Under the Cloud

On October 19, 1942, nearly eleven months after the United States declared war on Japan, Major General Leslie Groves, the military head of what came to be known as the Manhattan Project, sat with Robert Oppenheimer on the Twentieth Century Limited. They must have appeared an odd pair—Groves with his bulldog face and elephantine body sitting across from Oppenheimer, his frame nearly skeletal in its thinness as he fidgeted and chain-smoked Chesterfields. At an undefined point as the train sped between Chicago and New York, Groves made his decision about the scientific leadership for the bomb, “the Gadget,” as some subsequent combination of secrecy and perversity named it. Groves wanted Oppenheimer. Of the possible candidates from the scientific community, Oppenheimer alone possessed the intelligence and the organizational instincts to direct the making of the first atomic bomb. Groves rightly thought Robert Oppenheimer brilliant, but more than that, he saw in him a leader able to focus the effort necessary to solve the most complex atomic problem ever attempted. Although nuclear physicists had long known the theoretical basis for a bomb, the practical difficulties of its construction remained monumental.

The decision that day virtually guaranteed the project’s success, for even Oppenheimer’s detractors agreed that no other man could do it. He produced the first atomic bomb in less than three years, from beginning to end. Looking back, it seems to me that in many ways, October 19 was the beginning of the end.

I think Oppenheimer would agree that the bomb delivered the end of the world as we had known it. The physicists who made the bomb—Oppenheimer, Fermi, Szilard, Teller, Seabold and many others—clad in a profound understanding of physics and armed with little more than slide rules, comprehended, with a depth of understanding that surpassed that of the military or political leaders who would direct its use, that nuclear weapons had the potential to destroy the planet.

Soon enough the burned and mutilated survivors of Hiroshima who wandered in the charred remains of their city would leave no doubt about the human face of the militarized nuclear age. But did the architects of the bomb foresee that their own children would huddle under their desks as sirens prepared them for a blast? That they would grow up not asking if, wondering only when, the next bomb would fall? Though the first bombs undoubtedly saved lives, arguably more Japanese than American, no one is saved from their legacy.

On the opposite side of the continent on that same October 19, I was born. It was many decades before I learned that I shared a birthday of sorts with the first atomic bomb.

Of course I do not remember those first three years while the bomb was being made. If I could, I think I would have thought them normal. There would have been blackouts in the town of San Pedro, where I lived with my parents, my older sister and, within a little more than a year of my birth, my baby brother. For sure my mother had a vegetable garden, but then, that was normal; she loved to garden, grew vegetables all her life, and had no need to call it a Victory Garden. Every night my father returned home in his three-piece suit. His orange Waterford pen-and-pencil set, fastened in his breast pocket by gold clips, perched there like tropical birds on a wire. His slide rule, made from ivory and engraved with precisely etched black scales, shared the pocket and was hidden tucked in a leather sheath. I was unaware that most fathers were at war, fathers like my uncle, a prisoner of the Japanese in the Philippines. Later I learned the reason for my father’s presence. It was no lack of patriotism, though I’m sure my father was not a fighter. Rather, as a chemical engineer with Standard Oil Company of California, his talents were more valuable making petroleum in Los Angeles. Petroleum, after all, was central to the war on all...