Colby Cosh: The atomic bomb through Oppenheimer's eyes
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A cult of wizards was assembled (on a mountaintop, loosely speaking) by a great empire: it was told to come up with a method to drop a sun on its enemies, and they succeeded. As Nolan's movie implies, almost every other thing that happened in the 20th century, including the actual use of the weapon, might be a footnote.
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If you are suitably mesmerized by these events, one thing to remember is that the record of them is still incomplete. 'Oppenheimer' was made even though documentary material about, and by, J. Robert Oppenheimer is still becoming available to the public, as a new National Security Archive (NSA) release reminded us on Tuesday. The NSA maintains a 'briefing book' of primary sources on the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and it makes periodic updates with newly declassified or rediscovered materials. The briefing book itself, built up over 20 years, is extensive enough to fertilize graduate-level papers on the decisions surrounding construction and use of the bomb.
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There are some fascinating new declassified documents in the 2025 update. One is a letter written in September 1944 by William S. Parsons, the navy officer who headed the ordnance group at Los Alamos. Parsons led the creation of the 'gun' design used for Little Boy, the bomb dropped on Hiroshima, and he would fly on the mission that delivered it. But he also had an administrative role as a voice of, and pair of eyes for, the professional military among the civilian boffins at Los Alamos.
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Parsons' letter is addressed to Maj.-Gen. Leslie Groves, overall boss of the Manhattan Project, and was delivered by Oppenheimer, which is why it sits in a file folder among the Oppenheimer Papers at the Library of Congress.
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The letter is Parsons' rambling argument, extraordinary in historical retrospect, against any mere testing of a nuclear weapon. Plans for what became the Trinity test in the New Mexico desert were already coming into view, and the American high command was then still wondering whether to invite representatives of the Axis governments. Parsons points out morbidly that the most impressive test, the most convincing demonstration, would be to detonate the bomb 'one thousand feet over Times Square.' Short of that, he did not see the point of setting one off in the desert amid a few unoccupied temporary structures when it could just be dropped on an enemy. 'Even the crater would be disappointing.'
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