The mission papers he had signed stated that Yoro had but one father and one mother: the army. The army, as we all know, has nipples too; it’s just that they point inward. The army is a body that doesn’t nurture, like a dog that instead of suckling her puppies saps the litter’s strength. Jim had an impeccable military record, and from what he told me, he’d participated in other missions that had wiped him out. It’s what made him such a good candidate for Yoro. But twenty-four hours was all it took to undermine an entire career as an anonymous military man. What he first accepted as just another mission quickly morphed into his worst fear. From the first day he knew it would be difficult to give Yoro up. From the second, he knew it would be nothing short of impossible.
Jim had already been looking for Yoro for five years by the time we met, and at that point she must have been around ten years old. He had been court-martialed for refusing to hand her over, but the trial was set aside because of the military’s desire to keep the case under wraps. He was discharged from the armed forces for disobeying orders that forbade him from establishing an emotional bond with the baby, to avoid his wanting to keep custody of her, as of course happened. So his crime was disobeying a ridiculous order, the kind that resists being given, let alone carried out: an emotional one.
From one day to the next, Jim found himself deprived of both Yoro and a military career. But he still had friends, and thanks to them he found a string of clues that he worked down one by one for a long time, including documents proving that the girl had been given to a family in the United States. When we met in New York, he was nearing the end of his painstaking investigation, which culminated two years later with our trip to Tokyo. Yoro’s foster family, or at least the last one we could find out about, was living in New Mexico. Who could have imagined my setting foot in a place like that: Los Alamos, the exact spot where the first atomic bomb had been developed and the Manhattan Project secretly coordinated.
WE LANDED IN LOS ALAMOS to call on the National Laboratory in July 1963, thanks to Jim’s contacts. It was sweltering, and I couldn’t help but connect that heat with the atomic bomb tests that took place that same time of year, in that same enclave. It was here that the thirty-eight-year-old Robert Oppenheimer received General Leslie Groves’s proposal to head a team of the world’s most brilliant scientists, nearly all of them older than he was. Jim went into detail about that mission, one of history’s best-kept secrets: the race with the Germans to see who could develop the first atomic bomb.
Oppenheimer agreed to oversee the project. Nearly all of them stepped up to the challenge. Scientists and military men worked day and night shut away in that reserve, their sole obsession to find a way to bring their theoretical formulations into reality. And to do it before the enemy did. The team was highly motivated. At first the atmosphere there was something like a summer camp. It was a race, after all, and not just any old race—here the most competitive, brightest athletes were poised for a sprint. When genius is challenged to outperform genius, not even the knowledge that the result will be the creation of a monster is enough to make it stand down. Intelligence gets restless once it’s engaged, eager, and ethical considerations are not going to dampen the pleasure of discovery, of cracking a highly complex problem. The opportunity to extend the very limits of the mind trumped any moral quandary.
Initially the scientists and the military clashed over ethical and political issues, but the day they found out the Germans were nowhere close to developing nuclear weapons and that surrender was imminent, it became obvious that their disagreements were only superficial. The scientists had been tasked with beating the Germans in building the most destructive weapon known to man, but had just lost their purpose. From that point on, all that mattered was how to create the monster, not in order to destroy the other one but only to see its face, to give birth to it, and unbeknownst to them at the time, to christen it among so many Japanese civilians. So Colonel Boris Pash, commander of the Alsos Mission in charge of investigating the Nazis’ atomic weapons program, sent a telegram to General Groves in November 1944. I haven’t had a chance to check the exact wording, but according to Jim, the telegram read something like “Mom didn’t have a baby; she’s not even pregnant; the doctors have declared her sterile.” Germany’s infertility, the fact that it was incapable of developing the bomb, left the race uncontested, wide open for the minds at Los Alamos, and winning was no longer a matter of peace but one of war. Robert Oppenheimer expressed himself after the first Trinity tests by quoting the Bhagavad Gita, a sacred Hindu text: “Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.”
So here we are now, in Los Alamos, knocking at a stranger’s door to ask after Jim’s daughter, my daughter. “To catch a glimpse of her,” Jim said as we drove, “just to know she’s alive, that she’s healthy and happy, that’s all I need.”
A blond woman with a sophisticated hairdo opened the door. I felt like a beggar. Surely this family was part of the same operation, expected to raise their girl without ever bonding. They probably went through the same range of emotions as Jim did. And I wasn’t far from the truth. Three minutes later we were sitting in the living room, on the family couch, and the woman was telling us that Yoro was no longer with them. They’d already come and taken her away. She gave us information on her whereabouts, but it wasn’t very reliable, she warned. Alcohol had debilitated her to such a degree that she lacked the strength for what could only be an impossible search—how could she or her husband find someone the military was trying to keep hidden? But she talked at great length about a project her husband had been working on before he was retired. It was called Project Orion, and she spoke excitedly, saying it’d been the only beautiful thing to come out of all those years in the industry of death.
She said her husband had worked in Los Alamos with Stanisław Marcin Ulam, the Polish mathematician who first presented the project in 1946, which the physicist Freeman J. Dyson went on to develop at General Atomics, the nuclear physics center in San Diego, keeping the dream alive even today, despite the naysayers. For most of the team, Orion was about salvation: how to avoid the extinction of the human race if it came to having to evacuate the planet. Then, as now, there was no means for reaching the distances needed to find habitable environments in space. So Orion was based on nuclear propulsion systems for spaceships that could outlast the fuel insufficiencies of chemical rockets and travel longer interplanetary distances. A series of atomic bombs were placed at the rear of a vessel so that the ripple effects of consecutive explosions could propel the craft into speeds reaching up to a considerable percentage of the speed of light. Taking into account that the human body cannot withstand prolonged periods of acceleration beyond 49 m/s2, scientists calculated the number of atomic bombs it would take to reach a viable escape speed with thrust enough to punch through the earth’s gravitational field. Their conclusion was two to four bombs per second, which would initially require one thousand atomic bombs only to keep it out of orbit. Most of this information, she said, had been classified as top secret in 1959. The radioactive element strontium 90 had been found in the baby teeth of children living near the nuclear test sites, and the global population was taking a stand against the arm’s race and nuclear energy, just as Project Orion was proposing not a single bomb but thousands of them. And this led to another immeasurable danger, details of which could be found in the reports: alternative ways of producing nuclear materials on the cheap. Access to this intelligence could allow any country to produce atomic weapons en masse and cheaply. That’s why most of the project had been kept secret aside from the relatively trivial details the woman gave, which were declassified.