The Manhattan Project was still at an early stage, D-Day was more than a year away, the war in the Pacific was not yet going well for the United States, and no one could have predicted how important the Japanese fleet or Truk might be by the time the bomb was ready. The discussion was surely a blue-sky exercise. The Japanese were selected as they would not be so apt to secure knowledge from it as would the Germans.” General Styer suggested Tokio but it was pointed out that the bomb should be used where, if it failed to go off, it would land in water of sufficient depth to prevent easy salvage. “The point of use of the first bomb was discussed and the general view appeared to be that its best point of use would be on a Japanese fleet concentration in the Harbor of Truk. The discussion that day ranged over a variety of topics-personnel issues, technical problems, commissioning a study on radioactive poisons, and even a “story to be allowed to leak out on the Los Alamos project to reduce the curiosity of the local population.”Īccording to Groves’s summary of the meeting: The first targeting discussion-insofar as can be determined from declassified documents and Manhattan Project histories-seems to have occurred during a meeting of the high-level Military Policy Committee on May 5, 1943. That was long before anyone could reasonably predict when the war in Europe might end or when atomic bombs might be ready for use. There is evidence-albeit fragmentary-that as early as May 1943, high-level planners assumed that Japanese rather than German military forces would be the likely target for first-use of the new weapon. Surviving Manhattan Project scientists continue to believe that the atomic bombs were used on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, rather than on German targets, merely because they were not ready in time. All of our concentration was on Germany.” We always worried what Heisenberg and other German scientists were doing. We never worried that the Japanese would have the bomb. Joseph Rotblat, a Polish scientist before the war and a founder of the Pugwash movement after the war, told me last February that “there was never any idea that would be used against Japan. Such weapons in the hands of Hitler would be the ultimate catastrophe for the world. The United States had to develop an atomic bomb before the Germans did. To a man, they-along with their American and British colleagues-got involved for one overarching reason: Germany had first-rate scientists who presumably understood the destructive possibilities of nuclear fission. Émigré scientists from Europe especially-Leo Szilard (who first conceived the idea of an atomic bomb), Enrico Fermi, Hans Bethe, Victor Weisskopf, Eugene Wigner, James Franck, Niels Bohr and the like- played pivotal roles in the Manhattan Project. From August 1939, when Albert Einstein alerted President Roosevelt to the possibility that atomic bombs could be built, to late 1944, when it became entirely apparent that Germany was not an atomic threat, the focus of U.S. If the new weapon was to be used at all in World War II, it would be against Japan.īut had Japan “always” been the target, as Groves implied? If so, that fact suggests a terrible irony that has been little noted in the decades-long debate over the use of the bomb. The Third Reich would collapse long before the first bombs were ready for use. A composite group of the 20th Air Force has been organized and specially trained and equipped.” īy the time the memo was written, it was clear to everyone connected with the atomic bomb project that Germany would not be the target. The target is and was always expected to be Japan. “While our plan of operations is based on the more certain, more powerful, gun type bomb, it also provides for the use of the implosion type bombs as soon as they become available. “Our previous hopes that an implosion type of bomb might be developed in the late spring of 1945 have now been dissipated by scientific difficulties. It contained a puzzling phrase, which I have italicized: Groves, director of the Manhattan Project, wrote a memo to Henry L.
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