government to surrender remains a matter
for debate — and it can be powerfully argued
that it was neither. The fact is that within
30 hours of the Russian entry into the Far
Eastern war, and after the obliteration of
Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Tokyo radio
announced that the Japanese government,
whatever may have been the morale of the
Japanese people, was ready for peace; and
on August 15 the Allies received the uncon
ditional surrender of Japan; the decision had
been taken at a meeting of the Japanese
Cabinet on the previous day—a meeting at
which 'all the Ministers and the military
and naval chiefs were profoundly impressed
by the gracious concern of His Majesty for
his subjects and the country, and silently
bowed in obedience, and wept’.
'Incredible and somehow disturbing’
To see this national humiliation in per
spective it is necessary to change the focus;
to draw back from the actual explosion and
its impact on the Japanese government and
its people; to look beyond the awful fascina
tion of the weapon and its immediate effects;
but before doing so there is one description
that might serve as an image on the retina
of the mind, a back-projection to a broader
analysis of the impact of the Bomb. In the
city of Nagasaki there were a number of
British prisoners of war —the only British
citizens to live through a nuclear attack.
One of them, a sailor, told a BBC corres
pondent what it was like: 'I cannot make
you understand how bright that flash was ...
it went through you first like the shock you
get from an electric battery . . . it was terri
bly hot as well — just like solid heat coming
at you. It was like the sunlight coming from
half a dozen suns instead of one . . .’
So man, after thousands of years in search
of the light, had found it —a light so bright
that the shadows remained etched on the
pavements of Hiroshima long after the bodies
that cast them had been blasted out of
existence....
When we, the civilised peoples of the
West, the heirs of Athens and Rome, were
the first to use this power in war, and when
we used it against an eastern race, we were
sowing a bitter wind; and we may yet reap
the whirlwind. But at the time there were
no mass feelings of guilt or apprehension.
It is true that in the New York Herald T ri
bune on August 7, 1945, someone with an
acute sense of history wrote that the new
force was 'weird, incredible and somehow
disturbing; one forgets the effect on Japan
or on the course of the war as one senses
the foundations of one’s own universe
trembling . . .’
Generally, however, the popular mood
was linked almost entirely to the effect that
the Bomb might have on the length of the
war. It was a mood almost of hysteria; a
febrile euphoria that was reflected in the
behaviour of President Truman on board the
cruiser Augusta. He bustled among the
ship’s company telling them the news in
an emotional state which, as Gar Alpero-
vitz has said, derived not from remorse,
but from satisfaction. His first remark to
those who were with him when the news of
the first atomic attack came through was
simple and uncomplicated. 'This,’ said the
American President, 'is the greatest thing
in history!’
The greatest thing in history became
known to the general public in the news
papers of August 7. Suddenly the Japanese
war, which even the most optimistic had
until now expected to drag on for at least
another year, seemed miraculously to be
almost over. So the general public and their
most powerful leaders united in an access of
chauvinism and of pride in the breathtaking
scale of the achievement.
Yet there were a few people — a tiny minor
ity—who realised the implications of what
had happened; who knew that all concepts
of power had been irrevocably changed.
These were the men (and women) who had
created the atomic monster and knew its
power; but to the politician the scientist is
at best an unreliable and unpredictable
animal. Even when not actually losing
his spectacles or appearing at committee
meetings without his trousers, he can be
guilty of the most reprehensible naivete.
His curiosity 'about facts, about systems,
about life’ leads him into excesses of inter
nationalism, and he is even capable of deep
feelings of guilt and remorse when scientific
discovery leads to destruction and misery
instead of to the broad sunlit uplands. As
Dr Robert Oppenheimer said many years
later of the work which he and his fellow
physicists had done on the bomb: 'In some
sort of crude sense which no vulgarity, no
humor, no overstatement can quite extin
guish, the physicists have known sin; and
this is a knowledge which they cannot lose.’
The politicians take charge
Clearly this sort of conscience is a commodity
of limited value to nations contemplating
mutual destruction in total war; and at this
stage the politicians began to take over from
the scientists. The British government began
research projects — principally at the uni
versities. There was a full exchange of ideas
and information between British and Ameri
can atomic experts; and by the autumn of
1941 a committee under Sir George Thomson
reported that there was a reasonable chance
that an atomic bomb could be produced by
the end of the war. On October 11, 1941,
President Roosevelt, in a letter to Mr
Churchill, suggested that the work should be
fully co-ordinated between Britain and the
United States. A number of British scientists
left for America, and by the summer of 1942
it was possible to take the decision to set
up large-scale production plants there.
These, it was later revealed, were at Oak
Ridge, Tennessee; Richland, Washington;
and Santa Fe, New Mexico; and on July 16,
at 5.30 am, the first test of an atomic bomb
was carried out in the New Mexico desert.
It was, to use the word in a somewhat bizarre
sense, a success. The steel tower on which
the Bomb had been placed was vaporised;
a flash brighter than daylight lit up the
area for miles around; the blast knocked
down men standing 10,000 yards away;
and for the first time American and British
scientists, in an observation post 10 miles
away, saw the mushroom-shaped cloud that
was to hang over two Japanese cities three
weeks later.
Already there were those who had seen
what it all signified. Perhaps the most col
ourful of these was Niels Bohr, the brilliant
Danish physicist. When the Germans in
vaded Denmark in April 1940, Bohr had been
allowed to continue his work in the Institute
of Theoretical Physics in Copenhagen. In
the autumn of 1943, however, Bohr learned
that he, his family, and staff were to be
arrested by the Germans and he activated a
previously arranged plan which took him
across the Kattegat into Sweden by fishing
boat and thence, in the bomb bay of a Mos
quito aircraft, to Scotland. The last part of
the trip, although near to tragedy, was in
some ways typical of the tenuous relation
ship that existed between Bohr and the
everyday world. When this quiet, unassum
ing scientist was fitted into the bomb bay
of the aircraft everyone, including Bohr
himself, failed to notice that the abnormal
size of his head prevented his flying helmet
from fitting properly; as a result he heard no
instructions from the pilot, neglected to fit
his oxygen mask, and spent most of the flight
unconscious.
On his arrival in London Bohr was at once
told of the progress that had been made by
this time in constructing the atomic bomb.
Lord Cherwell, formerly Professor Linde-
mann, simply wanted to know whether the
theory was correct; whether, when the Bomb
was ready, it would really explode. For
Bohr the problem was not so straightforward.
This impractical genius, who could not even
fit an oxygen mask, had grasped the signifi
cance of the Bomb in a way that seemed to
have escaped the politicians, and the sol
diers. For him the argument was not whether
the Bomb would explode; the answer to that
for him was easy —if enough time, money,
and intellect were applied to the project, of
course it would explode. What, Bohr wanted
to know, happened next?
So Bohr, the physicist who set off for his
London appointments with the place and
time of his engagements typed on six slips
of paper —one in each pocket —set about
persuading Winston Churchill to share the
secrets of the atomic bomb with the Russians.
The impact of the unworldly professor on
the great man of state was predictably
counter-productive. Churchill’s view was
that Bohr had not been transported in a state
of unconsciousness from Stockholm to Scot
land to interfere in political matters that
did not concern him.
Eventually Bohr did what was expected
of him. He went to the United States and
placed his incomparable experience at the
disposal of the engineers of the Bomb; but
not without taking care to set out, in a
letter to President Roosevelt, some of the
real facts of post-nuclear life. 'The fact of
immediate preponderance,’ he wrote, 'is,
2692