Dr. O: Well, I have my doubts, General Groves.
Gen. G: Well, you know I've never concurred with those doubts at any time.
If Oppenheimer, who knew nothing yet of the extent of the destruction, was only feeling “reasonably good” about his handiwork, Leo Szilard felt terrible when the story broke. The press release issued from the White House that day called the atomic bomb “the greatest achievement of organized science in history” and threatened the Japanese with “a rain of ruin from the air, the like of which has never been seen on this earth.” In Chicago on Quadrangle Club stationery Szilard scribbled a hasty letter to Gertrud Weiss:
I suppose you have seen today's newspapers. Using atomic bombs against Japan is one of the greatest blunders of history. Both from a practical point of view on a 10-year scale and from the point of view of our moral position. I went out of my way and very much so in order to prevent it but as today's papers show without success. It is very difficult to see what wise course of action is possible from here on.
Otto Hahn, interned with the German atomic scientists on a rural estate in England, was shattered:
At first I refused to believe that this could be true, but in the end I had to face the fact that it was officially confirmed by the President of the United States. I was shocked and depressed beyond measure. The thought of the unspeakable misery of countless innocent women and children was something that I could scarcely bear.
After I had been given some gin to quiet my nerves, my fellow-prisoners were also told the news… By the end of a long evening of discussion, attempts at explanation, and self-reproaches I was so agitated that Max von Laue and the others became seriously concerned on my behalf. They ceased worrying only at two o'clock in the morning, when they saw that I was asleep.
But if some were disturbed by the news, others were elated, Otto Frisch found at Los Alamos:
Then one day, some three weeks after [Trinity], there was a sudden noise in the laboratory, of running footsteps and yelling voices. Somebody opened my door and shouted, “Hiroshima has been destroyed!”; about a hundred thousand people were thought to have been killed. I still remember the feeling of unease, indeed nausea, when I saw how many of my friends were rushing to the telephone to book tables at the La Fonda Hotel in Santa Fe, in order to celebrate. Of course they were exalted by the success of their work, but it seemed rather ghoulish to celebrate the sudden death of a hundred thousand people, even if they were “enemies.”
The American writer Paul Fussell, an Army veteran, emphasizes “the importance of experience, sheer vulgar experience, in influencing one's views about the first use of the bomb.” The experience Fussell means is “that of having come to grips, face to face, with an enemy who designs your death”:
I was a 21-year-old second lieutenant leading a rifle platoon. Although still officially in one piece, in the German war 1 had been wounded in the leg and back severely enough to be adjudged, after the war, 40 percent disabled. But even if my leg buckled whenever I jumped out of the back of the truck, my condition was held to be satisfactory for whatever lay ahead. When the bombs dropped and news began to circulate that [the invasion of Japan] would not, after all, take place, that we would not be obliged to run up the beaches near Tokyo assault-firing while being mortared and shelled, for all the fake manliness of our facades we cried with relief and joy. We were going to live. We were going to grow up to adulthood after all.
In Japan the impasse persisted between civilian and military leaders. To the civilians the atomic bomb looked like a golden opportunity to surrender without shame, but the admirals and the generals still despised unconditional surrender and refused to concur. Foreign Minister Togo continued to pursue Soviet mediation as late as August 8. Ambassador Sato asked for a meeting with Molotov that day; Molotov set the meeting for eight in the evening, then moved it up to five o'clock. Despite earlier notice of the power of the new weapon, news of the devastation of a Japanese city by an American atomic bomb had surprised and shocked Stalin and prompted him to accelerate his war plans; Molotov announced that afternoon to the Japanese ambassador that the Soviet Union would consider itself at war with Japan as of the next day, August 9. Well-armed Soviet troops, 1.6 million strong, waited in readiness on the Manchurian border and attacked the ragged Japanese an hour after midnight.
In the meantime a progaganda effort that originated in the U.S. War Department was developing in the Marianas. Hap Arnold cabled Spaatz and Farrell on August 7 ordering a crash program to impress the facts of atomic warfare on the Japanese people. The impetus probably came from George Marshall, who was surprised and shocked that the Japanese had not immediately sued for peace. “What we did not take into account,” he said long afterward, “… was that the destruction would be so complete that it would be an appreciable time before the actual facts of the case would get to Tokyo. The destruction of Hiroshima was so complete that there was no communication at least for a day, I think, and maybe longer.”
The Navy and the Air Force both lent staff and facilities, including Radio Saipan and a printing press previously used to publish a Japanese-language newspaper distributed weekly over the Empire by B-29s. The working group that assembled on August 7 in the Marianas decided to attempt to distribute 6 million leaflets to forty-seven Japanese cities with populations exceeding 100,000. Writing the leaflet occupied the group through the night. A historical memorandum prepared for Groves in 1946 notes that the working group discovered in a midnight conference with Air Force commanders “a certain reluctance to fly single B-29's over the Empire, reluctance arising from the fact that enemy opposition to single flights was expected to be increased as the result of the total damage to Hiroshima by one airplane.”
The proposed text of the leaflet was ready by morning and was flown from Saipan to Tinian at dawn for FarrelPs approval. Groves' deputy edited it and ordered the revised text called to Radio Saipan by inter-island telephone for broadcast to the Japanese every fifteen minutes; radio transmission probably began the same day. The text described the atomic bomb as “the equivalent in explosive power to what 2,000 of our giant B-29's can carry on a single mission,” suggested skeptics “make inquiry as to what happened to Hiroshima” and asked the Japanese people to “petition the Emperor to end the war.” Otherwise, it threatened, “we shall resolutely employ this bomb and all our other superior weapons.” Printing milhons of copies of a leaflet took time, and distribution was delayed some hours further by a local shortage of T-3 leaflet bombs. Such was the general confusion that Nagasaki did not receive its quota of warning leaflets until August 10.
Assembly of Fat Man unit F31 was progressing at Tinian in the air-conditioned assembly building designed for that purpose. F31 was the second Fat Man with real high explosives that the Tinian team had assembled; the first, with lower-quality HE castings and a non-nuclear core, unit F33, had been ready since August 5 for a test drop but would not be dropped until August 8 because the key 509th crews were busy delivering Little Boy and being debriefed. The F31 Fat Man, Norman Ramsey writes,
was originally scheduled for dropping on August 11 local time… However, by August 7 it became apparent that the schedule could be advanced to August 10. When Parsons and Ramsey proposed this change to Tibbets, he expressed regret that the schedule could not be advanced two days instead of only one since good weather was forecast for August 9 and the five succeeding days were expected to be bad. It was finally agreed that [we] would try to be ready for August 9 provided all concerned understood that the advancement of the date by two full days introduced a large measure of uncertainty into the probability of meeting such a drastically revised schedule.
One member of the Fat Man assembly team, a young Navy ensign named Bernard J. O'Keefe, remembers the mood of urgency in the Marianas, where the war was still a daily threat:
With the success of the Hiroshima weapon, the pressure to be ready with the much more complex implosion device became excruciating. We sliced off another day, scheduling it for August 10. Everyone felt that the sooner we could get off another mission, the more likely it was that the Japanese would feel that we had large quantities of the devices and would surrender sooner. We were certain that one day saved would mean that the war would be over one day sooner. Living on that island, with planes going out every night and people dying not only in B-29s shot
