ATOMIC BOMB

The mushroom-shaped cloud associated with the above-ground detonation of an atomic bomb is one of the most defining images and represents one of the most challenging moral imperatives to arise from the mid-twentieth century. The scientific, technological, political, sociological, psychological, religious, and ethical ramifications of humankind's ability to harness and release in a fraction of a second fundamental forces of nature make the atomic bomb one of the preeminent issues of modern society and human existence.

Bomb Engineering

An atomic bomb is a weapon that derives its energy from a nuclear reaction in which a heavy nucleus of an atom such as uranium or plutonium splits into two parts and subsequently releases two or three neutrons along with a vast quantity of energy. These nuclear reactions, if they can be induced rapidly and in quick succession across a critical mass of material, produce a cataclysmic release of energy of prodigious dimensions from a very small quantity of initial material.

Advances in the design of these weapons have focused on efficiency and effectiveness, including ways to produce purer initial materials, induce and sustain more rapid reactions, and produce similar effects with smaller amounts of material. As a result, nuclear devices now available to the armed forces can yield effects from a small warhead on a missile that compare favorably to those generated in the 1950s by weapons so large that bombers had to be specially adapted to haul and drop them. Advances in weapons construction techniques further allow experts to assemble even relatively impure materials into "dirty" bombs with limited yield but severe environmental effects.

Developments since the mid-1980s have posed new threats to world security as an ever-expanding set of nations gained access to suitable raw materials for constructing these devices. Global monitoring of these materials has become increasingly more difficult and nongovernmental organizations have sought, and probably have obtained, previously unavailable raw materials to construct small-scale nuclear devices to advance sinister purposes.

The technology behind atomic bombs dates to work in physics including the theoretical work of Albert Einstein at the beginning of the twentieth century and experimental work by Otto Hahn, Fritz Strassmann, Lise Meitner, Otto Robert Frisch, and others in Germany and Sweden in the late 1930s. Scientists in Germany, France, the United Kingdom, the Soviet Union, Japan, and the United States all realized that it might be possible to produce weapons of mass destruction as an extension of the work of the experimental physicists, but it was only in the United States that these efforts were organized and funded to achieve success.

State Construction

The Hungarian refugee physicist Leo Szilard organized his physics colleagues in the United States to petition President Franklin Delano Roosevelt to sponsor work to build an atomic bomb out of fear that the Germans were already well advanced in their efforts. (This claim was later shown to be completely erroneous.) He enlisted the aid of Einstein in this cause, and Roosevelt responded in the fall of 1939 by devoting $6,000 in discretionary money to preliminary investigations by scientists. This sum had grown to $300,000 per year by 1941 with funds channeled through the National Bureau of Standards to hide the scientists' true intent. By 1941 Vannevar Bush, president of the Carnegie Institute of Washington, DC, had formed and chaired an Office of Scientific Research and Development to better harness the abilities of scientists in the United States to contribute substantially to the war effort. A series of experiments at the University of California at Berkeley, the University of Chicago, and a remote location in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, during the period of 1940 to 1941 established that a fission reaction could be created and controlled, that new elements were created in such reactions that could also be useful as sources for bomb materials, and that uranium-235 could be separated from the much more abundant but non-useful for bombs uranium-238 via a number of different means. Several of these separation techniques involved the use of highly reactive and corrosive materials, especially uranium-hexafluoride, in addition to a whole series of radioactive and dangerous by-products from the various processes associated with production of the basic materials needed for atomic bombs—by-products that continue to create problems of waste disposal and health impacts to this day.

Bush appointed a secret National Academy of Sciences (NAS) committee in 1941 to recommend whether it was feasible to build an atomic bomb. The committee, chaired by the Nobel Prize–winning physicist Arthur Holly Compton of the University of Chicago, concluded in May 1941 that an expanded six months of intensive research was needed before a decision could be rendered. Bush was dissatisfied with this report and responded by appointing more engineers to the committee and asking them to reconsider and produce a new report. This report, delivered on July 18, reached the same general conclusions as the prior one. By this point, Bush had a secret report from British scientists concluding that an atomic bomb could conceivably be built within the next few years.

Bush used this report and his own persuasive powers to convince President Roosevelt to give his full backing to proceeding with a large-scale effort to build the bomb. Roosevelt decreed that only four other people were to know: James B. Conant (Bush's deputy and president of Harvard University), Vice President Henry Wallace, Secretary of War Henry Stimson, and U.S. Army Chief of Staff George Marshall. Members of Congress were explicitly excluded from knowledge of the project and remained so throughout the war. The third and final NAS committee report completed in November 1941 provided a cost estimate of $133 million (in 1940 dollars)—a vast underestimate for a project whose final cost of $2 billion was about two-fifths of the entire military cost of World War II to the United States.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (ACE) became the vehicle by which this massive endeavor would be hidden in the federal war budget because construction contracts were large and difficult to understand. The project was turned over to ACE in June 1942 and code-named the Manhattan Engineer District (MED) for its proposed base of administrative operations in New York City. MED became known colloquially as the "Manhattan Project," even though building the atomic bomb had little to do with the city of New York. Colonel Leslie Groves, the civil engineer who supervised the building of the Pentagon in record time, was promoted to brigadier general and given command of the Manhattan Project.

General Groves swiftly commandeered equipment, supplies, human resources, and the best scientists who could be assembled, and created a series of centers in remote locations in Hanford, Washington; Oak Ridge; and Los Alamos, New Mexico in addition to maintaining work at many universities and over 200 corporations including Stone and Webster, Dupont, Eastman Kodak, and Union Carbide. At its peak in 1944 there were more than 160,000 employees working on the project. This workforce overcame tremendous scientific and technical problems in the push to build "the device," and the first atomic bomb performed superbly at Alamogordo, New Mexico, on July 16, 1945. Three weeks later the first atomic bomb was used in war as the Enola Gay bomber dropped a single 90-kilogram device over Hiroshima, Japan, on August 6, 1945. Two days later the Soviets declared war on Japan and invaded Manchuria, and on August 9 a second atomic bomb weighing only 6.1 kilograms fell from the sky over Nagasaki, Japan, which created equally widespread destruction (because of its smaller size, the second bomb was considerably more powerful per kilogram). The emperor of Japan announced his intent to accept the Potsdam Proclamation and surrender to the Allied forces on August 14, 1945, with a formal surrender occurring on the 2nd of September.

Assessments

These first atomic bombs affected earth, water, air, and all living organisms in the targeted area. The Hiroshima bomb delivered the equivalent energy of 13.5 kilotons of TNT, while the much smaller but technically superior Nagasaki device yielded 22 kilotons of TNT. The fireball radius was 150 yards with a peak heat close to that of the center of the sun. These bombs leveled the core of these cities with a huge shock wave moving at the speed of sound and heat radiation moving at the speed of light that, while sustained for only a few seconds, vaporized entire structures and human beings, seriously burned thousands of others, and sowed radiation poisoning in human and animal tissue, water supplies, building remains, and the very earth itself, which would affect generations to come. J. Robert Oppenheimer, the scientific leader of the Manhattan Project, when viewing the test site explosion at Alamogordo was reminded of the words of Shiva from the Bhagavad Gita, a Vedic text of India, "I am become death, the destroyer of worlds."

Many scientists associated with the Manhattan Project went on to take leading roles in organizations such as the American Nuclear Society, Federation of Atomic (later American) Scientists, Union of Concerned Scientists, and International Pugwash that sought to stop the spread of nuclear weapons and better educate the public about the brave new world humanity entered with the creation and use of these devices. Einstein expressed deep regret at his own key role in getting the ear of President Roosevelt for Szilard. Einstein would later write, "the unleashed power of the atom has changed everything save our modes of thinking, and thus we drift toward unparalleled catastrophe ... [A] new type of thinking is essential if mankind is to survive and move toward higher levels." Szilard was appalled to learn that America had used the atomic bomb against Hiroshima and devoted himself to the post-war effort to restrict and control the development and use of nuclear weapons. Most nuclear scientists, however, went on to further government contract work on the construction of thermonuclear weapons that were more than one thousand times more powerful than those developed during the project or to work on peaceful uses of nuclear energy. Many scientists, joined by other scholars such as Pitirim Sorokin, Ruth Sivard, Alex Roland, Bruce Mazlish, Kenneth Waltz, and John Mearsheimer, agreed with the assessment of the nuclear scientist Donald York that providing these types of implements rendered war on a large scale too horrific to contemplate and consequently saved hundreds of millions of lives in the standoff between the United States and the Soviet Union known as the Cold War (1945–1989).

Karl Jaspers, a noted German philosopher, argued in Atombombe und die Zunkunft des Menschen (1958), that an entirely new way of thinking was required after the creation of the atomic bomb. The philosopher and mathematician, Bertrand Russell, argued in 1946 in "The Atomic Bomb and the Prevention of War" (Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 2(5): p. 19), that the only way to prevent war was through an international government that possessed atomic weapons and was prepared to use them if nations would not heed its directives and settle their disputes amicably with one another.

In the years following the development and deployment of the atomic bomb, the United States and other nations went on to develop more powerful weapons and to repeatedly test them above and below ground. Tens of thousands of civilians and military personnel were exposed to increased amounts of radiation, many unwittingly and unknowingly. The balance of evidence and the opinion of the majority of scientists with expertise who have studied this issue, suggest that for the most part the effects were quite minimal, although whether these low levels of exposure have long-term detrimental health effects can neither be demonstrated nor conclusively denied. The government of the United States, throughout this period, consistently assured the American public that there were no risks, despite voluminous information from scientists and classified studies they had commissioned that showed such a claim to be preposterous.

Various ethical arguments have been advanced against nuclear weapons. For example, some have argued that atomic weapons are "unnatural" and on this basis alone should be banned. But all armaments beyond sticks and stones fall under the same charge. Massive fire bombings in World War II of British, German, and Japanese cities killed far more civilians and in ways every bit as horrendous. While an atomic weapon is more than the "beautiful physics" that Enrico Fermi declared when asked about any moral qualms he had about working on the bomb, it must be viewed on a long continuum of the technological evolution of warfare. Whether nations holding nuclear technologies can, and should be able to, prohibit others from acquiring such devices remains an open question to be decided in sociopolitical processes that will include but not be wholly determined by ethical criticism. There is little question that human thought as expressed in writings across a wide range of other subject areas has also been profoundly influenced by the genesis and spread of nuclear weapons. The future of the world is literally increasingly in the hands of a very small number of individuals.

DENNIS W. CHEEK

SEE ALSO Baruch Plan;Einstein, Albert;Hiroshima and Nagasaki;International Relations;Limited Nuclear Test Ban Treaty;Oppenheimer, J. Robert;Rotblat, Joseph;Weapons of Mass Destruction.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

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