Manhattan Project

The United States was the first country to create a nuclear weapon and remains the only one to use such a weapon in war. The atomic bomb, and the government-appointed Manhattan Project that developed it, continues to provoke ambivalence among Americans more than 60 years later. On the one hand, many Americans regard the Manhattan Project as a testament to the country's “can do” spirit and ability to mobilize scientific and material resources. Moreover, it is certainly the case that the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki helped end World War II. Yet, at the same time, it was impossible not to recognize that these events ushered the world into a somber new era in which, for the first time, humanity possessed the means to destroy itself.

In the first four decades of the 20th century, physicists began to unlock the mysteries of the atom. As their under-standing of the atom's characteristics grew, so too did their sense that the atom's secrets might open the door to unheard-of potential for military and civil purposes. The theories and the experiments of the 1930s culminated in an experiment in December 1938 in which two German scien-tists, Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassman, managed to split ura-nium atoms and achieve the release of energy. Given Albert Einstein's equation of the relationship between matter and energy (e = mc2) the splitting of atoms and the resulting release of energy had enormous implications.

In the United States, American and émigré scientists immediately understood the implications of the German success. In August 1939 Einstein wrote to Pres. Franklin Roosevelt to warn him that the Germans were on the track [Page 442]of creating a super weapon. The U.S. government's response was initially meager: a paltry grant of $6,000 to Columbia University, which arrived in early 1940. But the fall of France and most of the rest of Western Europe to the Nazi Blitzkrieg in spring 1940 thoroughly alarmed the Roosevelt administration, and it secretly unleashed the vast resources of the U.S. government in a quest, code-named the Manhattan Project, to build an atomic bomb. The bomb's original target was Nazi Germany, believed to have a major atomic weapons program of its own. In fact, the German effort was highly tentative in nature and made little headway, in part because of Nazi contempt for “Jewish science.”

Indeed, Nazi anti-Semitism helped ensure that the Manhattan Project could draw not only on American-born scientists, but also on a considerable number of Europe's greatest physicists, who had fled Nazi Germany and fascist Italy. Among a host of scientific talent, two nuclear physicists would play the crucial roles in developing the weapons: Enrico Fermi and Robert Oppenheimer. Fermi was not only a first-rate theorist, but also a brilliant experimental physi-cist. He had left Italy in December 1938 to accept an aca-demic position in the United States. Under his leadership, scientists at the University of Chicago created the first nuclear chain reaction on December 2, 1942.

By that time, a massive scientific complex was well under construction at Los Alamos, New Mexico, where much of the core work of the Manhattan Project would be conducted. Major subsidiary plants were also built at Hanford, Washington, and Oak Ridge, Tennessee. The Hanford and Oak Ridge facilities provided the plutonium and uranium for the bombs that would be dropped on Japan. Overall management of the project fell to an Army engineer, Maj. Gen. Leslie Groves, who possessed extraor-dinary talents for organization and management. Groves provided the laboratories, the manufacturing facilities, and the work force that allowed the scientists to get on with their work. He also recognized talent, and in the develop-ment of the atomic bomb he recruited and supported Robert Oppenheimer, whom he noted might not have a Nobel Prize, but was nevertheless “a real genius.”

...