At 0530, 16 July 1945, in a remote section of Alamogordo Air Force Base, New Mexico, the first full scale test was made of the implosion of the atomic fission bomb. For the first time in history there was a nuclear explosion. And what an explosion! - Major General Leslie R. Groves. July 18, 1945.

THE test explosion of an atomic bomb in New Mexico would lead to the first time use of a nuclear weapon in the history of warfare. Less than a month later, on August 6, 1945, the Japanese city of Hiroshima was destroyed by a atomic bomb dropped from an American B-29 bomber. On August 9, another nuclear bomb exploded over Nagasaki, killing more than 40,000 civilians and adding to the 70,000 killed at Hiroshima.

No other weapon in the history of ancient or modern warfare had such a cataclysmic effect on a target. The atomic bomb would introduce new and terrifying military weapons into world arsenals. Nuclear fission, the key to the atomic bomb, in addition to generating a new technology, would start an unprecedented arms race and initiate a cold war between the United States and Soviet Russia that would last forty-six years.

When did the United States adopt a policy that would inflict such monumental consequences on the world? Who was responsible for its initiation and implementation? An examination of the historical events preceding the first explosion at Trinity and the destruction of Hiroshima leads to the conclusion that no policy was ever adopted nor did the United States make a categorical decision to enter the Atomic Age. Instead of a definitive and explicit directive from the highest echelons of government to build and use the most devastating weapon the world has ever known, a series of events combined and coalesced to cause the United States to introduce to the world nuclear fission with both its creative and destructive powers.

What would become an irrevocable and irreversible avalanche started, not in America, but in Berlin, Germany, in 1939 at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute, when two German chemists, Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassman, split the atom into two equal parts. The discovery confirmed earlier experiments by Ernico Fermi in Italy and Frederic Joliot-Curie in Paris. Hahn sent the results to his partner, Lise Meitner, a voluntary exile living in Sweden and whose nephew Otto R. Frisch was working with the Swedish physicist Niels Bohr. When informed of the experiment Frisch wrote, "The most striking feature of this novel form of nuclear reaction is the large energy liberated." This would prove to be one of the most notable understatements of all time. Many scientists in the laboratories of Germany, particularly those of Jewish ancestry, left Germany as Hitler came to power, among them a Hungarian-born physicist, Leo Szilard. Szilard escaped first to London and then went to New York. At the news of the Hahn discovery he wrote to Joliot-Curie on February 2, 1939? When Hahn's paper reached this country (United States) about a fortnight ago, a few of us at once got interested in the question of whether neutrons are liberated in the disintegration of uranium. Obviously, if more than one neutron were liberated, a sort of chain reaction would be possible. In certain circumstances this might then lead to the construction of a bomb which would be extremely dangerous in general and particularly in the hands of certain governments."

Szilard was determined that the United States be alerted to the possibility that Germany could develop an atomic bomb. Much of the incentive for developing nuclear fission resulted from the belief that Nazi Germany might develop an atomic bomb and use it for world conquest. Many of the refugee German scientists knew of the advanced state of German science. It was now July 1939. Two months later on September 2, 1939, Germany invaded Poland and World War II began.

Believing that the United States should initiate a course of action in light of the threat of a German atomic bomb, Szilard sought the help of famed theoretical scientist Albert Einstein to reach President Franklin D. Roosevelt. As a result of meeting with Szilard, Einstein wrote a letter to President Roosevelt on August 2, 1939, in which he pointed out that the chain reaction set up on a large mass of uranium could lead to the construction of an extremely powerful bomb which could well destroy a whole port together with some of the surrounding territory. He added that the President might think it advisable to have some permanent contact between the Administration and a group of scientists. (After the Second World War Einstein would write to his biographer, Antonina Vallentin, "I really only acted as a mail box. They brought me a finished letter and I simply signed it.") His letter was the catalyst leading to the manufacture of the atomic bomb.

After reading the letter delivered by Alexander Sachs, President Roosevelt's ordered a bottle of Napoleon brandy. As the two men sipped, the President called his secretary, Brigadier General Edwin Watson, "Pa, this requires action." Since the Presidential green light carried with it no defined plan of action, three years would pass before a serious investigation began into the into the development of nuclear fission, at that time, was only a theory. The project ended up in a bureaucracy unacquainted with nuclear science, the Bureau of Standards, and received a grant of $6000.

The irreversible nondecision was on a slippery slope and would cost two billion dollars before the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. But by the spring of 1944 no clear-cut policy had been adopted by the United States Government to build and deploy an atomic bomb.

In June 1940, President Roosevelt appointed Vannevar Bush, president of the Carnegie Institution, to direct all government science activities and to develop a system for producing a chain reaction. But within two months Bush and Dr. James B. Conant, president of Harvard University and an eminent chemist, were ready to write off plans for a nuclear bomb.

In the meanwhile, Szilard and Fermi continued to work on a chain-reacting pile made of graphite and uranium under the stadium of Stagg Field at the University of Chicago. On December 2, 1942, Fermi decided the pile was high enough to go critical. At 10:37 a.m. the control rod was pulled out one foot.

The radiation count began to climb. The rod was pulled still further out and the clicking of the Geiger counter increased. At 24 feet the clicking had turned into a roar and the pile began to chain react. The bomb project, moving ahead unimpaired and unbeknown to the great majority of the Congress of the United States, had advanced from theory to reality. The first controlled chain reaction in history had been produced. Szilard told Fermi the day would go down in history as a black mark against mankind.

The breakthrough at Stagg Field gave further impetus to the juggernaut moving toward the "day the sun came up twice" over Japan.

Major General Leslie R. Groves was appointed to head the Manhattan Project with the objective, known only to a few, of constructing an atomic bomb. To head up the team of scientists Groves selected a theoretical physicist from the University of California at Berkeley, Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer.

Large sums of money were needed for the building of plants to produce the uranium isotope U 235. Funds approved for other military projects were secretly diverted to the construction of facilities at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and Hanford, Washington.

On September 30, 1944, Bush and Conant sent proposals to President Roosevelt recommending international controls of atomic energy, advising him that the bomb would be ready by August 1945. Their recommendations matched those of the Swedish scientist Neils Bohr in maintaining that all scientific information should be controlled by a commission with entry to all military, laboratories, and industrial plants in the world. Such a policy, if adopted by the President, might have change the entire perspective of nuclear arms control. Alexander Sachs, who had delivered Einstein's letter in 1939, had prepared for presidential approval a procedure for demonstrating the bomb before an internal body and recommended that Germany and Japan be notified that their countries would be the scene of such demonstration bombings. According to Sachs, the President "nodded his agreement."

On March 15, 1945, Secretary of State Stimson had lunch with the President. He told him that the bomb would be ready for testing in the summer. He said that decisions should be made for the future control of the bomb and explained the positions of the scientists opposing the dropping of the bomb on Japan. The matter had to be settled by the time the bomb was ready. The President agreed but did nothing. No determination of policy governing the exchange of information and future regulations was made.

On April 12, 1945, Franklin Delano Roosevelt died at Warm Springs, Georgia. On April 13 the nondecisions of President Roosevelt were on the desk of Harry S. Truman.

Immediately after President Truman was sworn in at 7:09 p.m. on April 12, Secretary of State Henry Stimson told the new President they needed to talk about an urgent matter that would give the country "a new explosive of almost unbelievable power."

On April 25, he and Truman were alone in Truman's office. The first sentence of Stimson's memorandum was intended to shock the new President. "Within four months we shall in all probability have completed the most terrible weapon ever known in human history; one bomb which destroy a whole city." Stimson did not discuss the use of the bomb on Germany or Japan or a proposal for international controls so the gap between the technical and policy makers widened. Truman made no decision on the use of the bomb against Japan. The only decision Truman could have made at that late date would have been not to use the bomb.

On the same evening President Truman met with Stimson, he addressed by radio the delegates to the opening of the United Nations conference in San Francisco. He said they were the architects of a better world. Forty-six delegates attended the conference, but only Secretary of State Stettinus and British Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden knew of the atomic bomb project and neither of those leaders would participate in a decision on where and how the atomic bomb would be used.

On July 21, 1945, while meeting at the Potsdam Conference with Churchill and Stalin, Stimson advised Truman the first nuclear explosion had occurred at the Trinity site in New Mexico and an "operation" would be possible any time after August 1 depending on the state of the "patient." Truman said he was "delighted." According to biographer David McCullough there was not one clear-cut moment when Truman made up his mind or announced he had reached a decision. Most likely he never considered not using the bomb and to have called off the approach to Armageddon would have been a drastic break with the history of the project.

There is no evidence that information conveying a realistic view of the situation in Japan and the possibility of a surrender gave pause to the verdict to drop the bomb. Intelligence relative to the plans for the bomb never reached Truman because of the complex nature of the United States government.

The President himself complained, "Strange as it may seem, the President . . . was not completely informed as to what was taking place in the world."

The momentum for the use of the bomb had been building up since the project began. The tentative date had been talked about in 1944. Without an overriding reason to reverse its thrust, neither Stimson or Truman nor any other leader would have stopped it or even wanted to stop it. Truman and almost everyone else connected with the atomic bomb project were merely responding to the momentum of developments over which they had little direct control.

Thus the decision to use the bomb seemed to be the natural culminating act for the achievement of a settled purpose. Winston Churchill wrote: "The historic fact remains and must be judged in the after-time that the decision whether or not to use the atomic bomb to compel the surrender of Japan was never an issue."

Lieutenant George Elsey, a young Naval Intelligence officer, recalled that Truman made no decision "because there was no decision to be made." Said Elsey, "He could no more have stopped it than a train moving down a track . . ." When the train came to the end of the track two nuclear bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, killing more than 100,000 men, women, and children.

After the Japanese attack Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, the United States declared war in accordance with the Constitution of the United States, where the responsibility for declaring war is imposed on the Congress, a policy that is clear cut, definitive, and unambiguous. However, in the armed conflicts that followed World War II in Korea, the Bay of Pigs, and Vietnam, policy decisions were clouded.

What the decision making processes were preceding each military encounter are not clear. No record exists of a comprehensive initiation, study of alternatives, or estimation of possible successes or failures. Decisions are made in a vacuum have the force of nondecisions without a fixed destiny. Instead they move forward at an accelerating rate like Lieutenant Elsey's train, unstoppable and irreversible. The issue was stated by Peter Wyden: "Reason versus Extinction."

"It may be argued that nothing is inevitable, that the unforeseen can, and often does, intervene and change the course of history. But an examination of events in the context of time substantiates the inevitability of the atomic bomb. When Albert Einstein wrote the formula for energy: E = MC - the die was cast. In a matter of time someone would discover a way to split the atomic and release energy with its megatons of explosive force. From the nature of the discovery it was axiomatic that the building of an atomic weapon would follow."

In August 1945 America was in a war that needed a quick ending that would save thousands of American lives. The atomic bomb had been tested, it was ready, its use ordained.

Somewhere in the distant past an irreversible nondecision had begun to work its way forward.

On July 16, 1945, the United States entered the Atomic Age.