SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
It's been just about 80 years since President Truman told the nation, August 6, 1945...
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HARRY S TRUMAN: A short time ago, an American airplane dropped one bomb on Hiroshima and destroyed its usefulness to the enemy. That bomb has more power than 20,000 tons of TNT.
SIMON: It was an atomic bomb. Three days later, when Japan had not surrendered, another was dropped on Nagasaki. Rough estimates put the death toll from both bombs at more than 200,000 people. Garrett Graff, the Pulitzer Prize finalist, has produced an oral history from scientists, politicians, pilots, soldiers and survivors of those weapons, which, as he writes, produced a horror so stark and visceral that the defining principles of international geopolitics in the eight decades since has been to avoid ever using the weapon again. His new book, "The Devil Reached Toward The Sky: An Oral History Of The Making And Unleashing Of The Atomic Bomb." Garrett Graff joins us in our studios. Thanks so much for being with us.
GARRETT GRAFF: Thanks for having me, Scott.
SIMON: Several voices point out early in the book that Adolf Hitler's crime set in motion scientific talent that would lead to the development of the bomb, didn't they?
GRAFF: When we talk about the atomic bomb in August 1945, we immediately associate it with Japan and the war in the Pacific. But the genesis for this project really is rooted in Europe and the scientists who flee the enveloping cloak of fascism in the 1930s and come to the United States and then urge the United States to launch this crash, no-holds-barred effort to develop an atomic bomb because they are afraid that Adolf Hitler will get the bomb first.
You know, they know the scientists personally, like Werner Heisenberg, the German physicist who are left behind, who they assume through the whole war is hard at work at building his own bomb. There's this very poignant quote to me in the fall of 1942, as the team at the University of Chicago tries to build the first chain reaction reactor where one of the scientists shows up early for his shift, and he says, look, somewhere in Germany, they're at work on Hitler's bomb, and if Hitler's working, I want to be sure that I am, too.
SIMON: Tell us about the scientists in Chicago, Berkeley, Princeton - come to Los Alamos, New Mexico. I wrote down your phrase. You call them the square-dancing, pottery-buying, graphite-dust-covered, mutton-eating, poker-playing men and women who made the bomb a reality.
GRAFF: Yeah. I think one of the unique powers to me of oral history is the way that it puts you back in the footsteps and experiences of the people who lived these events first hand before they know the outcome. I think part of the challenge of narrative history is often - is it makes events seem neater and simpler and more preordained than they felt to anyone who was living them at the time. And so what I really tried to do with this book was capture the experiences and the memories of the people before they knew what they were doing was going to work, you know, what it was like to sit there and say, you know, will we get the bomb first? Will the United States win World War II? Does an atomic bomb work at all?
And I think one of the things that you really see in this project is we so often oversimplify the story of the Manhattan Project to just, you know, J. Robert Oppenheimer and his merry band of physicists on this mesa in Los Alamos. But the real majesty of the Manhattan Project is in the scale that only the United States could achieve at that time. You know, we built the 100,000-person secret cities in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and Hanford, Washington, where we developed the uranium and plutonium for the bombs, where, you know, these were facilities, you know, 50 miles wide by 50 miles long that employed 100,000 people apiece. In August 1945, the Oak Ridge bus system is one of the 10 largest public transit systems in the United States, and no one knows the city exists at all, and it doesn't appear on a single map.
SIMON: I mean, you make a point of saying that it wasn't, obviously, just American scientists or, for that matter, people in government and the military, but U.S. industry.
GRAFF: A big part of this is the story of the industrial might that we bring, you know, the work that DuPont brings, the work that Tennessee Eastman does in Oak Ridge. And there's a sort of amazing sequence where Tennessee Eastman is looking around at the labor market that it can bring to these uranium refining machines called calutrons. And they settle on basically high school girls from Tennessee because that's the - that's who they can hire in 1943, 1944, amid the wartime labor shortages. And as it turns out, these high school girls - they called them Calutron Girls at the time - outperform the California Ph.D. scientists in refining and making uranium, even though most of those calutron operators only hear the word uranium for the first time in that clip from Harry Truman on August 6, 1945. They work the whole war without ever actually knowing the thing that their machine is making.
SIMON: And heart-piercing accounts from schoolchildren who lived through that morning of August 6, 1945. One young woman says, I felt colors. I remember my body floating in the air. Another says, I do not know how to describe the light. I wondered if a fire had been set in my eyes. And then one young woman said later of the survivors, nobody there looked like human beings.
GRAFF: Yeah. The final chapters of this book are just - are this incredible, highly emotional juxtaposition between the triumph of the American bomber crews who deliver the bomb, the celebration of the workers on the Manhattan Project, that these are successful. I mean, the Enola Gay lands back at Tinian, and they have metals pinned to their chest, and they literally go off to a barbecue party to celebrate the bombing while Hiroshima burns behind them. And I have to say that reading the memories of the Hibakusha, the bomb-affected people in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, is some of the most searing memories I have ever come across.
SIMON: This thought is almost terrible to utter, but did the decision to drop the atom bombs nevertheless avoid the killing and what would have been more people? If the war had continued, the fire bombing had continued, and the U.S. and Soviet Union would have had to invade Japan.
GRAFF: This is a question we will never satisfy one way or another. But you have to put yourself back in what I talk about in the book as sort of the permission structure of the spring of 1945, that this is the end of the deadliest conflict in human history. There are 60 million people who have died in World War II - 45 million civilians, 15 million combatants. And I don't think that necessarily makes it any better that we dropped the bomb. But we now much better also understand that the hard-right factions of the Japanese government were not close to surrendering even after the second bomb and that it took Emperor Hirohito really interceding to surrender the country. And he survives a coup the night before his surrender on August 15 by hard-right Japanese imperialists who want to keep fighting even after both of these bombings.
SIMON: What thought should we take with us today, 80 years later?
GRAFF: To me, I think part of this story is also recognizing that we are living in a moment today where we are probably closer to nuclear danger in our age than we have been for most of the 80 years since World War II. You know, we've already seen conflicts this year between India and Pakistan, the two largest nuclear arsenals to ever come into open conflict. We've seen the U.S. and Israeli raids over the Iranian nuclear program. And there's a very real possibility, both in Europe and in Asia, that we will see actually new weapons proliferate to new countries over the years ahead and that the, you know, so-called nuclear club might be larger than ever by the 2030s.
SIMON: Garrett Graff. His new book, "The Devil Reached Toward The Sky." Thanks so much for being with us.
GRAFF: Always a pleasure, Scott.
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