Are Nuclear Weapons Useless? II-Who Else Said So?
Another person who asserted the uselessness of atomic bombs, years before General Powell did, was J. Robert Oppenheimer. Oppenheimer was also someone you’d think might know, if anyone would. He was the physicist who directed the Scientific Division of the Manhattan Project at the secret Site Y in northern New Mexico where the world’s first atomic bombs were designed. Even before the first one was tested, Oppenheimer had declared their uselessness.
Not until Harry Truman became president on April 12, 1945, did he learn about the Manhattan Project to build the new kind of bomb. In May, a committee of Manhattan Project leaders called the Interim Committee was put together to advise him on whether and how to use the bomb, if we should have it to use. That had never been certain. But by May 1945, it was looking likely that we would.
Germany surrendered on May 8, 1945. The great fear—the fear that had motivated the urgent work in the Manhattan Project—had been that the Germans would be the first to develop an atomic bomb. We knew now that wasn’t going to happen.
No one had thought Japan would be able during the war to develop an atomic bomb.
At the end of May 1945, six weeks before the first atomic bomb was successfully tested at Trinity in southern New Mexico, Oppenheimer was visited by another Manhattan Project physicist, Leo Szilard. The day after Szilard called on Oppenheimer, a meeting of the Interim Committee was to take place in Washington D.C. Oppenheimer would be present as a member of the Interim Committee’s Scientific Advisory Group.
Szilard wanted Oppenheimer to oppose using the bomb on Japan. Szilard and a number of other Manhattan Project scientists believed that using the bomb would immediately start a nuclear arms race that would imperil humanity.
In response to Szilard’s urgings, Oppenheimer said, according to Szilard,
“The atomic bomb is shit.”
“What do you mean by that?” Szilard asked.
“Well, this is a weapon which has no military significance. It will make a big bang—a very big bang—but it is not a weapon which is useful in war.”1
When General Powell said nuclear weapons were “useless,” is that what he had meant—that they had “no military significance”?
The Interim Committee did meet the next day, June 1, and Oppenheimer attended. There were, apparently, differences of opinion between the Advisory group and the Committee as to whether the bomb should be used on Japan and how. Still, after some discussion, the Interim Committee produced a recommendation that the bomb be used in Japan “on a military plant surrounded by worker’s homes without prior warning.” That is, the Committee recommended that it be used as a “strategic” weapon the way conventional bombs had been used in Germany to attack their war-making resources.
There was no question, now, as we’ve said, of using the atomic bomb on Germany.
President Truman’s representative on the Interim Committee, a businessman from South Carolina named Jimmy Byrne who would later be Truman’s Secretary of State, had strongly supported this recommendation. The same day, he carried the Committee’s recommendation to President Truman. We have no record of President Truman’s response to it.
The Interim Committee had recommended. then, a “strategic” use of the new bomb. That is, a military use.
Is this a use the new bomb did have or could have had?
Next: Are They Useless? III-Can They Have a Military Significance?
Kai Bird, Martin J. Sherwin, American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, Alfred A. Knopf, 2005, p. 292