"Always" the Target?(1)
By: Arjun MakhijaniBased on an article in The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, May/June 1995.
On 23 April 1945, Gen. Leslie R. Groves, director of the Manhattan Project, wrote a memo to Henry L. Stimson, Secretary of War. It contained a puzzling phrase, which I have italicized:
"Our previous hopes that an implosion type of bomb might be developed in the late spring of 1945 have now been dissipated by scientific difficulties...
"While our plan of operation is based on the more certain, more powerful, gun type bomb, it also provides for the use of the implosion type bombs as soon as they become available. The target is and was always expected to be Japan. A composite group of the 20th Air Force has been organized and specially trained and equipped."(2)
By the time the memo was written, it was clear to everyone connected with the atomic bomb project that Germany would not be the target. The Third Reich would collapse long before the first bombs were ready for use. If the new weapon was to be used at all in World War II, it would be against Japan.
But had Japan "always" been the target, as Groves implied? If so, that fact suggests a terrible irony that has been little noted in the decades-long debate over the use of the bomb. From August 1939, when Albert Einstein alerted President Roosevelt to the possibility that atomic bombs could be built, to late 1944, when it became entirely apparent that Germany was not an atomic threat, the focus of U.S. bomb makers was Germany.
Emigre scientists from Europe, especially Leo Szilard, Enrico Fermi, Hans Bethe, Niels Bohr and the like, played pivotal roles in the Manhattan Project. To a man, they, along with their American and British colleagues-got involved for one overarching reason: Germany had first-rate scientists who presumably understood the destructive possibilities of nuclear fission. The United States had to develop an atomic bomb before the Germans did. Such weapons in the hands of Hitler would be the ultimate catastrophe for the world.
Joseph Rotblat, one of the European emigre scientists at Los Alamos, and the only one to quit when it became clear in late 1944 that Germany would not have the bomb before the war ended, said in an interview with me that "there was never any idea [among scientists] that it would be used against Japan. We never worried that the Japanese would have the bomb. We always worried about what [Werner] Heisenberg and other German scientists were doing. All of our concentration was on Germany."(3)
Surviving Manhattan Project scientists continue to believe that atomic bombs were used on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, rather than on German targets, because they were not ready in time. But that may not be the whole story.
Early Targeting Discussions
The first targeting discussion (insofar as can be determined from declassified documents and histories of the Manhattan Project) occurred during a meeting of the Military Policy Committee of the Manhattan Project on 5 May 1943, over two years before V-E day:
The point of use of the first bomb was discussed and the general view appeared to be that its best point of use would be on a Japanese fleet concentration in the Harbor of Truk [an island in the Pacific Ocean]. General Styer suggested Tokio [sic] but it was pointed out that the bomb should be used where, if it failed to go off, it would land in water of sufficient depth to prevent easy salvage. The Japanese were selected as they would not be so apt to secure knowledge from it as would the Germans.(4)
Of course, the bomb was far from ready, as the specific choice of Truk as a target was theoretical at this stage. But Manhattan Project scientists seem to have been unaware of this discussion or reasoning then or even in the decades that followed, though the document itself is not new and has been cited in historical works before.."(5) For example, Hans Bethe, who headed the Theoretical Division at Los Alamos during the Manhattan Project, reacted with amazement when I brought this to his attention on 14 February 1945:
This is completely new to me....I am amazed both by the conclusion not to use [the bomb] on Germany and secondly by their reasons [for targeting the Japanese fleet]. We [the scientists] had no idea of such a decision. We were under the impression that Germany was the first target until the German surrender. That was my belief. Obviously, it was wrong.."(6)
Glenn Seaborg, who headed the team that first isolated plutonium, concurs. In an interview on 3 February 1995 he said:
So far as I recall right up until the time the Germans surrendered in the spring of 1945, we thought that the Germans would be the target for the atomic bomb. As their demise became more and more predictable perhaps we somewhat drew away from that feeling, but certainly we thought in 1944 that Germany would be the target.(7)
David Hawkins was a special assistant to Robert Oppenheimer, the scientific director of the Los Alamos Laboratory where the first atom bombs were designed and built. Hawkins was also for a time the historian of the early Los Alamos effort. He also agreed that the scientists had no idea that Germany had been discussed and rejected as a potential target as early as May 1943.(8) Hawkins and others I interviewed do not recall discussions of targeting among the scientists until well into 1945, and especially after the war in Europe had ended on 8 May 1945.(9)
The Bomber of Choice
In contrast to a specific targeting of the Japanese fleet at Truk, the use of the bomb on Germany appears to have been considered only as a retaliatory measure in case of first German use of the bomb. A Military Policy Committee status report of 21 August 1943 makes a reference to the potential bombing of Germany, but the statement only discusses that possibility in case the war became "unduly" long and the Germans were be able to produce "a usable bomb" before the United States. In that event, the Committee concluded it might "be necessary for us to stand the first punishing blows [of German atom bombs] before we are in a position to destroy the enemy."(10) But the practical preparations continued to be for a bombing in the Pacific, not the European war.
An early decision to use the newly developed B-29 bomber also points to the choice of a Pacific war target as primary. The B-29 was selected as the bomber that the U.S. would use as early as the summer of 1943, provided the appropriate modifications could be made to it. Captain Parsons was put in charge of this project in June 1943. According to the official history of the Manhattan Project by Richard Hewlett and Oscar Anderson, Jr., the choice of the B-29 indicated that Japan was already the primary target. "Had Germany been the primary target, the choice would hardly have fallen on an aircraft never intended for the European theater."(11)
That conclusion is supported, at least indirectly, by the technical facts. British Lancasters could have been modified for the atom bomb. The four-engine Lancaster had a normal payload of 14,000 pounds, but some had been modified to carry the "Grand Slam"-- at 22,000 pounds, the heaviest bomb produced in the war. The chief technical advantage the B-29 had over the Lancaster was its great range: 3,000-4,000 miles. That made it the only bomber suitable in the pacific.(12)
Nationalistic feeling may also have played a part in the choice of the B-29 over the Lancaster.(13) Manhattan Project officials wanted British collaboration in the scientific aspects of their work, but were reluctant to give up sole control of decisions regarding nuclear weapons. Germany as a target would not only have meant the probable use of a British bomber, but also that control over logistical aspects would have to be shared with the British.
It is noteworthy that the argument that American lives would be saved by bombing Japan does not seem to have been a factor in early targeting decisions. Indeed, the overall strategy of the war, including allocation of resources between the European theater and the Pacific theater, apparently did not figure in these nuclear targeting discussions, so far as we have been able to determine. Nuclear decisions seem to have taken place primarily within the context of the nuclear capabilities of Germany and Japan relative to the United States.
The other startling point is that the officials who made these early decisions did not see fit to communicate them to the scientists. Groves had set up the Manhattan Project on a "need to know basis"; it appears that he and his fellow members of the Military Policy Committee felt that the scientists and engineers who created the bomb under the assumption that the target was Germany had no need to know otherwise. During my interview with him on 3 February 1995, David Hawkins, Oppenheimer's special assistant at Los Alamos, speculated that Groves may have told Oppenheimer about the discussion of Truk as a target that occurred during the Military Policy Committee meeting 5 May 1943, but that if he did so Oppenheimer did not communicate this to other scientists.
Targeting and the Schedule of Bomb Production
The Military Policy Committee targeting discussion of 5 May 1943, had nothing to do with an estimate of when the war against Germany might end. In the spring of 1943, no one knew when that might be. Moreover, the technical problems that eventually delayed bomb production into the summer of 1945 had not yet emerged. In fact, a report of the committee, dated 21 August 1943, suggested that a fission weapon might be available by the fall of 1944 or by January 1, 1945.(14)
That schedule would have been compatible with the targeting of Germany. But the available documentation suggests that there were no discussions, much less plans, for use of the bomb against Germany. Given the fact that the losses of Allied troops were expected to be heavy during and after D-Day, one might expect to find evidence that contingency plans to use the bomb in the fall of 1944 had been made. But there is no evidence of that, either. Rather, what evidence there is - albeit sketchy - suggests that there was simply an automatic assumption at an early stage that Japanese forces would be the target.
That Japan would be the target of the first U.S. atomic bomb attack did not change when the Alsos mission came to the conclusion in late 1944 that there was no prospect that Germany would have an atomic weapon before the end of the war. Indeed, work on the project was speeded up. Alsos was the code name for the Manhattan Project's intelligence mission to find out the scientific and technological progress that Germany was making on its atom bomb project.
As historian Martin Sherwin has noted, by 1945 "the race for the bomb had already changed from a race against German scientists to a race against the war itself."(15) Oppenheimer recalled that the period of the most intense work on the bombs was between the time of the German surrender and the use of the bombs against Japan.(16)
What began in the early years of the war due to fear of a German nuclear weapons program was completely transformed by the fall of 1944 to a project of using nuclear weapons as a tool of immense military superiority to be used to accomplish a variety of goals. In order to do that, successful use of the bomb as an instrument of power had, first of all, to be demonstrated.
Questions
Time has not stilled the controversies surrounding the decision to bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki, even while Japanese diplomats were quietly exploring a face-saving way to surrender. In the past five decades, millions of words have been written to explain the bombings.
To most Americans -- especially veterans -- the use of the bombs was a cut-and-dry matter. They were dropped to end the war quickly and thus save American lives. Others have postulated that the bombs were used to send a signal to the Soviet Union about power in the post-war world or to study their effects on real cities as targets. The argument has also been made that the bombs were used to justify the huge expenditure of scarce wartime resources.
It seems clear that the 5 May 1943 memo suggests that a form of nuclear deterrence was at work. The Germans were thought to have an active nuclear bomb program; therefore, the Military Policy Committee was reluctant to use the first U.S. bomb against German forces. If it had been used against a German target -- and if it had been a dud -- the Germans might have been more likely to recover it and "to secure knowledge from it."
All such explanations, and more, find historical support in documents relating to the Manhattan Project. But nothing in the historical record can answer these questions: How many scientists, if any, would have left the project if they had known in 1943 that Japan might have been the target of first use? How many scientists simply would have quit in 1943 and 1944, Rotblat style, if they had known that the target "was always expected to be Japan"?
With the possible exception of Oppenheimer, the scientists, who were motivated mainly by the specter of a Nazi bomb, were not aware of the early targeting decisions. This throws a far harsher light on the ineffectiveness of dissenting scientists in affecting the political and military policy of the Manhattan Project. Until today, the central issue of debate on this score has been related to the failure of the group of scientists who wanted a demonstration shot or other warning before the use of the bomb to persuade the Interim Committee, a temporary body appointed by the Secretary of War to advise the President on targeting strategy and post-war nuclear weapons related issues. But if the scientists were not even aware of how the policy evolved, due to the secrecy and compartmentalization that was a hallmark of the Manhattan Project, how could they even have participated in the decision-making in an informed fashion?
Fifty years later, such if-only-they-had-known speculation is merely an intellectual exercise dealing with a host of unknowable factors. But is does raise an essential philosophical and practical point regarding secrecy and the responsibility of scientists -- an old question that is nonetheless as relevant today as it was 50 years ago: If scientists do not have the minimum information needed to participate openly and democratically in decision-making about the use of weapons of mass destruction, should they be involved in making them?
Institute for Energy and Environmental Research
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Revised March 20, 1996
Updated some links September 12, 2003