The Bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki: Stupidity, techno-fantasies and the idea of the “moral” scientist

Seventy years ago, on 6 August 1945, as the Second World War drew to a close, the United States of America decided to drop an atom bomb on Hiroshima, a Japanese city. Three days later, on 9 August, the USA attacked the country again and employed an atom bomb in the city of Nagasaki. These bombings are estimated to have killed close to 200,000 people and injured several more.

The story of the atomic bomb that resulted in this destruction is well known. The popular narrative goes thus. In 1905, Albert Einstein discovered “E=mc2”, his theory of equivalence between mass and energy. As the Second World War was breaking out, on 2 August 1939, he wrote with a heavy heart to Franklin Roosevelt, then the president of the United States of America about the possibility of “extremely powerful bombs” that utilised uranium chain reactions. Einstein appeared to believe that the German government was already working towards building such a capacity and implored Roosevelt to do the same.

Subsequently, Roosevelt ordered a research and development project named the Manhattan Project and a group of scientists led by Robert Oppenheimer, an American theoretical physicist, developed the atomic bombs that were dropped on Japan by the USA to end the Second World War. Witnessing the detonation of a plutonium bomb during the Trinity Test in New Mexico, Oppenheimer, who was a Sanskrit scholar, philosophically (and sadly) quoted the Bhagvad Gita saying, “I am become death, destroyer of the worlds”.

Beyond the questions of moral responsibility that arise out of the thousands of lives that were destroyed by the bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki over multiple generations, the American decision is largely seen as a strategically rational one. It was, as many would argue, a decision that won it the Second World War and established its hegemony over the postwar world. But history is shaped by contingency as much as it is by what appears to be rational decision-making. If, what seems to be a stupid decision and thought process now, may have seemed perfectly rational then, given what was known at that time, the converse is equally true. Thus, we might question the rationale behind the American decision to devote its resources to build the atomic bombs.

We are stymied in our understanding of the sheer scale of resources required to build the bomb. This is because of the idea that the development of the bomb was essentially a scientific enterprise that was carried out by academic physicists, and not an industrial activity carried out by military and industrial engineers. However, according to David Edgerton’s Technology and Global History since 1900 the project, that was named the Manhattan Engineer District in full—after engineer district units in the American army—–and headed by the brilliant engineer Major General Leslie Groves, only spent $70 million from its total cost of $2 billion on scientific research. Much of the rest was spent on the massive industrial facilities required to produce fissile materials. This included a half million acre factory (with all the hassles of land acquisition) built by Dupont—an American chemical company that Groves had employed to be the prime contractor for the construction of the plutonium production complex—which went through, at Hanford, in south-central Washington and several other facilities all over the countries including a massive one at Oak Ridge in Tennessee. The race to build the bomb was, in fact, not determined by scientific research, but by the race  to build the factory and produce fissible material quickly through painfully slow processes.

To put that expense of $2 billion in military perspective: Edgerton claimed that this money could have been used by the Americans to procure five times more heavy guns or a third more tanks. Indeed, three billion dollars could buy 4000 B-29’s—long-range heavy bombers—that were used exclusively for long distance operations against Japan. This assumes particular significance given that the American military in the Pacific theatre always felt short of materiel; as the Pacific Fleet Admiral William Halsley later recalled, in Francis Pike’s Hiroshito’s War: The Pacific War, 1941-1945, “Europe was Washington’s darling, while the South Pacific was only a stepchild.”

The US Strategic Bombing Survey—a rigorous exercise involving hundreds of officers, civilians and enlisted men—estimated that the atomic bombs dropped on Japan each caused as much damage as a single large conventional aerial bombing raid. This was because even though the atomic bombs were very powerful, much of that energy was wasted; conventional raids involving hundreds of smaller bombs could better target cities for destruction. Thus, the atomic bombs dropped on Japan, that cost a billion dollars each, were scarcely more destructive than what could have been achieved with existing weapons at little extra cost. Even less than this lackadaisical performance had been expected at the decision-making stage. Early estimates by the physicist Leo Szilard suggested that uranium would produce a mere fifty to hundred times of the destruction that TNT would result in. A committee headed by the James Chadwick, the English physicist credited with the discovery of the neutron, for the British Military Application of Uranium Detonation (MAUD) project—that did substantial initial legwork and feasibility studies for the bomb until convincing the Americans to take atomic bombs seriously by starting the Manhattan Project in 1941—determined that one pound of uranium was equal to 72 tons of TNT. The US National Academy of Sciences—based on whose report the eventual decision was made—estimated that it was merely 12 tons of TNT equivalent. The Trinity test finally yielded four times the impact that the scientists had expected.

Why did the Americans pump resources into heavy water facilities, enrichment processes, nuclear piles and reactors knowing that it would make for fairly poor results, especially during the time of war? The American war establishment was initially less than enthusiastic about this gigantic undertaking and little is known about what suddenly turned the tide. James Conant—an American chemist who served as the president of Harvard University and was the administrator of the Manhattan Project—overestimated the historian’s acuity when he noted in a 1943 memo that a future historian of science might well be bewildered by the rapid change of tempo.

Perhaps one may argue that despite a lack of clear headed thinking, the dropping of the atomic bomb ended the Second World War. But this idea was questioned from almost the very beginning. The issue of Foreign Affairs—a reputed American journal on international relations—that was published after the bombs were dropped, scarcely mentioned any role they played in Japan’s surrender, and emphasised over other factors instead:

Even before August 6, Japan was hopelessly beaten. The only unresolved question was [when she would surrender]. The atomic bomb speeded their decision; but the strategic situation in the Pacific, especially our capture of Iwo Jima and Okinawa, which unlocked the gateways to Japan, was a decisive factor. Significantly the first Japanese peace overtures were made to Russia about the time the campaign on Okinawa ended.

The “traditionalist argument,” is based around the post-facto claim of Henry Stimson, the secretary of war of the USA at the time. His assertion, that the bombs ended the war early and obviated the need for an invasion of the Japanese islands, which would have cost half a million American lives, held sway until the 1960s.

However, later scholarship showed that not only would the Japanese have surrendered anyway—despite their wartime image as honor driven, quick-to-kamikaze fanatics—but also that there is much evidence to show that Americans were aware of this fact. The culmination of this revisionist picture was the political economist and historian Gar Alperowitz’s excellent book in 1995, The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb and the Architecture of an American Myth, which held that the reason for dropping the bomb was not to end the war. Alperowitz argued that the bomb had been dropped to quell the threat of Soviet expansion in East Asia that would result from Stalin's imminent declaration of war on Japan, and to establish the superiority of American power in the impending cold war.

In fact, in his book Shock of the Old, David Edgerton, a historian of technology, has put forth the intriguing thesis that the bomb actually lengthened the war. Besides the diversion of much needed war resources that could have massively scaled up the overall war effort, the desire to use the bomb also meant that that no assurances were offered to Japanese emperor in the Potsdam declaration—the Proclamation Defining Terms for Japanese Surrender that was issued on 26 July 1945. Strangely, it was an assurance that was freely offered after the bombs were dropped. Furthermore, in order to provide the atomic bomb with a “clean target”, the US Air Force had to hold off conventional bombing of not just Hiroshima and Nagasaki but three other Japanese cities that were also being considered. All of these acts, Edgerton argues, led to the war lasting longer than it would have, had the atomic bombs not been deployed.

It may well have been the Soviet, and not the Nazi or Japanese wartime threat that was central to the decision of not just dropping the bombs on Japan, but also the curious determination to build them. In his book Now It Can Be Told: The Story of the Manhattan Project,, General Groves wrote, “Russia was our enemy.... and the project was conducted on that basis.” But even if the Soviet Union was the real perceived enemy, the development of the atomic bomb did not make for a long American hegemony. Russia became a member of the nuclear club just four years later in 1949, Britain in 1952 and France in 1960. Even countries such as China and India caught up in 1964 and 1974 respectively, long before they had addressed the need for basic amenities for all their citizens. Thus the Americans made no real long-term strategic gains from using the atomic bomb.

What of the moral and ethical role played by the scientists? The bomb is central to the global polemic on science and human values. The model of science as a "pure," politically disinterested activity was shattered by the atomic bomb. As the cliché goes, "Physics lost its innocence" in 1945. One of the first scholarly works on the atomic bomb, Robert Jungk's Brighter than a 1000 Suns, was published in German in 1956 and drew its inferences exclusively from his interviews with physicists. With chapters such as Atomic Scientist versus Atomic Bomb, For They Know not What They Do, The Scientists' Crusade and Dilemma of the Conscience, it helped create the popular moral tale of scientists who were conflicted about the “demon they had created” and were working to prevent the use of the atomic bomb. Central to this story is the enigma of Robert Oppenheimer. Much is made of Oppenheimer’s alleged and sombre quotation from the Bhagvad Gita after the success at Trinity. Published in the wake of Oppenheimer's humiliation and fall from grace after reports surfaced of him being a communist during the McCarthyism of the early 1950s, Jungk’s books responded more to the times that it was written in, and than to the decade-old events the text was chronicling. This rehabilitation of sorts for Oppenheimer found eager ears amongst an American public that sought to impose their own anxieties about the nuclear age on this national hero who had fallen foul of the establishment.

The morality of using the atomic bomb is considered distinct from a conventional bombing raid, mostly due to the issue of radioactivity. However, given that Oppenheimer had, according to Richard Rhodes’ The Making of the Atomic Bomb, explicitly pondered over the possibility of contaminating the German food supply with plutonium; his support for what today would be called a dirty nuclear weapon indicates that the moral dilemmas ascribed to him in the popular imagination are more fiction than fact. The most crucial role played by the scientists in the decision to drop the bomb was in target selection. Rhodes writes that physicists including Oppenheimer actually suggested that the bomb be directed at civilian rather than military targets so its full power could be tested and its psychological impact emphasised. The celebrated recitation of the Bhagvad Gita first took place at least a decade after Trinity. There is no evidence that the atmosphere during the Trinity test itself was one of anything but jubilation.

Having argued that the decision to build the bomb was not the wisest from the point of view of wartime resources; explored whether or not the bomb gave the Americans any substantial leverage either in the Second World War or the Cold War that followed; and showed that morality played a relative insignificant role in the thought processes of physicists, how may we rethink the history of the atomic bomb and the story of science and ethics therein? Perhaps we need to frame it as a failure to be explained, akin to how we frame the early history of the other Weapon of Mass Destruction that was born of the Second World War; the German V-1 and V-2 rockets. Developed by Wernher von Braun—who later pioneered rocketry at National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)—these struck terror in hearts of Londoners during the war and the missiles that were later developed became an increasingly terrifying killer in the decades that followed. In fact the same issue of Foreign Affairs that scarcely mentioned the atomic bomb had these ominous words in an article about the rockets:

No one can deny that [rocket] is a most remarkable technical achievement... [and has] come into military plans and strategy to stay. [The victims] have only a grim preview of what the future can hold for the population of every city in the world- unless that is, the destructive possibilities of these weapons are brought under control by the agreement of all nations.... Is it too much to hope that there can be one law and one controlling authority in a world any part of which can be laid to waste.

Despite the terror that was felt at the time and the fact that the German missile programme became the basis for all modern missiles and rockets (that are regularly used in war even today and have arguably killed more people than atomic bombs); a narrative of ideology and stupidity—if not insanity—has come to dominate our contemporary picture of Nazi Germany’s missile programme. We are told that rocket research was promoted by sections of the army that were convinced that the shock introduction of a highly destructive weapon would produce a “psychological impact” that would change the course of any conflict. In addition to this, was the myth that the Allied Forces—comprising Great Britain, France, the Soviet Union, the United States and China—too were developing rocket bombs.

An entrenched Army leadership that combined, as Michael Neufeld noted in The Rocket and the Reich: Peenemünde and the Coming of the Ballistic Missile Era, “high tactical and technical competence with disastrously short sighted strategic thinking” was easy prey to this rhetoric. According to Neufeld, the "competing bureaucratic empires" that characterised the Nazi regime allowed the army to exploit the situation and go ahead with an ill-thought-out programme. Thus, the Germans built a massive facility in a complex of tunnels that was located under a mountain at Peenemunde to build the V-1 and V-2 rockets. Wernher von Braun headed this programme. Albert Speer, a German architect who was Minister of Armaments and War Production in the Third Reich, and Hitler became enthusiasts of the project. The latter's obsession with "vengeance", as Neufeld put it, made him easy prey to the "psychological impact" argument advanced by rocket scientists. Thus, the programme that failed to win the war for the Nazis was unambiguously characterised as a “useless gestures of a desperate lunatic” that diverted resources, which could have been better used to build upto 24,000 fighter aircrafts. Although the rockets struck terror in the hearts of Londoners, they were too inaccurate and easily thwarted; thus constituting what Neufeld called a “little more than a nuisance.” He believed that the programme was a fitting symbol of the "Nazis’ pursuit of irrational goals with rational technocratic means.”

Similarly, the American government’s flawed decision to build and use the atomic bombs was also a result of fantastical gains talked up by scientific bureaucracies and lapped up by an irrational establishment. The decision to build the bomb was in large part a product of the strident efforts of Vannevar Bush—an electrical engineer and the president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology—whose ideas later created the National Science Foundation. Historian Stanley Goldberg argued that Bush strived to build a “climate of opinion” in favor of the bomb. The idea of a devastating psychological impact also played a key role in the eventual decision, as did fear that the Germans were developing the bomb. Conversely, the Germans were just as alarmed at the idea of the Allies developing rockets.

Hitler thought that the V2 would end all wars just as Szilard and others believed that the atomic bomb would. Both displayed a desperate belief in the deterrence theory—that nuclear weapons would deter other states from attacking with their nuclear weapons due to the possibility of retaliation and mutually assured destruction. In his book The Creation of Armageddon: The rise of American Air Power, American historian Michael Sherry deals extensively with the “technological fanaticism” that characterised arguments in favor of the bombing of cities. He rightly devotes only a few pages to the atomic bomb; it was merely one in a long list of apocalyptic fantasies of decisive air power that existed only in the minds of scientists, politicians, strategic thinkers and the military.

The story of the Nazi rocketry programme too is told as a tale of morality, in both Neufeld’s book and others after it. The reference here is less to the intended victims of the rockets, and more to the horrendous conditions under which slave labour from concentration camps was used to build them. Indeed Neufeld and others estimated that the  killed twice as many of the slave workers who built it than those who endured its descent.  Here however, we find no reason to identify any moral dilemmas amongst the engineers; their actions are explained away as just reflective of general Nazi inhumanity. During his early years in postwar America, von Braun sought to make excuses for his work in the slave camp during the war. These were never taken as truthful, though he seldom had any issues arising from his wartime work due to the importance of his later research for the Americans in space and missile development. A song by Tom Lehrer, an American singer, satirist and mathematician, from the 1960s neatly summed up von Braun’s career:

Gather round while I sing you of Wernher von Braun,

A man whose allegiance

Is ruled by expedience.

Call him a Nazi, he won't even frown.

"Ha, Nazi Schmazi," says Wernher von Braun.

Don't say that he's hypocritical,

Say rather that he's apolitical.

"Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down?

That's not my department," says Wernher von Braun.

We’re quick to identify errors in Nazi thinking and ascribe them to almost culturally rooted pathologies, but the story of the atomic bomb tells us that such pathologies are deep rooted in the thought process of all societies, especially when it comes to fantasies about technology, killing and war. More often than not, these pathologies lead to unspeakable suffering, and do not result in the desired outcomes. We would do well to be extremely skeptical about the claims of assured victory and geopolitical dominance that will result from investing in one or another weapon.

As for science and morality, scientists typically just reflect the war hungriness and ruthlessness of the establishment and society as a whole. This is not to absolve scientists of the consequences of their action. But we seldom see the need to explain away the attitudes of politicians and the military towards mass killing; why should scientists be any different?