What Would You Do?

This image depicting the radioactive cloud at the Trinity test site in Southern New Mexico was painted by DeHaven Solimon Chaffins of the Laguna and Zuni Pueblos. Her exhibit "Radon Daughter," about the long-term effects of living alongside the Jackpile-Paquate uranium mine, runs at the Indian Pueblo Cultural Center in Albuquerque through February 2022.

When I was in college, I wrote a paper for a class I took at the business school. The course was called something scholarly-sounding like “Political Forces and the Rise of Brinksmanship in the 20th Century.” I chose to write about the Manhattan Project, which had long fascinated me. I was born in 1957—the top of the bell of baby boomer births, I think—and I was a kid of the Cold War. We did duck-n-cover drills in kindergarten; I knew that Russian missiles aimed at us from Cuba could end my five-year-old life in a flash. What’s striking to me now is how normal that seemed.

I had to get the instructor’s permission for my thesis subject. He readily granted it. But his eyebrows rose when I told him what I wanted to explore. Not the science of the bomb, which to this day, I have only a cursory understanding of. Not the military strategies required to fight Hitler and Hirohito. Not even the political forces at play in this country, as revered FDR was succeeded by Give-‘em-Hell Harry Truman.

I wanted to understand how, emotionally, people could decide to drop that bomb; unleash that kind of power; re-write, forever, the world’s script. That angle was OK, said the professor, as long as I did justice to the socio-political forces at play in the decision. Fine.

I learned a lot, writing that paper. In the summary, where you’re supposed to deliver a ringing, crystalline consummation of everything else in the paper, here was mine: America was afraid. Terribly, terribly afraid of Germans getting nuclear weapons first. And then, after Germany surrendered but Japan stayed in the war, America was afraid that Hirohito didn’t get it that he was done. By the time he did get it, thousands more lives would be lost.

There were other factors, probably: Pearl Harbor, and the anger it inspired against the Japanese. A desire to show the world, and a rising Russia, that we were not to be trifled with militarily. Maybe the bit of a chip on Harry Truman ‘s shoulder, who didn’t win the presidency outright but inherited it when Roosevelt died. Certainly a bit of military insecurity. The idea of a demonstration bomb off the coast of Japan was floated, instead of targeting population centers. That idea was scrapped. The reason? Scientists weren’t sure the bomb would work. If it fizzled out there in the ocean, they reasoned, Hirohito would be emboldened to fight on. Think about that: we used a real bomb against real people because we were afraid it might fail.

I can’t remember what grade I got. But if the point of a thesis is to expand your understanding, it succeeded. I have a working knowledge of how the decision to bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki was made. Still, even after all these years, the question nagged at me: how could they do it?

The Bradbury Museum in Los Alamos is an amazing place. It’s devoted to papers, paraphernalia, photographs, artifacts and re-creations of the Manhattan Project. There are life-size models of Little Boy and Fat Man, the uranium and plutonium bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. There are detailed explanations of the gun-fire detonation mechanism, which ended up working with uranium but not plutonium, forcing a pivot to the implosion mechanism. There are life-sized statues of U.S. general Leslie Groves and Manhattan Project leader Robert Oppenheimer. These are made of some kind of eerie white cloth that make the figures look like ghosts, or maybe nuclear blast victims. There’s an explanation that Kokura, Japan was the target for that second bomb. Bad weather forced a last-minute change, and it was 70,000 people in Nagasaki, not Kokura, who died that night. How did the people of Kokura feel when they heard that, I wonder?

What stopped me most was a letter from Albert Einstein to FDR, dated August 1939. Long since unclassified, the letter is a chilling, understated warning that German scientists had succeeded in harnessing nuclear fission, and that Germany had halted sales of uranium from the Czechoslovakian mines it had seized. Presumably, they needed to keep that uranium for themselves. Einstein does not urge FDR to produce nuclear weapons. He does say that it “may be advisable for the administration to have ongoing contact with the group of physicists working on chain reactions in America.” Within a month, a task force was formed. Within six months, money was flowing to physicists to pursue the technology. By 1942, the players were assembled, a partnership with Britain secured, and The Manhattan Project was on its way.

I have visited the Bradbury before. I have seen that letter before. But it wasn’t til last week, looking through the glass at that faded letter, that something clicked. Something that had eluded me 40 years earlier.

I’m not sure that those of us who did not live through World War II can really understand what it felt like. To have a whole generation of young men go off to war in a faraway place and not come back. To watch a sociopath overrun Europe and attempt to exterminate a whole people. To have your own soil attacked, albeit on a tropical island that most Americans would never visit and could not relate to. Their “boys” were there, and they died by the thousands.

The leaders who decided to build the bomb, and then drop it, were products of a dark time. They remembered World War I. They lived through the Depression. They watched the rise of a madman, a second world conflict, and a fearsome technology of destruction. The politicians may not have fully understood atomic bombs, but the scientists did. The decision to use them was bitterly divisive. Oppenheimer himself went on to preach for nuclear deterrence—a stance (along with a long-ago Communist girlfriend) that eventually earned him a trip to the McCarthy hearings. But in that moment, in a world that seemed fragile and frightening, a hawk in the White House got to decide.

And who are we to say? We can study something out of the past all we want. But if you are not living it, with the emotions that attach to it, do you really know how you would react?

When I trained to be a grief counselor, we learned to look at everything a person does as an outgrowth of their interior emotional landscape. Thoughts, choices, responses, worldviews—it all tracks back to feelings. Even if they’re irrational, nonsensical, wrong. Those feelings are the person’s inner truth of that moment. It’s where you start.

There was something about that faded, understated, 80-year-old letter; telling the leader of the free world about a fearsome new threat, that made me think about the emotions that drove Einstein and Oppenheimer and Truman. Being powerful, or famous, or brilliant, or responsible for millions of other people’s lives, doesn’t make you less subject to the forces that make us human. If anything, maybe it’s more, when the stakes are higher.

So if emotions rule us, what’s the best we can hope for? Some kind of societal boundaries that save us from ourselves? Keep us inside the lines, enforcing compassion, empathy and justice?

There’s a quote attributed to Martin Luther King about the arc of human history being long, but bending ultimately toward justice. I think his words were it actually a paraphrase of something abolitionist minister Theodore Parker said a century earlier. Whatever the provenance, I hope it’s true. I hope we can keep trying to build the legal and judicial systems that save us from our darker selves; that in the end, push us toward the light.