| Closing
the circle: Philip Morrison, a decent person
Translated
from Italian into English and originally published in the
book “Una Bomba, Dieci Storie”, by Stefania Maurizi , publisher
Bruno Mondadori, Milan , 2004
His
voice is rough and he has a terrible cough, but his energy
reaches me even through the telephone receiver. That energy
has served him well; without it, Philip Morrison could never
have defended the right cause at the wrong time – or, better,
at the right time, but at a time so dark that those who were
fighting for certain causes in those years did so at their
own risk. It is for this reason that Philip Morrison recently
received the Hans Bethe award “for his persistent and infectious
conviction that decent people armed with reasoned arguments
can prevail”.
Emeritus
professor of Physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
(MIT) in Boston and a great science populizer, Morrison has
dedicated his life to disarmament, choosing a different road
from that of Joseph Rotblat or, that is “getting his hands
dirty.” In the interview which follows, Philip Morrison traces
his “parallel life.”
====================================
Professor
Morrison, late in the ‘30s you were at the University of California
at Berkeley and in fact you were one of Robert Oppenheimer’s
most promising pupils...
Yes,
that was a marvellous period of my life! Berkeley seemed like
the answer to all my dreams at once.
====================================
What
do you mean?
Well,
in five years my life changed radically. I came from a poor
family and I took my degree at Carnegie Mellon, a good college
which I attended thanks to a scholarship. I lived at home
with my parents to save money and I was a streetcar student,
literally: I went to the college by streetcar, early in the
morning, and went home late at night. I was worried about
money, but had no worries about school, except to learn.
Once
at Berkeley , I found myself away from home, catapulted into
a very stimulating social and political life, working for
a fascinating mentor like Robert Oppenheimer, I got my first
job, and I got married: all that within five years!
Everyone
remembers in a vivid manner one thing or another, I remember
the formidable acceleration my life had in those years in
which I was very busy and very young as well: I arrived in
Berkeley in August 1936, I was close to twenty-one. I remember
it was somewhat before the elections, and actually I voted
for the first time there at Berkeley , for F.D. Roosevelt.
====================================
Why
were you so busy?
Because
apart from the academic work, I was working hard for a union
which tried to protect the teaching assistants and paper readers
of the graduate school at Berkeley . And this activity was
very exciting and time consuming too.
====================================
Were
you a member of the American Communist Party or just a civil
rights activist?
I
was a member of the American Communist Party for a couple
of years, but then I left in 1939, at the time the Soviets
signed the non-aggression pact with the Nazis.
====================================
Was
that a disappointment for you?
Yes.
====================================
Going
back to your mentor, Robert Oppenheimer, what kind of person
was he?
The
most interesting thing I can tell you is that when I arrived
at Berkeley , I found Oppenheimer brilliant, fascinating,
witty and warm. He had a formidable personality and we all
tried to imitate him. But that was not the case several years
before, then his personality was different, he was brilliant
and fascinating, but sometimes he had a tough and sardonic
behaviour and looked down on people he didn’t consider as
intelligent as he was. I cannot say this for sure, but
I would say this was thanks to the woman he met in Berkeley
in those years."
====================================
Did
you get involved in the Manhattan Project thanks to Oppenheimer?
No.
I was involved by a friend who had been at Berkeley as well:
Robert Christy, a fellow student with me.
====================================
How
did it happened?
I
got involved in the Project voluntarily. That was at the end
of 1942 and many things had happened in the meantime: I remember
a terrible speech by the Führer, one night in the spring of
1938. I was up very late in the night together with my friends:
it was 3 o’clock in the morning in Berkeley and Hitler was
giving a speech to a mass rally. It was on the other side
of the ocean, his harangue and boastful tone reached us through
a radio and nine hours’ time divided Berkeley from Nuremberg
. But everything seemed very close to us, even the war which
had not started yet but was clearly coming. And that idea
occupied our entire lives.
====================================
Then
there was the attack on Pearl Harbour , in 1941.
At
that time, I was no longer at Berkeley , I was working at
the University of Illinois , Urbana , living close to the
university campus. A huge murmur started up on the campus
and I realised that something strange had happened. I turned
on the radio and heard the news: America was at war. That
was the Pearl Harbor Sunday!
We
all became involved in wartime research, even those of us
in the physics department at the University of Illinois ,
although our work had nothing to do with uranium. Anyway,
it was at the University of Illinois that I heard of the Manhattan
Project for the first time. I only knew that there were physicists
working on it, and that many physicists had “disappeared”
and no one knew where they were and what they were doing.
We realised, of course, that they were involved in wartime
work.
====================================
And
did you suspect that the Project had something to do with
uranium?
As
I already told you, we didn’t know precisely what the Project
was about, we simply spoke about it and knew that nuclear
fission - which had been discovered just before the war -
was going to lead to some important development. Already in
1940, eight or maybe nine countries - like France , India
, Brazil - had science military committees working on the
nuclear fission problem, although none of them yet had a large-scale
project like the Manhattan Project turned out to be.
====================================
And
so, how exactly did you get involved in the Project?
My
friend Robert Christy, who was in Chicago , called me in December
1942: he knew I was going to participate at the physicists’
annual meeting in Chicago , and on that occasion he told me
I definitely should go speak with him. And so I went to his
office at the physics department of the University of Chicago
, and I was very surprised when at the department entrance
I came upon armed guards. I didn’t expect this at a university
campus.
That
was my first contact with the Manhattan Project. Bob came
down and escorted me, gave me a visitor badge, and once in
his office told me: “OK, very glad to see you, I have an important
question for you: what do you think we are doing here?” “
I don’t know”, I replied and added: “something to do with
uranium, but I don’t know what”. “We are making bombs” . I
was overwhelmed by that reply and I will never forget it.
Bob offered me a job as a physicist and I entered the Manhattan
Project in this capacity.
====================================
Why
did you accept his offer?
I
feared Germany very much: nuclear fission had been discovered
by the Germans, they published the news first. We knew they
had very able physicists, that they were militaristic and
had already developed the first ballistic missiles. And so
we had good reasons to fear they could create the atom bomb
first.
And
when Bob offered me the job, he asked me: “Do you think there
is any way our side could lose this terrible war, unless they
get the atom bomb and we don’t have it?”. And that question
has stayed in my mind ever since.
====================================
We
were speaking before about your membership in the American
Communist Party. In the war against Hitler, the Russians were
your allies as well. Do you think the decision not to involve
them in the bomb’s development was fair?
I
don’t think it was fair, but I don’t think it was unfair:
this is the way things go among nations. We knew that the
relationships between Russia and America were touchy and didn’t
imagine that the bomb would be ready during the war.
We
were very concerned about the Germans and we didn’t think
very much about the Russians. Nor did we know their physicists
very well. We realised that the Soviet Union had very brilliant
physicists, but they were not in close touch with us. And
the Project was legally and in reality strngly secret. Nothing
could even be mentioned to non-members of the Project from
any country, even the USA.
====================================
Going
back to the Project, you were one of the group leaders. What
did your group do?
Actually,
first in Chicago and then in Los Alamos , I was group leader
of three groups, all doing the same job at different scales.
We were studying the chain reaction and producing many kinds
of them: explosive reactions and non-explosive ones, enormous
chain reactions which were mock-ups of those typical of the
big reactors, or fast little ones to study those of the bomb.
That was a dangerous job, too - after the end of the war,
two of my colleagues died from radiation.
====================================
On
the 16th of July you participated in the Trinity Test, the
first nuclear test in history, in which the plutonium bomb
was tested.
Yes,
and I wrote a report for that test. The plutonium bomb weighed
roughly five tons, but the fundamental device of that bomb
- the core which I helped to assemble and which contained
the plutonium charge - only weighed a few kilos: three day
before the test, I was asked to bring it from the Los Alamos
lab to the Alamogordo desert, where the bomb was tested; I
brought it in the back seat of an Army sedan driven as was
usual by an official woman Army driver.
====================================
Could
you tell me about the Trinity test?
That
was an incredible experience, and we didn’t sleep very much
the night before. I was witnessing the test from the base
camp, 10 miles away from the point at which the bomb went
off. Near me there were 50 people and many bigwigs, people
who I normally didn’t meet, like Vannevar Bush or James Conant.
But General Groves was not there, he was elsewhere. I was
laying prone on the hard ground.
====================================
Wasn’t
dangerous to do that? I mean, weren’t there risks related
to radioactivity and fallout?
We
were ten miles away and deemed safe from those dangers. Closer
watchers stayed inside concrete inside, whereas open air was
fine at ten miles distance.
I
was wearing ordinary although very dark sunglasses. I had
placed a welding glass over the right lens and I had shielded
the left lens of my sun glasses with cardboard and an aluminium
foil as well: I didn’t want to lose dark adaptation in both
eyes.
I
counted the seconds, and at zero I slightly raised my head:
at the beginning, I saw a violet glow reflected from the ground,
it was so brilliant that it seemed blinding to me. Immediately
afterwards, I looked through the welding glass and I saw an
enormous disk of white light. This disk was a true white in
color, although I was looking at it through the welding lens,
which normally transforms white light into green. Everything
lasted for a very short time, two or maybe three seconds,
during which I had difficulty as the light was so strong that
I couldn’t distinguish properly, but I clearly remember that
enormous round pattern. Then I felt a very strong sensation
of heat on the skin of my face and arms, and gradually my
eyes began to adapt and my vision improved, so I took off
the welding lens and the sunglasses as well. The disk stopped
growing horizontally and grew vertically, like a red and brilliant
column of fire mixed with swirling obscuring matter . That
column grew very high vertically, in a few seconds developing
a mushroom-like head of a red and brilliant colour: finally,
the entire structure reached 15,000 feet in altitude. I huddled
closer to the ground waiting for the air shock: it came as
two deep thuds, but there was no earth tremor . Once the air
shock was over, I stood up to watch the mushroom: gradually,
its glowing died out and the mushroom became an enormous column
of smoke. We were all awed and very terrified about what was
going to happen next.
====================================
Precisely
on the occasion of such a crucial and terrifying event like
the Trinity test, a group of physicists, and among them Szilard
petitioned President Truman for a demonstrative use of the
atom bomb. Did you know about that petition?
Oppenheimer
told us that the petition existed, but he didn’t show it to
us, and so I couldn’t read it.
====================================
You
knew him personally, in your opinion, why did he behave in
such a way?
War.
====================================
Shortly
after that test you were shipped out for Tinian, a Pacific
island close to Japan ...
Yes,
there were 60 of us from Los Alamos . The U.S. army had built
the world’s largest airport in Tinian ; I think that at that
time something like 600 four-engine planes per mission were
taking off from that airport. And so it was quite an amazing
place.
I
went to Tinian in a four-engine plane from Albuquerque ’s
airport, in New Mexico . It was a long trip, 18 to 20 hours,
and we were sent there to assemble the plutonium bomb: all
the material had been shipped to Tinian , and once again we
had to prepare everything, but this time not for a test.
====================================
That
bomb was launched on Nagasaki the 9 th of August 1945 , and
in September you were sent to Japan by the American government.
You arrived there the first day of the American occupation
and you were actually one of the first Americans to walk through
the rubble of Hiroshima . What kind of spectacle did you see?
Actually,
I was one of the first Americans to walk through the rubble
of Hiroshima . Everyone was very anxious to know about the
aftermath of the bombing, especially American newspapers and
the world press, but all the people who knew something about
the bomb were in the U.S. making more bombs.
I
and a few of my colleagues were on the ground as we were still
in Tinian, much nearer Japan . And so I agreed to go to Japan
, with the sense that in that way I was closing the circle,
completing my eyewitness experience of the entire tragedy.
It was terrifying, but I was prepared for that. I travelled
by train for a couple of weeks across Japan and I saw cities
of all sizes reduced to heaps of burnt ruins: up to 1,000
B-29 bombers had been used in some fire bombings.
Not
much had happened to Hiroshima ’s suburbs, whereas Hiroshima
was a rust-red ruin: the bomb had destroyed everything and
killed 80,000 people, later on at least as many would die,
due to radioactivity, wounds and severe burns. But Tokyo also
was a rust-red ruin and in the first fire attack alone 100,000
people had been killed, you could only see ashes and the ruins
of some concrete building where people could hide.
Travelling
across Japan , I saw that the old inferno, the one provoked
by fire bombs, was not so different from the new one: the
atom bomb inferno. Radioactivity was a big problem, of course,
and fire bombs didn’t pose such a problem, but in my opinion
the real difference between the old war and the new one was
the chilling realisation that now, because of nuclear weapons,
it was easier to destroy big cities through a single bomb
and a single bomber. More than change that war, the two atomic
bombs would have changed the following one.
====================================
I
see what you have just said, but when you saw Hiroshima ,
did you regret having worked on the bomb?
We
didn’t want to work on it, but as I told you at the beginning,
we feared the Germans could build the bomb and we realised
that there was no other way than building the bomb first.
Anyway, I had nothing to do with the Hiroshima bomb, I had
worked on the Nagasaki one, or rather, on the plutonium bomb,
which was used two times, one in the Trinity Test and the
second of that type on Nagasaki .
====================================
That
is, you didn’t know what city would be bombed with your bomb?
Exactly,
I learned after the event. Actually, I had been an advisor
for a committee which had to choose which Japanese city should
be bombed, but that committee simply asked me the general
characteristics the city should have, how big it should be
and so on, as that committee was not decisive, but more technical
and advisory. They reported to the decision makers.
====================================
And
you, on your part, didn’t ask anything of that committee?
I
asked them whether it was possible to just give a warning
to the Japanese, so that they could know the new kind of warfare
that was waiting for them. They categorically said it wasn’t
possible. And the kernel of that committee was a brilliant
bomber pilot who told me: “I have to fly that machine. You
don’t. I don’t want to have any other worries, watching to
see whether enemy planes are there waiting to shoot me down”.
And I told him he didn’t have to worry about that. But he
shut me up by saying: “Don’t tell me what to do”.
I
was devastated by this kind of answer: it was clear that we
physicists didn’t have much influence on those decisions.
Anyway, all this experience made me understand that as soon
as secrecy was lifted , we physicists had to use our fifteen
minutes of celebrity against the use of the bomb.
====================================
In
effect, you did so: you co-founded the Federation of American
Scientists, or FAS.
I
wrote the first page of the constitution of that association,
which at the beginning we called “Federation of Atomic Scientists”:
that was in 1946.
====================================
What
was FAS’s most significant achievement?
Well,
in producing a reasoned basis for opposition to major wars,
especially nuclear wars, and this is still a crucial issue
for our world. I think that we were the first to do such a
thing. And then other groups began to do so, but those were
pacifist groups, whereas we started from the point of view
of people who were not necessarily pacifist, but who realised
that weapons of mass destruction - and by saying weapons of
mass destruction I mean nuclear weapons, as I don’t think
the others can do what nuclear weapons can do - changed everything.
We cannot have both weapons of mass destruction and war: either
we give up those weapons or we give up war. As Einstein said:
“ I don’t know how the third war will be fought, but I do
know that the fourth will be fought with sticks and stones”.
====================================
And
what about the “small” nuclear weapons, or tactical weapons,
such as the neutron bomb, or the more recent “ bunker busters?
In your opinion, could those weapons allow for the use of
nuclear weapons without provoking the apocalypse?
Unlikely.
====================================
Earlier
on you quoted Einstein. Was he a member of your Federation?
No,
he was saying about the same things we were saying, but he
justly realised that his name was too important to be diluted
within a group of all kinds of physicists. We certainly weren’t
famous as he was, but we were good public relations just at
that time and we were invited by everyone: schools and clubs
and associations.
====================================
And
due to your activism in arms control you had troubles ...
today, you’re widely recognised as one of the most courageous
advocates of a peaceful solution to the Cold War during the
McCarthy era, but back then, you went through a very hard
time!
Yes,
that was a very unpleasant story. Cornell University was quite
decent with me, but not all my colleagues had been so: the
closest of them to me were wonderful, but some members of
the faculty tried to have me fired, as I was supporting arms
control, peace, disarmament and so on.
I
had to go through all kinds of hearings and investigations
and interviews with all kinds of people, and I had to cope
with disquieting situations as well. One day I went in our
small town to hold a series of conferences about the atom
bomb and nuclear armaments. Those lectures were not only popular
things, they were intended for people who had some technical
background and were working in various kinds of companies.
I gave three or four lectures, the public appreciated them
and once the lectures were over some of the listeners came
to say goodbye to me and so on. Well, one of those listeners
took me aside and told me: “I shouldn’t tell you this, but
I am an employee of a phone company: your calls are recorded
by the FBI”.
And
so I discovered that my phone calls were recorded and that
my mail was under control, and I had to get a lawyer. I chose
a very respectable lawyer, I knew him and we didn’t much agree
politically, but he was a very decent person and we shared
some views about that war against “communists”. He told me
that what the FBI was doing was completely illegal. However,
some faculty members and trustees of Cornell behaved worse
than the FBI.
====================================
What
did they do to you?
In
order to fire me, they tried to set me up, fabricating false
evidence against me. At that time, there was a little firm
in New York which could supply you with material to set anybody
up, and some of those people who wanted me out of Cornell
used this firm. It gave them marvellous inflammatory statements
which, according to them, I had authored for the Daily Worker,
which was and it now the official daily paper of the American
Communist Party.
It
took me an entire summer to unmask those accusations: I had
to go to the library, find the newspapers, and check the quotations
to demonstrate that those statements were false. Anyway, it
turned out fine in the end, and I think my university appreciated
the fact that I was telling the truth and openly saying what
I believed. However, it cost a lot from an emotional point
of view, and from the point of view of the time and the physical
and mental energy I wasted in doing that.
====================================
At
least in your case, it turned out fine, whereas in Oppenheimer’s
case, it didn’t go well at all...
You’re
definitely right...and I was distressed by what was happening
to him. Like most of those in the physicist community, I tried
to do all I could to support him, but we couldn’t do a great
deal: the entire country was in a kind of anticommunist furore.
====================================
Today
that furore has disappeared: the Cold War is definitely over,
and now biological weapons are of great concern. However,
terrorism and rogue states are the new enemies, and the possibility
of their acquiring weapons of mass destruction triggers pre-emptive
wars. Do you see a parallel between past and present? I mean,
a parallel between the way the past fear of communism and
the current fear of terrorism jeopardise world security and
our civil freedoms?
I
do see certain similarities, because America is not going
in the right direction this time either: our country is withdrawing
from an entire series of international treaties. Whereas,
in this war against terrorism - like in the Cold War - solutions
have to be found in détente, in disarmament, in treaties which
include methods of ensuring that there are no violations,
and finally in peaceful solutions within the international
community: I am convinced they can be found. And really, in
this era of weapons of mass destruction, they must be found!
====================================
Stefania
Maurizi specialized in science journalism at Imperial College
in London . She is currently collaborating as a regular contributor
with some major Italian newspapers and magazines, such as
the Italian broadsheet newspaper "La Stampa" (consistently
rated among the top three Italian newspapers) and the weekly
magazine "Diario." She recently was awarded the
competitive Armenise-Harvard fellowship for Italian science
writers. Stefania authored the book Una Bomba, Dieci Storie
(One Bomb, Ten Stories) in which she investigates the
last unsolved mysteries of the making of the first atom bomb.
Una Bomba, Dieci Storie has been awarded the Citta'di
Cecina Prize in 2005.
|
