62 pages • 2 hours read
Richard RhodesThe Making of the Atomic Bomb
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 1986A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Part 3Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 3: “Life and Death”
Chapter 18 Summary: “Trinity”
Truman, the new American president, is brought quickly up to speed on the atomic bomb project and its implications for world affairs. War secretary Stimson presses the idea of openness with Russia about the bomb, but Truman distrusts the Soviets. US bombers continue to pummel Japanese cities. The atomic target committee wants an urban area not yet bombed, to gauge the effectiveness of the nuclear weapons, but such municipal areas are getting hard to find. War secretary Stimson nixes Kyoto; it’s too important historically and culturally, and bombing it would be a blot on America’s reputation. Already, Stimson deplores the wholesale destruction of enemy cities and “did not want to have the United States get the reputation for outdoing Hitler in atrocities” (650).
The target committee wants the bomb to explode at the right height to inflict maximum damage: too high, and it blows up in “thin air”; too low and it mainly blasts a huge crater. With the surrender of Germany early in May 1945, an “Interim Committee” of US officials begins the work of planning for the post-war world; one issue on its agenda is the control of nuclear weapons. Against the fear of an arms race lies the concern that the Soviets might take advantage of openness merely to develop their own bombs. A successful ground test wouldn’t show the bomb's effects on a city; a test failure would provoke disbelief from the enemy; even a warning that a city was to be destroyed might tempt the Japanese high command to move Allied POWs to that city. The Interim Committee decides to opt for surprise, and Truman concurs.
The gun-type bomb should work properly without a live trial, but the implosion bomb must be tested. The Los Alamos team selects a spot deep in the New Mexico desert where the first nuclear device will be detonated. At Ground Zero, workers build a 100-foot metal tower to hold the gadget. North, west, and south of the tower, at a distance of nearly six miles, the Army builds bunkers for cameras, control systems, and observer stations. The various parts of the bomb are sent to Ground Zero and carefully assembled; the process takes days. At the same time, most of the gun-type bomb is sent, also in parts, by plane to San Francisco and thence by ship to the island of Tinian.
From a hill 20 miles away, a gathering of dignitaries—including James Chadwick, discoverer of the neutron, the particle that makes possible an atomic bomb—observe the test. A few seconds before 5:30 a.m. on July 16, 1945, the bomb is detonated. For a moment, conditions at the center of the bomb “resembled the state of the universe moments after its first primordial explosion” (670). A sudden and blindingly white light appears, growing into a half-mile-wide fireball that rises into the atmosphere, a glowing, purple cloud shaped like a mushroom. Forty seconds later a shock-wave wind hits, knocking some observers to the ground. The blast is equal to nearly 19,000 tons of TNT.
Chapter 19 Summary: “Tongues of Fire”
Colonel Tibbets and his bomber battalion begin arriving on Tinian Island to prepare for the nuclear raid on Japan. About the size of Manhattan, Tinian is covered in landing strips that make it the largest airport in the world. Hundreds of B-29s line the fields, taking off and landing during the ongoing bombing raids over Japan. Not all the bombers make it back. At the Potsdam conference in Germany in late July 1945, Truman casually mentions to Stalin that the US has a new weapon. Stalin—whose spies already have informed him about the bomb—replies noncommittally that he hopes the weapon proves useful against Japan.
US officials, worried about a difficult and costly invasion of Japan, finalize the decision to go ahead with the nuclear strikes. They select four undamaged cities, including Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as possible targets, hoping the results will convince the Japanese to give up. President Truman issues the Potsdam Declaration, which demands that Japan surrender its armed forces unconditionally or face “prompt and utter destruction” (692).
Various part of the two bombs begin arriving at Tinian. By July 31 the gun-type bomb, “Little Boy,” is ready. Weighing nearly five tons and 10 feet long, the bomb looks like “an elongated trash can with fins” (701). Tibbets’ crews complete their final practice runs. The weather over Japan clears up, and at 2:45 a.m. on August 6, Tibbets’ B-29, named “Enola Gay” for his mother, takes off with a crew of 12 and Little Boy for the flight to Japan.
Morning clouds are few over the port city of Hiroshima, so they fly there, climb to 31,000 feet, and a little after 8:15 a.m. drop Little Boy and execute a diving turn to get away. At 1,900 feet, the bomb fires within itself a bullet of U235 into a set of rings of U235, causing the material to go critical and detonate. A bright light envelopes the plane; two powerful shock waves buffet it. The plane turns to observe, and the crew sees a mushroom cloud towering over a city consumed by turbulent smoke and flame. The bomb’s yield equals 12.5 kilotons of TNT; the effect is the nearly complete destruction of most of Hiroshima.
Buildings are reduced to rubble and the ruins burn for hours. The central area is almost completely leveled, “a desert except for scattered piles of brick and roof tile” (728). The intense heat of the blast causes severe skin burns two miles away; within a half-mile, people are incinerated instantly to small bundles of black char. The streets and the river are filled with thousands of corpses. For survivors—many of whom wander, disoriented, burnt skin hanging from their arms, calling out the names of missing loved ones—it feels like the end of the world.
After several days, many survivors suffer new symptoms: ulceration, bleeding, nausea, vomiting, loss of appetite, bloody diarrhea. The bomb’s initial blast of intense gamma rays has caused massive trauma to body tissues; some people rot away while still alive. By the end of 1945, more than half of Hiroshima’s residents are dead from the bomb. In contrast, the March 10 Tokyo firebombing kills only 10 percent of the 1 million wounded. Stalin, now realizing the American bomb is a serious thing, wants to obtain some leverage over events in the Pacific before it’s too late; he declares war on Japan on August 9; his forces promptly attack Japanese troops garrisoned in Manchuria.
On the same day, a B-29 named “Bock’s Car,” piloted by Major Charles Sweeney, carries an implosion-type plutonium bomb, “Fat Man,” toward Kokura, Japan, but clouds cover the target there, so Sweeney detours to Nagasaki, where an opening in the clouds allows the bombardier to drop Fat Man onto the city. The resulting fireball equals 22 kilotons of TNT; as with Hiroshima, Nagasaki is mostly destroyed; 70,000 are dead by year’s end from the bomb’s effects and twice that number by 1950.
On August 10, the Japanese high command offers to surrender with the proviso that the emperor shall remain in place. A third atomic bomb will be ready by mid-August, but Truman doesn’t want, yet again, to kill so many innocents. The fire bombings continue, however. The Japanese agree to the Potsdam Declaration terms on August 14. The next day, Emperor Hirohito speaks by radio to his people, describing “a new and most cruel bomb, the power of which to do damage is indeed incalculable” (745), and declaring that Japan will give up the fight.
Part 3 Analysis
Thucydides remarked that any man who can see all sides of an issue is completely unfit for battle. The ancient Greek general recognized that attempts to be fair-minded toward opponents require a mutual trust that simply doesn't exist when sabers are rattling. The first side to lay down their arms in a gesture of peace will simply be slaughtered.
Oppenheimer and Bohr believed openness about the weapons would solve the problem of mutual annihilation, but Oppenheimer was sympathetic to the Russian system and respected them, while other US officials feared that the Soviets would cheat. The Soviets, with their stated aim of inspiring communist revolution worldwide, were against most of what the US represents. Without trust, the result was a standoff between two giant nuclear powers that teetered on the brink of worldwide disaster several times during the decades of the Cold War.
One of the reasons the US can build nuclear weapons, while most other nations can’t, is its ability to marshal the enormous power of its industry to the production of bombs and bomb materials. Atom bombs are complex and require large quantities of rare materials; only a large, modern nation has the production capability to make them. These difficulties are the main reasons terrorists and other revolutionaries of recent decades haven’t constructed their own nuclear weapons. As well, nuclear nations won’t hand over such devices, even to guerrillas they support overseas, because to do so is to lose control of powerful weapons that could then be used against them.
Ironically, beyond his history-making letter to Roosevelt about the danger of Hitler getting an atomic bomb, Einstein wasn’t much involved in America’s nuclear project. American authorities didn’t trust him for his pacifism and possible Zionism, which they feared might convince him to serve the interests of forces other than those of the US. Szilard and Oppenheimer were closely monitored for similar reasons.
In the post-war decades, the concept of “MAD,” or “mutually assured destruction,” became a cornerstone of strategic deterrence for both the US and the Soviet Union, the two major players in the nuclear game. By this concept, neither used nuclear weapons in an attack against the other, lest the opponent launch its own arsenal of nuclear bombs against the aggressor, thereby assuring that both sides are destroyed. The danger is so great that the US and Russia to this day can't even get into a minor military skirmish, for fear that such actions can get out of hand and become nuclear. America and the Soviets therefore fought “proxy wars” in Korea, Vietnam, and Afghanistan, battling on foreign soil and thus opposing each other only indirectly.
A technical problem of the early-1990s breakup of the Soviet Union involved Russia’s retrieval and/or dismantling of nuclear weapons stored in neighboring ex-members. Especially touchy was the problem of Ukraine, which returned its atomic arsenal to Russia in exchange for a promise from the US to protect it from military interference by its much larger neighbor. When Russia supported a rebellion in eastern Ukraine in 2014, the Ukrainians asked the US to honor its commitment; the US, wanting to avoid a shooting war with Russia that might go nuclear, instead applied economic and other sanctions against them.
The tension that resulted, paired with accusations that Russia meddled in the US 2016 election, caused relations between the two nuclear superpowers to deteriorate, raising the specter of renewed Cold War tensions and a revived threat of trigger-happy officials igniting a nuclear disaster. Add to this the border tensions between nuclear-armed Pakistan and India, alongside the imminent threat of Iran and North Korea becoming nuclear powers in tense neighborhoods, and the Los Alamos scientists’ original concerns about a world packed with nuclear bombs seem quite justified.
Without the atomic bombs, America’s Air Force would simply have continued destroying Japanese cities from above with conventional weapons. Massive aerial bombing was wearing down the Japanese will to resist; already, they were sending feelers to Russia, hoping the Soviets might mediate a surrender. The biggest concern for Japan was protecting the emperor; to turn him over to the victors was unacceptable. The US knew, from hard battlefield experience, that Japanese forces would fight to the death; during the Pacific war, few of them were captured as prisoners. Allies fought for months, at the cost of thousands of American and more than 100,000 Japanese lives, simply to take the islands of Iwo Jima and Okinawa. The thought of going through this against the entire Japanese population—millions of lives lost, including up to a million American servicemen—made US officials turn to the bomb as a decisive way out.
The decisive effect of the nuclear detonations over Hiroshima and Nagasaki—gigantic, searing fireballs, cities flattened almost instantly, instant obliteration of tens of thousands, the horrors of radiation poisoning—carried tremendous psychological impact. It would be impossible for Japan to escape a destruction so thoroughgoing that it might mean the end of the nation, its culture, and its people. Emperor Hirohito acknowledged as much in his radio speech to his subjects on August 15, 1945, when he explained the reasons for the surrender. It might be possible, then, to argue that atomic bombs hastened the end of the Pacific war. Author Rhodes includes 16 pages of eyewitness testimony to the horrors of nuclear devastation at Hiroshima. These words condemn, if not the use of atomic bombs during the conflict, then their continued existence in large numbers in the arsenals of major nations decades after their effects were so violently displayed at the close of World War II.
