Lebanon, November 89, Hiroshima and after the Bomb

レバノンのピエール・ジェマイエル産業相が暗殺されたのは21日。「ジェマイエル」の名は、レバノン政治中心のひとつ。1989 年11 月、初めて訪れた米ニューヨーク。マンハッタンをひとりで歩いていると、タイムズスクエアの電光ニュースはレバノン大統領（Muawwad）暗殺の速報を流していた。

このときのアメリカ行きは、出発時点から大ニュース続きだった。

成田空港内のテレビは、中華人民共和国の鄧小平が最後まで握っていた軍トップの地位を譲ると報じていた。オレゴン州ポートランドを経由して到着したのは五輪開催が決まったアトランタで、チェックインしたのは郊外の「ホリデーイン」。部屋のテレビ画面に最初に映ったのは現副大統領のチェイニー国防長官だった。何やら、大事件らしい。そう、東西ベルリンを隔てていた壁が崩されているまさにその時だったのだ。

出張中、仕事そっちのけで新聞とテレビに没頭していたことは言うまでもない。

広島市内への原爆投下成功の知らせにLos Alamos は複雑な感情に満ちた。

Later in the day (August 6, 1945), the news was announced over the Los Alamos public address system: “Attention please, attention please. One of our units has just been successfully dropped on Japan.” Frank Oppenheimer was standing in the hallway right outside of his brother’s office when he heard the news. His first reaction was “Thank God, it wasn’t a dud.” But within seconds, he recalled, “One suddenly got this horror of all the people that had been killed.” (pp. 315-316)

… That evening a crowd gathered in an auditorium. One of the younger physicists, Sam Cohen, remembers a cheering, foot-stamping audience waiting for Oppenheimer to appear. Everyone expected him to come onstage from the auditorium wings, as was his custom. But Oppenheimer chose to make a more dramatic entrance from the rear, making his way up the center aisle. Once onstage, according to Cohen, he clasped his hands together and pumped them over his head like a prize-fighter. Cohen remembers Oppie telling the cheering crowd that it was “too early to determine what the results of the bombing might have been, but he was sure that that Japanese didn’t like it.” The crowd cheered and then roared its approval when Oppie said he was “proud” of what they had accomplished. By Cohen’s account, “his [Oppenheimer’s] only regret was that we hadn’t developed the bomb in time to have used it against the Germans. This practically raised the roof.”

It was as if he had been called upon to act out a stage role, one to which he was truly not suited. Scientists are not meant to be conquering generals. And yet, he was only human and so must have felt the thrill of pure success; he had grabbed a metaphorical gold ring and he was happily waving it aloft. Besides, the audience expected him to appear flushed and triumphant. But the moment was short-lived.

Alice Kimball Smith later insisted that “certainly no one [at Los Alamos] celebrated Hiroshima.” But then she admitted that ‘a few people” tried to assemble a party in the men’s dormitories. It turned into a “memorable fiasco. People either stayed away or beat a hasty retreat.” Smith, to be sure, was referring only the scientists, who appear to have had a decidedly muted – and different – reaction than the military enlisted men. [Ed] Doty [a soldier] wrote home: “There were parties galore. Invited to three of them, I managed to get to only one…. It lasted until three.” He reported that people were “happy, very happy. We listened to the radio and danced and listened to the radio again… and laughed and laughed at all that was said.” Oppenheimer attended one party, but upon leaving he saw a clearly distraught physicist retching his guts out in the bushes. The sight made him realize that an accounting had begun.

Robert Wilson had been horrified by the news from Hiroshima. He had never wanted the weapon to be used, and thought he had grounds for believing it would not be. In January, Oppenheimer had persuaded him to continue his work – but only so that the bomb could be demonstrated. And Oppenheimer, he knew, had participated in the Interim Committee’s deliberations. Rationally, he understood that Oppie had been in no position to make him any firm promises – that this was a decision for the generals, Secretary of War Stimson and, ultimately, the president. But he nevertheless felt his trust had abused. “I felt betrayed,” Wilson wrote in 1958, “when the bomb was exploded over Japan without discussion or some peaceful demonstration of its power to the Japanese.”

Wilson’s wife, Jane, happened to be visiting San Francisco when she heard the news about Hiroshima. Rushing back to Los Alamos, she greeted her husband with congratulatory smiles, only to find him “very depressed,” she said. And then, three days later, another bomb devastated Nagasaki. “People were going around banging garbage can covers and so on,” Jane Wilson recalled, “and he wouldn’t join in, he was sulking and unhappy.” Bob Wilson recalled, “I remember being just ill… sick… to the point that I thought I would be – you know, vomit.” (pp. 316-317)

On August 14, Radio Tokyo announced the government’s acceptance of this clarification (“the authority of the emperor to rule would be ‘subject to the Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers…’”) and, therewith, its surrender. The war is over – and within weeks, journalists and historians began to debate whether it might have ended on similar terms and around the same time without the bomb. (p. 318)

At noon on Friday, September 21, 1945, Oppenheimer went to say farewell to Henry Stimson. It was both Stimson’s last day in office as secretary of war and his seventy-eighth birthday. Oppenheimer knew that Stimson was scheduled to give a parting presentation a the White House that afternoon in which he would advocate, “very belatedly,” thought Oppenheimer, the case for “an open approach on the atom….” By Stimson’s diary account, he would bluntly tell President Truman that “we should approach Russia at once with an opportunity to share on a proper quid pro quo the bomb.”

… Stimson asked him to accompany him to the Pentagon barbershop, where he had his thin gray hair trimmed. When it was time to go, Stimson rose from the barber’s chair, shook Oppenheimer’s hand and said, “Now it is in your hands.” (p. 322)

核兵器を開発して戦争を終わらせたオッペンハイマーは、全米で賞賛される。

さて、原爆がドイツではなく、日本に投下されたことについて、「人種差別的な考慮によるもの」との意見が日本にはあるが、この本による限り、その批判は正しくない。原爆はドイツ降伏時にはまだ開発中であり、ドイツの降伏を知ったオッペンハイマーは「間に合わなかった。遅すぎた」と言い、上に引用したように、対ナチスに使用できなかったことを悔やんでいる。

[Oppenheimer] soon began to make his private brooding public. “We have made a thing, a most terrible weapon,” he told an audience of the American Philosophical Society, “that has altered abruptly and profoundly the nature of the world… a thing that by all the standards of the world we grew up in is an evil thing. And by so doing… we have raised again the question of whether science is good for man….” The father of the atomic bomb explained that it was by definition a weapon of terror and aggression. And it was cheap. The combination might someday prove deadly to whole civilizations. “Atomic weapons, even with what we know today,” he said, “can be cheap… atomic armament will not break the economic back of any people that want it. The pattern of the use of atomic weapons was set at Hiroshima.” The Hiroshima bomb, he said, was used “against an essentially defeated enemy… it is a weapon for aggressors, and the elements of surprise and terror are as intrinsic to it as are the fissionable nuclei.” (pp. 323-324)

After Hiroshima and the end of the war, such work, he said, was felt to be “against the dictates of their hearts and spirits.” He was a scientist, he told a reporter disdainfully, not an “armaments manufacturer.” Not every scientist, of course, felt this way. Edward Teller was still promoting the ”Super” to anyone with the patience to listen. When Teller asked Oppenheimer to urge that research on the Super continue, Oppie cut him short: “I neither can nor will do so.” It was a reaction that Teller would never forget – or forgive. (p. 325)

When President Truman issued his message to Congress on October 3, 1945, many scientists initially thought it reassuring. Drafted by Herbert Marks, a young lawyer working for [Secretary State Dean] Acheson, the message urged Congress to establish an atomic energy commission with power to regulate the entire industry. Unbeknownst even to Washington insiders, Oppenheimer had helped Marks write the message. Not surprisingly, it reflected Oppie’s own sense of urgency about both the dangers and the potential benefits of atomic energy. The release of atomic energy, Truman pronounced, “constitutes a new force too revolutionary to consider in the framework of old ideas.” Time was of the essence. “The hope of civilization,” Truman warned, “lies in international arrangements looking, if possible, to the renunciation of the use and development of the atomic bomb….” Oppenheimer thought he had won the president’s commitment to seek the abolition of atomic weapons. (pp. 325-326)

… [A]t 10:30 am on October 25, 1945, Oppenheimer was ushered into the Oval Office. President Truman was naturally curious to meet the celebrated physicist, whom he knew by reputation to be an eloquent and charismatic figure. After being introduced by Secretary Patterson, the only other individual in the room, the three men sat down. By one account, Truman opened the conversation by asking Oppenheimer’s help in getting Congress to pass the May-Johnson bill, giving the Army permanent control over atomic energy. “The first thing is to define the national problem,” Truman said, “then the international.” Oppenheimer let an uncomfortably long silence pass and then said, haltingly, “Perhaps it would be best first to define the international problem.” He meant, of course, that the first imperative was to stop the spread of these weapons by placing international controls over all atomic technology. At one point in their conversation, Truman suddenly asked him to guess when the Russians would develop their own atomic bomb. When Oppie replied that he did not know, Truman confidently said he knew the answer: “Never.” (P. 331)

… Finally, sensing that the president was not comprehending the deadly urgency of his message, Oppenheimer nervously wrung his hands and uttered another regrettable remarks that he characteristically made under pressure. “Mr. President,” he said quietly, “I feel I have blood on my hands.”

The comment angered Truman. He later informed David Lilienthal, I told him the blood was on my hands – let me worry about that.” But over the years, Truman embellished the story. By one account, he replied, “Never mind, it’ll all come out in the wash.” In yet another version, he pulled his handkerchief from his breast pocket and offered it to Oppenheimer, saying, “Well, here, would you like to wipe your hands?”

[After the meeting,] the President was heard to mutter, “Blood on his hands, dammit, he hasn’t half as much blood on his hands as I have. You just don’t go around bellyaching about it.” He later told Dean Acheson, “I don’t want to see that son-of-bitch in this office ever again.” Even in May 1946, the encounter still vivid in his mind, he wrote Acheson and described Oppenheimer as a “cry-baby scientist” who had come to “my office some five or six months ago and spent most of his time wringing his hands and telling me they had blood on them because of the discovery of atomic energy.” (p. 332)

冷戦の本格化とともに米国の「赤狩り」が始まる。カリフォルニア時代に米国共産党員との付き合いがあり、左翼思考の強かったオッペンハイマーも当然調査の対象となる。フーバー長官のFBI が放っておくわけがない。一方、妻Kitty との仲は……。