The Manhattan Project
The Manhattan Project
On the morning of August 6th 1945, a squadron of B-29’s took off from Tinian Airfield, in the south pacific headed for Japan. This three plane squadron was made up of, The Great Artiste, The Necessary Evil, and The Enola Gay. In the payload bay of the Enola Gay was a nine thousand, seven hundred pound nuclear bomb named “Little Boy” and its target was Hiroshima Japan. It took the squadron six hours to fly from Tinian to Hiroshima. At 8:09 AM the Enola Gay began its bomb run. At 8:15, the bombardier Thomas Ferebee released the payload over the city of Hiroshima. It took 44.5 seconds for the bomb to reach its target altitude of nineteen hundred feet. When it detonated the energy released was equivalent to sixteen kilotons of dynamite. In less than a second, over seventy thousand people were killed, another seventy thousand were injured. Buildings caught fire and were damaged up to four miles from ground zero. Three days later “Fat Man” was dropped on Nagasaki with the energy release of twenty one kilotons of dynamite, killing a little more than eighty thousand people and injuring as many more. The total death tolls of both bombs are estimated to be nearly two hundred thousand people. That number doesn’t calculate the number of people who were irreparably injured, exposed to radiation, and displaced. How did we get to those moments?
Leo Szilard
In 1938, President Roosevelt famously received a letter from Albert Einstein. It warned Roosevelt that the Germans could be working on an atomic bomb and told Roosevelt that it would be in the United States best interest to begin its own atomic program. However, the letter wasn’t written by Albert Einstein. It was only signed by Albert Einstein, in fact it was written by physicist Leo Szilard who you might remember from an earlier post. Szilard felt that a letter from himself most likely wouldn’t reach the presidents desk, let alone have any impact on the president. Einstein was obviously a famous and well regarded scientist and his warning obviously carried more weight with the president. Ironically even though Einstein’s “letter” to Roosevelt was integral to the beginning of the Manhattan Project, Einstein was not allowed to work on the project. He was denied security clearance because he was a renowned pacifist, and it was thought that his pacifism might hinder the project in some way. Scientists hired to work on the project weren’t even allowed to consult with the famed physicist. Szilard, who filed a patent for the idea of a neutron chain reaction in 1934, has cited that he was inspired by the H.G. Wells novel, The World Set Free. In 1939 Leo Szilard along with Enrico Fermi began and advisory committee to develop and enrich Uranium, with the purpose of triggering nuclear chain reactions.
A Military Operation
What started as an exploratory committee quickly became a military operation. Szilard and Fermi quickly proved that the science wasn’t just theoretical. By the end of 1941, spurred on by the attack on Pearl Harbor the United States government took Szilard’s exploratory committee and placed it under the command of the United States Army Corp of Engineers, with the codename of “The Manhattan Project”. It was called the Manhattan Project for a few reasons. The primary reason was that a majority of the theoretical work around the development of the bomb happened at Columbia University in Manhattan.
Oppenheimer and Groves
Once the project became a military operation, General Leslie Groves was put in charge. His first order of business was to hire a scientific director. He chose Robert Oppenheimer for the job. Oppenheimer studied in Germany under the famed physicist Max Born. Born also taught Nobel Prize winners, Enrico Fermi, Wolfgang Pauli, and Werner Heisenberg. Oppenheimer was supposedly chosen because of his work ethic. When asked about his studies and notoriously rude behavior, he said “I need physics more than I need friends”. However it is now known that he was hired because Groves felt he could control Oppenheimer a lot easier than the other free thinking scientists involved. Oppenheimer was unquestionably a brilliant scientist, and his stewardship of all the great scientific minds of he early 20th century led to the development of the nuclear bomb and the nuclear age. However he was an alleged communist and a known philanderer. Information General Groves used to frequently remind Oppenheimer he had, when he brought up questions about how and what the military’s intended uses of the bomb would be.
Oak Ridge
Outside of Manhattan, all of the theoretical work, would have to eventually become practical. The United States government seized over sixty thousand acres of land through the use of eminent domain. Although there were test sites, research facilities, and bases of operation scattered throughout the country for the Manhattan Project. The primary places where most of the practical research, development, and testing occurred, in Los Alamos, New Mexico, and Oak Ridge, Tennessee. In 1945 before the bombs were dropped It was estimated by Life magazine that "probably no more than a few dozen men in the entire country knew the full meaning of the Manhattan Project, and perhaps only a thousand others even were aware that work on atoms was involved." The United States government employed over one hundred thousand people to build and develop the Oak Ridge laboratory and uranium enrichment facility. However each stage of the labor was so compartmentalized none of the workers even knew what they were building.
The primary purpose of the Oak Ridge facility was for enriching uranium. Now I am not a nuclear engineer nor am I nuclear physicist. I don’t think I can convey properly the necessity or reasons why uranium needs to be enriched before it is used in reactors and weapons. But, within uranium there is an isotope called uranium-235. Uranium-235 is whats required for nuclear fission. Within natural uranium only 0.72% of its make up is uranium-235. So the uranium is enriched or concentrated to increase the amount of uranium-235, which increases the chances of fission, and then things can go boom. Please, please if you’re interested in the enrichment of uranium, look into it deeper and don’t take my word for it, because I am positive I must have explained that wrong. The most important part is that it took the work of eighty two thousand people at the Oak Ridge facility, nearly two and half billions dollars (total cost of the Manhattan Project), and almost three years to enrich the uranium required for the first nuclear bombs.
Trinity
Oppenheimer named the first nuclear bomb test after a poem her was reading at the time by John Donne. One of the most terrifying things that I researched that I hoped wasn’t true was that the scientists weren’t 100% certain the first test of the bomb wouldn’t be apocalyptic. The days leading up to the first test there were discussions and “bets” made about what would happen. Some thought that it wouldn’t work at all, but the two most terrifying concerns were that once the chain reaction was set off would it just continue and destroy the planet? The second was, would the reaction be so intense, that it would set the atmosphere on fire….and then destroy the planet. You have to remember these are vitally important questions that we know today might seem ridiculous but without a practical test they didn’t no for sure. Now on all accounts I have researched it has been said that these concerns were marginal at best and they were as certain as they could be that this wouldn’t happen. Still I find it extraordinary that knowing a nuclear apocalypse was possible, however unlikely, they still went on with the test.
The culmination of all the work, blood, sweat, and tears, occurred on July 16th 1945 in the New Mexico desert. It exploded and released the equivalent energy of twenty kilotons of TNT. It created a two hundred and fifty foot crater and turned the desert sand into glass. That glass would later come to be named trinitite. It created a forty thousand foot mushroom cloud, and the shockwave was felt over 100 miles away. The sound of the explosion was heard as far as El Paso, Texas. After witnessing the Trinity explosion Oppenheimer said he thought of a quote from the Bhagavad Gita “If the radiance of a thousand suns were to burst at once into the sky, that would be like the splendor of the mighty one” However years later (in my opinion after he finished reading the holy book) he said another verse popped into his immediately following the explosion…..
“Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”
There is no doubt that there are polarizing opinions about the work of the Manhattan Project and bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The results and history speak for themselves. The proceeding years of nuclear proliferation became the dominate force of the latter part of the twentieth century and beyond. Harnessing such immeasurable power proved to be insatiable. It could have and should have been used to usher in a renaissance of peace and prosperity. However the advancements of nuclear energy moved at a glacial pace whereas the weapons applications of nuclear weapons flourished. The amount of times that the world was brought to the brink of destruction in the 1960’s, 1970’s, and 1980’s is unconscionable. The United States to this day is the only country to use nuclear weapons on a populace…..twice.
