Day One: Before Hiroshima and After

Day One: Before Hiroshima and After
Peter Wyden
New York: Simon and Schuster. 1984.

Vivid account of the problems in communication that occurred on America's way to developing the atomic bomb and of the effects of the bomb on the people of Hiroshima. A balanced account that recognizes America's responsibility to the world for producing a weapon that could end civilization and maybe even Earth and the context of a Japan that would never surrender until the last Japanese had been killed, depriving thousands and thousands of American GI's of their lives--unless the United States demonstrated the destructiveness of the atomic bomb to the Japanese government, and especially to Emperor Hirohito.

The bomb was created because of the American scientists' fear that Hitler was on the verge of developing it. Seems that Hitler was concerned more with rockets than with the atomic bomb project and the Germans were actually well behind in the race to develop it.

The scientists who developed the bomb were not sure that it would work and had no knowledge of the effects of radiation on survivors. The irony of it all is expressed in General Groves's statement that dying of radiation, he had been told, is relatively pleasant.

The need for the scientists to explain to FDR, Truman and Churchill in plain English, in the brief time allotted to them, the implications of the atomic bomb. This process had been enhanced by Einstein's letter to Roosevelt when Einstein was considered a has-been physicist, who was "a joke," in his words, at Princeton.

Throughout, the scientific world, with its culture of communication, clashed with the military world that prohibited freedom of speech. No "leaks." The military, in the person of General Groves, treated the scientists as people incapable of getting the job done without orders and control by the military.

The book makes vivid the enormousness of the power of the atomic bomb, which has been superseded by bombs many times more powerful and the horrible effects on innocent men, women and children. The decision that led to choosing Hiroshima as the target was political, with Secretary Stimson refusing to allow Kyoto, a Japanese intellectual and religious center, to be the target because it was a city he had visited and because of his concern that destroying it would point Japan toward Russia and not to the United States after the war.

In the end, both Oppenheimer, the lead scientist on the project, and General Groves, the lead military commander on the project, were stripped of power because of their arrogance and belief that they could do no wrong.

Best Sentences:
"...the making of the new weapon had posed, as Oppenheimer liked to phrase it, a 'technically sweet problem....' "

"The father of the bomb was...Dr. Leo Szilard, and the idea of building such a device occurred to him as he waited for a red traffic light to change at an intersection of Southampton Row in London.... Playfulness...led the...Hungarian-born physicist to visualize an atomic chain reaction as he ambled about the city in that golden September of 1933, pursuing his favorite pastimes: thinking and walking."