(1) Intensify the blockade and aerial bombardment of Japan.
(2) Contain and destroy major enemy forces.
(3) Support further advances for the purpose of establishing the conditions favorable to the decisive invasion of the industrial heart of Japan.
Truman had not yet signed on for the Japanese invasion. One of his advisers favored a naval blockade to starve the Japanese to surrender. The President would soon tell the Joint Chiefs that he would judge among his options “with the purpose of economizing to the maximum extent possible the loss of American lives.” Marshall, with MacArthur concurring from the field, estimated that casualties — killed, wounded and missing — in the first thirty days following an invasion of the southernmost Japanese home island would not exceed 31,000. An invasion of the main island of Honshu across the plain of Tokyo would be proportionately more violent.
When Szilard returned to Washington from South Carolina he looked up Oppenheimer, just arrived in town for the Interim Committee meeting, to lobby him. So hard was the Los Alamos director working to complete the first atomic bombs that Groves had doubted two weeks earlier if he could break free for the May 31 meeting. Oppenheimer would not for the world have missed the chance to advise at so high a level. But his candid vision of the future of the weapon he was building was as unromantic as his understanding of its immediate necessity was, in Szilard's view, misinformed:
I told Oppenheimer that I thought it would be a very serious mistake to use the bomb against the cities of Japan. Oppenheimer didn't share my view. He surprised me by starting the conversation by saying, “The atomic bomb is shit.” “What do you mean by that?” I asked him. He said, “Well, this is a weapon which has no military significance. It will make a big bang — a very big bang — but it is not a weapon which is useful in war.” He thought that it would be important, however, to inform the Russians that we had an atomic bomb and that we intended to use it against the cities of Japan, rather than taking them by surprise. This seemed reasonable to me… However, while this was necessary it was certainly not sufficient. “Well,” Oppenheimer said, “don't you think that if we tell the Russians what we intend to do and then use the bomb in Japan, the Russians will understand it?” And I remember that I said, “They'll understand it only too well.”
Stimson's insomnia troubled him on the night of May 30 and he arrived at the Pentagon the next morning feeling miserable. His committee assembled at 10 a.m. Marshall, Groves, Harvey Bundy and another aide attended by invitation, but Stimson's attention was focused on the four scientists, three of them Nobel laureates. The elderly Secretary of War welcomed them warmly, congratulated them on their accomplishments and was concerned to convince them that he and Marshall understood that the product of their labor would be more than simply an enlarged specimen of ordnance. The handwritten notes he prepared emphasize the awe in which he held the bomb; he was not normally a histrionic man:
S.1
Its
We don't think it
Great History Landmark like
But,
Bids fair [to be]
— on the ordinary affairs of man's life.
May
May [be]
Oppenheimer was surprised and impressed. When Roosevelt died, he told an audience late in life, he had felt “a terrible bereavement… partly because we were not sure that anyone in Washington would be thinking of what needed to be done in the future.” Now he saw that “Colonel Stimson was thinking hard and seriously about the implications for mankind of the thing we had created and the wall into the future that we had breached.” And though Oppenheimer knew Stimson had never sat down to talk with Niels Bohr, the Secretary seemed to be speaking in terms derived at some near remove from Bohr's understanding of the complementarity of the bomb.
After Stimson's introduction Arthur Compton offered a technical review of the nuclear business, concluding that a competitor would need perhaps six years to catch up with the United States. Conant mentioned the thermonuclear and asked Oppenheimer what gestation period that much more violent mechanism would require; Oppenheimer estimated a minimum of three years. The Los Alamos director took the floor then to review the explosive forces involved. First-stage bombs, he said, meaning crude bombs like Fat Man and Little Boy, might explode with blasts equivalent to 2,000 to 20,000 tons of TNT. That was an upward revision of the estimate Bethe had supplied the Target Committee at Los Alamos in mid-May. Second-stage weapons, Oppenheimer went on — meaning presumably advanced fission weapons with improved implosion systems — might be equal to 50,000 to 100,000 tons of TNT. Thermonuclear weapons might range from 10 million to 100 million tons TNT equivalent.
These were numbers most of the men in the room had seen before and were inured to. Apparently Byrnes had not; they worried him gravely: “As I heard these scientists… predict the destructive power of the weapon, I was thoroughly frightened. I had sufficient imagination to visualize the danger to our country when some other country possessed such a weapon.” For now the President's personal representative bided his time.
Entirely in energetic character, Ernest Lawrence spoke up for staying ahead of the rest of the world by knowing more and doing more than any other country. He made explicit a future course for the nation about which the previous record of all the meetings and deliberations is oddly silent, a course based on assumptions diametrically opposite to Oppenheimer's profound insight that the atomic bomb was shit:
Dr. Lawrence
That was a prescription for an arms race as soon as the Soviet Union took up the challenge. Arthur Compton immediately signed on. So did his brother Karl. Oppenheimer contented himself with a footnote about materials allocation. Stimson eventually summarized the discussion:
1.
2.
3.
Oppenheimer demurred that the scientists should be released to return to their universities and get back to basic science; during the war, he said, they had been plucking the fruits of earlier research. Bush emphatically agreed. The committee turned to the question of international control and Oppenheimer took the lead. His exact words do not survive, only their summary in the meeting notes kept by the young recording secretary, Gordon Arneson, but if that summary is accurate, then Oppenheimer's emphasis was different from Bohr's and misleading:
