A Conventional Tale of Nuclear Weapons
OSHINSKY, DAVID M.
A Conventional Tale of Nuclear Weapons Day One: Before Hiroshima and After By Peter Wyden Simon & Schuster. 412 pp. $19.95. Reviewed by David M. Oshinsky Professor of History, Rutgers; author,...
...This is the one time I am going to be the final deciding authority...
...Did this obscene instrument of death save more lives than it actually destroyed...
...The most provocative part of Day One is Wyden's discussion of radiation...
...J. Robert Oppenheimer, the project director, developed a personal stake in the use of force...
...Nor does Wyden's recent letter to the New York Times Book Review, where he attempts to provide "a catalogue of heretofore unknown horrors in the development of nuclear weapons—specific facts disclosed for the first time in my book...
...Wyden insists, for instance, that he exposed the Target Committee's "zeal" to "obliterate Kyoto, simply because the entire city was a religious shrine (Secretary of War Henry D. Stimson had to veto this plan repeatedly...
...On the surface the city is sleek, Westernized, unblemished by war...
...author, "A Conspiracy So Immense: The World of Joe McCarthy" "One millisecond after you read this, you and one billion other people could begin to perish...
...One project physician described the injuries at Hiroshima by noting, "The thing is, these people got good and burned— good thermal burns...
...that the exigencies of war loosened morality on both sides...
...Wyden's point is well taken...
...With breathless, portentous hyperbole Peter Wyden begins Day One...
...Drawing on the Manhattan Project's "Proposed Target Folders" for evidence, Sherwin wrote: "One city stood out above all the others in light of the Committee's criteria—Kyoto, the ancient capital of Japan and the center of her civilization for more than a thousand years...
...Following a series of frantic meetings, they agreed the chances of this occurring were approximately three in a million...
...Harry Truman entered the White House completely ignorant of the awesome new weapon (or anything else of real importance...
...Edward Teller was already salivating at the prospect of building the hydrogen ("super") bomb...
...To quote Day One, "The outcome of the discussion, as Compton saw it, was final: 'No one could suggest a way in which [a preview] could be made so convincing that it would be likely to stop the war.'" The second example raises another deficiency of the book—its sketchy documentation...
...Could the United States have failed to construct a nuclear device when Germany and Japan were already in the race...
...Personally, I'd rather drown in meaningful footnotes than in endless gossip detailing Leo Szilard's wardrobe, General Groves' eating habits, or "the supreme status symbol at Los Alamos" —a bathtub...
...The hibakusha, or scarred victims, have been shunted out of view because they make foreign tourists feel uncomfortable...
...Beneath the surface, meanwhile, the people remember—and seethe at the virtual absence of American regrets...
...The extraordinary debate surrounding the atomic bomb proves there are no simple answers to the questions he and others have raised...
...Since I did not wish to drown the text in footnotes," Wyden explains, "I have provided the most precise source notes...
...The result is utter confusion...
...Did the enormous cost of the undertaking produce a situation where the bomb had to be used to justify the expenditures...
...The chief scientists were more concerned about another issue: Teller's devilish calculation that the heat buildup generated by a nuclear explosion could ignite the atmosphere's nitrogen and set the whole planet on fire...
...Still more annoying is Wyden's habit of funneling irrelevant information to the reader through an asterisk on the bottom of almost every page...
...these policymakers never seriously considered a noncom-bat demonstration of the bomb or a clear warning to the Japanese...
...This alone makes Wyden's book a welcome addition to a vast yet narrowly focused literature...
...and worse, several of them continued to minimize the problem even when the evidence was abundantly clear...
...there is no precision at all...
...If American officials had made the Japanese aware of the impending catastrophe, would they have thereby averted it...
...You don't, for key elements in the chain of blunders that brought us to the brink of nuclear extinction remain to be disclosed...
...Moreover, Wyden himself has Lawrence and Compton arguing against a demonstration at the fateful meeting on May 31, 1945...
...Assuming the scientists did argue among themselves about a harmless demonstration, any one of them could have expressed his views directly to the decision-makers: They all belonged to a scientific advisory board that took up the very option with Groves, Stimson and Secretary of State James Byrnes...
...Despite Wyden's efforts, the "key elements in the chain of blunders that brought us to the brink of nuclear extinction remain to be disclosed...
...FDR had no atomic policy at all...
...However useful the collating of such material may be, though, it does not support the author's repeated claims of original scholarship...
...The essential details of the story he pulls together have appeared in print before...
...Well, Martin J. Sherwin made this point a decade ago in his excellent book, A World Destroyed...
...You probably think you know why...
...Young people wear jeans and T-shirts bearing American logos...
...We learn once again that: Leo Szilard, Niels Bohr and other prominent scientists were deeply troubled by the moral implications of their creation...
...Still, as Wyden reminds us, the Japanese have to a certain extent allowed their memories to overtake reality...
...There are skyscrapers and fast-food chains...
...On this matter I am the kingpin,' he told [General Leslie R.] Groves as he struck Kyoto from the list...
...Any person with radiation damage (a rarity) would have been killed with abrick first...
...Here Stimson dissented...
...stark and graphic reconstruction of the event...
...But even more I resented something that was not in the museum at all: recognition that the bombing did end the War, thereby saving lives, American and Japanese...
...and finally, the devastation at Hiroshima was almost beyond belief...
...These questions will continue to haunt us for years to come...
...That was deemed an acceptable risk at the time...
...British and American policymakers did not trust the scientists or listen to their political advice...
...Norman Ramsey, atop physicist, accepted the common assumption that "all casualties would be standard explosion casualties...
...Wyden's letter also makes much of his having shown how Oppenheimer "deliberately failed to inform the Washington decision-makers" that Nobel Prize winners Ernest Lawrence, Enrico Fermi and Arthur Compton wanted to demonstrate the bomb to Japanese officials before actually employing it in combat...
...At the Hiroshima Peace Museum, he writes, "I was shaken by the...
...From the outset, Oppenheimer considered his "gadget" a conventional weapon with an unconventional bang...
...Dozens of important meetings and anecdotes are left uncited...
...One is never sure whether Wyden's word-for-word version of a 1945 conversation came from a reputable account or has been reconstructed from self-serving interviews done in 1983...
...But the value of his cluttered, uneven, melodramatic account of the atomic bomb "before Hiroshima and after" lies less in what it purports to reveal than in its sweeping chronology: It sketches the major actors, recalls the vital decisions, and describes how they were arrived at...
...Healleges, justifiably, that virtually every expert ignored its risks...
...Toward the end of Day One Wyden does give us a gripping account of life in Hiroshima today...
...This is only part of the story— a rather small part...
...that it had hardly been the unprovoked war crime depicted by the museum display...
Vol. 67 • December 1984 • No. 22
