. Their skin was then torn loose by the blast, so that even on their faces it hung down like rags. One of Dr Hachiya’s patients described some soldiers, burned from the hips up:
Where the skin had peeled, their flesh was wet and mushy. They must have been wearing their military caps because the black hair on top of their heads was not burned. It made them look like they were wearing black lacquer bowls. And they had no faces! Their eyes, noses and mouths had been burned away, and it looked like their ears had melted off. It was hard to tell front from back.26
The scenes of pain and horror were unending. There were people with their bowels and brains coming out, and many children with dead mothers. There was ‘a woman with her jaw missing and her tongue hanging out of her mouth’ wandering around in the rain crying for help. One man stood holding his torn-out eye in his hand.27
This was only the beginning. These were the victims of light, blast and heat. Radiation sickness was to follow: nausea, vomiting, extreme thirst, loss of appetite, diarrhoea, fever, convulsions, delirium, purple spots on the body, loss of hair from the roots, and bleeding: in the urine, the retina, the mouth, the rectum or the respiratory passages. Death was preceded by the decay of internal organs. The committee set up to study the bomb’s effects described what the radiation did:
It destroyed the actively regenerating cells in the body and greatly devastated the vital defensive mechanism. These heavy doses were the main reason for the poor repair, the prevalence of infection, and the extremely high mortality in atomic bomb injury. The atomic bomb not only brought tragic and horrible injuries to the exposed but also hindered the basis for the reparative and regenerative processes of the living body.28
This too was only the beginning. The survivors among those exposed to radiation had a greatly increased risk of contracting leukaemia, and showed high rates of other physical illnesses, and of psychiatric disorders. There were high infant mortality rates among foetuses exposed to radiation in the womb, and those who survived often had retarded growth and abnormally small heads. Up to the end of 1945 the Hiroshima bomb caused 140,000 deaths. Five years later the total had reached 200,000. And there was to be a continuing toll of radiation-induced chromosomal and genetic disorders in children conceived years after the bomb.29
And the bombing of Hiroshima was itself only the beginning. Just after eleven a.m. on 9 August the atomic bomb called Tat Man’ was dropped from an American bomber on Nagasaki. There 70,000 died by the end of the year and five years later the total had reached 140,000.
One girl who was five years old at the time of Hiroshima wrote, ‘the more you hear the sadder the stories get’. One boy of five wrote later, ‘Since just in my family there is so much sadness from it, I wonder how much sadness other people must also be having.’30
A woman who was a schoolgirl at Hiroshima asked, ‘Those scientists who invented the atomic bomb, what did they think would happen if they dropped it?’31
For scientists and others involved in the bomb, sympathy was inhibited by distance. They were only faintly aware of the people who were to be burnt, blinded, blistered, shrivelled, irradiated and killed.
What might have held them back was a sense of moral identity. Few would hope to be remembered as people who ruined and destroyed so many. But again, in a developed version of the psychology of the blockade and of area bombing, this restraint was eroded.
The sense of moral identity is shaped by values which are only partly autonomous. Moral identity is often about being a ‘good enough’ person, in terms of a base line set by others. In the decision to use the bomb the base line had shifted down during the moral slide from the blockade to the area bombing of Germany and to the fire-bombing of Japan. Predictably, one member of Stimson’s committee made the point that the ‘number of people that would be killed by the bomb would not be greater in general magnitude than the number already killed in fire raids’.32
Participation in a massacre is less threatening to the picture of yourself as a kindly and humane person if the horrors seem to have little to do with you. To diminish the sense of personal responsibility is to weaken the restraining effects of moral identity. The sense of personal responsibility for the atomic bomb was weakened by distance and by evasion, but, above all, was weakened by the way contributions to the use of the bomb were shared among so many people.
Distance does not just reduce sympathy. It also reduces the feeling of responsibility.
This contrasts with close-up participation, as in the My Lai massacre. Immediacy often causes stronger emotional revulsion. The need to overcome this revulsion generates a stronger awareness of personal agency. It strengthens the sense of being responsible, and increases awareness of the kind of person you have to be to do such things. This awareness can restrain someone from acting, or else can lead to guilt afterwards.
Distance has the opposite effect; by weakening the emotional revulsion, it makes the act easier. This reduces the feeling of responsibility and reduces awareness of the kind of person you become in doing it. There is less restraining pressure against the act, and less guilt afterwards. With the atomic bomb, this had paradoxical effects. Some of those who came closest to the victims had strong feelings of responsibility and guilt. While some of those further away, whose responsibility was really much greater, were enabled by the distance to live comfortably with what they did.
Those who actually dropped the bombs were less responsible than people who took the decisions higher up the chain of command. In modern technological war, psychological responses are poorly correlated with degrees of responsibility. In people further back up the chain, this causal distance reduces the psychological resistance they have to overcome.
It is easier to drop a bomb than to kill people by hand on the ground. But bombing can have its own psychological costs.
There were variations between those closely involved in the bombing. The night before 6 August the Enola Gay’s navigator, Captain Van Kirk, found it necessary to take two sleeping pills. He then spent the night playing poker. Perhaps these were signs of stress. But some people were relatively untroubled. Before take-off, a Protestant chaplain was able to ask God ‘to be with those who brave the heights of Thy heaven and who carry the battle to our enemies’. And Colonel Paul Tibbetts, the pilot of the Enola Gay, was later able to re-enact the bombing at model aircraft shows.
Others felt differently. The Enola Gay was preceded over Hiroshima by a reconnaissance aircraft, commanded by Major Claude Eatherly, who sent the go-ahead signal. Coming back from Hiroshima, he said a prayer in which he resolved to dedicate his life to abolishing war and nuclear weapons. Afterwards he was haunted by nightmares of the bomb. He sent envelopes of money to Hiroshima. In 1950 he attempted suicide. Later he forged a cheque for a very small sum of money, which he paid to a fund for the children of Hiroshima. He staged a hold-up, but took no money. He was eventually compulsorily detained for psychiatric treatment in hospital.
On one view, Major Eatherly was not psychiatrically ill, but was a sane man incarcerated in hospital to discredit his anti-nuclear protests. He later wrote that the dedication of his life to that cause ‘has cost me much because of the mental and emotional disturbances, caused by the guilt of such a crime. I have spent nearly eight of those years in hospitals and a short time in jails. I always seemed to be happier in jails because I had a release of guilt by being punished.’ He also wrote that ‘the fact is that society simply cannot accept the fact of my guilt without at the same time recognizing its own far deeper guilt’.33
On another view, his method of seeking punishment for his guilt was a symptom of psychiatric disturbance. Either way, he paid a heavy price for involvement in Hiroshima.
Further away from the bombing, the mood was good. General Leslie Groves, the commander of the Manhattan Project, was positively cheerful as he passed the news of Hiroshima to Robert Oppenheimer: ‘I am very proud of you and all your people … Apparently it went with a tremendous bang.’ And President Truman, when told the news at lunch on board ship, said to the sailors at his table, ‘This is the greatest thing in history.’34
Still further back in the causal chain were the scientists. Some were appalled. Leo Szilard’s immediate reaction was that ‘using atomic bombs against Japan is one of the greatest blunders of history’. Otto Frisch was sombre, but his description of some of his colleagues shows that others were not:
I still remember the feeling of unease, indeed nausea, when I saw how many of my friends were rushing to the telephone to book tables at the La Fonda Hotel in Santa Fe, in order to celebrate. Of course they were exalted by the success of their work, but it seemed rather ghoulish to celebrate the sudden death of a hundred thousand people, even if they were ‘enemies’.35
The restraining effects of moral identity can be weakened by evading any clear recognition of what you are doing.
In his private diary Truman wrote a passage on the bomb. Given the decision he was making, there is something disappointing about the quality of his thought:
We have discovered the most terrible bomb in the history of the world. It may be the fire destruction prophesied in the Euphrates Valley Era, after Noah and his fabulous Ark. Anyway we ‘think’ we have found a way to cause a disintegration of the atom. An experiment in the New Mexican desert was startling – to put it mildly … This weapon is to be used against Japan between now and August 10th. I have told the Sec. of War, Mr Stimson, to use it so that military objectives and soldiers are the target and not women and children. Even if the Japs are savages, ruthless, merciless and fanatic, we as the leader of the world for the common welfare cannot drop this terrible bomb on the old capital or the new. He & I are in accord. The target will be a purely military one and we will issue a warning statement asking the Japs to surrender and save lives. I’m sure they will not do that, but we will have given them the chance.36
The passage gives evidence of the need to escape from any clear, plain statement of what he was about to do. There is the denial of the full human impact of the bomb by seeing the victims as ‘Japs’ and savages. There is the half-suggestion that the bomb may not work anyway: we only ‘think’ we have found a way to split the atom. We are exonerated because we are giving them a warning, even though we know they will ignore it.
Above all, there is the evasion of the fact that an atomic bomb dropped on a city cannot possibly be directed at purely military targets. In Hiroshima civilians outnumbered soldiers by more than six to one. President Truman certainly had some idea of the civilian casualties later. After Nagasaki he stopped the atomic bombing, saying that the thought of wiping out another 100,000 people was too horrible, and that he did not like the idea of killing ‘all those kids’.37 Perhaps at some level he knew about this before Hiroshima. If not, his concern for the children was too small to prompt him to find out.
It was not only the President who had to face or evade a moral decision. The scientists who developed the bomb were also faced with a question of conscience. While some confronted it, others took refuge in evasion.
Many of the physicists involved were aware of the moral dilemmas quite early. Some faced them directly and refused to participate. I.I. Rabi turned down Oppenheimer’s invitation to be the Associate Director of the Manhattan Project, partly because he did not want to make three centuries of physics lead up to an atomic bomb. Some, like Szilard, Frisch and Peierls, also faced the dilemmas directly and decided that the threat of a Nazi bomb made it right to work on the project. Others found the dilemmas hard to think about and put them out of their minds in order to work on the project.
A way of evading moral questions was to concentrate single-mindedly on the job. One line of thought assumed that responsibility for consequences was limited by people’s roles: it was the scientists’ role to make discoveries, but what was done with them was up to politicians or ‘society’. Some thought that knowledge was intrinsically worth pursuing, whatever the consequences. Others thought that research was something which scientists were virtually unable to give up.
Robert Oppenheimer spoke about the irresistible appeal of scientific and technological projects:
It is my judgement in these things that when you see something that is technically sweet you go ahead and do it and you argue about what to do about it only after you have had your technical success. That is the way it was with the atomic bomb. I do not think anybody opposed making it; there were some debates about what to do with it after it was made.38
Perhaps Oppenheimer was projecting onto scientists in general his own total susceptibility to intellectual or technical beauty. Not all scientists would do what is ‘technically sweet’ regardless of consequences. But some of Oppenheimer’s account of the psychology is confirmed by a self-critical physicist, who talked anonymously to Robert Jungk about the Nagasaki bomb:
I dreaded the use of this ‘better’ bomb. I hoped that it would not be used and trembled at the thought of the devastation it would cause. And yet, to be quite frank, I was desperately anxious to find out whether this type of bomb would also do what was expected of it, in short, whether its intricate mechanism would work. These were dreadful thoughts, I know, and still I could not help having them.39
Although there were honourable exceptions like Bohr, Szilard and Peierls, naïve assumptions about moral and political thought were common among the atomic scientists. No doubt this intellectual limitation in the scientific community deserves criticism. Off stage there is another community also open to criticism. Philosophers will not be impressed by the weak and confused quality of Oppenheimer’s thinking about making the bomb. It is clear that scientists, including Oppenheimer, had no idea of the existence of a kind of thinking which they lacked. Their ignorance is only part of the general failure of philosophy, at least at that time, to make a serious impact on the thinking of the wider community. By omission, philosophers who only talk to each other bear some responsibility for a climate conducive to the evasive thought which contributed to Hiroshima.
Above all, the sense of personal responsibility was reduced by the way agency was fragmented. Among the airmen who obeyed the order to drop the bomb, the many scientists who helped to make it, the President, the many political and military advisers involved in the decision, who killed the people of Hiroshima? No one seems to have felt that the responsibility was fully his.
Truman’s thinking about the question of a harmless demonstration was effectively delegated to Stimson’s committee. He saw the decision as mainly technical, and himself as constrained by expert advice.
In Truman’s memoirs, 561 pages are devoted to 1945. The decision to use the atomic bomb is explained briefly on page 491. He said that he knew that the bomb would inflict casualties beyond imagination:
On the other hand the scientific adviser of the committee reported, ‘We can propose no technical demonstration likely to bring an end to the war; we see no acceptable alternative to direct military use.’ It was their conclusion that no technical demonstration they might propose, such as over a deserted island, would be likely to bring the war to an end. It had to be used against an enemy target. The final decision about where and when to use the bomb was up to me. Let there be no mistake about it. I regarded the bomb as a military weapon and never had any doubt that it should be used. The top military advisers to the President recommended its use, and when I talked to Churchill he unhesitatingly told me that he favoured the use of the atomic bomb if it might aid to end the war.40
It is striking that Truman’s claim that the decision was up to him took the form of saying that ‘the final decision about where and when to use the bomb was up to me’. This comes just after saying the committee had concluded that it had to be used against an enemy target. This central decision seems to have been delegated by Truman to the committee.
Stimson’s committee considered a harmless demonstration, but rejected it on several grounds. The Japanese might suspect it was a trick. Or they might attack the aircraft used in the demonstration, or take Allied prisoners to the target area. The bomb might not work, or it might not be impressive enough to stop the war. If the demonstration did not result in surrender, the bomb’s shock value would be lost. The committee reported that they could propose no technical demonstration likely to end the war: ‘we see no acceptable alternative to direct military use’.41
Although Truman handed over discussion of this question to Stimson’s committee, they do not seem to have seen themselves as considering all aspects of the decision, but only the ‘technical’ issues involved in it. One member of the committee, Robert Oppenheimer, was later asked about influences on their decision. He said:
What was expected of this committee of experts was primarily a technical opinion on new questions … President Roosevelt and Sir Winston Churchill showed their complete accord with the fact that the atomic bomb had to be used if it proved necessary to end the war. This opinion weighed heavily in the scale. Unfortunately, time was lacking. It seems possible that a more thorough study of the problem, more prolonged, would have led those responsible to a more precise or even different conception of what was necessary to do with these new weapons.42
An interview thirteen years later may not fully reflect the original deliberations, but Oppenheimer’s answer gives the impression that he, and perhaps others, did not bring clear thinking to the issue. His point about Roosevelt and Churchill is confused. He refers to their view that the bomb should be used if this was necessary to end the war. But this view is irrelevant to the ‘technical’ question the committee saw itself answering: was the use of the bomb necessary to end the war? If this opinion really ‘weighed heavily in the scale’, the thinking of the committee was confused.
Oppenheimer gives the impression that the committee was not seriously or fully engaged with whether there were other ways of ending the war. They seem to have felt the decision had already been taken, at least partly, by Roosevelt and Churchill. The decision imposed a huge weight of responsibility. Understandably, the committee wanted to think it was not just theirs. President Truman had the same reason for wanting to think it was not just his decision, but a technical one to delegate to them.
To look closely at this, one of the central decisions of the twentieth century, is to become aware of a moral vacuum. No one seems to have felt sufficiently responsible for the decision to look with energy and imagination for alternatives.
These two bombs killed over a third of a million people, both adults and children, in a hell we cannot adequately imagine.
The moral debate about the use of the bombs is about two central issues. Could the war have been stopped by other means? And, if there were no alternative ways of stopping the war, would this justify dropping these bombs?
Perhaps there was no certain way of ending the war without the use of the bomb, but it is not hard to see the outlines of an approach worth trying.
The Japanese government could have been told of the bomb. They could have been given photographs and other evidence from the test already carried out in New Mexico. They could have been invited, quietly through diplomatic channels, to send representatives, including physicists, to another demonstration of the bomb in the United States. A guarantee of safe conduct could have been given. Japanese physicists could have had discussions with American physicists and been told enough to show that the bomb was genuine. This could have been combined with an invitation, again given quietly through diplomatic channels, to negotiate peace. It could have been said that surrender need not be unconditional, and that the Allies would not depose the Emperor.
A bomb demonstration in the United States would have met the main worries of the Stimson committee. The Japanese would have been less likely to reject the bomb as a fake. They could not sabotage the demonstration by moving Allied prisoners to the site or by shooting down an aircraft carrying the bomb.
For the Japanese to have accepted the public ultimatum issued at Potsdam would have involved a loss of face. They were not prepared to accept unconditional surrender or the loss of the Emperor. A quiet invitation to negotiate, coupled with abandonment of the demand for unconditional surrender and an assurance about the Emperor, might have ended the war without dropping the bomb.
In fairness to Truman, it should be remembered that he did not have the advantages of hindsight. He was taking decisions under all the pressures of a wartime presidency. And there is obviously no certainty that the kind of approach suggested would have ended the war. But, in the light of what happened to the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the thought is unavoidable that such an approach should have been tried.
Suppose using the bomb had been the only way of shortening the war. Would it then have been justified?
One contribution to this debate was made in 1956, when it was proposed that Oxford University should award an honorary degree to President Truman. Proposals for honorary degrees were always accepted and few University members bothered to vote on them. But on the day Truman was proposed, Congregation was full because there was a controversial proposal to include less of the Greek New Testament in the Theology degree.
One witness described the occasion:
The House was preparing to snooze through the routine business before coming to what was the real reason for their presence, but suddenly and startlingly, Miss Anscombe rose and (after duly seeking the VC’s [Vice Chancellor’s] permission to speak English) delivered an impassioned speech against the award of an Oxford degree to the ‘man who pressed the button’ of the Bomb. The VC called for a vote: she was in a minority of one.
This speech elicited only ‘the complete silence and impassivity of those present … not the slightest sign of approval or disapproval, not a murmur, not a rustle, not a change of countenance, but only utter imperturbability’.43 Memories of the occasion vary. In a different account, four people voted against the degree, including another philosopher, Philippa Foot.
The content of Elizabeth Anscombe’s speech is reproduced in a paper she published at the time on ‘Mr Truman’s Degree’. She correctly saw how area bombing had prepared the way for the atomic bomb. She accepted that, in the circumstances, dropping the bomb probably saved many lives, but pointed out that the circumstances included the Allies’ demand for unconditional surrender and their disregard of Japan’s known desire for a negotiated peace.
Elizabeth Anscombe’s central moral claim was that to kill innocent people as means to an end is always murder. The state has a right to order killing in a war fought either to protect its own people or to protect others who are treated unjustly. There is no right intentionally to kill innocent people, those who are neither waging the war nor supplying its means. Attacking military targets as carefully as possible may involve unintended but foreseen civilian deaths, and this is not murder. But it is not acceptable to attack where the military objective can only be hit by taking as your target something which includes large numbers of innocent people: ‘Then you cannot very well say they died by accident. Here your action is murder.’44
Elizabeth Anscombe finished on a rhetorical flourish. She said that she would fear to go to the degree ceremony ‘in case God’s patience suddenly ends’. Afterwards, Harry Weldon, Air Marshal Harris’s former colleague, offered to arrange comprehensive air cover.
It is hard to warm to the response of those who heard Miss Anscombe and then voted in a way that left her in such a small minority. Just possibly, each person who voted against her may have had good reasons. But their silence and utter imperturbability now seem extraordinary. Was there too little time for discussion, because of the pressing issue of Greek New Testament in the Theology degree? Did no one think that this courageous and powerful speech deserved the compliment of rational opposition? Apart from Philippa Foot, where were the philosophers?
The moral framework assumed in this criticism of Truman’s decision is the Just War doctrine of the Judaeo-Christian tradition. On this view, the intentional killing of innocent people (’murder’) is absolutely forbidden. Although it is recognized that modern warfare inevitably results in the deaths of innocent people, the absolute ban on murder does not entail pacifism. The doctrine of double effect is invoked to permit some acts which will foreseeably kill innocent people. Where these deaths are foreseen but not intended consequences, and where they are not out of proportion to the good aimed at, the act is permissible.
There are questions to raise, both about the appeal to the doctrine of double effect and about the absolute prohibition on killing innocent people.
One question about the doctrine of double effect is about how to decide which consequences of an act are intended and which are merely foreseen. One possible test is whether the consequences in question are wanted. This test would allow the bombing of Dresden or of Hiroshima, if those who took the decisions could say sincerely, ‘We only wanted to destroy the city, and regret that there was no way of doing this without also killing the people there.’ This test seems not nearly demanding enough, and is certainly not the one relied on by Miss Anscombe.
A more demanding test says that you still intend even unwanted consequences if they are so close to the act as to be inextricable from it. Some test of this sort seems to be what Miss Anscombe relied on. She excluded taking a target which included large numbers of innocent people: ‘then you cannot very well say they died by accident. Here your action is murder.’ There is a problem of how close or how inextricable actions and consequences have to be for the consequences to count as intended. What reasons can be given for drawing the boundary in one place rather than another, and what is the moral case for regarding the boundary as so important?
Apart from these boundary problems, there is a deeper issue. If the weaker test (’Were these consequences wanted?’) allows too much, some of us find the stronger version (’Were the deaths so bound up with the act that we cannot say they died by accident?’) allows too little. It can be argued that this test is so restrictive that it undermines the view that the intentional killing of the innocent is in all circumstances wrong.
Take the case of the ferry carrying the heavy water from Norway, which was blown up. If the heavy water had reached Germany, a Nazi atomic bomb would not have been certain, but would have been more likely. Letting Hitler have an atomic bomb would risk huge numbers of deaths and perhaps a Nazi victory. With so much at stake, it seems worth paying a substantial price to keep the chance of such a bomb as low as possible. No one wanted the deaths of the twenty-six people who were killed when the ferry was blown up. But it would be hard to argue that it would have been better to have risked the heavy water reaching Germany.
The absolute prohibition on intentional killing of innocent people seems a good deal less plausible if it tells us that Knut Haukelid and his colleagues were wrong to sink the ferry. But it may have this consequence.
The absolute prohibition is usually defended against such objections by the doctrine of double effect. If the deaths of the ferry passengers were not intended, the sinking is permitted and the objection fails.
If the weaker test of intention (’Were the deaths wanted?’) is used, the deaths were unintended. Trouble was taken to reduce loss of life by having the water sent on the Sunday morning ferry. And if there had been no passengers, those who blew it up would have been relieved.
But the weaker test allows too much, perhaps even the bombing of Hiroshima. It is natural to follow Miss Anscombe in opting for the stronger test: ‘Were the deaths so bound up with the act that we cannot say they died by accident?’ But then it is hard to avoid the implausible view that Haukelid acted wrongly. The justification for what Haukelid did was that it reduced the risk of a far greater evil. Haukelid does not need the strange defence that, when the ferry was blown up killing half the passengers, they died by accident.
What does need this strange defence is the absolute prohibition on intentionally killing innocent people even where this averts a much greater evil. The absolute prohibition is central to Miss Anscombe’s argument that, no matter how terrible the alternative, the use of the bomb on Hiroshima could not possibly have been justified. The strength of the absolute prohibition is that it insists that we do not treat the people of Hiroshima as transparent, just looking through them to the lives saved through ending the war. In the ferry case the absolute prohibition is in deep trouble. Unless rescued by an absurd stretching of the idea of accidental death, it tells us not to blow up the ferry. We have to risk Hitler getting the atomic bomb. In this case we have to look away from the people Hitler’s bomb might kill. It is hard to rely on a moral doctrine which has, in human terms, so poor a sense of proportion.
This unfavourable view of the absolute prohibition is hard to escape when it is judged in terms of its human impact. It is usually defended by those who assume a moral law whose authority is independent of its consequences for people. Elizabeth Anscombe’s references to acts being ‘forbidden’ and to God’s patience were not mere rhetoric. She relied on the doctrine of the Just War, taught by the Catholic Church as part of God’s law. In that context, criticisms about it being disastrous in human terms miss the point. But, equally, to those of us who judge these things in terms of their human impact, such appeals to authority miss the point.
Some of Miss Anscombe’s reasons for her view are implausible outside her religious framework of belief. But we have seen that there are other reasons for agreeing that those who used the bomb did not have enough justification for doing so. Miss Anscombe’s vote was right, and those who silently voted her down were wrong.
The lack of proper exploration of other ways of ending the war is the obvious reason why Truman’s decision is hard to defend. But there is also the issue of whether using the bomb would weaken the chance of putting atomic weapons under international control.
With hindsight, it is hard to be sure whether the use of the bomb by one country led to the post-war nuclear arms race. There is an alternative view, that using the bomb demonstrated its horror in a way no harmless experiment could have done, and so helped to sober up the world. Perhaps an arms race was inevitable and this one was restrained by memory of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Or perhaps, as the Franck Report suggested in June 1945, restraint could have led to international control instead of the arms race.
Two things are clear. The question of international control, raised by Niels Bohr and even now unresolved, was not given the attention it deserved. And, as Bohr saw, it is the fundamental issue of the nuclear age.
Niels Bohr was the most distinguished theoretical physicist to play a role in the development of the bomb. His contribution to the debate on the use of atomic weapons reflected both his moral seriousness and his habit of fundamental thinking. These qualities turned out to be not enough for his ideas to make the necessary impact on decision-makers.
Bohr escaped from occupied Denmark. Because of the threat of a Nazi bomb, he was willing to work on the Manhattan Project. He started to think about the deeper problems of atomic weapons and realized that, since the United States had made the bomb, the Soviet Union would soon follow. The choice was simple: international control or a nuclear arms race. He saw international control as the only safe option.
In 1944 Bohr’s ideas persuaded Felix Frankfurter, who passed them on to Roosevelt. The President asked Frankfurter to tell Bohr that he wanted to discuss safeguards with Churchill. Bohr returned to England, and persuaded the President of the Royal Society, Sir Henry Dale, of the importance of the issue. Dale was among those who persuaded Churchill to see Bohr. Thinking of voluntary abstention from using the bomb, in the interests of future international control, Dale wrote to Churchill: ‘It is my serious belief that it may be in your power even in the next six months to take decisions which will determine the future course of human history. It is in that belief that I dare to ask you, even now, to give Professor Bohr the opportunity of brief access to you.’
Privately, Dale expressed the fear that Bohr’s ‘mild, philosophical vagueness of expression and his inarticulate whisper’ might mean he would not get through to ‘a desperately preoccupied Prime Minister’.45
The meeting was not a success. Lord Cherwell was present and much of the time was taken up with argument between him and Churchill on points irrelevant to Bohr’s purpose. According to Bohr’s own ‘very vivid memories’ of the interview, recounted to Margaret Gowing, the main point was never reached. ‘Professor Bohr was unable to bring the Prime Minister’s mind to bear on the implications of the bomb or to tell him of his belief that the President himself was giving the subject such serious thought.’ Churchill disliked the meeting. Bohr asked if he could send a memorandum on the subject to Churchill:
The Prime Minister replied that he would always be honoured to receive a letter from Professor Bohr but hoped that it would not be about politics. Bohr came away greatly disappointed at the way the world was apparently governed, with small points exercising a quite irrational influence. ‘We did not speak the same language,’ said Bohr afterwards.46
Bohr sent a memorandum to Roosevelt, saying that ‘the terrifying prospect of a future competition between nations about a weapon of such formidable character can only be avoided by a universal agreement in true confidence’. Prevention of a secret arms race would call for ‘such concessions regarding exchange of information and openness about industrial efforts including military preparations as would hardly be conceivable unless at the same time all partners were assured of a compensating guarantee of common security against dangers of unprecedented acuteness’.
In August 1944 the two men met. Roosevelt told Bohr he shared the hopes expressed in the memorandum, and asked Bohr to enlarge on it. But when Roosevelt met Churchill at Hyde Park a few weeks later, it was Churchill’s view of Bohr which prevailed. The aide-mémoire of their conversation, probably drawn up by Churchill, included the point that ‘Enquiries should be made regarding the activities of Professor Bohr and steps taken to ensure he is responsible for no leakage of information particularly to the Russians.’47
Bohr’s idea was not seen at all by Churchill. It was glimpsed and then forgotten by Roosevelt. His failure to persuade was not surprising. Neither his clogged written prose nor his mumbling conversational style were best suited to engaging political leaders. And the idea was so radical. The time and thought it needed would not have been readily forthcoming, either from a desperately busy wartime Prime Minister or from an equally busy and fatally ill wartime President.
After the war, Bohr tried again. In 1950 he wrote an Open Letter to the United Nations, urging ‘the ideal of an open world, with common knowledge about social conditions and technical enterprises, including military preparations, in every country’.48 But this time the attention of the United Nations, and of the world, was diverted by the outbreak of the Korean War. The open world was again put aside.
Bohr’s account of his idea left a number of loose ends. It was not a proposal for replacing nation-states by a world government. Nations were to agree on openness. But the possibility of cheating on the agreement suggests the need for policing, and so for some kind of supra-national authority in nuclear matters. And there is the question of what to do if some countries refuse to join the open world. How much pressure on them would be justified? The nature of the compromise between national independence and a world nuclear authority was left vague.
Despite the sketchy nature of the proposal, Bohr’s central idea is right. Nuclear weapons (and comparable biological and chemical weapons) are so dangerous that international monitoring and control are essential. And this does mean giving up some degree of national sovereignty. The dangers of not having international control of nuclear weapons were frighteningly apparent during the nuclear arms race of the Cold War. When that arms race ended, many people relaxed about the issue. But, since the end of the Cold War, the proliferation of nuclear-armed nation-states keeps the danger alive in a different form. The open world is something we may be unwise to put aside for too long.