We've Gotta Talk About the Bomb
Historian Alex Wellerstein educates us on a subject many nuclear advocates are happy to ignore: atomic bombs and the wartime effort that first made them
Trinity, the first nuclear bomb, at 16 milliseconds post-detonation. New Mexico, USA, July 16, 1945.
In this week's Decouple Podcast, we learn about the Manhattan Project, its origins, and its aftermath. Our guest is Dr. Alex Wellerstein, a historian of science at Stevens Institute of Technology and the creator of NUKEMAP.
Entering the Atomic Age
In 1938, scientists in Europe first discovered that uranium atoms could “fission,” their nuclei splitting into smaller elements and releasing energy in the process. In 1942, motivated to harness the newfound energy source before Nazi Germany did, the United States authorized a secret, cost-no-object military program to make a new class of weapons based on fission “chain reactions.” Just three years later, in 1945, the largest human-made explosion to that point, the Trinity test in New Mexico, proved the effort had succeeded. Within a month, that destructive force was turned on civilians at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, hastening the Japanese surrender at the end of World War II.
Physicist Lise Meitner (left) at Bryn Mawr College in 1959. In 1938, after having fled to Sweden from Nazi Germany, she recognized and proved the physics of nuclear fission in response to puzzling experimental results from colleagues in Berlin. Despite her fundamental contributions, she was excluded from the 1944 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the discovery.
Early construction at the K-25 gaseous diffusion uranium enrichment facility in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. During the Manhattan Project, Oak Ridge was known as the Clinton Engineer Works, or “Site X.”
A photo series of the first 0.11 seconds of the Trinity test, a 21 kiloton yield in the New Mexico desert
“Little Boy,” the gun-type uranium bomb dropped on Hiroshima in August 1945
Building an industry overnight
The Manhattan Project remains one of the most impressive government efforts to date for its speed, scale, novelty, and secrecy. Within a few short years, it had mobilized around 1% of the United States’ workforce, war expenditure, and electricity supply. Entirely new industries were born just to service single aspects of the project. But although this activation of industry and science set the stage for peaceful uses of nuclear energy to come, its purpose was, above all, to make weapons.
Dr. Chris Keefer and Dr. Alex Wellerstein delve into the origins of the Manhattan Project, the massive scale of its industrial and scientific undertaking, and various political, social, and historical questions arising from this unique chapter in history.
What are nuclear bombs? Did “the bomb” end World War II? What is fallout? What happened to the Manhattan Project after the war ended? How did the United States transition into the Cold War? What was the impact on the public psyche?
Wellerstein speaks 💬
On early fears of the bomb:
[After the discovery of nuclear fission,] the people who immediately start thinking about weapons and are afraid of them are people, usually Jewish, who fled Europe because of the Nazis and are now in the United Kingdom or the United States and are seeing this discovery coming out of Berlin. They're the ones who immediately start to try to raise the alarms all over the place, because they find it utterly plausible that the Nazis could make and use this weapon. If there's a weapon to be made, they don't want them to do it.
On the scale of the Manhattan Project workforce:
If you were old enough to work and not drafted in the war, there's a 1 out of 100 chance you worked on the atomic bomb, and you probably didn't know it.
On size and speed of the Manhattan Project:
[The Manhattan Project was] not even the biggest for World War II. The B-29 program was more expensive than the Manhattan Project. But also the B-29 made thousands of bombers, not one weapon... I think the speed and the secrecy are where it really distinguishes itself. And also it becomes a model for other projects.
On whether nuclear bombs or the invasion of Manchuria ended WW2:
It's easy to make the argument that, in the timeline we live in, it's both.
On the impact of the success of the Trinity test (implosion-type plutonium bomb):
I do think it affects negotiations and decisions to use the bomb and decisions to negotiate with Japan. It changes a lot of calculus because of the plutonium production rate. You only need six kilograms of plutonium per plutonium bomb. You need 64 kilograms of uranium per uranium bomb. The rate of production is about 21 kilograms of plutonium per month from the three Hanford facilities when they're going at full steam. The rate of production at Oak Ridge at that time is about a kilogram a day, so about 30 kilograms [of uranium] a month. So that's one uranium bomb every two months, more or less, versus three plutonium bombs a month. If you can't use plutonium, you have just a slow weapon that only you get once every couple of months.
On the Manhattan Project after the war:
So by 1947, when the Atomic Energy Commission actually takes over from the Manhattan Project... they have only 13 cores in the stockpile. And they're all just pieces. They have no assembled weapons, and they don't have the ability to even put them together. They have like zero bombs ready to go. And that's the big scandal of the early Cold War, the big secret that the US doesn't have a stockpile... The Manhattan Project was not built to last. It was built to be this temporary solution, and then everybody went home.
On fallout at Hiroshima and Nagasaki:
The radiation that kills people at Hiroshima is all acute. So it's radiation released by the initial fission reaction or maybe some of the fission products in that cloud right as they're fresh. It's not by fallout, the delayed radiation. There's a little bit of delayed radioactivity at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, from rainout mostly. It's just very small, and the studies the Japanese have done have shown that if it had any effect on mortality, we can't pick it up. It's so small that it falls into the noise of just regular cancer rates and stuff. The main problem is being there when the weapon goes off and getting this blast of gammas and neutrons and things like that.
Full interview
How far is appropriate for modern nuclear power to distance itself from its military origins? Watch or listen to the full interview and let us know your thoughts!
Further reading 📚
Restricted Data: The History of Nuclear Secrecy in the United States by Dr. Alex Wellerstein
Dr. Wellerstein’s blog, Restricted Data: The Nuclear Secrecy Blog
Manhattan Project: The Story of the Century by Bruce Cameron Reed
The MAUD Report — the secret 1941 report that concluded an atomic bomb was feasible using a relatively small mass of enriched uranium. The British document inspired the United States to ramp up a bomb program under the direction of the military.
Related episode 💣
Swords Into Plowshares: How to Get Rid of Nuclear Weapons with James Conca
Keywords
The Bomb, Manhattan Project, plutonium, uranium, war, fallout, nuclear weapons, reactors, radiation, fear, industrial, secrecy, history
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Manhattan Project lead scientist J. Robert Oppenheimer (left) and hard-driving military director General Leslie Groves (right) at ground zero of the Trinity test, 1945. Photo: Digital Photo Archive, Department of Energy (DOE), courtesy of AIP Emilio Segrè Visual Archives, CC0
Love the nod to Lise Meitner!
Most excellent synopsis - I saw it on YouTube.