By John LaForge
The U.S. scientists who tested the first atomic bomb in New Mexico on July 16, 1945, took the immeasurable risk of converting the atmosphere into fire and burning to death all biological life on Earth and in the Seven Seas.
Although they strenuously tried, the Manhattan Project scientists were unable to rule out the risk of causing human extinction, and they lit their match anyway. How can such an action be excused? How can such spectacular hubris and arrogance be reconciled with self-conscious human decency?
I don’t believe it can. The immeasurable barbarity of putting all living beings in the world at risk eclipses the power of language to even describe it. Ruthless megalomania? Depraved nihilism? Coldblooded criminal insanity?
When Robert Oppenheimer, the civilian head of the program, informed his boss, the Nobel Prize winning physicist Arthur Compton, about the risk, the whole program could have been halted. Compton later wrote in his memoir, “Was there really any chance that an atomic bomb would trigger the explosion of the nitrogen in the atmosphere or of the hydrogen in the ocean? Better to accept the slavery of the Nazis than to run a chance of drawing the final curtain on mankind!”
Compton reportedly decided that “Unless they came up with a firm and reliable conclusion that our atomic bombs could not explode the air or the sea, those bombs must never be made.” (The Precipice by Toby Ord, New York 2020, p.91) General Leslie Groves, the military officer in charge of the bomb project, agreed, but when the great theoretical physicist Hans Bethe concluded that the danger was “a remote possibility,” Compton and Groves allowed the project to proceed, trusting that further calculations would rule out global extinction.
Ultimately, Oppenheimer’s secretly commissioned study of the question could not prove the risk was zero. According to Daniel Ellsberg in The Doomsday Machine (Bloomsbury 2017, p.289), before the test, Gen. Groves drafted a “news release in case the explosion was larger than expected and destroyed Oppenheimer and the other observers.”
Italian physicist Enrico Fermi worked furiously on computations that found atmospheric ignition unlikely, but he “worried whether there were undiscovered phenomena that, under the novel conditions of extreme heat, might lead to unexpected disaster,” according to Ord’s The Precipice. The day of the blast, Fermi reportedly put the chances of atmospheric ignition at “about ten percent.”
James Conant, President of Harvard University, observed the test in person and thought the flash was much longer and brighter than expected. He wrote in his private notes: “My instantaneous reaction was that something had gone wrong and that the thermal nuclear transformation of the atmosphere, once discussed as a possibility and jokingly referred to a few minutes earlier, had actually occurred.” Yes. Multiple personal accounts of the test report that Fermi had offered to “make book” at fixed odds on whether: 1) the test would incinerate New Mexico, and 2) the test would ignite the whole world.
That the test was conducted in spite of its potential to cause omnicide has characterized and informed the nuclear weapons complex ever since.
The extreme secrecy that protected “the gadget” has been maintained to this day. Nuclear attack schemes are only leaked to the public when disguised in the tired but reliable Cold War euphemisms like “deterrence,” “flexible response,” or “Single Integrated Operational Plan.”
Official lying concealed in 1945 and still sanitizes today the catastrophic realities of nuclear explosions, or buries them under mountains of verbiage about “low-yield” H-bombs or “theater weapons,” that are “designed to limit collateral damage.” Truman’s August 6 public statement dared to claim that Hiroshima was “a military base,” chosen in order “to avoid the killing of civilians.” (The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb, Gar Alperovitz, New York 1995, p.521)
Care or concern for the victims of nuclear attacks has never curtailed or even limited the development of a nuclear warhead. How else explain submarine missile warheads with 31 times the force of the Hiroshima bomb, or the neutron bomb designed to kill living things but leave inanimate objects intact? If concern for targeted peoples existed inside the nuclear weapons complex, the Bomb would already have been abolished, because it is well known that nuclear attacks can only produce deliberate massacres caused by the uncontrollable, indiscriminate mass destruction of shattering overpressure, hurricane force winds, immense firestorms, agonizing radiation burns and poisoning, and eventual radiation-induced diseases. To see for yourself, watch Greg Mitchell’s short film “Atomic Cover-up” via PBS.org.
Don’t be fooled this August when the old canard is trotted out for the 80th time about how U.S. atomic bombings of cities “saved lives.” No bombing ever did that.
