“This was their finest hour”

The discovery of the atomic nucleus was a momentous event in the history of science. It also turned out to be more momentous in the history of the world. Nuclear fission and the possibility of using its secret for war purposes were a very definite eventuality. Hitler’s Germany had already initiated a programme to tap this power for producing a weapon that could prove to be the most decisive. France as early as 1940 had succumbed and the future of the human race and human civilisation were at stake. Winston Churchill in his House of Commons speech on 18 June 1940 said: “What General Weygand has called the Battle of France is over. The Battle of Britain is about to begin. Upon this battle depends the survival of Christian civilisation. Upon it depends our own British life, and the long continuity of our institutions and our Empire. The whole fury and might of the enemy must very soon be turned on us. Hitler knows that he will have to break us in this Island or lose the war. If we can stand up to him, all Europe may be free and the life of the world may move forward into broad, sunlit uplands. But if we fail, then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science. Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that, if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, ‘This was their finest hour.’ ” Could that be the voice of man speaking in the darkness of the civilisational night?

 

Churchill was speaking about the “broad sunlit uplands” more as an inspired visionary made to speak so by an unknown power. He was certainly not aware of it, though he lent himself commendably to it, to that unknown power. That indeed marked well the “finest hour” in the history of recent times. But perhaps he was speaking of the Dark Age essentially in the context of the British Empire. There were, however, larger issues involved, much larger issues pertaining to the march of the evolutionary time, and destiny had to take cognisance of them. Positive participation of America, thanks particularly to the Pearl Harbor incident, was one such work of the unknown destiny.

 

The story of development and use of the atom bomb in the Second World War marks the beginning of another age in many ways. Sinister it may look from a certain point of view, but perhaps the old order had to yield place to the new in the holocaust of all that was retrograde or what had come to be a spent force of the era: the atom bomb had to arrive.

 

When on 2 August 1939 Einstein wrote to President Roosevelt, urging him to initiate work on the development of the atom bomb, little did he realise the implications of the social changes it would bring about. His plea was basically in terms of getting ready to prepare an offensive weapon for use in the war. The discovery of nuclear fission and the possibility of sustaining a chain reaction as a precursor for producing a powerful bomb were pointed out. The news of the progress made by Germany in this area was brought to the United States by Niels Bohr and the experiments, carried out in just a week’s time, confirmed the results. Had the German scientists forged ahead with this discovery and put it into the war programme, the consequences for mankind would have been disastrous. In fact, they were well on their way to building a heavy water plant and a nuclear reactor in 1942. Einstein was quick to realise the situation even at the early stage and lent his entire weight to promote American initiative. He mentioned in his letter to the President that this “phenomenon would also lead to the construction of bombs, and it is conceivable—though much less certain—that an extremely powerful type of bomb, carried by boat and exploded in a port, might very well destroy the whole port together with some of the surrounding territory.” Eventually, in 1945 modified 46B-29 bomber aircraft carried the atomic weapons.

 

Avowals of some of the professionals

Scientists differed regarding the merit of nuclear applications outside the laboratory for any commercial or military purposes. The findings were thought to be of the nature of a scientist’s curiosity without relevance to other issues. Thus Ernest Rutherford, the father of nuclear physics, maintained: “Any one who says that with the means at present at our disposal and with our present knowledge we can utilise atomic energy is talking moonshine.” But soon the moonshine was dispelled and science moved from laboratory to the world of large-scale operations. Here was the breaking of new ground with unknown destiny asserting its dynamic nature. In it far-reaching events were taking shape.

 

We may at this juncture look at the avowals of a few of the leading participants in the wartime atomic project. Here are some of the statements:

 

Eugene Wigner: As for my participation in making the bomb, there was no choice. The original discovery that made it possible was made in Germany, and we had believed that the German scientists were ahead of us in the development of a nuclear weapon. I shudder to think what would have happened if Germany had been first to acquire the weapon.

 

Leo Szilard: During 1943 and part of 1944 our greatest worry was the possibility that Germany would perfect an atomic bomb before the invasion of Europe... In 1945, when we ceased worrying about what the Germans might do to us, we began to worry about what the government of the United States might do to other countries.

 

Joseph O Hirschfelder: At Los Alamos during World War II there was no moral issue with respect to working on the atomic bomb. Everyone was agreed on the necessity of stopping Hitler and the Japanese from destroying the free world. It was not an academic question. Our friends and relatives were being killed and we, ourselves, were desperately afraid.

 

Edward McMillan: My feeling was something like, ‘Well it worked!’ There's no great emotion to that, except that it worked. I think it was later that I and many others began to think about the consequences, about what could be done with such a powerful device.

 

Philip Morrison: We saw the unbelievably brilliant flash. That was not the most impressive thing. We knew it was going to be blinding. We wore welder's glasses. The thing that got me was not the flash but the blinding heat of a bright day on your face in the cold desert morning. It was like opening a hot oven with the sun coming out like a sunrise.

 

Brig Gen Thomas Farrell: The effects could well be called unprecedented, magnificent, beautiful, stupendous, and terrifying. No man-made phenomenon of such tremendous power had ever occurred before. The lighting effects beggared description. The whole country was lighted with the intensity many times that of the midday sun.

 

George B Kistiakowsky: At Los Alamos we had some conversations on the subject and I must admit that my own position was that the atom bomb is no worse than the fire raids which our B-29s were doing daily in Japan, and anything to end the war quickly was the thing to do.

 

Luis W Alvarez

We had the means to end the war quickly, with a great saving of human life. I believed it was the sensible thing to do, and I still do.

 

Victor Weisskopf: We were afraid that Hitler had the bomb first, and we made this bomb, which shortened the war and saved a lot of American and Japanese lives in the Japanese war.

 

Albert Einstein: If I had known that the Germans would not succeed in constructing the atom bomb, I would have never lifted a finger.

 

Hans Bethe: I think it was necessary to drop one, but the second one could have easily been avoided. I think Japan would have capitulated anyway.

 

J Robert Oppenheimer: I believe it was an error that Truman did not ask Stalin to carry on further talks with Japan, and also that the warning to Japan was completely inadequate.

 

While many of these views might have been voiced on the spur of the stupefying moment, in the light of the blinding flash that shot out in the Alamogordo desert, they only show the complexity of the spirit of the time which one did not understand. But do we understand it now? Perhaps we are too close to the history to assess the importance of the Second World War from the pyre of which arose, Phoenix-like, the soul of the new age.

 

The twofold objective

Before we go into few details of the Project under which the objective was fulfilled, let us first get an idea about the total effort involved in it. The Project was planned and created with a twofold objective:

 

●to carry out research in the related fields;

●to set up a production system that would bring about a usable atomic bomb.

 

The Project was named after the Manhattan Engineer District (MED) of the US Army Corps of Engineers, for the reason that a lot of early work was done in New York. In 1942 General Leslie Grove was chosen to lead the Project. He bought a site at Oak Ridge where were set up facilities to separate the fissile uranium-235 from natural uranium-238. Robert Oppenheimer looked after the daily running of the project. The team of scientists who worked on the atom bomb worked 6 days a week and often 18 hours a day.

 

“By 1945 the Project had nearly 40 laboratories and factories which employed 200,000 people. That was more than the total amount of people employed in the US automobile industry in 1945. The total cost of the Manhattan Project was $2 billion which is about the equivalent of $26 billion today.” $2 billion may seem a frightening figure to create a weapon of mass destruction; but the “total cost to the United States for World War II was approximately $3.3 trillion.” (1942-1945 value)

 

The details of the atomic devices/bombs produced and detonated are as follows: the first experimental bomb as a trial gadget exploded on 16 July 1945 at Alamogordo; The Little Boy dropped on Hiroshima on 6 August 1945; The Fat Man on Nagasaki on 9 August 1945; bomb number 4 remained unused.

 

The total cost of all bombs, mines and grenades was $31.5 billion, making an average cost per atomic device/bomb as $5 billion. After witnessing the awe-inspiring Alamogordo atomic blast, Oppenheimer quoted Sanskrit verses from the Gita’s 11th chapter; he compared it with a thousand suns that at once blazed in the ancient sky. Suddenly some dreadful multiple godhead in his gold-red form appeared in the brightness of these suns on the new horizon. Presently the Time-Spirit had picked up its transformative responsibility.

 

Another insight

In this context we should well remember and understand what Sri Aurobindo, remote from the weapons factories and battlefields, saw about the vast destructive power of the atom. At the time when the Second World War had just started, he forebode in his sonnet A Dream of Surreal Science, dated 25 September 1939, the following. There were other methods, surer than the methods of science, by which he had arrived at the conclusions:

 

One dreamed and saw a gland write Hamlet, drink

At the Mermaid, capture immortality;

A committee of hormones on the Aegean’s brink

Composed the Iliad and the Odyssey.

 

A thyroid, meditating almost nude

Under the Bo-tree, saw the eternal Light

And, rising from its mighty solitude,

Spoke of the Wheel and eightfold Path all right.

 

A brain by a disordered stomach driven

Thundered through Europe, conquered, ruled and fell,

From St. Helena went, perhaps, to Heaven.

Thus wagged on the surreal world, until

 

A scientist played with atoms and blew out

The universe before God had time to shout.

 
Again, in 1942, long before Alamogordo, Sri Aurobindo wrote about something brighter than a thousand suns, about “the riven invisible atom’s omnipotent force.” (Savitri, p. 255) He had already seen the potentialities of the fissioned atom’s enormous power. We wonder how he had arrived at this truth, a truth altogether beyond the reach of reason. We cannot even realise the implications it portends. Is there another way of doing science which can be learned and pursued in terms of its deeper possibilities? Perhaps there is. But let us go back to the world of men and atom.

 

A social perspective

We have a very readable account of the Manhattan Project from Peter Hales with a sensitivity which puts the weapons effort in acceptable social perspective. He writes: “America, sprawling and diverse, came to draw upon its peculiar resources, physical, social and human, to create this superweapon and win the last good war… the scientific and military achievements of the Manhattan Project. This is the myth of the Manhattan Project, a powerful narrative, drawing the American past into a global future. And it offers itself for analysis, for unmasking and disentangling the threads that might comprise such a cultural history as I have written. This is a story about the birth of America's atomic spaces, their creation by military fiat and necessity, their occupation by people, buildings, and social networks, their consolidation into a new type of cultural environment, penetrating work, leisure, environment, language, and belief, and present even today as a significant, if surreptitious, strain of American culture. This is the history of that atomic culture.”

 

The social scientist must note the significance of this history stepping into the new culture.

 
The Project needed a combination of two vastly different features, features associated with academic institutions and military establishments, two vastly different institutions. Hales continues: “These impulses toward utopian planning had to meld with the military planning models. General Groves, shadowy director of the MED, had made his career by studying, and building, military bases, environments that were simultaneously Spartan grids of self-sacrifice to the will of the state and profoundly intrusive spaces of individual and social management and regulation. Groves’s last construction project was a different kind of extension of the modern social landscape, the largest ever undertaken by the military: a giant multi-sided model of a bureaucracy-as-fortress—the Pentagon. His influence on the Pentagon had been to ruthlessly enforce efficiencies of scale and mass-regulation to keep the project on time and budget. Its influence on him had been to provide a paradigm for imagining military bureaucracy mapped out as space and symbol. To do this required people, brought from outside the fences and the particular environment of the atomic spaces: atomic scientists, pipe fitters, concrete pourers, housewives, musicians, writers, engineers, social workers… men, women and children…The Manhattan Engineer District created a new form of American cultural landscape with one Herculean goal in mind: the manufacture of a new form of atomic superweapon in time to use it on the Japanese. The goal was achieved, and the explosion of consequence from that achievement has still not finished washing its forces over us.” I am not sure, if we have really made a fuller and proper understanding of the contributions General Leslie Groves, men who mould events.

 

But there are, as in every walk of human life, “large and uneasy issues also. They lie underneath the everyday circumstances that make up the atomic culture. For this is a story of lands, sacred lands, taken and altered. It is a story of men and women, buildings, work, pleasure, punishment, language, food, bodies: and out of all of these, consequences.”

 

The social transformation that we witness today had its overt roots in these remarkable developments. Today we live in the American era with all its glorious possibilities—and all its degrading pitfalls. Yet its creative spirit is something that should be recognised and applauded, creative in every walk of life, even though one may see a thousand vitalisitc and arrogant shortcomings in it. The great cycles of time needed this adventure of globalising consciousness and it is that which was effectively born on the fast lane of the Second World War. Where will this track lead us? Nobody knows; the answer to this question is not known. This zestful creative spirit has certainly opened itself to the wonderful working of the Goddess of Perfection, Mahasaraswati, to put it in Sri Aurobindo’s terminology, but where do the other three indispensable cosmic powers stand, the luminous powers of Goddess of Wisdom Maheshwari, Goddess of Strength, Mahakali, and Goddess of Harmony, Mahalakshmi? Can we have a deeper intuition of their presence and functioning in the universal order of things? If an answer to this question is to be found, the Sage must be born amongst us. Will that happen?

 

Large and uneasy issues

During the active phase of the Atomic Project there was a refugee German physicist, Klaus Fuchs, who worked on the theory of gaseous diffusion cascades. His contributions in the field were significant. But being a member of the Communist Party, he turned out to be the famous "Atom Spy" who transferred to the Soviet Union “virtually everything he knew about atomic weapons”. The immediate consequence in 1951 was the ordering of development of the deadly hydrogen bomb by President Truman,—only four days after Fuchs's arrest. Fuchs served a 9-year term in prison. After he was released, he became a lecturer in physics in East Germany.

 

However, it will be profitable to examine the rich multidimensional benefactions that came about in the wake of the War effort. This examination may also indicate to us the new character of science and technology that we now possess. The stamp of another free and vigorous science-hood may be discernible on it—of the Big Science becoming universal.

This article forms an introductory chapter in the author’s book Big Science and India ready for publication. It essentially retells the story of development and use of the atom bomb, retells briefly the unprecedented social transformation that came in its vigorous wake. ~ RY Deshpande