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* A Hieronymus Bosch Painting Come to Life
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War Stories


A NEW, CHILLING SECRET ABOUT THE MANHATTAN PROJECT HAS JUST BEEN MADE PUBLIC


TURNS OUT OPPENHEIMER’S BOSS LIED, REPEATEDLY, ABOUT RADIATION POISONING.

By Fred Kaplan
Aug 08, 20233:17 PM

Maj. Gen. Groves and J. R. Oppenheimer view the base of the steel tower used for
the first atomic bomb test near Alamogordo, New Mexico, on Sept. 11, 1945.
Bettmann
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Newly declassified documents reveal that Gen. Leslie Groves—director of the
Manhattan Project, the top-secret operation that built the atomic bomb during
World War II—misled Congress and the public about the effects of radiation. He
did so initially out of ignorance, then denial, and finally, willful deception.

The documents also show that some scientists in the project, including J. Robert
Oppenheimer, director of the Los Alamos lab where the bomb was first tested,
kept mum about Groves’ lie rather than dispute him or confront the general
directly.



The cache of documents—the latest in a series of once secret and top-secret
material about the A-bomb obtained over the years by the National Security
Archive, a private research organization at George Washington University—was
released on Monday, within days of the 78th anniversary of the bombings of
Hiroshima and Nagasaki and in the wake of the release of Oppenheimer, the wildly
(and deservedly) successful film that has grossed $500 million since its hit
theaters just three weeks ago.

One of the new documents the archive obtained is a memo by four scientists,
titled “Calculated Biological Effects of Atomic Explosion in Hiroshima and
Nagasaki,” dated Sept. 1, 1945. (The bombs were dropped on Aug. 6 and 9 of that
year.) Until this memo was written, it had been assumed the A-bomb’s victims
would be killed by its blast and its heat. But this memo concluded that at least
some of the deaths had been caused by radioactive fallout, days or weeks after
the explosions.

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And yet, the day before the memo’s date, at a press conference in Oak Ridge,
Tennessee, Groves said radiation had caused no deaths and that claims to the
contrary—some published in Asian newspapers—were “propaganda.” In a memo to
Oppenheimer, George Kistiakowsky, the Los Alamos scientist who coordinated the
biological report, said that Groves had “stuck his neck out by a mile,” so he
hesitated to pass the study along.

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Even by then, enough was known about radiation poisoning to have made Groves
stop short of dismissing the claims so strongly. The archive’s documents show
that, back in April, three months before the first test of the bomb in New
Mexico, medical experts with the Manhattan Project warned of a toxic “cloud”
that could spew “radioactive dust” over a wide radius for “hours after the
detonation.” Some urged Groves to evacuate the area around the test site, which
he resisted, not wanting to attract media attention. One scientist remembered
years later that Groves “sniffed” at the warning and said, “What’s the matter
with you, are you a Hearst propagandist?” (Hearst was the leading newspaper
chain of the day, often specializing in sensational reports.)

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OPPENHEIMER IS A MIND-BLOWING MOVIE, BUT HOW IS IT AS HISTORY?

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On July 21, five days after the test, Stafford Warren, the Manhattan Project’s
chief medical officer, wrote to Groves that “the dust outfall from the various
portions of the cloud was potentially a very serious hazard over a band almost
30 miles wide extending almost 90 miles northeast of the site,” adding that
there was still “a tremendous amount of radioactive dust floating in the air.”
(Recent studies, based on computer modeling, suggest that radioactivity from the
first atomic test spread much farther, affecting 46 states and parts of Mexico
and Canada.)

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Yet Groves ignored Warren’s findings.  On July 30, in a memo on the likely
effects of an atom bomb dropped on Japan, he wrote Gen. George Marshall, the
U.S. Army chief of staff: “No damaging effects are anticipated on the ground
from radioactive materials.” (This was a deceptively written sentence: at the
time, few thought much fallout would linger “on the ground,” but it was widely
known that it could rain down from the sky and scatter across the air, which
humans could breathe or soak in.)

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Groves’ awareness of this danger is clear in an Aug. 25 excerpt from his diary,
in which he wants to know if it’s safe to invite the press to come survey the
test site (this, more than two months after the first test). One of the
scientists told him that it “wouldn’t be so safe” if the journalists stood as
close as 100 feet from where the bomb had gone off. Reporters did come on Sept.
11 and were given “white booties” to protect them from possible radiation.

It’s possible that, even at this point, Groves simply didn’t believe the worst
about radiation. On the same day as his diary entry about inviting reporters, he
had a phone conversation with a fellow officer at Oak Ridge about Japanese radio
broadcasts reporting cases of radiation sickness. Groves said this was all
“propaganda” and that the sickness was more likely caused by “good thermal
burns.”

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Still, Groves sent a team of inspectors to the two bombed cities to determine
the impact of radioactivity. He wrote Gen. Marshall that casualties from
radiation were “unlikely,” but the “facts” had to be established.

This makes sense. Before the bombs were dropped, most scientists assumed that
blast and heat would be the dominant effects. Radiation would be a footnote;
anyone who received a lethal dose of radiation would be close enough to the
explosion to die from the blast or the heat.

However, as was later discovered, the A-bomb’s “secondary effects”—radiation,
smoke, fire in particular—could, under certain circumstances, spread even
farther than the effects of blast and heat.

As early as the first inspectors’ report—the one that Kistiakowsky at first
withheld from Groves but eventually passed along to him—there was notation of
“freak survivors” within the blast radius who later died of radiation sickness.

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On Nov. 27, months after the memo about the biological effects of the atomic
explosions in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Stafford Warren, the project’s chief
medical officer, wrote Groves with even more definitive proof. Of the roughly
4,000 patients admitted to hospitals in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, he wrote, “1300
or 33% showed effects of radiation and, of this number, approximately one-half
died.”

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Nonetheless, three days later, in testimony before the Senate Special Committee
on Atomic Energy, Groves was asked if there was any “radioactive residue” at the
two bombed Japanese cities. Groves replied, “There is none. That is a very
positive ‘none.’ ”

Groves further claimed that no one in the two cities suffered radiation injury
“excepting at the time that the bomb actually went off.” He added that it
“really would take an accident for … the average person, within the range of the
bomb, to be killed by radioactive effects.”

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Finally, in a comment that sealed his reputation among his critics, Groves said
that irradiated victims who died not right away, but after some time, would do
so “without undue suffering. In fact,” he said, “they say it is a very pleasant
way to die.”

Groves discounted, downplayed, then denied the reports about radiation sickness
because, like many at the time, he thought that nuclear weapons would be the
centerpiece of U.S. defense policy (as indeed they were for the next few
decades) and that the American public would rebel against them if they were seen
as something like poison gas—and thus beyond a moral threshold.



By this time, Oppenheimer had recently departed from Los Alamos, but he remained
on government advisory boards. Like many scientists, he had underestimated the
effects of radiation, but he was now well aware of the inspectors’ studies and
of Groves’ false comments. Heralded as “the father of the atom bomb,” he felt
blood on his hands, as he famously confessed to President Harry Truman. But he
said nothing about Groves’ lies—at least not in public.

Some were not so silent. On Dec. 6, 1945, one week after Groves’ testimony,
Philip Morrison, a Manhattan Project scientist who was on the team that surveyed
the bombs’ damage in Japan, testified before the same committee, citing the
facts about radiation, directly contradicting Groves’ blithe assurances.
Morrison went on to become a professor of physics at MIT and an activist in the
community of scientists—many of them veterans of the Manhattan Project—who
advocated nuclear arms control and disarmament.

Maybe someday someone will make a movie about him.


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 * History
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