Abstract
A summer evening in the late 1960s: Mary Palevsky, at home after completing her first year at the university argues vehemently with her father, Harry Palevsky, a noted physicist at Brookhaven National Laboratory on New York's Long Island.
She is determined to do something that he forbids. Angry and frustrated, she blurts out: “What gives you the right to decide what is good or bad for me to do? You worked on atomic bombs that killed 150,000 people. And you are always telling me what you know about being a good person. Look at what you have done!” It is not a Kodak moment in the Palevsky household.
In the early days of World War II, Harry Palevsky and Elaine Sammel, both brilliant and technologically accomplished people, joined the Manhattan Project's Metallurgical Laboratory at the University of Chicago, where they met and began dating. Later they were transferred, separately, to Los Alamos. They were married on July 25, 1945. She was 22; he was 25. Twelve days later, Hiroshima was destroyed.
“Questions about the moral and ethical implications of the bomb have always been in the background of my life,” writes Palevsky, possibly with some understatement.
Palevsky became particularly obsessed with the Manhattan Project in the mid-1990s during the controversy over the Smithsonian Institution's proposed Enola Gay exhibit. Although the centerpiece was to be a portion of the fuselage of the Hiroshima plane, the exhibition's clear purpose was to focus attention on the moral and political meanings of the atom bomb in historical context.
“The FDA gave me approval, Sharon; why can't you?”
Palevsky knew her parents to be thoughtful and moral people dedicated to making the world a better place. But they had recently died and as the Smithsonian controversy rolled on, she became determined to come to grips with their involvement in the Manhattan Project.
She ransacked her memory for things her mother and father had said over the years about the project, and she reviewed her father's recollections, which she had tape-recorded shortly before his death. But she also sought out other experts and witnesses, including 16 Manhattan Project scientists.
Atomic Fragments, writes Palevsky, “is a study in memory and meaning, an exploration of the intersection of the personal and public, through life spans and across generations.” Just so. The book explores how Palevsky, the author, came to understand the bomb project and her parents' role in it. It also touches upon how a few other Manhattan Project scientists recall, understand, and perhaps redefine their own roles and motives.
Palevsky weaves together and summarizes in-depth conversations she had with Hans Bethe, the war-time director of the Theoretical Division at Los Alamos; Edward Teller, a man who truly “needs no introduction”; Philip Morrison, who conducted on-the-scene surveys of Hiroshima and Nagasaki shortly after the bombings and quickly became a champion of nuclear disarmament; David Hawkins, a philosophy professor who was J. Robert Oppenheimer's assistant and confidant at Los Alamos; Robert R. Wilson, who became so disgusted with weapons work that he turned to particle physics after the war, eventually getting Fermilab up and running; and Joseph Rotblat, the only scientist who left the project during the war for reasons of conscience.
And then there is Herbert York, the first director of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and now an ardent nuclear abolitionist. In one conversation with York, Palevsky told how Robert Wilson seemed to have had some regrets about leaving Los Alamos and giving up his security clearance. He might have been more effective in the post-war nuclear debate, Wilson had come to believe, if he had remained an insider for a time. York, for many years the quintessential insider, responded:
“It depends on how repulsed you were by Hiroshima. It may be wrong, and maybe it's just a much later rationalization, but in my own case, I simply say there were 50 million people killed in the war and very few at Hiroshima that ended it. So I don't have any feeling of regret at all except in the narrowest sense—another 150,000 or so people did die—mostly civilians, but it was mostly civilians in the whole war.”
A shocking quote. But quoting people out of context is notoriously unfair. Twenty-seven pages are devoted to York, and in that fuller reading he comes across as a thoughtful man of rigorous intellectual integrity who felt that by the summer of 1945, there were no moral thresholds left to cross. The only sensible way to prosecute the war at that point, according to York, was to end it quickly and definitively.
The principal value of Atomic Fragments is not Palevsky's inner journey, which is generally fascinating, even when she strains a little too hard now and then to make a poetic point. The value is that Palevsky offers the testimony of people like York plain. Palevsky makes copious use of direct quotations, letting her interviewees paint their own portraits in full color, never in black and white.
But that is not to suggest that Palevsky was merely a walking tape recorder. She probed and prodded and even argued with her interviewees, but always in an attempt to more precisely understand what they had been up to during the war, to “ask what happens to people with kind hearts and humanist feelings when they work on weapons of mass destruction—espe-cially when those weapons are used.”
In the end, Palevsky came to terms with her parents' role in the Manhattan Project, but not with the meaning of the bomb itself. With the exception of Rotblat, who has never agreed that the use of the bomb was in any sense proper, no one in the book seems to have regrets about having worked on the Manhattan Project.
The war had been long and brutal. Tens of millions of civilians had already died in Europe and Asia. Firebombs carried by a massive fleet of B-29s were incinerating Japanese civilians by the tens of thousands every week. Japanese militarists were not likely to surrender on terms that the allies could live with.
If the war dragged on for many more months, additional hundreds of thousands of Japanese would die. If the United States were forced to invade, U.S. and Japanese casualties would be horrific—Okinawa writ many times over. The bomb had to be used. Its “shock” value would end the war.
These arguments of necessity have been trotted out for more than 50 years. It is hard to imagine that anyone who worked on the Manhattan Project to its conclusion would disagree with them. One must agree or be wracked by unending, paralyzing guilt.
But lurking in the shadows in several of the interviews is a more troubling moral argument. Isn't it likely that the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki spared the world a true nuclear holocaust in which tens if not hundreds of millions would have died? The use of atomic weapons on cities had made it clear to all that world wars could no longer be fought. Surely that was a moral good. Hans Bethe made the point most directly:
“You can no longer use atomic bombs for saving lives. Hiroshima saved lives, lots of them, lots of Japanese and many Americans. If there were a nuclear war today, it would be a destruction of both countries, so in that sense it cannot be repeated. But I think the realization that it cannot and must not be repeated was very much facilitated by Hiroshima. If we hadn't had these two atomic bombings, people would not have realized what a terrible thing this is….
“And so, in a way, the victims of Hiroshima died so other people could live. It is unhappy, but that is the way it is. And there was no way of preventing the atomic bomb from being invented, both by the United States and Russia.”
Atomic Fragments is unlike any other history of the Manhattan Project. It is not remotely definitive; it is as subjective and as fragmentary as its title suggests. But it is, as advertised, a “study in memory and meaning”— memories and meanings that may send shivers along your spine as they challenge your sense of right and wrong.