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History 2285

Gambling with the Devil:

The Necessity of Risks in the Manhattan Project

By

Hunter Driscoll

Charlotte, North Carolina

July 2, 2008

“Suddenly, there was a pinprick, whiter than magnesium, a photographer’s bulb, and he was blinded with light.  It flashed through his body, filling all the space around them, so that even the air disappeared.  Just the light.  He closed his eyes for a second, but it was there anyway, this amazing light, as if it didn’t need sight to exist.  Its center spread outward, eating air, turning everything into light.  What if Fermi was right?  What if it never stopped?  And light was heat.  Bodies would melt.  Now a vast ball, still blinding, gathering up the desert at its base of light.  The ball grew, glowing hotter, traces of yellow and then suddenly violet, eerie and terrifying, an unearthly violet Connolly knew instantly no one had ever seen before.  Eisler’s Light.  His heart stopped.  He wanted to turn away, but the hypnotic light froze him.  He felt his mouth open in cartoon surprise.  Then the light took on definition, pulling up the earth into its rolling bright cloud, a stem connection it to the ground…Connolly heard shouts, loud whoops and spurts of spontaneous applause, and looked at the crowd.  Scientists shook hands or hugged.  Someone danced.  But it was only a reflex, an expected thing, for then it grew quiet again, solemn, and people just stared at the cloud, wondering what they had seen…It didn’t have a name yet.  Not death.  People had ideas about death.  Pyramids and indulgences and metaphors for journeys.  Connolly saw, those ideas, everything we thought we knew, were nothing more than stories to rewrite insignificance.  This was the real secret.  Annihilation.  Nothing else.  A chemical pulse that dissolved finally in violet light.  No stories.  Now we would always be frightened.”[1]

This excerpt from Los Alamos, a fictional rendering of the Trinity test, forces the reader to imagine the incredible new force that had been unleashed on the world.  This power had never been witnessed before and astounded the observers that were in attendance that early July morning.  But as the fictional cheers suggest, the road to Trinity was not easy, simple, or clearly marked.  This writer contends that considerable risks and gambles were crucial to the successful conclusion of the Manhattan Project before the end of World War II.  These dangers can be demonstrated most clearly through the manufacturing process of the bomb, the experiments associated with the development of the bomb, and the medical risks present throughout the entire process.

The creation of the Manhattan Project did not spawn out of nothingness.  In 1933, as the Nazi party came to power in Germany, a Hungarian physicist named Leo Szilard theorized that a sufficient mass of an indeterminable material could start a chain-reaction and unleash a phenomenal amount of energy in the process.  In 1938, Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann, both living in Nazi Germany, became the first people to knowingly split apart a uranium atom using neutrons.[2]  Fearing the development of a super weapon by the Nazi regime, Szilard enlisted the aid of the famous Albert Einstein to plead to the United States government to counter the Nazis and develop a nuclear weapon of its own.  “In spring of 1942, [Vannevar] Bush approached the US army to provide the gigantic engineering support that was going to be necessary to translate the scientists’ predictions into a usable weapon.  By June, the US Army was responsible for ‘all large-scale aspects’ of the atomic energy programme, and the Manhattan Project was born.”[3] 

In 1942, General Leslie Groves, overseer for the construction of the Pentagon, was selected to head the Manhattan Engineering District.  His second-in-command, Major General K. D. Nichols describes him best, “...General Groves is the biggest S.O.B.  I have ever worked for.  He is most demanding.  He is most critical.  He is always a driver, never a praiser.  He is abrasive and sarcastic.  He disregards all normal organizational channels.  He is extremely intelligent.  He has the guts to make timely, difficult decisions.  He is the most egotistical man I know.  He knows he is right and so sticks by his decision.”[4]  Nichols was absolutely correct in his characterization of General Groves.  It is difficult to imagine that any other man would have the charisma, smarts, and drive to manage such a monumental undertaking.  The Manhattan Project was venturing into the unknown.  Plutonium was a new, unfamiliar substance, and no one had ever crafted it into any sort of explosive.  It was apparent that much money would be spent traveling down the wrong road; all of which would be necessary to complete the bomb before the end of the war.  In July of 1942, Groves spent $720 million on construction for the Project, the equivalent of fifteen Pentagons.[5]  A project as vast and important as this one required a man of Groves’s skill to see it to the end.  Groves knew that very little was known about the project he was undertaking.  “This was in accord with the general philosophy I had followed throughout the military construction program and to which we adhered consistently in this project; namely, that nothing would be more fatal to success than to try to arrive at a perfect plan before taking any important step.”[6]  Groves was not afraid to spend large sums of money on multiple projects knowing that some of them would be dead-ends.  He was hoping that a few of them would work.

Throughout the project Groves would spend roughly 8 billion dollars and lead around a million men to accomplish one of the greatest engineering projects of the century.[7]  He would be responsible for procuring materiel, constructing facilities for the production of uranium and plutonium, and organizing sites where research could be done.  Nothing like this had ever been accomplished before.  Groves had to make a bomb which no one had made before, do it as soon as possible, and ensure that it was capable of being produced full-scale. 

As one of the first orders of business upon entering his position, Groves had to decide how to manufacture massive quantities of uranium-235 and plutonium.  Uranium-235 had the nasty misfortune to be only .7% of all the uranium found on Earth, and was also chemically identical to its isotopic partner uranium-238.  “Four methods—using helium, air, water and heavy water—were under active study.  It was essential that we concentrate on the most promising and more or less abandon work on the others.  By the end of the afternoon we settled on helium cooling.  But within three months this decision was changed.”[8]  It was unknown what the most efficient method of separating the two isotopes was.  The risk to go ahead with creating a manufacturing plant without knowing the best way to produce the most uranium-235 was an important one.  Groves was doing everything in his power to make the bomb a part of World War II.  The risk of constructing plants to manufacture uranium and plutonium was more than just important though, it was a colossal undertaking in terms of manpower and resources!  Giant facilities would be built in Tennessee and Washington for the sole purpose of not just making fissionable material, but of doing it as quickly and cheaply as possible. 

While it was unknown how to quickly separate uranium, almost nothing was known about plutonium and how to separate it.  “It was true that the transmutation of uranium by spontaneous chain reaction into usable quantities of plutonium fell entirely outside of existing technical knowledge.”[9]  Plutonium had only been discovered a few years earlier and much was still unknown about it.  To place so much money, manpower, and hope in the production facility was a huge risk.  Millions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of hours were spent to build a facility where all the knowledge on how to form plutonium and then separate it from uranium was “predicated entirely on theoretical reasoning.  Not until December 2, 1942, did we have any such proof, and this was weeks after we had decided to go ahead at full speed on the plutonium process, and many days after we had started to prepare the plans for a major plant.”[10]  Groves took a major risk that shaved years off of the completion of the plant.  Although it had been theorized how to manufacture plutonium, “there was no time for an orderly transition from development to production, for design of the plutonium bomb was already underway—and had been since 1941.”[11]

Manufacturing plants took years to design, fund, and build before they could be used to create that for which they were formed.[12]  Scientists in laboratories normally toiled for years to perfect a specific process and attempt to find out how to make it as cheaply and efficiently as possible.  After such experiments, a semi-works plant would be created and the machinery and processes would be tested.  Groves was unsure of using three different firms to produce plutonium.  Quickly, but not haphazardly, Groves assessed all the choices and selected Dupont to handle all the phases of plutonium production.  “Dupont was not in the least bit anxious to accept the grave responsibilities it would have to carry under a contract for the entire plutonium project.  Its reasons were sound: the evident physical operating hazards, the company’s inexperience in the field of nuclear physics, the many doubts about the feasibility of the process, the paucity of proven theory, and the complete lack of essential technical design data.  To these there were added the extreme difficulties involved in designing, constructing and operating a full-scale plant without prior laboratory or semi-works plane experience.”[13]  Skipping the steps of a laboratory and semi-works plant would save the Manhattan Project years of labor, but would cost much more in efficiency and inexperience.  He wanted them to start production “without regard to normal procedure.”[14]  Groves had asked Dupont to perform a miracle; a miracle that could win World War II.

Pressure, like the pressure placed on Dupont and its workers, was one of the main reasons risk such as these were taken.  The fear that the Germans might build the bomb before the United States was something the workers of the Manhattan Project thought about constantly.  This was especially true in Hanford, Washington.  “It was typical of the wartime effort that there was not enough time to try out parts of the machine; the best one could do was to make sure the most important elements were understood.  The engineers involved in planning the pile experiment were uniformly cautious, claiming the job could not be done in the way Fermi and Szilard proposed – and probably couldn’t be done at all! But the physicists were undaunted.  The just needed a few important parameters, a few good ideas, a crew of dedicated workers (usually graduate students in physics)—and a lot of luck.  The pressure to make this experiment work was enormous, for if such a reactor could not be built immediately then nuclear bombs would probably not provide a decisive advantage to the allies.”[15]  The workers were completely dedicated to finishing the bomb.  The workers knew that their efforts could win the war.  The worker’s devotion was one of the main reasons General Groves found it less daunting to partake in uncertain risks.

Concerning the production of plutonium, the facility was a minor accomplishment.  The actual design process involved in converting uranium-238 into plutonium-240 was a complicated task.  In order to produce plutonium in a reactor, the uranium had to be placed in aluminum cans.  It had to be a tight fit, as no air or water could be allowed to touch the uranium or it would not react.  Earl Swensson, production superintendent at Hanford, had a novel solution to this problem: “He said you know they’ll never make one of these in the lab, even if they work on it for 10 years.  It’s a statistical matter.  Why don’t we make a thousand a day, we’ll examine each one and test them all, and the poor ones we’ll strip the aluminum can off and save the uranium and the next day we’ll make another thousand.  The first day a thousand failed, but there were maybe 10 better than the others and we tried to figure out why these 10 were better.  The next day maybe they had 18 that were better.  And they kept doing this and lo and behold after about three weeks they had one perfect can.  Purely statistical.  If you made a thousand a day for three weeks, you had made 20,000 until you got a good one.  They made five good ones the next day, and 10 the next and after a while out of a thousand they were making 500 and 600 a day that were right.  That’s how they did it.  It was a little terrifying because if we didn’t have them it would stop the whole thing.  The reactor would be ready on September 15 and we would have nothing to put into it.”[16]  Situations like this were all too common.  Production in these plants was very hastily accomplished and often mistakes were made.  All of these manufacturing shortcuts in order to hasten the production of plutonium were well worth the costly risk.  Barely more than one year after the plant was conceived, the first batch of plutonium was delivered to Los Alamos on February 1, 1945.[17]

The plutonium facility in Hanford, Washington was not the only manufacturing site that was affected by risks.  As stated earlier, it was unknown how to extract the most uranium-235 from uranium-238.  One method consisted of spinning the unrefined uranium around extremely rapidly and the heavier uranium-238 would gravitate towards the outside, where it could be removed.  This was the initial plan for extracting as much uranium-235 as quickly as possible.[18]  “But with so much at stake, Groves’s policy committee decided they could not risk everything on the electromagnetic separation approach.  They decided to build a ‘backup’ plant using gaseous diffusion, the second most promising approach.”[19]  This method involved another insufficiently tested method for extracting uranium-235 from its isotopic brother, uranium-238, called the diffusion method.  The uranium would be converted into uranium hexaflouride.  This gas would be pushed through extremely fine mesh which would block a small percentage of the slightly larger uranium-238 atoms.  Eventually, all that would be left would be weapons-grade uranium-235.  It was eventually discovered that this method was much more successful than the electromagnetic method.  For this reason, and the fact that the diffusion method cost roughly a tenth of the electromagnetic method, the original process was scrapped.[20]  Often during the Manhattan Project, costs were a governing force behind some of the risks taken.

There is no doubt that the manufacturing processes were the most costly expenditures during the Manhattan Project.  But the experimental aspects of the development of the atomic bomb, and the risks associated with it, were no less important.  Among the experimental risks taken were Enrico Fermi’s experimental test pile in Chicago, the uncertainty of the gun-type design compared to the implosion-type design, and the lack of a test for the uranium gun-type design.

While Leo Szilard had theorized that it was possible to create a self-sustaining chain reaction, it had never been accomplished in a laboratory setting.   In 1942, under the “West Stands of Stagg Field at the University of Chicago” on an unused squash court, Enrico Fermi and a score of other scientists constructed the first working, self-sustaining nuclear reactor.  This reactor was constructed of graphite blocks, interlaced with uranium rods.  The concept behind the reactor was that if there was enough uranium present, any neutrons given off from fission, would be more likely to strike another uranium atom, thus giving off more atoms.  “An atomic chain reaction may be compared to the burning of a rubbish pile from spontaneous combustion.  In such a fire, minute parts of the pile start to burn and in turn ignite other tiny fragments.  When sufficient numbers of these fractional parts are heated to the kindling points, the entire heap bursts into flames.”[21]  But as with any fire, it could easily get out of control.  Numerous safety devices were in effect before the pile was allowed to commence.  Three sets of control rods, designed to absorb neutrons and prevent a chain reaction, were situated around the reactor.  Also a water team, armed with hoses that sprayed liquid cadmium salt solution, was on station ready to flood the reactor with neutron absorbing cadmium.  But these were only in presence because of the very grave risk of the pile going critical and melting down or causing a nuclear explosion.  “Possible risks to the public compounded the problem, as larger numbers of potential victims offset the presumably lesser danger to any single person.”[22]  In the middle of downtown Chicago, this would have been disastrous. 

“Early in November, we had been faced with a serious problem involving the location of the first experimental test pile.  The original plan had been to place it in the Argonne Forest, some fifteen miles out of Chicago, where special facilities were being built to accommodate the pile and its accompanying laboratories.  The already insufficient time available for this construction was cut even further by some labor difficulties which, while not particularly serious, led to delays.”[23]  A decision was made to forego the safety factor of building it outside of a populated area.  “There was no reason to wait, except for our uncertainty about whether the planned experiment might not prove hazardous to the surrounding community.  If the pile should explode, no one knew just how far the ganger would extend.  Stagg Field lies in the heart of a populous area, while the Argonne site was well isolated.  Because of this, I [General Groves] have serious misgivings about the wisdom of Compton’s suggestion.”[24]  This was one of the most dangerous risks taken during the Project.  Had anything terrible happened that December day, most of Chicago would have been destroyed or irradiated beyond habitation.

This pile had been originally designed as a small test pile for the larger one in Argonne, but time constraints overruled safety precautions and it was upgraded to the actual test pile.  Taking risks for the sake of saving time was seemingly commonplace during the Manhattan Project.  Also common during the Project were cut corners.  As time was of the essence, proper procedure gave way to haste.  Red tape was cut for the sake of beating the Nazis.  “There was never time there to do things in an orderly manner.  If a process worked at all, we adopted it and moved on.  Improvements could be put in place after the war.”[25]  These words were spoken by McAllister Hull, a junior scientist in the Manhattan Project.  He is perfect proof that it was more important to the workers to finish the bomb than it was to obey proper experimental procedure.

But building the first nuclear reactor in the middle of a residential district of a city was not the only risk taken in the experimental facet of the Manhattan Project.  The original design for the atomic bombs had been the gun-type bomb.  One subcritical mass of fissionable material would be fired at another subcritical mass of fissionable material.  For a split second, the masses would combine into one supercritical mass and a chain reaction would initiate.  This would work perfectly fine for the relatively stable uranium-235 bomb, as its neutrons needed coaxing to trigger the chain reaction.  But it soon it became clear that a gun-type bomb using plutonium would not be stable enough; it would detonate before both masses could completely form into one critical mass.[26]  In July of 1944, J.  Robert Oppenheimer, Scientific Director of the Manhattan Project, decided that a gun-type gun consisting of plutonium was unfeasible.  And since production of uranium-235 was slow-going, a new method would have to be found for the plutonium.  “Development of implosion on a crash basis was the only possibility worth considering.”[27]  A core of fissionable material would be surrounded in a casing of explosive lenses.  Upon detonation, the lenses would evenly force the plutonium towards the center, giving it supercritical mass, and thus, explosion.  But this technology was very new and almost nothing was known about focused explosions.  “There were several things that could go wrong: The lenses could fail to put a symmetric pressure wave onto the plutonium nuclear explosive, because, for example, the firing mechanism—which was at the limit of timing technology in 1945—might not set each lens off within a microsecond of each other.  Or the lenses might not fit perfectly.  We had had to compensate for shrinkage by putting shims between the castings.  This was done with the pusher blocks as well.  What if the shims put spikes in the pressure wave as it hit the nuclear explosive?  Suppose the pressure wave was symmetric and sufficiently powerful to crush the plutonium, but the initiator didn’t work as designed.  It was possible, despite the careful calculation of the expected hydrodynamics, that the plutonium would blow apart and stop the chain reaction before completion, giving a smaller explosive power than expected.”[28]  The entire project, minus one small uranium bomb, was hinged on the expectation that the lenses would perform flawlessly.  If these lenses failed to perform as intended, the small amount of plutonium that had been painstakingly obtained would be blown all over the desert.  “This was a risk that the planners did not want to take, as it could set them back many months, if not years.  For this purpose, Jumbo was built.  “At first the scientists were so unsure that the bomb would work that they proposed putting it inside an enormous steel container.  If the bomb worked then the container would be vaporized instantly.  If it didn’t whatever blast there was would be contained and the costly plutonium could be recovered.  When it was finally built, the container, called Jumbo, weighed 214 tons and had 15-inch (38-centimeter)-thick walls of banded steel.  Getting the enormous contraption to the test site was one of the hardest parts of the construction.  It was the heaviest single object ever moved by railroad.”[29]  Jumbo was a beast.  Jumbo was an attempt at risk control on the part of the directors of the Manhattan Project.  Eventually the decision was made to not use Jumbo for the Trinity test as the designers felt confident that at least part of the plutonium would go critical.  “It is interesting to speculate about what would have happened, with the actual explosion of almost twenty thousand tons, if we had used Jumbo.  That the heat would have completely evaporated the entire steel casing is doubtful.  If it did not, pieces of jagged steel would probably have been hurled for great distances.”[30]  It is difficult to imagine the power it would take to rip fifteen inches of solid steel.

While Jumbo was created for the plutonium implosion bomb test, another risk of the Manhattan Project was centered on the test of the uranium gun bomb, or lack thereof.  July 16, 1945 is arguably the most important day in history for physicists.  It marks the Trinity test, the first detonation of a nuclear device and the culmination of years of wearisome research.  But the gadget, as the Trinity bomb would come to be known, was not the first nuclear weapon constructed.  Little Boy, the common name for the first uranium bomb, was ready in June of 1945.[31]  The decision to forego the uranium test was a risk that was quite understandable.  The process for purifying uranium was extremely time and money consuming.  To use the precious-little purified uranium-235 in existence was unnecessary according to Oppenheimer and Groves, “At no time was there any idea of testing the gun-type bomb.”[32]  They could not afford to waste such a costly material; they simply hoped that it would work when used in combat.

It is human nature to be curious about the unknown.  That is why the scientists working on the Manhattan Project pushed on, and it is also why other countries were interested in the happenings of the United States atomic program.  Security was very tight in the Project.  Guards were posted everywhere and passes had to be given for any sort of leave.  All employees had extensive background checks.  “Naturally, we made every effort to find out before employing anyone whether there was anything in his background that would make him a possible source of danger, paying particular attention to his vulnerability to blackmail, arising from some prior indiscretion.”[33]

These background checks were performed not just on the ordinary personnel, but on leaders of the Project, including J.  Robert Oppenheimer.  Oppenheimer had married a communist sympathizer and the security organization was rather uninterested in appointing him the Scientific Director of the Manhattan Project.  But Groves understood what Oppenheimer could bring to the project and what an invaluable resource he would be.  “IN accordance with my verbal directions of July 15, it is desired that clearance be issued for the employment of Julius Robert Oppenheimer without delay, irrespective of the information which you have concerning Mr.  Oppenheimer.  He is absolutely essential to the project.”[34]  Groves put the security of the entire project at risk when he chose Oppenheimer as the Scientific Director.  This was a risk that was rather subjective but Groves’s trust was well placed as he felt no other man could have completed the project as quickly.

The first half of the twentieth century was full of exciting new developments in the field of physics.  These centered on new discoveries about the atom.  One of the still mysterious forces surrounding the atom was radiation.  Radiation is a phenomenon where unstable atoms give off atomic particles in an effort to regain stability.  These particles interact with the body in horrible ways including damaged bone marrow, skin burns, and cancer.[35]   For the sake of completion, short cuts were sometimes taken when it came to radiation safety.  “Health Division experts believed they could hold radiation risks, the “special hazards” in project usage, to tolerable levels.  By and large they did, but whether they did or not might have mattered little.”[36]  Finishing the bomb was the primary concern for the thousands of workers.  If they had to be exposed to a miniscule amount of radiation that had no immediate effects, it was a risk that almost anyone there would have been willing to take.

These risks were not just present at the major production facilities in Hanford, Washington and Clinton, Tennessee, The Metallurgical Laboratory at the University of Chicago also had its share of preventable risks taken in the name of the war.  “This concerned the Coca-Cola machine.  It was a style of machine that dropped a paper cup, which was then filled with carbonated water and coca-cola syrup.  The man who came to service the machine at our lunch time forgot to bring his hose for filling the syrup resivoir.  He walked into the neighboring laboratory where wet chemistry was being performed and borrowed a rubber hose from an aspirator, filled the reservoir with the syrup, returned the hose and left.  Some time after lunch a technician was carrying an alpha counter and noticed that the meter went off the scale as he passed the Coke machine.  By the next day the Coke Machine was replaced with one that dispensed bottles rather than liquids.  We never did know how many, if any, employees drank that Coca-Cola.”[37]  Unnecessary risks like these plagued scientists and engineers alike.  So much was unknown about the processes behind radiation safety. 

Mistakes, like the Coca-Cola incident, were quickly taken care of and steps were taken to ensure they would not happen again, not now or in the future. “The bomb makers foresaw these problems. Knowing the hazards, they accepted the need to protect workers and the public against undue exposure. Soon after starting work on plutonium, therefore, the Metallurgical Laboratory of the University of Chicago formed a health division as full partner to its Physics, Chemistry, and Engineering divisions. It also launched research programs to learn more about the hazards and the means of its health and safety effort on Chicago practice and research.”[38]  This division not only looked at the health effect on workers in the Metallurgical Laboratory, it was tasked “...looking also further into the future.  What would be the radiation effects of the bombs that we would use?  What would be the dangers to which people would be exposed as a result of the everyday use of radioactive materials in an atomic age?”[39]  The administrators understood that risks would take place, but they had the foresight to learn how to prevent risks in the future.

Los Alamos was also a site that had various health hazards from radiation exposure.  Often experiments would take place in the canyons around Los Alamos.  “A young scientist likened one of those experiments to “tickling the tail of a sleeping dragon.” Probably no more than a casual quip, the comment nonetheless tapped a deep vein of meaning.  In the lore of dragon hunting, the reptile’s potent tail posed a special danger.  Its thrashing might inflict unexpected damage on the unwary hero even after the animal itself had received its death wound.  Metaphorically, the dragon’s tail aptly symbolizes the “special hazards” of the Manhattan Project and, perhaps even more aptly, the key process of testing nuclear weapons.”[40]  Radiation, while unknown in its effects, was understood to be extremely dangerous.  Methods to protect workers were put into effect soon after the creation of the Health Division in Chigaco.  Routine screening for radiation poisoning was continued through the entire war but it was quite ineffective.  Normal results varied too greatly from person to person and were affected by too many factors to be useful.  “Routine testing simply provided no basis for early warning.”[41]  Prevention looked to be the only feasible method for treating radiation.  But lead shielding was used at every opportunity and minimizing exposure times seemed to be the only solutions for solving the health hazards.  But health was always second-place in the Manhattan Project.  “Health hazards did not rank highest among the risks of gambling large amounts of money, men and scarce resources on the effort to convert untested theories into working weapons.”[42]

Many authors have conjectured about various risks and their importance during the Manhattan Project.  None of these authors could hope to be as experienced or in depth as General Leslie Groves.  Groves was the Chief Administrator of the Manhattan Engineering District.  There was no aspect of the project he was unfamiliar with.  Any composition about the Manhattan Project would be foolish to not include this man.  His insights into the project are rather straight forward in his personal memoir about the Project.

Cynthia Kelly, in her compilation The Manhattan Project: The Birth of the Atomic Bomb in the Words of Its Creators, Eyewitnesses, and Historians, explores the Project and how it shaped the people that worked on it.  It is an extremely helpful general knowledge text.  Kelly makes not direct attempt at proving a point through the book, and so offers a refreshingly simple assemblage of people.  These were people that were asked to leave their normal life behind and move to remote sections of the country to help the government win the war.

K.D. Nichols was the Deputy District Engineer to General Groves and he wrote The Road to Trinity, his personal memoirs about the Manhattan Project.  These were as helpful as Groves’s had been.  He argues that the science learned from the Manhattan Project should be used for peaceful, powerful purposes.  He concludes that this is not a simple task, but well worth it.  Nuclear energy is much safer than “hydraulic power, gas, oil, or coal.”[43]  Nichols is a man ahead of his time.

Barton Hacker, in his book, The Dragon’s Tail: Radiation Safety in the Manhattan Project, 1942-1945, talk discusses American policy towards radiation safety during the Manhattan Project.  He does a very through job of analyzing every aspect from the reactor in Chicago to the test in Alamogordo.  He concludes that much research has been done to safely protect workers from radiation, but circumstances will always change and much research still needs to be done.

            When the Japanese Navy attacked the naval base at Pearl Harbor, America was lifted to a patriotic fervor.  This fervor united men and women and blacks and whites.  This patriotism extended even to the men and women working to build the first atomic bomb.  This dedication extended into the decision making process during the Manhattan Project.  Many risks were taken during the Project that might have seemed haphazard at the time, but in retrospect, they were well calculated to save time in the long run.  If the plants were not made before a full understanding of how to separate plutonium from uranium, the bomb would have been delayed months if not years.  If corners had not been cut or red tape bypassed, it is doubtful the bombs would have been used in 1945.  People were willing to accept a personal sacrifice in safety if it meant that the bombs could help save Allied soldiers in the war.

It is interesting to see how ordinary people act when put under the most stressful of situations, such as watching loved ones leave to fight in far off lands.  To know that any thing accomplished at home could help the soldiers in the field was reason enough for these people to expose themselves to the risk of igniting the entire atmosphere, or even blowing up Chicago.  “At no time did I ever have reason to doubt the intense devotion to the accomplishment of our goal of the Chicago group—indeed, of the entire Manhattan Project—and to me that was all that ever mattered.”[44]  A leader like General Groves was a man the workers of the Manhattan Project could place their trust in and know that the risks were well worth the price of failure.
Works Cited

Cohen, Daniel. The Manhattan Project. Brookfield, CT: Millbrook Press, 1999.

Groves, Leslie. Now It Can Be Told: The Story of the Manhattan Project. New York: Harper and Row, 1962.

Hacker, Barton.  The Dragon’s Tail: Radiation Safety in the Manhattan Project, 1942-1946. Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1987.

Hull, McAllister. Rider of the Pale Horse: A Memoir of Los Alamos and Beyond. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2005.

Kelly, Cynthia C., ed. The Manhattan Project: The Birth of the Atomic bomb in the Words of Its Creators, Eyewitnesses, and Historians. New York: Black Dog and Leventhal Publishers, Inc., 2007.

Nichols, K. D. The Road to Trinity. New York: William Morrow and Company, Inc., 1987.

Endnotes