AT THE BOMB TEST SITE IN NEW MEXICO, a desert gunnery range miles from any other sign of civilization, clocks read eight hours earlier than they did in Berlin. As Churchill and Truman were conferring in the Little White House for the first time on July 16, Robert Oppenheimer and General Leslie Groves were in a control bunker ten thousand yards from ground zero.
In the darkness the desert skies had produced a furious squall. Thirty-mile-per-hour winds strafed the bunker, and thunder cracks shook the earth. The first atomic explosion was scheduled for 4 a.m., but the weather threatened everything. There was talk of postponement.
“If we postpone,” said Oppenheimer, “I’ll never get my people up to pitch again.”
Groves was adamant: This was the time. They had to get the Trinity test shot done before Truman sat down at the negotiating table in Potsdam. Besides, each day the war in the Far East continued, more American soldiers died.
Every thirty minutes, Oppenheimer and Groves left their bunker and walked out into the stormy night to discuss the weather. The chief meteorologist, Jack Hubbard, promised that the storm would move on before sunrise. Was he right? Groves had no faith in the weatherman; he found Hubbard to be “obviously confused and badly rattled.” The group decided to push forward, postponing ninety minutes until 5:30 a.m.—which was not ideal, as the scientists needed Trinity to go off in darkness for the sake of the high-speed cameras. It had to be done not a minute past 5:30.
Nerves had stretched to the breaking point. “There was an air of excitement at the camp that I did not like,” Groves later wrote, “for this was a time when calm deliberation was most essential.” He feared that one of these scientists might crack, that nervous collapse or even hysteria was imminent. “The strain had been great on all our people, and it was impossible to predict just when someone might give way under it. There was always the chance, too, that a trained saboteur might be present, either within or without the organization, awaiting an opportunity.”
Enrico Fermi, the Italian physicist, worried that the storm could drench the scientists with radioactive rain, post-detonation. “There could be a catastrophe,” he warned Oppenheimer. In addition, a last-minute test of the firing mechanism had malfunctioned, and now the team believed there was a good chance Trinity would be a dud. This news had caused Oppenheimer to become highly emotional. Fermi also worried that, if the bomb did work, it could potentially ignite the atmosphere. To lighten the strain, the scientists took bets as to how big the explosion would be—if there would be one at all. Oppenheimer had bet conservatively: 3,000 tons TNT equivalent. Edward Teller—the brilliant Hungarian physicist, who later would become “the father of the hydrogen bomb”—bet the highest: 45,000 tons.
The test site was sixty miles northwest of the tiny village of Alamogordo; the Spanish had referred to this stretch of rattlesnake-infested desert as Jornada del Muerto—historically translated as Journey of the Dead Man, or Journey of Death. The gadget itself hung 100 feet above the ground, inside a tower. The bomb looked like a ball with wires poking out in all directions, like some primordial organism, only it was encased in metal and was the size of a Volkswagen. It was a “Fat Man” implosion-type bomb, using plutonium enriched at the Hanford reactor.
Oppenheimer’s team would remember the way he smoked cigarettes and drank black coffee during the early morning hours, unable to mask his anguish. At one point he cracked a book of Baudelaire poems, reading the verse quietly as lightning flashes lit up the night sky. (An aficionado of the written word, Oppenheimer had taken the name of the test shot—Trinity—from a John Donne poem.) “It was raining cats and dogs, lightning and thunder,” recalled Los Alamos scientist Isidor Rabi. “[We were] really scared [that] this object there in the tower might be set off accidentally. So you can imagine the strain on Oppenheimer.”
Hundreds of scientists were spread out around the test site, which had three bunkers all situated at ten thousand yards. Others had gathered on Compania Hill, a viewing site twenty miles northwest of ground zero. The men were organized into groups according to function: Services, Shock and Blast, Measurements, Meteorology, Spectrographic and Photographic, Airborne Measurements, and Medical. Each man had dark glasses to protect the eyes. The observers were told to lie down and bury their faces in their arms at the moment of detonation. Few were intending to follow those orders, noted Edward Teller: “We were determined to look the beast in the eye.” One of the scientists recalled, “With the darkness and the waiting in the chill of the desert the tension became almost unbearable.”
At 5:10 a.m. a Chicago physicist named Sam Allison announced over a loudspeaker from the control center: “It is now zero minus twenty minutes.” At zero minus five minutes, the soldiers guarding the tower that held the gadget climbed into jeeps and abandoned their posts, motoring to the safety of the control bunkers. As clocks ticked away the final minutes, everyone present took position. In Oppenheimer’s bunker, S-10000, observers watched him. He barely breathed, holding on to a post to steady himself. The shot was set to go off by automatic timer, and it was the job of a scientist named Donald Hornig to monitor it; in the final minute, Hornig would be the only one who could flip a switch to stop Trinity. “My hand was on the switch,” he recalled. “I could hear the timer counting . . . three . . . two . . . one . . .
“Now!”
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“My first impression was one of tremendous light,” Groves recorded, “and then as I turned, I saw the now familiar fireball . . . The light had been so much greater than any human had previously experienced.”
“All of a sudden, the night turned into day,” recalled scientist Joe Hirschfelder, “and it was tremendously bright; the chill turned into warmth; the fireball gradually turned from white to yellow to red as it grew in size and climbed into the sky.”
General Thomas Farrell, the army’s chief of field operations at Los Alamos: “The lighting effects beggared description. The whole country was lighted by a searing light with the intensity many times that of the midday sun. It was golden, purple, violet, gray, and blue. It lighted every peak, crevasse and ridge of the nearby mountain range with a clarity and beauty that cannot be described but must be seen to be imagined.”
The group watched as a mushroom cloud climbed to a height of over ten thousand feet. Farrell approached Groves and said to his boss, “The war is over.”
Oppenheimer himself later recalled the moment. “We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, a few people cried. Most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad-Gita . . . ‘Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.’”
Roughly thirty minutes later, General Groves called his contact in Washington, an official from the Interim Committee named George L. Harrison, by phone. One hour after that Groves called in more details. It was Harrison’s job to construct a cable to be sent to the secretary of war, now in Germany. Harrison wrote out the words in thinly veiled code with a note of comic relief, and at 9:30 a.m. eastern time he showed this cable to his superiors, who approved it. The cable fired off at 11:15 a.m. Washington time.
In one of history’s more macabre ironies, the Trinity shot went off at roughly the moment when Harry Truman and Winston Churchill were striking a blow for liberty, unaware, thousands of miles away at the Little White House in Babelsberg.
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Truman dined at 8 p.m. that night in his villa, with Ambassador Harriman and Joseph Davies among others. A band from the Second Armored Division played a concert during the dinner. As coffee was being served, one of Truman’s aides approached to inform him that the secretary of war and General Marshall were on their way to the Little White House to discuss an important matter. Stimson and Marshall arrived soon afterward to find Truman in his office on the second floor. Jimmy Byrnes was also present. Stimson gave Truman a cable, which had arrived from George L. Harrison in Washington. It read:
Operated on this morning. Diagnosis not yet complete but results seem satisfactory and already exceed expectations. Local press release necessary as interest extends great distance. Dr. Groves pleased. He returns tomorrow. I will keep you posted.
Truman and Byrnes “were delighted” by the news, Stimson recorded in his diary. The scientists had pulled it off. This was the news they had been waiting for, what must have felt like the answer to every question. The bomb was now in Truman’s proverbial hands, which made the former farmer and haberdasher the most powerful man who had ever lived.
The sentence regarding “local press release” signified that the Trinity shot had been so loud, citizens living great distances away had heard the blast and had contacted authorities, and so the army had put out a faux press release to throw off any suspicion. The press release indicated that an unexpected explosion had occurred at the Alamogordo Army Air Base, and that there had been “no loss of life.”
Conversation in the Little White House turned to Japan as the secretary of war had more news. Stimson said that a peace feeler had apparently come from Tokyo, to representatives of Stalin’s government in Moscow. There was no evidence that the feeler had any substance, but it was encouraging news. Earlier on this day, Stimson had written a memorandum to Truman called “The Conduct of the War with Japan,” and it is highly likely that he handed Truman this document during this sit-down. It concerned the ultimatum that Stimson had discussed with the president—a warning to Japan that something deeply destructive was about to happen, in hopes that Japan would surrender.
“It seems to me that we are at the psychological moment to commence our warnings to Japan,” Stimson wrote. “Moreover, the recent news of attempted approaches on the part of Japan to Russia, impels me to urge prompt delivery of our warning. I would therefore urge that we formulate a warning to Japan to be delivered during the course of this Conference.” If the Japanese then refused to surrender, Stimson concluded, “the full force of our newer weapons should be brought to bear.”
Stimson also brought up Russia. The closer Truman moved toward the negotiating table at Potsdam, the more Stimson feared the Soviets’ intentions in the Far East. He worried that Stalin aimed to do in the Far East what he was doing in eastern Europe—extend the influence of the USSR and communism. Stimson argued that, in negotiations, the United States should prevent the Soviets from gaining full control of trade ports in the Far East, such as Dairen in Manchuria. He also feared new developments in Korea, and the following sentence presaged a whole new war that would begin before the Truman administration was over: “The Russians, I am also informed, have already trained one or two divisions of Koreans,” Stimson wrote. He worried that the Russians would use these military divisions to “influence the setting up of a Soviet dominated local government [in Korea].”
Korea, Stimson concluded, “is the Polish question transplanted to the Far East.”
Following this meeting, Truman bounded down the stairs of the Little White House in a conflicted mood. On the first floor, Joseph Davies was still lounging, post-dinner.
“Is everything all right?” Davies asked.
“Yes, fine!” Truman said.
“Over here or back home?”
“Back home. It has taken a great load off my mind.” Only later would Truman tell Davies what he was talking about—Trinity, calling it a “terrible success.”
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At noon on July 17, one day after the Trinity shot, a bulletproof limousine pulled up to the Little White House in Babelsberg. It was surrounded by scurrying groups of cold-faced men, wearing ties and bearing guns. The limousine had curtains, so no one could see who was inside. When the car door opened, Stalin appeared. The Man of Steel wore a military tunic, and he was flanked by Molotov and the translator Pavlov. The group was shown into the Little White House, where Truman was sitting behind an oversized wooden desk near a sun-brightened window. “I got to my feet and advanced to meet him,” Truman wrote in his diary. “He put out his hand and smiled.”
Joseph Stalin was the most mysterious man alive. Few Americans had ever laid eyes on him. None knew where he lived, or with whom, or what his passions were, if any, outside of power politics. It was known, however, that he was born into abject poverty in the province of Georgia, and that he had risen to power during the struggles of the communist revolution, a time when only the most Machiavellian of militants could have survived, let alone flourished. He had taken over the Communist Party in 1922, and this was the foundation of his dictatorship. It was no coincidence that almost all of the powerful Soviets who had risen alongside Stalin—that is, any potential rivals—had since been assassinated, deported, tried, and executed for political crimes, or had simply vanished off the face of the earth. Stalin, meanwhile, had ushered the Soviet Union into the industrial age, as the feared dictator of what was now some 190 million subjects.
Truman was surprised by Stalin’s diminutive stature. The sixty-six-year-old Soviet stood only about five feet five inches. His trimmed gray hair was brushed back from his bulging brow, which accentuated his eyes—yellow, as if stained by cigarette smoke. His skin was rugged and pockmarked, and his teeth were cracked and discolored. He wore a mustache gently pointed at the ends, and his smile was remarkably unassuming. Truman was told that Stalin had a deformed arm, but the president saw no evidence of it in person. “What I noticed especially,” Truman recorded, “were his eyes, his face, and his expression.”
The Russia expert George Kennan, who had spent time with Stalin over the years while working in the Moscow embassy (where he still worked), described the sensation of being in the Soviet’s presence: “An unforewarned visitor would never have guessed what depths of calculation, ambition, love of power, jealousy, cruelty, and sly vindictiveness lurked behind this unpretentious façade. I was never in doubt, when visiting him, that I was in the presence of one of the world’s most remarkable men—a man great, if you will, primarily in his iniquity: ruthless, cynical, cunning, endlessly dangerous; but for all of this—one of the truly great men of the age.”
Stalin apologized for showing up a day late, as his doctor had insisted he travel by train, rather than by air. Truman and Stalin then dove into the agenda for Potsdam. Truman noticed how Stalin looked him directly in the eye when he spoke, and the president spoke “straight from the shoulder,” as he put it. Interpreter Chip Bohlen sat by taking notes. Bohlen scribbled the following:
TRUMAN: “I am here to—be yr friend—deal directly yes . . .”
STALIN: “Good—help—work—USSR go along with US.”
The conversation turned to the complicated issue of China. Stalin revealed that negotiations with Chinese foreign minister T. V. Soong in Moscow had moved along with little success. These negotiations involved the secret Yalta agreements, the willingness of the Chinese to grant the Soviets access to ports and control of Chinese railroads. The Chinese refused to agree to all the terms. The trouble with the Chinese, Stalin claimed, is that they “don’t understand horse trading.” But the talks were ongoing, and Stalin had decided to join the war against Japan anyway, he told the president, fixing the date now at August 15.
Truman had come to Potsdam with many goals, but “the most urgent, to my mind,” he later wrote, “was to get from Stalin a personal reaffirmation of Russia’s entry into the war against Japan, a matter which our military chiefs were most anxious to clinch.” Truman had accomplished this goal before the first conference plenary session had begun. He wrote in his diary: “Most of the big points are settled. He’ll [Stalin] be in the Jap War on August 15th. Fini Japs when that comes about.”
Truman suggested that Stalin and his party stay for lunch. Stalin replied that he could not, but Truman pressed him. “You could if you wanted to,” he said.
It was agreed. Colonel Rigdon, in charge of serving lunch, dashed into the kitchen, where Truman’s mess staff was working. There was no time to find more opulent fare. Rigdon later recalled, “All I could do was increase the quantities of liver and bacon that I had planned to serve as the main course, and of side dishes.”
Lunch was served at 1:40 p.m. Stalin revealed at the table that he did not believe Adolf Hitler was dead. “I think he’s loose somewhere,” Stalin said—maybe in Argentina or Spain. Stalin praised the wine on the table, so bottles were brought out for his inspection; the wine was from California. Truman later presented a number of bottles to Stalin as a gift. After lunch, the group moved onto a porch for photographs—the leaders posed with smiles on their faces, like old friends—and then the Soviets departed.
That afternoon the president prepared himself for the first plenary meeting at Potsdam. One can only imagine the thoughts moving through his mind as he dressed in his rooms, donning a dark gray double-breasted suit, a white shirt, and a bow tie. He had come to some conclusions about Stalin already. As he wrote in his diary on this day: “I can deal with Stalin. He is honest—but smart as hell.”
At 4:40 p.m. Truman left the Little White House with his staff in a motorcade—MPs on motorcycles, secret service in jeeps, with flags flying and sirens blaring. The palace where the conference was to be held was called Cecilienhof, and it was a ten-minute drive. At a gatehouse manned by Russian soldiers, the flags of the three nations flew in the breeze—the Stars and Stripes, the Union Jack, the Hammer and Sickle. When the big iron gate opened, Truman’s motorcade moved through winding tree-lined roads manned by green-capped Red Army soldiers with bayoneted rifles. The palace then revealed itself—three stories with a high red tiled roof, with an arch in the center leading into a courtyard, where the main entrances were situated. The palace had been completed in 1917 and contained 176 rooms. Inside the courtyard the Russians had planted a large red star, made out of geraniums. The red flowered star “strikingly informs all that the Russians are the conference host,” recorded one of Truman’s bodyguards, escorting him on this day.
Each nation’s delegation had its own entrance into the palace. Truman and his party walked through their own door, down long hallways to a dark-wood-paneled conference room with high ceilings and a large grid of windows that allowed natural light to flood the room. In the center was a round table surrounded by chairs, with miniature flags of the three nations at the center. There was no water or glasses on the table, but there were ashtrays aplenty. Both Stalin and Churchill and their parties had arrived before Truman. At 5 p.m. the parties assembled and posed for photographs and newsreel cameras. Joseph Davies recalled walking into the conference room with Truman: “As we entered, we were almost blinded by a battery of klieg lights and moving picture cameras. Very shortly thereafter, however, the business was ‘on.’”
Fifteen men sat at the negotiating table, five from each nation, and the rest of the advisors sat ringed around them. This table felt familiar to Truman, for it had the aura of a great big poker table. He eyed his opponents. He knew that they hoped to take advantage of him, the inexperienced one, who had been an obscure county judge just ten years earlier, and whose rise seemed still inexplicable. The Big Three leaders had come together to map out the future, but their interests were not the same. At 5:10 p.m., here in this palace—“only a few miles from the war-shattered seat of Nazi power,” as Truman put it—the historic Potsdam Conference was called to order.