Published on Portside (https://portside.org/)
A New, Chilling Secret About the Manhattan Project Has Just
Been Made Public
Fred
Kaplan
August
8, 2023
Slate
Newly declassified
documents reveal that Gen. Leslie Groves—director of the Manhattan Project, the
top-secret operation that built the atomic bomb during World War II—misled
Congress and the public about the effects of radiation. He did so initially out
of ignorance, then denial, and finally, willful deception.
The documents also
show that some scientists in the project, including J. Robert Oppenheimer,
director of the Los Alamos lab where the bomb was first tested, kept mum about
Groves’ lie rather than dispute him or confront the general directly.
The cache of
documents—the latest in a series of once secret and top-secret material about
the A-bomb obtained over the years by the National Security Archive, a private
research organization at George Washington University—was released on Monday,
within days of the 78th anniversary of the bombings of
Hiroshima and Nagasaki and in the wake of the release of Oppenheimer,
the wildly (and deservedly) successful film that has grossed $500 million since its hit theaters
just three weeks ago.
One of the new
documents the archive obtained is a memo by four scientists, titled “Calculated Biological Effects of Atomic Explosion in
Hiroshima and Nagasaki,” dated Sept. 1, 1945. (The bombs were
dropped on Aug. 6 and 9 of that year.) Until this memo was written, it had been
assumed the A-bomb’s victims would be killed by its blast and its heat. But
this memo concluded that at least some of the deaths had been caused by
radioactive fallout, days or weeks after the explosions.
And yet, the day
before the memo’s date, at a press conference in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, Groves
said radiation had caused no deaths and that claims to the contrary—some
published in Asian newspapers—were “propaganda.” In a memo to Oppenheimer,
George Kistiakowsky, the Los Alamos scientist who coordinated the biological
report, said that Groves had “stuck his neck out by a mile,” so he hesitated
to pass the study along.
Even by then,
enough was known about radiation poisoning to have made Groves stop short of
dismissing the claims so strongly. The archive’s documents show that, back in
April, three months before the first test of the bomb in New Mexico, medical
experts with the Manhattan Project warned of a toxic “cloud” that could spew “radioactive dust” over a
wide radius for “hours after the detonation.” Some urged Groves
to evacuate the area around the test site, which he resisted, not wanting to
attract media attention. One scientist remembered years later that Groves
“sniffed” at the warning and said, “What’s the matter with you, are you a Hearst propagandist?”
(Hearst was the leading newspaper chain of the day, often specializing in
sensational reports.)
On July 21, five
days after the test, Stafford Warren, the Manhattan Project’s chief
medical officer, wrote to Groves that “the dust outfall from the various
portions of the cloud was potentially a very serious hazard over a band almost
30 miles wide extending almost 90 miles northeast of the site,” adding that
there was still “a tremendous amount of radioactive dust floating in the air.”
(Recent studies, based on computer modeling, suggest
that radioactivity from the first atomic test spread much farther, affecting 46
states and parts of Mexico and Canada.)
Yet Groves ignored
Warren’s findings. On July 30, in a memo on the likely effects of an atom
bomb dropped on Japan, he wrote Gen. George Marshall, the U.S. Army chief of staff:
“No damaging effects are anticipated on the ground from radioactive materials.”
(This was a deceptively written sentence: at the time, few thought much fallout
would linger “on the ground,” but it was widely known that it could rain down
from the sky and scatter across the air, which humans could breathe or soak
in.)
Groves’ awareness
of this danger is clear in an Aug. 25 excerpt from his diary, in which he wants
to know if it’s safe to invite the press to come survey the test site (this,
more than two months after the first test). One of the scientists told him that
it “wouldn’t be so safe” if the journalists stood as
close as 100 feet from where the bomb had gone off. Reporters did come on Sept.
11 and were given “white booties” to protect them from possible radiation.
It’s possible
that, even at this point, Groves simply didn’t believe the worst about
radiation. On the same day as his diary entry about inviting reporters, he had
a phone conversation with a fellow officer at
Oak Ridge about Japanese radio broadcasts reporting cases of radiation
sickness. Groves said this was all “propaganda” and that the sickness was more
likely caused by “good thermal burns.”
Still, Groves sent
a team of inspectors to the two bombed cities to determine the impact of radioactivity. He wrote Gen. Marshall that casualties from
radiation were “unlikely,” but the “facts” had to be established.
This makes sense.
Before the bombs were dropped, most scientists assumed that blast and heat
would be the dominant effects. Radiation would be a footnote; anyone who
received a lethal dose of radiation would be close enough to the explosion to
die from the blast or the heat.
However, as was
later discovered, the A-bomb’s “secondary effects”—radiation, smoke, fire in
particular—could, under certain circumstances, spread even farther than the
effects of blast and heat.
As early as the
first inspectors’ report—the one that Kistiakowsky at first withheld from
Groves but eventually passed along to him—there was notation of “freak survivors” within the blast radius who
later died of radiation sickness.
On Nov. 27, months
after the memo about the biological effects of the atomic explosions in
Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Stafford Warren, the project’s chief medical
officer, wrote Groves with even more definitive proof. Of the roughly 4,000
patients admitted to hospitals in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, he wrote, “1300 or
33% showed effects of radiation and, of this number, approximately one-half
died.”
Nonetheless, three
days later, in testimony before the Senate Special Committee on Atomic Energy,
Groves was asked if there was any “radioactive residue” at the two bombed
Japanese cities. Groves replied, “There is none. That is a very positive ‘none.’ ”
Groves further
claimed that no one in the two cities suffered radiation injury “excepting at
the time that the bomb actually went off.” He added that it “really would take
an accident for … the average person, within the range of the bomb, to be
killed by radioactive effects.”
Finally, in a
comment that sealed his reputation among his critics, Groves said that
irradiated victims who died not right away, but after some time, would do so
“without undue suffering. In fact,” he said, “they say it is a very pleasant
way to die.”
Groves discounted,
downplayed, then denied the reports about radiation sickness because, like many
at the time, he thought that nuclear weapons would be the centerpiece of U.S.
defense [sic] policy (as indeed they were for the next few decades) and that
the American public would rebel against them if they were seen as something
like poison gas—and thus beyond a moral threshold.
By this time,
Oppenheimer had recently departed from Los Alamos, but he remained on
government advisory boards. Like many scientists, he had underestimated the
effects of radiation, but he was now well aware of the inspectors’ studies and
of Groves’ false comments. Heralded as “the father of the atom bomb,” he felt
blood on his hands, as he famously confessed to President Harry Truman. But he
said nothing about Groves’ lies—at least not in public.
Some were not so
silent. On Dec. 6, 1945, one week after Groves’ testimony, Philip Morrison, a Manhattan Project scientist
who was on the team that surveyed the bombs’ damage in Japan, testified before
the same committee, citing the facts about radiation, directly contradicting
Groves’ blithe assurances. Morrison went on to become a professor of physics at
MIT and an activist in the community of scientists—many of them veterans of the
Manhattan Project—who advocated nuclear arms control and disarmament.
Maybe someday
someone will make a movie about him.
Fred Kaplan is the
author of The Bomb: Presidents, Generals, and the Secret History of
Nuclear War.
Source URL: https://portside.org/2023-08-09/new-chilling-secret-about-manhattan-project-has-just-been-made-public
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