JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1875  [Part of a long series on Atomic and Nuclear Weapons]

There was a short period in July 1945–right after the atomic bombs were detonated over Nagasaki and Hiroshima–that a pervasive, acceptable logic took hold of the minds of many at Los Alamos and Washington D.C. that the  bomb might actually work to prevent war.  Loosely put, the bomb was too terrible to use, too lethal, too destructive, too fantastically bad in its earliest stages of design to actually become part of the world’s military arsenal.  If that feeling was widespread, it lasted abut 72 hours.  Oppenheimer had it for a little while for a few days, until he realized that his expectations were unfounded and that he saw the situation in reverse.  

It is interesting to set the meeting with Oppenheimer in the course of Truman’s daily day, a pretty busy day, a day filed with stuff and fluff and a meeting with Oppenheimer about the future of the arms race.  Turns out that the meeting with Oppie went as scheduled, ended perfectly on time to accommodate the next Oval Room visitor, the postmaster from Joplin, Missouri.  It must’ve been important to the Joplin man, and I guess to Truman, but not too many others. 

The meeting between Oppenheimer and Truman did not go well.  It was then that Oppenheimer famously told Truman that “I feel I have blood on my hands”, which was unacceptable to Truman, who immediately replied that that was no concern of Oppenheimer’s, and that if anyone had bloody hands, it was the president.  Oppenheimer felt as though the future was in the balance, and that the American government was using/would use the bomb as a political tool against the Soviets. Actually, the employment of the bomb as a part of American foreign policy was–obviously–a new affair, and the application of it as a sort of Pax Atomica in the early years following the end of the war was a wholly new development.  And applying the threat of the use of the weapon against the Soviets was a natural state, as many military figures (including, for example, General Leslie Groves) considered them as an enemy right from the start.  The fight between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. started pretty much in 1944, when (with General Groves, again) there was a spearhead movement to control all of the world’s supplies of atomic-bomb-related natural resources.

That is just a little of the background to the meeting in the Oval Office back there in October 1945.  Truman had very little use for Oppenheimer then–little use for his “hand wringing”, for his high moral acceptance of question in the use of the bomb, for his second-guessing the decision.  Cold must have descended in the meeting, as Truman later told David Lillenthal of Oppenheimer that he “never wanted to see that son of a bitch in this office again”.  Truman would retell the story in different waysm, but with generally the same result, waxing about how he dismissed the “cry-baby scientist”.