The Day the World Went Nuclear Read online

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  We recognize that the application of recent scientific discoveries to the methods and practice of war has placed at the disposal of mankind means of destruction hitherto unknown, against which there can be no adequate military defense, and in the employment of which no single nation can in fact have a monopoly.

  —From a statement issued by U.S. president HARRY TRUMAN, Canadian prime minister MACKENZIE KING, and United Kingdom prime minister CLEMENT ATTLEE on November 15, 1945

  * * *

  We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, a few people cried, most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad Gita; Vishnu is trying to persuade the prince that he should do his duty and, to impress him, takes on his multi-armed form and says, “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” I suppose we all thought that, one way or another.

  —ROBERT OPPENHEIMER on the first successful test of a nuclear bomb, from the 1965 television documentary The Decision to Drop the Bomb

  A NOTE TO READERS

  THE YOUNG ENSIGN FROM Brooklyn looks at his wife, who is holding their newborn son. The baby is big, more than ten pounds. The ensign has been back from the Pacific for more than two years and is starting a new life: as father and provider.

  William James O’Reilly hopes his new son will follow in the tradition of his ancestors: hardworking Irish Catholics who value family and loyalty over money and material things. He and his bride of just over a year, Angela, are thrilled with their baby boy, whom they name Billy—William James O’Reilly Jr.

  Bill and Angela married in New York City’s St. Patrick’s Cathedral in 1948. She already had a good job as a physical therapist at Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital in Manhattan, and it is there baby Billy is born. Ensign O’Reilly, with a college degree from St. Francis College and military training at the College of the Holy Cross, is trying to decide on a career direction. Now, with the arrival of the baby, the urgency of that decision is more pronounced.

  The newlywed couple lives in a small apartment just over the George Washington Bridge in northern New Jersey. Money is tight. Already the ensign is regretting leaving the navy, where there was security and direction. Unlike many of his peers, Bill O’Reilly Sr. loved his time in the service. He learned much during the occupation of Japan, the experience bringing him a measure of respect for the Japanese people, who, in his opinion, endured the occupation with discipline.

  Soon the ensign will move his wife and baby to the teeming New York City suburb of Levittown on Long Island. Here, inexpensive housing is being built, and mortgages for veterans are favorable. The price for a simple two-bedroom home is eight thousand dollars. Both Bill and Angela will live there until they die.

  * * *

  My father was always nostalgic for the navy and fascinated by World War II. He firmly believed he would have been killed if MacArthur’s land invasion had come to fruition; his ship, the Oneida, was set to ferry hundreds of marines close to the beaches of Japan. Only later did my father find out that thousands of Japanese kamikaze pilots were waiting to attack the U.S. fleet. The carnage would have been devastating.

  And so it is that Ensign O’Reilly, his wife, and their two children—my sister, Janet, arriving two years later—built yet another traditional American family over the decades of the 1950s and 1960s. My dad never prospered in the marketplace, keeping his job as a low-level financial analyst for almost thirty years. As a child of the Great Depression, he valued a steady paycheck more than anything. Thus, he settled for a pedestrian job and allowed his vast talents for communication to go undeveloped.

  Not usually introspective, my father was convinced of one certainty, which he shared with me on a few occasions: his very existence, and therefore my life as well, was likely saved by a terrible bomb and a gut-wrenching presidential decision that is still being debated to this day.

  But for the young ensign and his present-day son, there really is no debate, only a stark reality. Had the A-bombs not been used, you would very likely not be reading this book.

  KEY PLAYERS

  U.S. GOVERNMENT

  Franklin D. Roosevelt: President of the United States from March 4, 1933, until his death on April 12, 1945

  Harry S. Truman: President of the United States from April 12, 1945, to January 20, 1953

  Henry L. Stimson: Secretary of war in the Roosevelt and Truman administrations

  Franklin D. Roosevelt

  Harry S. Truman

  Henry L. Stimson

  JAPANESE GOVERNMENT AND MILITARY

  Hirohito: Emperor of Japan

  Tomoyuki Yamashita: Army general

  Hideki Tojo: General of the army and prime minister from October 18, 1941, to July 22, 1944

  Kuniaki Koiso: Prime minister from July 22, 1944, to April 7, 1945

  Kantaro Suzuki: Admiral in the navy and prime minister from April 7, 1945, to August 17, 1945

  Hirohito

  Tomoyuki Yamashita

  Hideki Tojo

  THE MANHATTAN PROJECT

  Leslie Groves: U.S. Army general in charge of the Manhattan Project

  Robert Oppenheimer: American physicist and laboratory director of the Manhattan Project

  Leslie Groves

  Robert Oppenheimer

  ALLIED FORCES IN THE PACIFIC

  Douglas MacArthur: U.S. general, commander of the Allied forces in the Southwest Pacific

  Chester Nimitz: U.S. admiral, commander of naval forces in the Pacific theater

  Carl Spaatz: U.S. general, commander of the U.S. Strategic Air Forces in the Pacific

  Richard Sutherland: U.S. general serving as MacArthur’s chief of staff

  Curtis LeMay: U.S. Army Air Forces general

  Charles McVay III: Captain of the USS Indianapolis

  Paul W. Tibbets: U.S. colonel, commander of the U.S. nuclear strike force and pilot of Enola Gay

  Charles Sweeney: U.S. major, pilot of Bockscar

  Douglas MacArthur

  Chester Nimitz

  Carl Spaatz

  Richard Sutherland

  Curtis LeMay

  Charles McVay III

  Paul W. Tibbets

  Charles Sweeney

  ALLIED FORCES IN EUROPE

  Dwight D. Eisenhower: U.S. general, commander of the Allied forces in Europe

  George S. Patton: U.S. general on the European front

  Dwight D. Eisenhower

  George S. Patton

  OTHER INTERNATIONAL PLAYERS

  Joseph Stalin: Soviet premier

  Winston Churchill: British prime minister

  Joseph Stalin

  Winston Churchill

  OTHERS

  Albert Einstein: World-renowned physicist

  Alexander Sachs: Wall Street economist and longtime friend of Roosevelt

  Albert Einstein

  Alexander Sachs

&nbs
p; PROLOGUE

  THE AGE OF NUCLEAR MASS DESTRUCTION is about to dawn.

  It has been six weeks since Nazi Germany invaded Poland, beginning what will become known as the Second World War. One month before, on August 2, 1939, theoretical physicist Albert Einstein wrote an urgent letter to President Franklin Roosevelt warning that “it may become possible to set up a nuclear chain reaction in a large mass of uranium” and that “extremely powerful bombs of a new type may thus be constructed.” Einstein and other top American scientists believe that the new bombs could obliterate entire cities—and that Nazi Germany is currently racing to build such weapons.

  Although Einstein and Roosevelt have met, he feels that sending the letter with one of the president’s key advisers, Alexander Sachs, will be the most effective way to get his point across. Sachs finally has an appointment in October. At first, Sachs labors to find the right words to describe what could be possibly the greatest single threat to mankind. Realizing he is not being successful, he reads Einstein’s letter aloud.

  The president agrees to allow a group of scientists to explore the feasibility of creating nuclear chain reactions. But he doesn’t see the urgency that Einstein tries to communicate.

  Two years later, on December 7, 1941, Japan takes its aggression to the shores of the United States and bombs the U.S. Pacific fleet at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. Roosevelt addresses Congress the next day. He uses the phrase that will describe the attack on Pearl Harbor for all: “a date which will live in infamy.” He asks the members of Congress to immediately vote to declare war on Japan and its allies, Germany and Italy. By 1:10 P.M., the declaration has passed both the Senate and the House of Representatives.

  At 4:00 P.M., Roosevelt signs the declaration of war. America has been attacked on her home soil. She is now at war. And now Congress allocates substantial funds to the secret research program known as the Manhattan Project.

  The world is about to become nuclear.

  Part One

  A Bomb to End the War

  CHAPTER 1

  LOS ALAMOS, NEW MEXICO

  November 1942

  BRIGADIER GENERAL LESLIE GROVES and a world-renowned physicist named Robert Oppenheimer are in the high country thirty-five miles northwest of Santa Fe. They are in the market for real estate and have found a spot that interests them. It is a twenty-five-year-old boys’ school with log dormitories and a stunning view of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. It will be purchased to build Oppenheimer’s new lab. In addition to the school, the government will also buy 8,900 acres of surrounding land.

  The general has tasked Oppenheimer with not only building a state-of-the-art laboratory in the middle of nowhere but also convincing some of the world’s sharpest minds to put their lives on hold and spend the rest of the war here.

  Oppenheimer was not the obvious choice to be in charge of this top secret endeavor to build the bomb, the Manhattan Project. His past indicated some trouble: The professor from the University of California, Berkeley had a history of depression and eccentric behavior. He also admitted to having been a member of several communist groups. Also, Oppenheimer had no experience managing a large group of people. Many doubted that he had the experience required to build the world’s first weapon of mass destruction.

  Atomic physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer was the laboratory director of the Manhattan Project, 1944. [National Archives]

  The road leading to Los Alamos. [Los Alamos National Laboratory]

  Yet the outspoken Brigadier General Leslie Groves was determined to hire him. “Oppenheimer knows about everything. He can talk to you about anything you bring up. Well, not exactly.… He doesn’t know anything about sports,” Groves would later tell an interviewer, referring to Oppenheimer as “a genius.”

  The Los Alamos Ranch School is soon ringed with security fences topped with coils of razor wire and guarded by soldiers and attack dogs. Oppenheimer’s scientists come to feel so secure that many stop locking their front doors when they leave for work in the morning. That safety, however, comes at a cost: the personal life of each employee at Los Alamos is subject to constant monitoring by security personnel. News of the atomic bomb research must be kept from Germany and the Soviet Union.

  This 1946 photograph shows the center of Los Alamos as it looked during the Manhattan Project years, when about 2,700 people worked there. [Los Alamos National Laboratory]

  What begins as a theoretical laboratory soon becomes a small town. A theater group is formed, with Oppenheimer himself making a cameo appearance as a corpse in the play Arsenic and Old Lace. A town council is elected. Parties are common and last late into the night, sometimes featuring the world’s most learned minds playing piano or violin to entertain their friends.

  On this high plateau, scientists work feverishly on a device designed to cause mass death and destruction. Utilizing a revolutionary new technology, the team is locking down the final design of a brand-new bomb. Shortly before World War II began, scientists discovered how to split the nucleus of an atom; the fission that occurs results in an enormous release of energy. Once news of this development leaked, weapons designers from around the world rushed to find a way to translate the research into a devastating implement of war.

  The people in Los Alamos are not alone. Since September 1939, the Nazis have also tried to build what scientists are calling an “atom bomb.” The Japanese, too, have been seeking such a weapon. So far, both have had no luck.

  CHAPTER 2

  LEYTE, VISAYAN ISLANDS PHILIPPINES

  October 20, 1944 • 1:00 P.M.

  GENERAL DOUGLAS MACARTHUR is grinning.

  Seven hundred miles west of the island of Peleliu, where marines are now mired in their fifth bloody week of combat, the sixty-four-year-old commander of Allied forces in the Southwest Pacific leans over the rail of the USS Nashville. He gazes into the distance at the island of Leyte in his beloved Philippines, which was invaded by more than a hundred thousand U.S. Army troops under his command three hours ago. His counterpart in Europe, General Dwight Eisenhower, became famous for the D-Day invasion of France this past June. So MacArthur, well known for his ego, has chosen to call the date of this invasion A-Day, for Attack Day. The invasion of Leyte is the second-largest amphibious landing of World War II, behind that of Normandy.

  After rushing ashore from their landing barges, American troops belly flop onto the sand of Leyte’s beaches, October 1944. [National Archives]

  As on Peleliu, intelligence reports predicting minimal enemy resistance have proven very wrong. The Japanese are putting up a fierce fight for the Philippines. Even miles out to sea, MacArthur can hear the chatter of automatic-weapons fire coming from groves of palm trees and see billowing plumes of black smoke from the jungle. Just overhead, American fighter-bombers buzz toward entrenched enemy positions, keeping a sharp eye out for Japanese fighter planes.

  Two years ago, after the fall of the Philippines to the Japanese, the most humiliating defeat of his storied career, General MacArthur promised the world that he would one day come back in glory to retake the islands. Now he is setting out to make good on that vow.

  Douglas MacArthur, who likes to refer to himself in the third person as simply MacArthur, is a shade over six feet tall, the son of a Medal of Honor–winning general through whom he has a lifelong connection to the Philippines. Arthur MacArthur Jr. fought in the American Civil War as a teenager and, after the Spanish-American War, served as military governor of the Philippines.

  “People of the Philippines, I have returned!” General Douglas MacArthur wades ashore at Red Beach on Leyte, October 1944. [National Archives]

  MacArthur clambers down a ladder hanging over the Nashville’s side and into a waiting landing craft. As he does every day, the general wears a freshly pressed khaki uniform that bears no ribbons. He carefully maintains the creases on his shirtsleeves and trousers by changing clothes frequently, and he has just donned a fresh uniform for the landing. In case the landing goes horribly wrong and MacArthur is
at risk of being taken prisoner, a loaded gun that once belonged to his father rests in his hip pocket.

  Sweat stains seep into MacArthur’s weathered field marshal’s cap; his dark brown eyes are shielded from the ocean’s glare by his Ray-Ban Aviator sunglasses, completing his trademark appearance.

  Lieutenant General Richard Sutherland, his chief of staff, follows MacArthur down the ladder. After the remainder of MacArthur’s group descend into the landing craft, several war correspondents join them. Douglas MacArthur knows the value of good publicity and has carefully choreographed his landing so that images of this great moment will soon be splashed across front pages around the world. The plan is to land not on the beach but at a dock. The photographers will step out of the boat first, then turn around to capture the immaculately starched and pressed general once again setting foot on Philippine soil.

  Like many a scripted moment, however, the actual event will unfold in quite a different fashion.

  Nine hundred and fifty-four days after fleeing the Philippines, General Douglas MacArthur orders the landing craft to sail for shore. It has taken MacArthur almost three years, but he has returned.

  His landing craft arrives at Red Beach on Leyte. The general’s face hardens as he steps off the boat into knee-deep ocean water, the razor-sharp creases in his pants disappearing in an instant.