Shockwave: Countdown to Hiroshima

By Stephen Walker (HarperCollins, 352 pages, $26.95. Grade: A-

The 60th anniversary of the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima follows closely the 60th anniversary of the debate on whether using the atomic bomb was the right thing to do.

But before it was released, it wasn't much of a debate.

Although some scientists thought the United States should demonstrate the power of the bomb before using it against Japan, they never had the chance to lobby President Truman. Even if they had, Truman probably wouldn't have been dissuaded.

For starters, no one was sure that the bomb would work, and a failed demonstration would have been disastrous in terms of the perception of American strength overseas. Then, there was the concern about how many American lives would be lost in an invasion of Japan if the bomb wasn't dropped (there, even schoolchildren were preparing to fight Americans with nothing more than sharpened bamboo sticks).

In addition, the specter of the Soviets entering the war in the Pacific loomed; Truman fervently wanted to end the war before this could happen. America had also spent $2 billion creating the bomb - a huge amount by 1945 standards - and that investment created a momentum of its own.

Finally, the memory of Pearl Harbor was still fresh in America's mind, fueling near-universal agreement that the Japanese deserved to be the target for the most powerful weapon ever developed.

On a clear August morning in 1945, they were.

Shockwave is the story of how that happened and covers the three weeks between the testing of the bomb and its use on Hiroshima.

Author Stephen Walker has combined the scientific, political, military and human factors that led to the development and use of the atomic bomb and told the story from the points of view of both the bombers and the bombed to create riveting parallel stories. For the Americans, it was a story of everything going right, and for the Japanese, it was a story of everything going wrong.

What may strike today's readers about the development of the atomic bomb was how low-tech so much of it was: critical calculations done with slide rules, plutonium hauled around in suitcases, detonators that could have been activated by thunderstorms, fuses that had to be installed by hand in the bumpy insides of a bomb bay.

The plane that dropped the first atomic bomb, the Enola Gay, was so overweight that no one knew if it could even get off the ground. (Lighter planes had failed to.) Only after it was en route to Japan did the crew learn what they were carrying. Yet, remarkably, everything that had to fall into place did.

Conversely, everything that could go wrong for the residents of Hiroshima did. Because the city had not already been leveled by the kind of fire-bombing raids that destroyed so many other Japanese cities, Hiroshima became a logical target.

Its residents (including 7,000 schoolchildren) literally pulled down 70,000 houses to make fire breaks in anticipation of incendiary raids. Were such a raid to come, the city had only 26 fire trucks to employ. They lived with a false sense of security, encouraged by the rumor that President Truman's mother was imprisoned in the city.

"There was virtually no protection from the blast," Walker writes. "The very flatness of the city center helped seal its destruction. The lack of any warning also contributed: Nobody was in the shelters when the bomb exploded. The whole city was taken by surprise. Only freakish accidents of fate ensured survival. Eizo Nomura was one such survivor, a clerk in the Fuel Distribution and Control Cooperative, a concrete building 100 meters from the hypocenter. Moments before the explosion, he had gone down into the basement to retrieve a document his chief had forgotten. Quite possibly he was the closest man to the hypocenter to survive."

Shockwave isn't without its minor annoyances: Walker repeatedly tells us that a general handled the plutonium used in the bomb with rubber gloves, and some of his prose in describing the effects of the blast reads like a laundry list. But all in all, he's given us a heckuva story that's hard to put down - and that's saying a lot for a story where you already know the ending.

The Ruin of J. Robert Oppenheimer and the Birth of the Modern Arms Race

By Priscilla J. McMillan (Viking, 338 pages, $25.95). Grade: A

J. Robert Oppenheimer is probably unknown to generations of Americans, but he clearly affected all our lives. Oppenheimer was the brilliant and charismatic leader of the Manhattan Project - the top-secret American effort in World War II to develop the atomic bomb.

One might think that such an achievement would either forever burn him into the national consciousness as a hero or a villain, depending on your point of view, but it was ultimately politics instead of physics that determined Oppenheimer's fate.

How that happened, and why, is the subject of Patricia McMillan's impressive biography, a book marked as much by its detailed explorations into the incredible technical challenges that faced Oppenheimer and other atomic scientists as it is by the political and personal story of Oppenheimer's slow undoing.

It's also the story of what happens when science meets politics, a friction that continues today in areas such as stem-cell research and the teaching of evolution.

While McMillan brings readers a detailed education about the development of atomic weapons, the book mainly concentrates on the years following WWII, offering an historical sequel, of sorts, to Stephen Walker's Shockwave.

After the United States used fission weapons to force Japan into surrender, America's nuclear supremacy was quickly challenged by the Soviet Union. Some scientists and politicians believed that for America to recapture its lead, it should develop a hydrogen bomb - a weapon 1,000 times more powerful than the weapons that leveled Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Besides the daunting technical difficulties in developing such weapons - innovations that many believed went beyond being military weapons to being tools of genocide, so great were their power - many members of the atomic community, including Oppenheimer, thought that the decision to develop such weapons should involve the American public.

His lack of enthusiasm about the hydrogen bomb on both practical and moral grounds was at odds with some other scientists (Edward Teller chiefly among them) and the U.S. Air Force, which viewed more potent nuclear weapons as its ticket to becoming the preeminent arm of the U.S. armed forces.

Oppenheimer and others believed that if the United States developed the hydrogen bomb, the Soviets would surely follow.

"(Many scientists) noted that with its two long coasts, the United States was more vulnerable than the USSR to attack from the sea . . . and that in embarking on a Super (hydrogen bomb) program, the United States would be doing Russia's research for it: the Russians inevitably would learn what we were up to. Everyone agreed that the Super was needed neither for deterrence nor retaliation, since the U.S. atomic stockpile would be sufficient to deal the Soviet Union a devastating blow even if that country had the Super and we did not," McMillan writes.

But then came the Korean War and the McCarthy hearings that, combined, created a political climate where opposition or even neutrality to the hydrogen bomb was viewed as unpatriotic. Oppenheimer became the personification of this perceived lack of patriotism, fueled in part by his association with friends who had links to the Communist Party.

No one fed that perception more than Teller, the brilliant yet churlish advocate of the hydrogen bomb. Teller thought that the nuclear laboratory at Los Alamos should devote all its attention to the hydrogen bomb. When the General Advisory Committee, which largely oversaw U.S. nuclear activities, disagreed, Teller put the blame squarely on Oppenheimer.

"(Oppenheimer) had a golden tongue, and the others must have succumbed to his spell. Teller did not view it as a matter of honest error or difference of opinion. Oppenheimer wanted to kill his, Teller's program; therefore he must have a hidden motive."

Of course, Oppenheimer eventually lost his argument and because of that, in McMillan's view, America and the USSR were propelled into a needless and dangerous arms race that lasted half a century.

What makes The Ruin of J. Robert Oppenheimer such an engaging book is McMillan's remarkable ability to take the reader inside the technical and political aspects of the Atomic Age. It makes for a great story about how technical and scientific challenges often are secondary to the power of politics and personality, leaving it only to one's imagination to wonder where that conflict will play out next.

Dan Danbom is a freelance writer living in Denver.

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