How the Atomic Bomb Redefined Geopolitics — 80 Years On

BIANNA GOLODRYGA, HOST: Well, this week marks 80 years since U.S. atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, devastating two of Japan’s major cities and killing an estimated 200,000 people. While this brought an end to the Second World War, the tragic legacy of the bombings still lingers today.

Now, historian Garrett Graff takes us back to that pivotal moment in his new book, “The Devil Reached Toward the Sky.” It gathers hundreds of accounts of those involved in the bombings from the crews of the B-29 bombers to the decision makers. He joins Walter Isaacson to discuss the scientific, political, deeply personal impact of how the bombs came to be.

WALTER ISAACSON: Thank you, Bianna. And Garrett Graff, welcome to the show.

 

GARRETT GRAFF: Thanks for having me, Walter.

 

ISAACSON: This is your third oral history book you did one on D-Day, you did one on 9/11 — why the format of an oral history, especially when you’re not really interviewing most of the people, it’s gathering their interviews from the past?

 

GRAFF: Exactly. This book is coming of course, at the 80th anniversary this month of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings, and the end of World War II. And I think this 80th anniversary feels so poignant to a lot of people because it marks the unofficial passing of the last of that greatest generation. And so for me, what I wanted to do with this project and with my D-Day book last year was — this is a moment when we have effectively every first-person memory of World War II that we’re ever going to have. And so, as these events slip from living memory into history, I wanted to try to take readers back to these apocal events in the shoes of the people who lived them firsthand.  

 

I love narrative history — but there’s often a sense in narrative history that events are sort of neater, cleaner and more preordained than they actually felt to any of the participants at the time. So I think there’s a unique power in oral history of sort of going back in the words of the people who lived them to a moment when the outcome of these events was uncertain to them. So, you know, you’re going back and sort of hearing from the physicists at moments when, like, they didn’t know whether Adolf Hitler would get the bomb first. They didn’t know that the US would — and the allies would even win World War II. They didn’t know whether the atom bomb would work at all.

 

ISAACSON: What did you discover that was slightly different by doing it based on them talking at the time?

 

GRAFF: Yeah, I think one of the things that you really come through when you look at the sort of diversity of voices in a project like this is, I think we oversimplify the story of the Manhattan Project so often to J. Robert Oppenheimer and his band of merry physicists on a mesa in Los Alamos. And, what you really see in this full scope and scale of the Manhattan Project is how much of this was about America’s industrial might. The secret cities that we built in Oak Ridge, Tennessee and Hanford, Washington, where we refined uranium and plutonium, you know, in factories and facilities and cities that had been carved out of, you know, orchards and, you know, mountain valleys that by the end of the war housed and employed a hundred thousand people a piece. You know, the bus system in Oak Ridge, Tennessee in August, 1945 when the atomic bomb was dropped was one of the 10 largest public transit systems in the United States. And no one knew it existed at all, and the city didn’t appear on any public map anywhere in the United States.

 

ISAACSON: You know, just hearing that and reading it in your book makes me think, could we ever do that anymore? I mean, we can’t build a rail system in California after 20 years.

 

GRAFF: Yeah. And I think that there is a lot to be said about the you know, what this era meant in terms of sort of news consumption and, you know, the ability of these mountain communities and desert communities in eastern Washington to keep secrets back then that could never hold in the age of the internet. But I do think that there is, you know, there’s some very important modern relevances of looking back at this project today. First the Manhattan Project rewrites the way that government thinks about science and technology as a core national strength. You know, there’s this deep irony in the first couple of years of the book where you have this group of mostly Jewish refugee scientists fleeing Europe, showing up on the shores of the United States in the late 1930s and sort of pleading with the US government to launch an atomic bomb effort, and the military wanting nothing to do with it. And they sort of say, you know, basically like science has no place in the military. You know, the military is all about, you know, war fighting and logistics and morale. And, you know, we don’t need a weapon like this. And then of course, the military gets pretty excited about the atomic bomb a few months later after Pearl Harbor.

 

ISAACSON: One of the people who changes that — and you got ’em in the book — is Vannevar Bush, who compared this to building the pyramids. And he’s the one who puts together that government, private, academic consortium that does so much. Tell me about his role.

 

GRAFF: Yeah, this is of course where America sort of begins to knit together government and science and technology. And, you know, there’s a quote in the introduction of the book where, you know, the story that we tell of World War II is about where the battles are fought. You know, Bastogne, D-Day, Leyte Gulf, Okinawa — 

 

ISAACSON: Yeah, Omaha Beach.

 

GRAFF: Exactly. But where the war is really won is in laboratories at MIT where radar and the proximity fuse are developed. It’s won in the laboratories at Los Alamos and in the, you know, code breaking rooms of Bletchley Park in the UK with the German enigma. And that, you know, as much as we think of World War II as a story of the servicemen in Europe and the Pacific, it really is a war that is as much a story of scientists and mathematicians.

 

ISAACSON: But it’s not just the scientists. In your book, what really struck me was like the Ford Motor Plant and Willow Run, and our ability — which I feel we’ve lost a little bit now — to do manufacturing at scale quickly.

 

GRAFF: Yes. And, that’s really where the, you know, magic of the Manhattan Project comes in. I mean, it’s the — there’s a reason that the Manhattan Project today remains, you know, a code word for daring and audacity. And part of that is in these early months, you have physicists at the University of Chicago beginning to map out on pieces of paper — I mean, remember, this is an era — they’re all working with slide rulers, you know, there are not computers that are aiding this engineering for most of the war. And with their slide rulers and butcher paper, they are starting to map out how to build and refine plutonium in orders of kilograms at a time when plutonium has never actually been even seen by the naked human eye. And it literally exists in the United States only in microscopic amounts.

 

ISAACSON: You talk about those people who convinced the military and for that matter, President Roosevelt to do the bomb. A lot of ’em, the Jewish refugees. Tell me about the role of refugees and whether that has some relevance today too, when we’re not allowing in as many foreign scientists.

 

GRAFF: Yeah, I —  again, I think unfortunately, this too, in too many places feels like a history book that should be filed under current events in the bookstore. Because again, this atomic bomb project would have never gotten off the ground without the leadership and the imagination of the Jewish refugee scientists who flee fascist Europe, come to the United States in the 1930s and forties. And in that sense, one of the things that really stands out for me in the book is when we talk about the atomic bomb and the 80th anniversary this month, we immediately leap to thinking about Japan and Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the end of the war in the Pacific. But the atomic bomb is entirely rooted in fascist Europe and the rise of Hitler’s Third Reich. And it is in fact, the motivating factor for these scientists is they know the German scientists left behind like Werner Heisenberg, who they fear are at work themselves on an atomic bomb. And so their motivation day in, day out for most of the three years of the Manhattan Project is to build the atomic bomb before Hitler does.

 

ISAACSON: You talk about Oak Ridge as a wonderful scene or, or discussion in the book about the young women in Oak Ridge, the high school graduates in the race. I think it’s to produce plutonium, right?

 

GRAFF: Uranium, yeah. Yeah.

 

ISAACSON: And tell, tell me about how that was important.

 

GRAFF: Yeah, and this is sort of, again, you know, we’re talking about the sort of industrial power of the United States and the role of, you know, Ford Motor Company building bombers or DuPont and Tennessee Eastman end up the big corporate players in the Manhattan Project. And in that Oakridge facility, Tennessee Eastman is looking around at what its labor workforce could be as they need to hire, you know, thousands and tens of thousands of workers in remote mountain Tennessee outside Knoxville, and they settle on high school girls from the surrounding community. You know, that’s who’s left in the workforce by 43, 44. And you have all the fancy California Berkeley PhDs saying, you know, we don’t think these women can actually operate these uranium refining machines called calutrons. And then they put ’em in a head-to-head test. And it turns out the teen girls in Tennessee outperform the California PhDs in uranium production.

 

And, what is just so incredible, again about the secrecy of this is most of those women who were known at the time as Calutron girls, you know, worked on those, you know, machines, you know, 24 hours a day, three shifts a day refining and creating uranium, and heard the word uranium for the first time when Harry Truman announces the existence of the Manhattan Project on August 6th, 1945. They never knew what they were doing behind those machines, what was coming out the other side, and what they were contributing to the war effort.

 

ISAACSON: When you talk about people not really knowing all the steps and the process that they were contributing to, that goes all the way up to Harry Truman, who I don’t think knew about the making of the bomb until Franklin Roosevelt dies and Truman suddenly becomes president. Tell me how that secrecy worked.

 

GRAFF: Yeah, and this is to me, one of the most amazing scenes in the book is, Franklin Roosevelt dies in spring 1945. Harry Truman is sworn in and Secretary of War Henry Stimson sort of stays after the first cabinet meeting with Truman and pulls Truman aside and says, “there’s really something I should come talk to you about.” And then sort of shows up with this briefing you know, where he brings Harry Truman into the fold for the first time about the existence of the Manhattan Project, the idea of an atomic bomb, and the fact that at that point they are mere weeks away from having the first working nuclear advice — nuclear device in the world.

 

ISAACSON: And there’s a decision made to drop the bomb, but it’s not actually a clear decision. It’s not like they have a very formal process and Truman makes a decision. It seems almost as if just instinctual that he does it. How was that decision made, and did he have any regrets?

 

GRAFF: Yeah, I spent a lot of time in the book talking about what you might call the permission structure for the atomic bomb in the spring and summer of 1945. Because, you know, we look back on that event as so singularly transformative, you know, the only time we ever used these weapons in combat in human history. But at the time we were involved in this incredibly brutal and deadly war with Japan. In that spring of 1945, Curtis LeMay is leading bombing missions against Japan, fire bombing Tokyo in Operation Meetinghouse that spring, that kills a hundred thousand Japanese in a single night. The s —  the deadliest night of conflict in human history. And then goes on to bomb a total of 66 Japanese cities. It, it, you know, single mission raids that are, you know, destroying 30, 40, 50, 60, even 70% of these cities in single nights. 

 

ISAACSON: But didn’t Secretary of War Henry Stimson, wasn’t he one of the ones who kind of understood we were going into a new era if we drop this bomb?

 

GRAFF: Yes, and they do, they do understand that this is a bigger bomb, that this is a different, different type of weapon, but they don’t necessarily think about it in the same sort of stark terms of civilian deaths that I think we now think of nuclear weapons.

 

ISAACSON: So in retrospect, were we right to drop the first bomb in Hiroshima?

 

GRAFF: It’s a really complicated question. I don’t think we will ever satisfy it one way or another. You know, I think all of the following are true. The dropping of the bomb certainly saves American lives. It probably saves Japanese lives. I mean, again, one of the things people lose sight of  is Japan is in the midst of a naval blockade that with widespread famine. And there are 200,000 Japanese civilians dying every month of starvation by the summer and fall of 1945. And, at the same time, I think it is hard to look back and think that these are weapons we could ever use again. I mean, I think that there is,

 

ISAACSON: But we used them again in Nagasaki a few days later. 

 

GRAFF:Yeah. 

 

ISAACSON: Was that justified?

 

GRAFF: In future conflicts, that, that you, I think is right, that sort of the central defining organizing principle of geopolitics after the war becomes never using these weapons again.

 

ISAACSON: Are you worried about that?

 

GRAFF: I’m very worried about it at this moment. And I think part of this moment in geopolitics is we lie a lot closer to nuclear danger than most people I think realize. We’ve already seen this year, you know, conflict between India and Pakistan, which are the two largest nuclear arsenals to ever come into open conflict. We’ve, of course seen the US and Israeli raids over Iran’s nuclear problem. And we have seen, you know, spreading conversations about nuclear proliferation in Europe and Asia as the US appears to pull back from some of its geopolitical alliances. 

 

ISAACSON: You went through hundreds of accounts of the Japanese survivors of the bomb. Tell me what you learned from that and what that was about.

 

GRAFF: Yeah. The final chapters of this book you know, I go back and forth between the triumph of the American, you know, Manhattan Project workers and the bomber crews that deliver these bombs, and then the tragedy on the ground in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The accounts from those cities are as searing as any memories I have ever come across in my historical research. And, I think, again, one of the things I really wanted to do with this project is over the next few years, we will see the passing of the last survivors of those bombs. And it’s important to me to carry their stories forward as a reminder about why these weapons are not like any other weapon in the human arsenal, and why we need to do everything that we can in our time to carry forward their dream that they are the last survivors of a nuclear weapon.

 

ISAACSON: Garrett Graff, thank you so much for joining us. 

 

GRAFF: Walter, always a pleasure.