Attributed to an Admiral Leray.
I have found this quote on several sites, but I can find no data on Leray.
Who was he?
Was he real?
Is this quote legit?
Prolly not an AmericanAdmiral…
It was apparently William D. Leahy, at least according to Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_D._Leahy#Atomic_bomb
What’s distinctly bizarre about Leahy’s scepticism is that it persisted after the Trinity test. Granted, there is a difference between exploding a test gadget under experimental conditions and dropping a weaponised device, but Leahy stuck to his guns until it was obvious that Hiroshima had been destroyed. Even on August 2nd he was taking a bet with George VI that the whole thing would fail.
According to The Experts Speak the actual quote is taken from Harr Truman’s Memoirs, Volume I: Year of Decisions on page 11.
It’s incorrect to say Leahy’s skepticism in the functioning of the device persisted after Trinity. Leahy was of the opinion that it was unneccessary and that using it would violate moral codes he believed the US should follow.
But this atomic bomb was an implosive, not explosive device.
So not only was he wrong about it functioning, he was even wrong in thinking that his field of expertise applied to this device. Rather like saying
Nope. His postwar public objections, notably in his 1950 memoirs, to the use of the bombs are, of course, extremely well-known. But he had previously continued to express doubts that the new weapon would amount to anything much right into early August '45. See Robert James Maddox’s discussion of Leahy in Weapons for Victory (1995; Missouri, 2004), though with the obvious observation that Maddox was seeking to dismiss his postwar views and the way they’d been used in the debates on the bombings.
If i recall, he also said, “This is not how I was taught to make war.”
To be fair, it would have been pretty bizarre if they had taught him to use atomic bombs in 1897.
On a near tangent, who was it who said after the Trinity test,
“Now we’re all sons-of-bitches”?
I used to know the answer to this question.
I don’t know, but IMHO, Oppenheimer’s: “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds” was a tad classier.
That was Kenneth Bainbridge.
A number of years ago, I did extensive primary-document research on Admiral Leahy at the Library of Congress, National Archives, and Naval Archives. That experience convinced me the stories about post-Trinity doubts of possible function are post-war fabrications.
For example, Captain Robert Dennison was a member of the Joint War Plans Committee, which prepared the plans for the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Leahy was the chairman of the JCS, and therefore Dennison had excellent access to Leahy. He told the United States Naval Institute that Leahy didn’t think the atomic bomb was necessary, not that it wouldn’t work (Dennison, Robert L., The Reminiscences of Captain Robert. E. Dennison, U. S. Navy (Retired), United States Naval Institute, Annapolis, MD., 1975). Leahy’s objections were, in fact predicated on the assumption that they would work, and would be horrific:
Is it possible that his objections were always on moral, rather than practical, grounds, and that he lied about his opinion of the practicality in an attempt to prevent what he saw as an atrocity?
If this is a whoosh, so be it - but if not, then I’m afraid you’re not correct. Plutonium bombs employ an implosion process to trigger a runaway fission reaction, as neutrons start bumping into other neutrons, which bump into other neutrons, and so on. (Way, way over-simplified). Further, the implosion process employed precisely designed chemical explosives.
That said, you’ve got a point - an expert in chemical explosives would be ill-equipped to assess an atomic bomb design. But not for the reasons you give.
I concede in the face of your prior archival legwork.
Will note that the detail has never personally struck me as crucial in the wider debates: it had seemed to me easy to envisage Leahy simultaneously continuing to express doubts about the feasibility and forcibly stating moral objections to those convinced otherwise.
I don’t think there was any prevarication in Leahy’s position. Leahy’s opinion about the workability of the atomic bomb was informed not by direct contact with the Manhattan Project scientists, but through briefings, reports, etc. As Roosevelt’s principal military advisor, he was allowed to access information about just about everything that was happening in the war effort. That doesn’t mean, however, that he was intimately involved in studying everything that was happening - there was simply too much happening on a daily basis. Leahy’s concerns were focused more on grand strategy, logistics, and diplomacy.
Strange as it seems now, for most of the war the Manhattan Project was considered a pie-in-the-sky long-shot project driven primarily by the fear that the Germans would develop a superweapon before us. As such, military leaders like Leahy, King, Marshall, etc. paid only occasional attention to it. The upshot of all this is that Leahy always continued to think of the possibility of a successful, deployable atomic weapon as a long-shot, and expressed this as doubts about the functionability of the weapons. Up until the successful Trinity test, that is.
I appreciate that. I agree with you on that second point, and it is an accurate expression of Leahy’s position before Trinity. After Trinity, his statements were more about morality and neccessity.