The movie, Oppenheimer, has made the public keenly aware of the Manhattan Project.
PROLOGUE
6 August 1945, I came into our apartment after playing in the back lot with my friends. It was nine days before my 6th birthday and in only four weeks I would be starting school in the first grade. My mother told me she had just heard on the radio that our Army Air Forces had dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan. I asked her what an atomic bomb was. She said, “It’s a big bomb.” And that was the extent of the world’s knowledge on the subject.
HOW IT BEGAN - OCTOBER 1939
Nobel Prize laureate Albert Einstein sent a letter to President Franklin Roosevelt warning that Nazi Germany was likely working to develop a nuclear weapon. Roosevelt formed the Advisory Committee on Uranium to study whether the U.S. could build a nuclear weapon. August 1942, the Manhattan Project began. [LINK]
At the beginning, the top-secret project’s roots were in physics laboratories in New York City. Most notable was Columbia University and its Nobel Prize winning physicist Enrico Fermi. [LINK]. But New York City was too crowded and too close to the coast for security. Roosevelt recognized the project needed absolute secrecy. Yet it would require enormous operating facilities and thousands of people to make a bomb.
Decisions on these matters involved politics. First, Roosevelt had to get the money from Congress, $1.89 billion (2023-$32 billion). He called in Senator Kenneth McKellar of Tennessee, ranking member of the Senate Appropriations Committee, [LINK] and said, “Senator, I need to put a large amount of money into the war effort, and I can’t let the press or anyone know how much or what it is being used for. Can you help me with that?” Grasping the enormity of the cost and the need for secrecy, Senator McKellar said, “Yes, Mr. President, I can do that for you. Just where in Tennessee are you going to put that ‘thang?’” [LINK] Later, McKeller would often be asked to "keep the secret" of the Manhattan Project by mingling its funds with other projects, or through carefully planned (secret) War Projects Funding. The Senator did not know what that “thang” was, but he knew that to get his approval, it would be in Tennessee.[i]
And so it was. Army General Leslie Groves chose three sites for the Manhattan Project. On 19 September 1942 he selected Oak Ridge, Tennessee to process the uranium. The second was Hanford, Washington for nuclear reactors and plutonium production. The third was Los Alamos, New Mexico to assemble and test the bombs. The sites were isolated, far from urban centers and the coast. Oak Ridge also offered available workers, water, and electricity.
That the project could remain a secret for three years is incredible. The three sites, with thousands of people, had a total area equal to a square over 27 miles on each side. There were also more than thirty smaller sites.
THE FIRST HURDLE
But before these facilities were ready, scientists had to make other tests and Enrico Fermi reluctantly moved to Chicago. His experiment site was an odd choice - the squash court under the stands at the University of Chicago's Stagg Field. Only a month after construction began, Fermi and his 15-member team, conducted their experiment. [ii] The self-sustaining nuclear reaction succeeded on 2 December 1942, the first step toward harnessing nuclear fission. [LINK]
Only those who needed to know were told about the experimental reactor. A historian explains, “Not even the mayor of Chicago knew. It would get everybody excited, and they wouldn’t have understood if they’d been told.”
Despite potential dangers, Fermi wasn’t worried. Multiple safety precautions were in place. The people at the experiment wore no protective clothing. But the team had a “suicide squad” ready to dowse the reactor with a bucket of material that would immediately stop the reaction.
And the Manhattan Project was on its way.
Soon – PART II - ONE OF THE ONE THOUSAND
[i] Army Captain E.V. Helms was a WWII hero. With the 2nd Armored Division, he fought in North Africa, and won medals for bravery in Sicily and Normandy. After the war, he settled in Tennessee. He traveled extensively in his work and during the summers his daughter Helen would often go with him. She remembers having dinner with Senator McKellar and her father. McKellar may have wanted to meet the War hero. The Senator was about 85 at this time and had served in Congress for 36 years.
[ii] One of Fermi’s team, a 40-year-old DuPont chemical engineer, Crawford Greenewalt, was at the chain reaction. Two weeks later he became the liaison between the Chicago physicists and his DuPont engineers in Delaware. Decisive, intelligent, and energetic, he devoted himself to the work. As testimony to his brilliance, Fermi asked him to leave DuPont and join his physics research team. Greenewalt pointed out that he was an engineer, not a physicist. Fermi assured him that he would have no trouble grasping the complexities of nuclear physics, but Greenewalt declined. No surprise, Greenewalt became the CEO of the DuPont Company six years later.
Enjoyed reading your reflections. Please allow me to share. Stan Ulam, a Polish mathematician, and his wife spent th winters at Univ of Florida while I was on faculty there. They left Poland at the onset of WWII; he was a professor at U Wisconsin. He is known for developing the Monte Carlo method. He was part of the Manhattan Project; they lived at Los Alamos. There is an excellent documentary on the project - The Day After Trinity. Stan is interviewed extensively and tells many of the stories he shared with me at Florida. He wrote a book about his experiences - Adventures of a Mathematician. He and another Polish mathematician were not in the movie Oppenheimer for some reason. The picture of the gate at Los Alamos in his book is exactly what we see in the movie.
I doubt that a secret like that could be kept today!