RACING FOR THE BOMB
General Leslie R. Groves: The Manhattan Project's Indispensable Man
By Robert S. Norris
Steerforth. 683 pp. $40
By the summer of 1945, U.S. bombers had dumped so many thousands of firebombs on 66 Japanese cities that 30 percent of the nation's population was homeless and 2.2 million civilians were dead or injured. Still, Japan was not ready to surrender. But when Hiroshima and Nagasaki were ruined and 200,000 died in a stunning new equation -- one atomic bomb per city -- the emperor quickly sued for peace.
Many books have been written about, and have romanticized, the scientists who opened the era of atomic warfare. But Robert Norris, a longtime nuclear weapons analyst for the Natural Resources Defense Council, feels that these histories are grossly defective because they tend to overlook Gen. Leslie R. Groves. Racing for the Bomb argues that Groves was in fact "the indispensable person in the building of the atomic bomb and was the critical person in determining how, when and where it was used on Japan."
Certainly it's doubtful that anyone else could have done a better job than Groves in overseeing the development of the vast military-industrial complex needed to construct those two war-ending bombs. Groves was put in charge of the Manhattan Project in 1942, and with astonishing speed -- three years -- it became an empire of laboratories, mines and factories operating in 39 states. The project stretched from Oak Ridge, Tenn., to many points west, including the enormous plutonium extractors at Hanford, Wash., and the bomb-designing lab in Los Alamos, N.M., where most of the geniuses hung out.
How did Groves get it done so swiftly? Aside from being a masterfully engineer (he had supervised hundreds of other major Army projects, the last being the construction of the Pentagon), he had established himself firmly enough in military hierarchies to be granted great independence. His line of authority came directly from Secretary of War Henry Stimson and Army Chief of Staff George C. Marshall, both of whom were so busy with other matters that they happily gave him almost total power. He loved it.
Brusque, overbearing, arrogant, Groves was not a popular boss, but many regarded him with at least sulky admiration. One aide recalled Groves as "the biggest S.O.B. I have ever worked for . . . the most egotistical man I know." But because Groves was so smart and tireless, "if I had to do my part of the atomic bomb project over again and could pick my boss, I would pick General Groves."
Few of the scientists at Los Alamos were that forgiving. As a group, they considered him "an uneducated military martinet." Groves had an equally low opinion of most of them, although eight had won the Nobel Prize and a dozen others won it later. He groused that they were "simply not accustomed to moving with courage and rapidity. . . . None of them were go-getters."
However, Norris's claim that Groves was the "critical person" in deciding where to drop the bombs could stand some modification. By Norris's own account, Groves wanted to hit Kyoto first; its size offered four times as many potential victims as Hiroshima, and the psychological payoff would have been enormous because of the city's great cultural and religious significance. For that very reason, Secretary of War Stimson, who had twice visited Kyoto and admired the place, took it off the hit list, despite Groves's repeated lobbying.
In these pages, we meet a godfather of the national security state. Stimson said he never knew a man so security-conscious. Groves wasn't just worried that our enemies might learn about the bomb project; he also wanted to shut out our allies and the busybodies in Congress and various executive-branch offices. Being a rigid chauvinist who was suspicious even of U.S. citizens with foreign accents, he never fully trusted some of the premier foreign-born scientists and had them trailed by security agents.
Groves was, indeed, a bit scary in the way he protected his turf. If patriotism prompted his obsessive secretiveness, intense personal ambition also was involved. "Groves, sitting atop his security pyramid, was the only person who knew everything about the bomb project," Norris writes, and from this superior position he had created a juggernaut, "a vast infrastructure of facilities, military units and tens of thousands of people, largely controlled by Groves."
As it happened, President Truman, with some reservations, had approved using the bombs. But what if, at the last minute, he had changed his mind? To Groves, that was unthinkable. Not even the president should get in his way. Groves later wrote that "as far as I was concerned, [Truman's] role was one of non-interference, basically a decision not to upset existing plans." Groves looked upon the Manhattan Project as his creation and those wonderful bombs as perhaps his "route to immortality."
Not quite. The last hundred pages, some of the best in the book, poignantly lay out just how and why this old, out-of-sync soldier's reputation faded away so fast. •
Robert Sherrill is on the staff of the Nation.
