August 25. The Navy negotiated with the USAAF. The two services agreed to a joint project to atomic-bomb a fleet of surplus Japanese, German and US ships moored at anchor. The Joint Chiefs appointed a subcommittee to plan the exercise. To head the subcommittee they chose Curtis LeMay. Operation Crossroads, to be carried out on Bikini atoll in the Marshall Islands, would be LeMay's second atomic-bombing command.
The destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by single bombs shocked and frightened the world. Americans in particular felt vulnerable for the first time to devastating attack, a reaction in part to having been the first to inflict such attack on another people. A great debate started up in the United States in the months after the war about war and peace. There were calls to outlaw the bomb, calls for world government, visions of “one world or none.” Even Edward Teller briefly embraced internationalism, writing in the new
After a time of confusion about appropriate legislation, the Truman administration backed civilian control of atomic energy domestically. Internationally, in an Agreed Declaration with Britain and Canada concluded on November 15,1945, it supported action “to prevent the use of atomic energy for destructive purposes” and “to promote the… utilization of atomic energy for peaceful and humanitarian ends.” Such action required a plan; Jimmy Byrnes as Secretary of State got the job of devising it. Byrnes appointed a protesting Dean Acheson chairman of a committee that included Groves, the two civilian wartime leaders of atomic-bomb development, Van-nevar Bush and James Bryant Conant, and, from the War Department, Henry Stimson's former aide John J. McCloy (Stimson had retired). Acheson in turn appointed a five-man board of expert consultants. David Lilienthal, a lawyer who was head of the Tennessee Valley Authority, agreed to serve as chairman. The other four members were Monsanto Chemical vice-president and plutonium specialist Charles Thomas, General Electric engineering vice-president Harry Winne, New Jersey Bell president Chester Barnard and Robert Oppenheimer.
Oppenheimer came prepared. He had explored the complexities of international control not only with Niels Bohr at Los Alamos and with Conant but also with shrewd, tough I. I. Rabi. “Oppenheimer and I met frequently and discussed these questions thoroughly,” Rabi told an interviewer many years later. “I remember one meeting with him, on Christmas Day of 1945, in my apartment [on Riverside Drive west from Columbia University in Manhattan]. From the window of my study we could watch blocks of ice floating past on the Hudson. We were then developing the ideas that became the basis of the Acheson-Lilienthal Report.” The work of formulating a plan was a way beyond misgivings and despair. “Once [Oppenheimer] got interested in something,” Rabi observes, “he went right in to become the leader of it.” Gordon Arneson, the State Department's specialist on atomic matters, says Oppenheimer became “the chief teacher for the Acheson-Lilienthal group.”
To Lilienthal, the group's work was “one of the most memorable intellectual and emotional experiences of my life.” The men met first in Washington. Oppenheimer gave them a ten-day course in nuclear physics, properly taking control, as the only real expert, of defining the technical basis of the problem, but other than serving as their
They flew to Los Alamos in Groves's private C-54, which Lilienthal in his diary called “a luxurious army transport plane.” The President was trying to reach Lilienthal — to offer him a Cabinet post as Secretary of the Interior, the TVA chairman thought — but not even that provocation dulled him to the significance of the secret mesa, “with the high mountains forming a majestic backdrop,” where they “went into casual little buildings, saw things only few men have seen, talked with soft-spoken, gentle, intelligent men about the things they had done… Now I have a sense that this thing of atomic bombs is
It wasn't a large place… and it wasn't a spectacular one. I looked around me and there were the same materials, colors, textures, and fabrics you might see in any warehouse. I saw the receptacles that contained the labor of God knows how many men, the cargoes of thousands of freight cars, the mental triumphs of gifted scientists born in a dozen countries. The receptacles were small, and I thought to myself, hell, I could walk out of here with one of them in my pocket. Not that I could have. Too many soldiers outside and inside the vault were watching us closely — tough troops who looked as though they kept their rifles cleaned. And supposing I had got away with one, what could I, an ordinary layman, have done with it? In a way, the same was true of so much of the whole Manhattan District. It bore no relation to the industrial or social life of the country; it was a separate state, with its own airplanes and its own factories and its thousands of secrets. It had a peculiar sovereignty, one that could bring about the end, peacefully or violently, of all other sovereignties.
What they came to was a radical proposal. Remarkably, it won their common agreement. When Bohr read it he wrote Oppenheimer of his “deep pleasure.” In every word of it, he said, he found “just the spirit which I think offers the best hopes for the development in which we all put our whole faith.”
The Acheson-Lilienthal Report, as the board's proposal came to be called, found that outlawing atomic bombs by inspection was unreliable: “Any system based on outlawing the purely military development of atomic energy and relying solely on inspection for enforcement would at the outset be surrounded by conditions which would destroy the system.” To the contrary, “every stage in the activity, leading from raw materials to weapon, needs some sort of control.” That control might work “if the element of rivalry between nations were removed.” The way to do that was to assign “the intrinsically dangerous phases of the development of atomic energy to an international organization responsible to all peoples… ”
If, for example, only this Atomic Development Authority could legally own and develop uranium ore, “then… not the purpose of those who mine or possess uranium ore but the
Three kinds of activity were intrinsically dangerous: acquiring raw materials, producing fissionable uranium and plutonium and using them to make atomic weapons. Other kinds of activity were safe: using radioactive tracer materials in medicine and science; operating small research reactors; possibly operating power reactors as well if the fuel were properly “denatured” to make converting it to an explosive more difficult. Safe activities might be licensed to states, reducing the necessary scale of the Atomic Development Authority bureaucracy. Intrinsically dangerous activities it would have to control and operate exclusively.
There would be a significant advantage in such operation: the scientists and engineers on the Authority staff could be more than policemen. They would work at the cutting edge of a new and exciting field of technology. The work would be intellectually satisfying. It would keep them keen. It would also keep them at least abreast of potential violators.
These were sufficiently radical ideas, particularly coming from hard-headed businessmen like Chester Barnard and Harry Winne. Winne even felt compelled to defend the group against a charge of radicalism, contributing to the report an assessment that “it may seem too radical, too advanced, too much beyond human experience. All these terms apply with peculiar fitness to the atomic bomb.” In the final pages of the report the group introduced a truly radical idea. Radical for its time, it would still seem radical today. It concerned the crucial question of sanctions.
If a nation attempted to violate such an agreement as the group was proposing, how could it be punished? Would the authority maintain an army? Would it stockpile atomic bombs? No. Instead, the authority as it developed would spread its mines and factories around. Its Oak Ridges and Hanfords, its research laboratories and nuclear
