Command and Control

The test was pushed back to 5:30 in the morning, right before dawn. The rain ended, and the weather cleared. The radio frequency used to announce the final countdown was similar to that of a local station. Thanks to interference, at the moment of detonation, Tchaikovsky’s Serenade for Strings cheerfully played in the control bunker. Kistiakowsky stepped out of the bunker to see the fireball and was knocked to the ground by the blast wave. He was about six miles from where the tower had just stood. This is what the end of the world will look like, he thought — this is the last thing the last man will see. Victor Weisskopf saw the flash and felt heat on his face from a distance of ten miles. His heart sank. For a moment, he thought that his calculations were wrong and the atmosphere was on fire. “The hills were bathed in brilliant light,” Otto Frisch, a British physicist, observed, “as if somebody had turned the sun on with a switch.” General Farrell expressed the mixture of fear, awe, pride, and an underlying attraction that this new power inspired:

The whole country was lighted by a searing light with the intensity many times that of the midday sun. It was golden, purple, violet, gray, and blue. It lighted every peak, crevasse and ridge of the nearby mountain range with a clarity and beauty that cannot be described…. It was that beauty the great poets dream about but describe most poorly and inadequately. Thirty seconds after, the explosion came first, the air blast pressing hard against the people and things, to be followed almost immediately by the strong, sustained, awesome roar which warned of doomsday and made us feel that we puny things were blasphemous to dare tamper with the forces heretofore reserved to The Almighty.

Kenneth Bainbridge, the supervisor of the test, turned to Oppenheimer and said, “Now we are all sons of bitches.” Within minutes the mushroom cloud reached eight miles into the sky.

* * *

The atomic bomb was no longer the stuff of science fiction, and the question now was what to do with it. On September 1, 1939, President Franklin D. Roosevelt had issued a statement condemning the “inhuman barbarism” of aerial attacks on civilian populations. Nazi Germany had invaded Poland that day, and the Second World War had begun. Aerial bombardment promised to make the trench warfare of the previous world war — long a symbol of cruel, pointless slaughter — seem almost civilized and quaint. In April 1937 the German air force, the Luftwaffe, had attacked the Spanish city of Guernica, killing a few hundred civilians. Eight months later, the Japanese had bombed and invaded the Chinese city of Nanking, killing many thousands. An era of “total war” had dawned, and traditional rules of warfare seemed irrelevant. President Roosevelt appealed to the European powers for restraint. “The ruthless bombing from the air of civilians in unfortified centers of population,” he said, “has profoundly shocked the conscience of humanity.”

Roosevelt’s appeal for decency and morality had no effect. The city of Warsaw was soon destroyed by German aircraft and artillery, then London was attacked from the air. The British retaliated by bombing Berlin. New theories of airpower were applied on an unprecedented scale. Unlike “tactical” strikes aimed at an enemy’s military forces, “strategic” bombing focused on transportation systems and factories, the economic infrastructure necessary for waging war. Strategic assets were usually found in the heart of cities.

At first, the British refrained from deliberate attacks on German civilians. The policy of the Royal Air Force (RAF) changed, however, in the fall of 1941. The Luftwaffe had attacked the English cathedral town of Coventry, and most of the RAF bombs aimed at Germany’s industrial facilities were missing by a wide mark. The RAF’s new target would be something more intangible than rail yards or munitions plants: the morale of the German people. Bombarding residential neighborhoods, it was hoped, would diminish the will to fight. “The immediate aim is, therefore, twofold,” an RAF memo explained, “namely, to produce (i) destruction, and (ii) the fear of death.” The RAF Bomber Command, under the direction of Air Marshal Arthur “Bomber” Harris, unleashed a series of devastating nighttime raids on German cities. During Operation Gomorrah in July 1943, RAF bombs started a fire in Hamburg with hurricane-force winds. The first “firestorm” ever ignited by aerial bombardment, it killed about forty thousand civilians.