The Oppenheimer Alternative Read online

  But Hindi—the Gita—was about deep connections, and its words, those terrible, portentous words, erupted in his consciousness as the towering maelstrom continued to roil the sky.

  Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.

  Chapter 16

  Three Weeks Later: August 1945

  I have no hope of clearing my conscience. The things we are working on are so terrible that no amount of protesting or fiddling with politics will save our souls.

  —Edward Teller

  Oppenheimer had been waiting impatiently in his office for the call; for God’s sake, the bomb should have been dropped on Hiroshima yesterday. Why hadn’t Manley phoned? Oppie had dispatched his assistant to Washington precisely so he could let him know the moment word arrived there from the B-29 that apparently had undergone a last-minute name change to Enola Gay.

  When his phone finally did ring, Oppie managed to knock his overflowing ashtray off his desk as he scrambled to snatch up the handset. It was the base operator. “A long-distance call for you, sir. Mr. Manley.”

  “Yes, yes!” Oppie exclaimed. “Put him through.”

  Some clicking and then: “Oppie—”

  “Damn it, John, why the hell do you think I sent you to Washington?”

  “I’m sorry, boss. Groves wouldn’t let me call until Truman announced the news. He’ll be going on the air in just a minute, and—”

  Oppie didn’t bother to cover the mouthpiece as he shouted to Bob Serber: “Radio! The president’s coming on!”

  There was a small Bakelite-encased radio on top of a half-height bookcase. Serber clicked it on and the unit began to warm up. They only got the Santa Fe station and the mesa’s own one, KRS; Oppie could tell that Serber had tuned in Santa Fe.

  “And?” demanded Oppie. “And?”

  “It worked!” said Manley.

  Oppie sagged back in his chair. The goddamn thing had worked! Serber was staring at him, waiting for some sign. Oppie gave a thumbs up, and Serber’s face broke into a wide grin, an expression Oppie thought gauche under the circumstances until he realized his own cheek muscles were similarly pulled tight.

  Manley went on: “Deak Parsons sent a message from the Enola Gay: ‘Results clear-cut. Successful in all respects. Visible effects greater than in New Mexico test.’”

  “Here he comes!” shouted Serber, pointing at the radio.

  The call was expensive but at that moment Oppie didn’t care. “Hang on, John,” he said, putting the handset on the desk and facing it toward the cloth-covered radio speaker.

  “—live now from the Atlantic Ocean, President Harry S. Truman, en route back to the United States from the Potsdam Conference.”

  And then Truman’s Missouri-accented voice, growing slowly in volume as the radio continued to warm up: “A short time ago, an American airplane dropped one bomb on Hiroshima and destroyed its usefulness to the enemy. That bomb has more power than twenty thousand tons of T.N.T. The Japanese began the war from the air at Pearl Harbor. They have been repaid many fold.”

  Oppie thought incongruously not of the uranium-gun bomb his team had designed but of the German V-2, “V” for Vergeltungswaffe—“Vengeance Weapon.” He got up and paced in front of the radio.

  “And the end is not yet,” continued Truman. “With this bomb we have now added a new and revolutionary increase in destruction to supplement the growing power of our armed forces. In their present form these bombs are now in production and even more powerful forms are in development.”

  More powerful forms? Oppie felt his entire body sag, gravity yanking him down. Surely Truman wasn’t alluding to Teller’s super? Surely they were done now? He looked at Serber, who shrugged, apparently equally surprised by the remark.

  And then, at last, the president gave the beast its name, a term first coined, as Oppie had learned from Leo Szilard, by H.G. Wells in 1913, but until this moment unknown to almost all Americans. “It is an atomic bomb. It is a harnessing of the basic power of the universe. The force from which the sun draws its power has been loosed against those who brought war to the Far East.”

  Well, thought Oppie, that wasn’t quite right; Teller’s hydrogen bomb would have been based on fusion, but the uranium-gun “Little Boy” design used on Hiroshima, and the plutonium-implosion Fat Man now already at the Tinian airfield south of Japan, were fission devices, the power of decay not unification. Still, either way, existing elements were transmuted into other ones; as Szilard had quipped when he’d gotten word of the Trinity test, “While the first successful alchemist was undoubtedly God, I sometimes wonder whether the second successful one may not have been the Devil himself.”

  Truman continued, his usually diffident voice taking on an edge: “We are now prepared to destroy more rapidly and completely every productive enterprise the Japanese have in any city. We shall destroy their docks, their factories, and their communications. Let there be no mistake: we shall completely destroy Japan’s power to make war.”

  No, no, thought Oppie. The goal was to show the whole world that fighting wars was no longer tenable—that any conflict could escalate to Armageddon and so all arms should be laid down. To continue to obliterate was—

  But that’s precisely what Truman intended: “It was to spare the Japanese people from utter destruction that the ultimatum of July the twenty-sixth was issued at Potsdam. Their leaders promptly rejected that ultimatum. If they do not now accept our terms they may expect a rain of ruin from the air the like of which has never been seen on this earth.”

  But of course they would accept the terms! There was no other rational course left now. Perhaps the second bomb could be towed far out into the Pacific and detonated there, with reporters from all nations invited to watch from a safe remove. Surely there was no need for it to be dumped on Kokura or Niigata.

  Truman continued: “We have spent more than two billion dollars on the greatest scientific gamble in history—and we have won. But the greatest marvel is not the size of the enterprise, its secrecy, or its cost, but the achievement of scientific brains in making it work. It is doubtful if such another combination could be got together in the world. What has been done is the greatest achievement of organized science in history.”

  Oppie had a flash of his friend I.I. Rabi, last year’s Nobel laureate in physics, who had turned down Oppie’s offer to become associate director here, saying he didn’t want the culmination of three centuries of physics to be a tool of devastating destruction. Oppie had replied then that Hitler had given them no choice ... but Hitler had been dead now for three full months. And, with luck and good sense, in another few months the very concept of international war would also fade into history.

  #

  As Robert walked along the mesa, he passed a young man sitting in a jeep. “One down!” the fellow shouted jubilantly. But surely not one to go. Yes, two bombs had been shipped to Tinian, but now that the Little Boy had been dropped, it had to end.

  Oppie had a destination in mind. It wasn’t time for their usual weekly get-together—and those took place in his own office, anyway—but still: this was the man he had to see. Some of those he passed stopped to pump his hand or slap his back or give him a thumbs up. But Oppie could only think the same thing he’d been thinking even before the bomb had been dropped on Hiroshima: Those poor little people.

  At last he came to Edward Teller’s office. The Hungarian’s door was open, so Oppie just stood there framed in the doorway until Teller at last looked up from his desk. There was nothing in front of him—no writing paper, no open journal. He’d just been staring, looking down at the battered wooden surface, lost in thought. “Edward,” Oppie said when their eyes met, “how are you?”

  Teller used his palms, flat against the wood, to push himself to his feet. But rather than walking over to Oppie, he headed to the window, looking out at the plateau, parched earth baking in the August heat. �
��I used to tell my first-year students about waves,” he said, his voice as always low in pitch but now also low in volume. “You can have one coming this way, arriving as a crest, a high of excitement and satisfaction, and you can have another, approaching that way, leading with its trough, a low of sadness and ...” He paused, and Oppie wondered if he was going to say “regret,” but, no, what Edward finished with was “... foreboding for what may come in the years ahead.” He at last turned to face Oppenheimer. “And when two such waves meet, the interference is destructive: they cancel out, leaving only ...” He sought a word; found it: “... calm.”

  Oppie stepped fully into the room and Teller went on. “I put on sun-tan lotion at the Trinity test site, did you know that? People laughed, but it seemed a prudent thing to do. I shall never forget that sight, that fireball. Still, how many of us—a hundred, perhaps—saw that test? And, of course, we all had welder’s glass or goggles. But yesterday, tens of thousands beheld such a light. And with no warning, Oppie, with no warning. The difference between them and us?” His mighty eyebrows lifted in a philosophical shrug. “We survived to tell the tale.”

  “But they will be the last ones, Edward. The last casualties of international war.”

  There was a note of hope in Teller’s voice. “Has Japan surrendered?”

  “Not yet, so far as I’ve heard. But they must.” Oppie’s voice cracked a bit. “They must.”

  “We should have warned them.”

  “Truman did. The Potsdam declaration—”

  “No, not like that. Who could understand such a thing? You, me, other physicists, yes. But a farmer, a shopkeeper, a schoolboy? Leo was right; we should have demonstrated it. Tokyo Bay, perhaps, but not a city, not homes.” At last Teller’s voice took on a bit of an edge. “You should have let me circulate his petition here.”

  At the end of June, Szilard had sent Teller a copy of the latest petition he’d been passing around the Met Lab in Chicago, calling on the president to refrain from dropping the bomb on Japan. Of course Szilard knew, after his meeting with Robert in Washington, that Oppie wasn’t likely to approve of such a thing and so he’d done an end run, asking Teller to gather signatures here on the mesa. But Teller had brought it to Oppie, seeking his permission—and Oppie had blown his stack, one of the few times during the whole project that he’d lost his temper. What, he had demanded, did Szilard or any physicist know of Japanese psychology? What did any of them know about ending a war? He’d even said a few unkind words about Szilard personally—things more typical of Groves than himself—calling him an obstructionist pest and an intellectually dishonest hypocrite; after all, Leo had been the one who had urged the previous president to create the bomb in the first place.

  “Maybe,” said Oppie; he certainly regretted the outburst, now more than a month in the past. But his action in barring the petition? He shrugged. “I don’t know.”

  Teller looked out the window again, apparently accepting that.

  Groves had called Oppie a little while ago. He’d said, “I think one of the wisest things I ever did was when I selected the director of Los Alamos.”

  Oppie had replied, “Well, I have my doubts, General Groves.”

  But Groves, uncharacteristically effusive, had said, “You know I’ve never concurred with those doubts at any time.”

  And it was a day for effusion: cheers and backslapping, flowing champagne—or spiked ginger ale masquerading as such—classes canceled and kids running loose on the mesa, the base radio blaring Vera Lynn and the Andrews Sisters. Oppie sent out word over the public-address system that there’d be a celebration in the theater later today for as many as could cram in there.

  But it was also a day for reflection. Getting on two years ago, on December 30, 1943, Niels Bohr, the famed Danish physicist, winner of the 1922 Nobel, the man who had first envisioned the atom as a dense nucleus orbited by far-distant electrons, had visited them here at Los Alamos. He’d immediately asked Oppie, “Is it big enough?” Was the atomic bomb they were planning to build big enough to end all war? Oppie had assured him that it indeed would be, and yesterday’s results must have proven that.

  “Edward,” Oppie said, “I think we’re done.”

  Teller turned to him again. “How do you mean?”

  “Your super. It’s ... excessive. I can’t have anything to do with it.”

  “Robert, perhaps today is not the day—”

  “What other day would be better? There will never be another day like this one, Edward. You know that; I know that. We can stop.”

  “The laboratory you’ve created here is unique. What would you have become of Los Alamos?”

  “Give it back to the Indians.”

  Teller looked out his window once more. The sun was growing ruddy as it slid down the sky. “There’s a Hungarian proverb: Szegény egér az, ki csak egy lyukra bízza magát.”

  Oppie frowned. One of the reasons Leo’s nickname for his countrymen of “the Martians” had stuck was that Hungarian bore so little resemblance to other European languages; Oppie could make no sense of what Teller had said. “Yes?” he prodded.

  “It literally means it’s a poor mouse that trusts his life to only one hole. Who knows what the future is going to bring, my friend? Not you or I—and so it is always safer to have multiple options.”

  “Safer? I’m not sure about that.”

  “Preferable, then,” said Teller. He turned again to face Oppie. “I do appreciate you coming by, Robert. But although your work may be over, mine has just begun.”

  Chapter 17

  Scientists aren’t responsible for the facts that are in nature. It’s their job to find the facts. There’s no sin connected with it—no morals. If anyone should have a sense of sin, it’s God. He put the facts there.

  —Percy Bridgman, Oppenheimer’s physics professor at Harvard

  In a daze, head swimming, heart pounding, Oppie walked down the packed earth of Bathtub Row to the log-and-stone cottage at its end that had been his home for almost two and a half years now.

  Log and stone: sturdy materials. The cottage had been built in 1929, he’d been told, and there was no reason to think it wouldn’t be standing in 2029 or beyond. The Japanese, on the other hand, made homes mostly from thin wood and even paper; those that hadn’t been blown straight to hell by the blast would have been incinerated in the fires that swept the landscape.

  But here on the mesa life kept hold. The small garden Kitty had planted was back to being well tended; it had been neglected during the months she’d been away.

  Oppie entered the house and caught Kitty as she was coming out of the tiny kitchen. He was used to finding her draped upon the couch, and she normally didn’t get up when he arrived, but, since she was already on her feet, he closed the distance and wrapped his arms around her, pulling her toward him. She hesitated for a moment then hugged him, too.

  “They ... they’ve dropped a second bomb,” Oppie said, holding her. “Apparently Kokura was clouded over, so they ...” His voice caught; he’d intended to say “they hit Nagasaki instead,” but it didn’t matter, he realized; they were just names to Kitty, and to him, alien syllables.

  “I’m so sorry,” she said softly. Kitty was much shorter than Oppie; the words were spoken into his bony chest.

  “Why didn’t they surrender?” asked Oppie. “After the first one, why didn’t they surrender?”

  “Truman said it had to be unconditional,” Kitty replied, still holding him. “Charlotte Serber thinks that’s the problem.” She disengaged from Oppie’s embrace but took his hand and led him to the couch by the stone fireplace. “She thinks the Japs want to keep their emperor. They think he’s divine; a god. She says unconditional surrender would be like asking the United States to agree to renounce Jesus.”

  Oppie heard the words but didn’t know what to do with them, and so set them aside. “I told ...
God, I told everyone that one bomb would be enough. Yes, we had to use it once. No, we couldn’t do a demonstration out in a desert—they’d accuse us of having buried thousands of tons of T.N.T. beneath whatever device we showed them, saying we were lying about really having a new type of bomb. Yes, it had to be dropped on a real target. No, we couldn’t announce which target in advance because they’d just move all their prisoners of war—all our boys they’ve captured—to wherever we said we were going to drop it, and, anyway, they’d then throw everything they had at shooting our B-29 out of the sky before it could drop its bomb.” He shook his head. “But one wasn’t enough.”

  “Why did they—why did we—only wait three days before doing it again?” asked Kitty. “I mean, communications out of Hiroshima must have been spotty at best. There was barely time for word to reach Tokyo, for anyone there to begin to comprehend ...”

  “Groves said thunderstorms were forecast for the weekend. It was either now or ... well, not never, but, you know, next week or later ...” He shook his head once more and said so softly that Kitty had to ask him to repeat it for her: “Those poor little people.”

  #

  Peer de Silva came into Hans Bethe’s lab. His uniform was immaculate, but his forehead glistened with sweat from walking through the August heat. “Mr. Battle?”

  Bethe suppressed a smile. Prior to the dropping of the bombs, titles such as “Doctor” and “Professor” were verboten when off the mesa, and those scientists who might have been known even then to the public were all referred to by fake names beginning with the same letters as their real ones. Few inside the barbed-wire perimeter had habitually used the conceit—few, that is, save de Silva and his ilk—and now that the whole world knew what they’d accomplished here, continuing the practice seemed silly. “Yes, captain?”