assemble as near a critical mass of U235 as anyone might ever assemble by hand and not be destroyed.
April 12, Thursday, was the day Frisch completed his critical assembly experiments with metallic U235. The previous day Robert Oppenheimer had written Groves the cheering news that Kistiakowsky had managed to produce implosive compressions so smoothly symmetrical that their numbers agreed with theoretical prediction. April 12 in America was Friday, April 13, in Japan, and on the night of that unlucky day B-29's bombing Tokyo bombed the Riken. The wooden building housing Yoshio Nishina's unsuccessful gaseous thermal diffusion experiment did not immediately burn; firemen and staff managed to extinguish the fires that threatened it. But after the other fires were out the building suddenly burst into flame. It burned to the ground and took the Japanese atomic bomb project with it. In Europe John Lansdale was preparing to rush to Stassfurt to confiscate what remained of the Belgian uranium ore; when Groves heard of the success of that adventure later in April he wrote a memorandum to George Marshall that closed the German book:
In 1940 the German Army in Belgium confiscated and removed to Germany about 1200 tons of uranium ore. So long as this material remained hidden under the control of the enemy we could not be sure but that he might be preparing to use atomic weapons.
Yesterday I was notified by cable that personnel of my office had located this material near Stassfurt, Germany and that it was now being removed to a safe place outside of Germany where it will be under the complete control of American and British authorities.
The capture of this material, which was the bulk of uranium supplies available in Europe, would seem to remove definitely any possibility of the Germans making use of an atomic bomb in this war.
The day these events cluster around, April 12, saw another book closed: at midday, in Warm Springs, Georgia, while sitting for a portrait, Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the sixty-third year of his life was shattered by a massive cerebral hemorrhage. He lingered comatose through the afternoon and died at 3:35 p.m. He had served his nation as President for thirteen years.
When the news of Roosevelt's death reached Los Alamos, Oppenheimer came out from his office onto the steps of the administration building and spoke to the men and women who had spontaneously gathered there. They grieved as Americans everywhere grieved for the loss of a national leader. Some also worried about whether the Manhattan Project would continue. Oppenheimer scheduled a Sunday morning memorial service that everyone in and out of the Tech Area might attend.
“Sunday morning found the mesa deep in snow,” Philip Morrison recalls of that day, April 15. “A night's fall had covered the rude textures of the town, silenced its business, and unified the view in a soft whiteness, over which the bright sun shone, casting deep blue shadows behind every wall. It was no costume for mourning, but it seemed recognition of something we needed, a gesture of consolation. Everybody came to the theater, where Oppie spoke very quietly for two or three minutes out of his heart and ours.” It was Robert Oppenheimer at his best:
When, three days ago, the world had word of the death of President Roosevelt, many wept who are unaccustomed to tears, many men and women, little enough accustomed to prayer, prayed to God. Many of us looked with deep trouble to the future; many of us felt less certain that our works would be to a good end; all of us were reminded of how precious a thing human greatness is.
We have been living through years of great evil, and of great terror. Roosevelt has been our President, our Commander-in-Chief and, in an old and unperverted sense, our leader. All over the world men have looked to him for guidance, and have seen symbolized in him their hope that the evils of this time would not be repeated; that the terrible sacrifices which have been made, and those that are still to be made, would lead to a world more fit for human habitation…
In the Hindu scripture, in the Bhagavad-Gita, it says, “Man is a creature whose substance is faith. What his faith is, he is.” The faith of Roosevelt is one that is shared by millions of men and women in every country of the world. For this reason it is possible to maintain the hope, for this reason it is right that we should dedicate ourselves to the hope, that his good works will not have ended with his death.
Vice President Harry S. Truman of Independence, Missouri, who knew only the bare fact of the Manhattan Project's existence, said later that when he heard from Eleanor Roosevelt that he must assume the Presidency in Franklin Roosevelt's place, “I kept thinking, ‘The lightning has struck. The lightning has struck!’” Between the Thursday of Roosevelt's death and the Sunday of the memorial service on the Hill, Otto Frisch delivered to Robert Oppenheimer his report on the first experimental determination of the critical mass of pure U235. Little Boy needed more than one critical mass, but the fulfillment of that requirement was now only a matter of time. The lightning had struck at Los Alamos as well.
PART THREE
LIFE AND DEATH
What will people of the future think of us? Will they say, as Roger Williams said of some of the Massachusetts Indians, that we were wolves with the minds of men? Will they think that we resigned our humanity? They will have the right.
I see that as human beings we have two great ecstatic impulses in us. One is to participate in life, which ends in the giving of life. The other is to avoid death, which ends tragically in the giving of death. Life and death are in our gift, we can activate life and activate death.
18
Trinity
Within twenty-four hours of Franklin Roosevelt's death two men told Harry Truman about the atomic bomb. The first was Henry Lewis Stimson, the upright, white-haired, distinguished Secretary of War. He spoke to the newly sworn President following the brief cabinet meeting Truman called after taking the oath of office on the evening of the day Roosevelt died. “Stimson told me,” Truman reports in his memoirs, “that he wanted me to know about an immense project that was under way — a project looking to the development of a new explosive of almost unbelievable destructive power. That was all he felt free to say at the time, and his statement left me puzzled. It was the first bit of information that had come to me about the atomic bomb, but he gave me no details.”
Truman had known of the Manhattan Project's existence since his wartime Senate work as chairman of the Committee to Investigate the National Defense Program, when he had attempted to explore the expensive secret project's purpose and had been rebuffed by the Secretary of War himself. That a senator of watchdog responsibility and bulldog tenacity would call off an investigation into unaccounted millions of dollars in defense-plant construction on Stimson's word alone gives some measure of the quality of the Secretary's reputation.
Stimson was seventy-seven years old when Truman assumed the Presidency. He could remember stories his great-grandmother told him of her childhood talks with George Washington. He had attended Phillips An-dover when the tuition at that distinguished New England preparatory school was sixty dollars a year and students cut their own firewood. He had graduated from Yale College and Harvard Law School, had served as Secretary of War under
