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Appreciating the Manhattan Project

This writer contends that taking into consideration the arduous task of keeping the largest multi-nation scientific undertaking in the history of the world a complete secret to the lay citizen, prolific health and safety risks, and the ever present threat of espionage from the Soviet Union, the success of the Manhattan Project was a greater achievement than that of the nuclear devices it subsequently produced. This writer will demonstrate this by examining the challenges that plagued the teams at four of the nuclear development locations across the Unites States, as well as examining the “tragic epic”[1] that the major contributors of the Manhattan Project wrote for themselves as they developed a weapon that would most assuredly alter the course of history.

Historiography

Historians have argued much on the subject of atomic weaponry and whether or not the development and implementation of the bomb was justified, and if the Imperial Japanese Empire was in a position to accept the terms of unconditional surrender set forth by the United States under President Roosevelt. In Prompt and Utter Destruction: Truman and the Use of Atomic Bombs Against Japan, J. Samuel Walker presents both the traditionalist view of the American decision to drop the bomb, which focuses on the necessity to end the war as soon as possible and save the lives of American troops fighting in the Pacific theater. In Walker’s own words, Truman believed that “he faced a choice between using the bomb and ordering an invasion of Japan that would have cost hundreds of thousands of American lives.”[2]

Those who subscribe to the revisionist view highly contest the traditionalist view. With new evidence coming from recently released Japanese government intelligence, revisionists argue that “the bomb was not needed to end the war and that Truman did not use it for military purposes.”[3] A book that exemplifies this viewpoint would be Ronald Takaki’s Hiroshima: Why America Dropped the Bomb. In it, Takaki contends that one of Truman’s aims for the deployment of the atomic devices would be to gain an advantage over the Soviet Union in foreign policy disputes.

As in most disputes over interpretation, the answer can generally be found in the middle of the two arguments. Scholars such as Barton J. Bernstein and Martin J. Sherwin have published numerous articles and essays dealing with the two opposing camps and the truths that each one brings to light. J. Samuel Walker states that Bernstein “has managed at one time or another to offend partisans on every side of the scholarly debate over the decision to use the bomb, which is a tribute to the integrity and quality of his work.”[4]

Appreciating the Challenge of Secrecy

            Foremost to the men and women involved in the development of the atomic bombs was the necessity for secrecy concerning the events that were transpiring under the cloak of secrecy in the three Manhattan Project secret cities.

            The task of staying in such a remote location for a period of time that almost reached three years eventually became a test of resolve for many of the scientists living there. In its early conception, the Manhattan Project’s housing facilities were no more than a series of trailers located on a dirt road with one common area for baths. As a result of the influx of women and children, along with the increasing number of scientists devoted to the project, the army had to increase the quantity and quality of the accommodations for the people living there. “Aside from the security restrictions and military police, the common denominator of Los Alamos, Hanford, and Oak Ridge in the early years was ever-present mud and dust, as barracks, dormitories, and houses were quickly built along unpaved roads for the steady influx of people.”[5]

            When those who came to Los Alamos after being selected by the recruitment team arrived, they were surprised by the extent to which security pervaded their everyday lives. All inhabitants at Los Alamos were assigned new names, driver’s licenses, bank accounts, insurance policies, and even tax returns in order to conceal the identities of the residents. “For instance, whenever Enrico Fermi came to Los Alamos, he was called Henry Farmer.”[6] Along with the stipulation that any people living in Los Alamos could not travel more than 100 miles away, any scientist who ran into a friend outside the complex had to give a detailed account of the conversation that took place along with who it was that he or she talked to. Also, as a precaution, every attempt at communication was monitored by military personnel and all mail was checked and read carefully.

            For all the above stated reasons, there could have been a disaster waiting to unfold within the ranks of the Los Alamos compound. The potential for a scientist to “crack” under the pressure of maintaining supreme secrecy whilst working on a weapon that could cause untold destruction was a very real possibility. A scientist that could not keep his wits about him could cause an untold number of casualties had that scientist been working under the pressure of some type of stress disorder brought on by seclusion and labor. It was these facts that, compounded with the patrolling armed forces and fences made of barbed wire, made the residents of the Los Alamos site feel like they were in a sort of prison. This did not stop the scientists from having their own fun, however. At night, the scientists often held lavish parties where they could come together, have a drink, and discuss they day’s work that was going on in different parts of the complex.

            The facility at Los Alamos was not the only location to have it’s fair share of problems. “In the meantime, construction crews were building a thousand homes and four factories at Oak Ridge, Tennessee. The largest of these was shaped like a U, with each wing spread out for half a mile. This uranium-separating factory covered forty-four square acres of land, and contained miles of pipes and thousands of pumps. It was so big, it required its own specially built power plant, a complex large enough to light the entire city of Boston.”[7]

            Inside this facility were people of differing age, race, and education. This amalgam of workers proved to be a study in racial segregation as African American workers were flocking to Oak Ridge by the thousands to assist on a “mysterious project located in the East Tennessee hills.” Historian Valeria Steele wrote about the experience of African Americans at Oak Ridge Tennessee, and Cynthia Kelly published it in her book The Manhattan Project. What Steele discusses is the Executive Order 8802 which said that there would be no discrimination in the employment of workers in defense industries of the government based on race, color or national origin, and that it was the job of employers and laborers to provide for the full and equitable participation of all workers in defense industries, without discrimination. At Oak Ridge, the original plan was to be able to house the African American workers in a separate village that had the same housing plans as whites. However, as plans grew larger for the Oak Ridge plant, the African American workers got pushed to the sides. The white residents took over the village set aside for the African American workers, and the African Americans were moved to “hutments” housing six people; the hutments only measured approximately 250 square feet. Abandoned were plans of churches, schools and stores for the African Americans. Instead, they were corralled into housing was, on average, worse than the ones that they had left behind. Even black married couples were forced to live in separate facilities.[8]

            This type of arrangement could have posed a considerable risk to the goal of secrecy that the United States government was trying to keep. By making black residents live the worse conditions than they had left, it would not be illogical to see people harbor resentment towards the government that had led them there under false pretenses. That being said, had one of the black workers complained to a local newspaper or other news medium about the shoddy living conditions of a government job after Executive Order 8802, there could have been a real incident at the Oak Ridge, Tennessee plant.

            At the Hanford Washington Plant, the crews were commissioned to enrich uranium-238 in order to convert it into plutonium. Hanford, Washington was a remote area in the deserted frontier of Washington. One resident and worker at Hanford said Washington was a “desert with tumbleweed and jackrabbits…What a shock when they ride past miles of empty desert and arrive at this huge construction camp at the old Hanford town site.”[9]

            Hanford employees had to with the harsh climate of the desert quite often. They dubbed the frequent sandstorms as “termination winds” because after they came, so many employees quit their jobs because of the thick film of grit and dirt that it placed on everything. If one was unlucky enough to be caught outside during one of the storms, they would get their “face black in the storm, and you felt grit in the food, on your hands and clothes, and everywhere. Everything felt like real fine sandpaper.”[10]

            The remoteness in Hanford, Washington was so great that many employees quit for the sole reason of feeling isolated. Also, there was a lack of recreational facilities that so many of the workers needed. As a worker whose job it was to work on a top secret military project, many felt that they were not being treated properly. No military commendations were handed out due to the necessity for secrecy, and even the recruiting booklet claimed Hanford was on the “rugged side”. Needless to say, the employee turnover rate was always dangerously high. Construction crews always had a turnover percentage of eight to twenty one percent at any point in the plant’s life.[11]

            It could be said that with their high turnover rate and the amount of unhappy employees leaving the plant, the Hanford plant would also hold a potential for a security disaster, much like the Oak Ridge plant. In any other time period besides this one, the Hanford plant would hold a prime set of conditions for the breaking of silence concerning what was going on at the plant.

            What must be appreciated about these scenarios is how virtually nothing happened with regards to the secrecy and security of the Manhattan Project. Even with the sometimes less than tolerable environment and circumstances, the employees working in these places realized that what they were working on was bigger than oneself. J. Robert Oppenheimer recalls “Almost everyone realized that this was a great undertaking. Almost everyone knew that if it were completed successfully and rapidly enough, it might determine the outcome of the war. Almost everyone knew that it was an unparalleled opportunity to bring to bear the basic knowledge…for the benefit of this country. Almost everyone knew that this job, if it were achieved, would be part of history. This sense of excitement, of devotion and of patriotism in the end prevailed.”[12]

            Oppenheimer’s quote most accurately depicts the attitude for those involved in the Manhattan Project. Most people were aware that they were being contracted by the government, and that what they were working on was a secret project vital to national security. Instead of knowing exactly what it was they were making, most people knew that they were helping to create a small piece of a larger puzzle. A few people did appear to have ideas about what was being made, as Donald Ross explains. “We had come from all across the country with training in electronics, chemistry, physics, engineering, or something related. They had only told us about our specific jobs and said the rest was top secret. But eight or ten of us sitting around our dorm room and consulting a recently published textbook…figured out what we were doing and why.”[13]

            General Leslie Groves had compartmentalized the manufacturing and research of the two atomic bombs. He had succeeded in breaking down the development and assembly so that all of that technology and work would not be isolated to one specific location. The metallurgical lab at the University of Chicago, the uranium factory in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, the Plutonium factory in Hanford, Washington, and the development and research team in Los Alamos, New Mexico, were all separate parts of a greater whole. “Compartmentalization, in addition to maintaining security, kept people focused on their assignment to achieve it. Each element had its own task, and all were carefully allocated, assigned, and supervised so that the sum of the parts resulted in the accomplishment of the mission.”[14]

            In summation, despite overwhelming challenges in keeping the largest multi-nation scientific undertaking in the history of the world a complete secret to the lay citizen, the facilitators behind the Manhattan project were able to keep it covert by instilling its patriotic necessity into it’s participators, and by compartmentalizing the manufacturing so that no one person would have a hand in all aspects of the bomb’s construction. To understand why the Manhattan Project was a greater success than the atomic bombs it produced, one must appreciate the devotion to secrecy that the project kept.

Appreciating Health and Safety Risks

The health and safety risks posed to workers during the development and construction of the nuclear devices were prolific. The people who worked with the research of the bombs at the University of Chicago and Los Alamos, as well as those who worked around nuclear material, were in particular danger. To fully understand and realize what made the Manhattan Project such a success, one must appreciate the health and safety risks that the employees of the project subjected themselves to.

Walter Simon, the first operations manager at the Hanford plant, recalled the night that the B reactor went critical, then shut itself down almost instantaneously. Simon gives immense credit to the conservatism of the Du Pont construction team in saving the plant from a nuclear meltdown. “Du Pont conservatism paid off on the reactors. Enough extra fuel tubes had been added to overcome the fission product poisoning.”[15] Had there not been an extra foresight on the part of the Du Pont Corporation, the Hanford Plant would have experienced a meltdown, possibly ending the lives of many who worked there.

Simon goes on to record that in order to protect scientists who were working with radioactive material, the engineers built a series of robotic arms that could handle the material without threat of exposure to the scientists. “The scientists were absolutely astounded in our ability to design arms and devices that could do these tasks. They stood a little bit in awe of how it all worked out. It was technically very good.”[16] Given the fact that the separation of plutonium was mostly a chemical process, these robotic appendages must have been a godsend to the scientists.

In Oak Ridge, employees worked with “calultrons”; large electromagnetic devices used to magnetically separate U-238 uranium (non-weapons grade) from U-235 (weapons grade) uranium. Not only were the machines themselves very fickle and had to be constantly maintained to prevent breakdowns, but when active, the machines exuded magnetic energy and permeated the surrounding area with a strong magnetic pull. This pull could be felt even on the catwalk rafters high above the calutrons. “If you walked along the wooden catwalk over the magnet, you could feel the tug of the magnetic field on the nails in your shoes. It was like walking through glue.”[17]

Because of the sensitive nature of the machinery the engineers and scientists were working with, the protection and security of the hardware was often placed before the employee’s safety. “One time, they were bringing a big steel plate in and got too close to the magnetic field. The plate pinned some poor guy like a butterfly against the magnetic field. So the guys ran over to the boss and said ‘Shut down the magnet! Shut down the magnet! We got to get that guy off.’ And the boss replied, ‘I’ve been told that the war is killing 300 people an hour. If we shut down the magnet, it will take days to get re-stabilized and get production back up again, and that’s hundreds of lives. I’m not going to do that. You’re going to have to pry him off with two-by-fours.’ Which is what they did. Luckily, he wasn’t badly hurt, but that showed us what our priorities were.”[18]

            In Los Alamos, scientists had to always exercise the utmost caution in their work. The tiniest slip or mistake could yield disasterous results. Even post-war tests could not be approached with a cavalier attitude. “On May 21, 1946, Slotin and seven other colleagues performed an experiment that involved the creation of one of the first steps of a fission reaction by placing two half-spheres of beryllium (a neutron reflector) around a plutonium core. The experiment used the same 6.2-kilogram (13.7 lb) plutonium core that had irradiated Daghlian. Slotin grasped the upper beryllium hemisphere with his left hand through a thumb hole at the top while he maintained the separation of the half-spheres using the blade of a screwdriver with his right hand, having removed the shims normally used. Using a screwdriver was not a normal part of the experimental protocol.”

“At 3:20 p.m., the screwdriver slipped and the upper beryllium hemisphere fell, causing a ‘prompt critical’ reaction and a burst of hard radiation. At the time, the scientists in the room observed the ‘blue glow’ of air ionization and felt a ‘heat wave’. In addition, Slotin experienced a sour taste in his mouth and an intense burning sensation in his left hand. Slotin instinctively jerked his left hand upward, lifting the upper beryllium hemisphere and dropping it to the floor. He exposed himself to a lethal dose (around 2100 rems, or 21 Sv) of neutron and gamma radiation. Slotin's radiation dose was equivalent to the amount that he would have been exposed to by being 1500 m (4800 feet) away from the detonation of an atomic bomb.”

“As soon as Slotin left the building, he vomited, a common reaction from exposure to extremely intense ionizing radiation. Slotin's colleagues rushed him to the hospital, but irreversible damage had already been done. His parents were informed of their son's inevitable death and a number of volunteers donated blood for transfusions, but the efforts proved futile. The accident ended all hands-on assembly work at Los Alamos. At first, the incident was classified and not made known even within the laboratory; Robert Oppenheimer and other colleagues later reported severe emotional distress at having to carry on with normal work and social activities while they secretly knew that their colleague lay dying.”

“Louis Slotin died nine days later on May 30, in the presence of his parents. He was buried in Winnipeg on June 2, 1946. The core, which later was termed the ‘Demon core’ due to the accidents it had led to, was subject to a number of experiments shortly after the end of the war and was used in the ABLE detonation, during the Crossroads series of nuclear weapon testing. Slotin's experiment was set to be the last conducted before the core's detonation and was intended to be the final demonstration of its ability to go critical.” [19]

            A similar accident had taken place exactly nine months earlier by a friend and lab assistant to Slotin. The accident had occurred under similar circumstances where the lab assistant was exposed to 510 rems of neutron radiation. The young man died 20 days later.[20]

            At The University of Chicago where the first self sustained nuclear chain reaction took place, the participants, namely Enrico Fermi, always had the thought in the back of their minds about what would happen if their chain reaction could not be controlled. However, when faced with the decision to either risk a meltdown or that of trying to control the disaster brought on by a nuclear attack by another country, the scientists opted to proceed with the testing. Luckily for the team of scientists involved, they had planned for multiple fail-safes. One was the manual insertion of cadmium rods into the “pile” to help absorb the rogue neutrons bouncing around. Another innovative failsafe was a cadmium-salt compound that could be dumped in the pile. The last failsafe, should the man that was manually sliding the cadmium rods in place be incapacitated, was another rod, suspended by a rope that could be released by the spectators on the balcony above.

            Due to the countless hours performing calculations and experiments, on December 2^nd, 1942, Enrico Fermi’s team achieved the first self sustaining nuclear chain reaction. Their many failsafes had not needed to be used thanks to their planning, but the threat had always loomed over them during experiment.

            July 16, 1945, marked the day that the world was first privy to the destructive force behind a nuclear explosion. The days before the Trinity test in Alamagordo, New Mexico were the most unnerving time for the men and women involved in the creation of the bombs. General Groves once said that the last three years leading up to the bomb were akin to spending three years on a tight rope.

The Trinity test was to demonstrate the power of the plutonium bomb, as the uranium bomb was ready for use. There were many issues still unresolved concerning the bomb’s use in the few days before the test. Don Hornig, a young scientist asked to babysit the bomb on its perch 100 feet above the ground, recalled that he wasn’t worried so much about watching the “gadget” above him as he was that his contribution of the electrical switching device might not work. “Oppenheimer was really terribly worried about the fact that the thing was so complicated and so many people knew exactly how it was put together that it would be easy to sabotage. So he thought someone had better baby sit right up until the moment it was fired. They asked for volunteers and as the youngest guy present, I was selected.”[21]

Hornig also recalled that there was a violent thunderstorm in the area as time grew closer for the testing to begin. “The possiblilty of lightning striking the tower was very much on my mind. But it was very wet and the odds were the tower would act like a giant lightning rod and the electricity would just go straight down to the wet desert. In that case, nothing would have happened. The other case was that it would set the bomb off.”[22]

            Hornig’s device, an electrical switching device, was foremost on his mind as the countdown for the bomb’s detonation reached its end. “I had invented the electrical switching device which came to be used on the bomb. The bomb itself was a sphere of plutonium surrounded by a couple tons of high explosive, which had to crush that sphere. To do that successfully, the high explosives had to be detonated at 32 points around the sphere. All of those initiations had to take place in a fraction of a millionth of a second. My switch was the device for doing that, for firing all 32 detonators well within a millionth of a second.”[23]

            At the Trinity test site, the scientists were skeptical and even apprehensive about the result of the bomb. “All the senior scientists who weren’t actually involved in the test had a betting pool. The betting ran from a complete dud to little explosions to middle sized explosions. Just a few people were willing to bet that it would produce what it was supposed to produce which was something like 20,000 tons of TNT’s worth. There was a lot of skepticism.”[24]  According to James Conant, “Predictions ranged from zero, a complete dud, to 18 kilotons of TNT (predicted by physicist I. I. Rabi, who won the bet^[8]), to destruction of the state of New Mexico, to ignition of the atmosphere and incineration of the entire planet (this last result had been calculated to be almost impossible, although for a while it caused some of the scientists some anxiety).” [25]

            In summation, it must be noted that the scientists and engineers who developed the nuclear devices put themselves at great risk for the goal of ending the War in the Pacific theater. To understand why the Manhattan Project was a greater success that the atomic bombs it produced, one must appreciate the health and safety risks associated with building weapons of this magnitude.

Appreciating the Threat of  Espionage

As previously detailed, security was a way of life for the Manhattan Project.  The goal was to keep the entire atomic bomb program secret from Germany and Japan.  In this, Manhattan Project security officials succeeded.  They also sought, however, to keep word of the atomic bomb from reaching the Soviet Union.  Although an ally of Britain and the United States in the war against Germany, the Soviet Union remained a repressive dictatorship and a potential future enemy.  In the United States, security officials were less successful.  Soviet spies penetrated the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos and several other locations, sending back to Russia critical information that helped speed the development of the Soviet bomb.

The idea of developing an atomic bomb was not something America had a monopoly on. Since fission had been discovered in Berlin, word had spread quickly around the world about this great new breakthrough. Any physicist that had been keeping up with the news would have known that a chain reaction was possible. The idea of an explosive chain reaction, however, was more of a distant thought.

In the time before Germany’s fall, the German’s were developing their own atomic weapons program. The German hopes were to supplement it with a vast spy network set up in the United States. This failed, however, as most German spies were caught, and none were able to join the ranks of the Manhattan Project. The same was also true in Japan. Japanese physicists had heard of the large scale project of create nuclear grade weaponry, but with no Japanese spies, there was never any confirmation to the rumors.

On the other hand, the time was especially ripe for communist sympathizers and members of the Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA) to infiltrate the ranks of the Manhattan Project. The CPUSA had thousands of members, a disproportionate number of whom were highly trained and very likely to work in the facilities that supplemented the Manhattan Project.

            The earliest attempts at recruiting by the Soviet Union were foiled by the FBI and Manhattan Project counterintelligence. An effective tactic used by the government to dissuade potential spies was to immediately draft said spies into the army so they would be far from sensitive subjects, such as nuclear development. The FBI also learned of scientists at the University of Chicago metallurgical laboratory who were possibly engaging in espionage. Naturally, these people were blacklisted by the government and dismissed from their jobs.

            British Physicist Klaus Fuchs was one of the most notorious spies and was not captured until 1950. Laura Fermi, who befriended Fuchs, recalled “I found at the steering wheel of my car an attractive young man, slim, with a small round face and dark hair, with a quiet look through round eyeglasses. He could not have been much over thirty years of age. Even as he spoke to me, he was leading a double life- that of a highly competent and appreciated physicist among friendly colleagues and that of spy. He was giving secret information to the Russians on the progress of the atomic bomb.”[26]

            Of course, there were more spies than just Klaus Fuchs; however, none offered as much information as he did. At his confession though, Klaus Fuchs turned the name of his Soviet contact, Harry Gold, who also turned in the name of David Greenglass. Greenglass was an Army machinist who worked briefly at Oak Ridge, who was then transferred to the Special Engineering Detachment (SED) at Los Alamos. Greenglass then funneled the information to his brother-in-law Julius Rosenburg, who then turned it over to the Soviet Union’s intelligence officials. Julius and his wife, Ethel, were executed on June 19, 1953 for their participation in the espionage. David Greenglass did not receive the death penalty because of his cooperation in turning over the names of other Soviet spies.

            Thanks to the effort of the FBI, the Manhattan Project counter intelligence officials, and a team devoted to the decryption of Soviet communiqué, Soviet espionage directed at the Manhattan Project only hastened the acquisition of the atomic bomb by 12 months. [27] The Soviet Union did not test their atomic bomb until 1949.

            To understand that the Manhattan Project itself was a greater achievement than the atomic bombs it subsequently produced, one must appreciate the ever present threat of espionage by the Soviet Union and the risk it placed on the scientists and engineers who worked so hard to develop the nuclear devices.

The Manhattan Project and it’s Lasting Epic

            Richard Rhodes’s description of a “tragic epic” defines the Manhattan Project most decidedly. The Manhattan Project “story” contains multiple heroes, all of whom are imperfect and flawed, an enemy whose viciousness and cruelty knows no bounds, a leader who brings the heroes together under a single banner, and the tragic ending, where the heroes discover that they have become the cruel enemy they have fought so hard to defeat.

            The heroes in this story are J. Robert Oppenheimer, the charismatic, yet eccentric genius who others look up to, Enrico Fermi, the man who escaped a fascist regime and helped build the world’s first nuclear reactor, Leo Szilard, the peculiar visionary who helped Albert Einstein realize the terrible power that laid dormant within the atom, Niels Bohr, the fugitive from the Nazi government who shed new light into the inner workings of the atom, and the countless others who contributed in their own unique way to the development of the atomic bombs.

            The leader in this story is General Leslie R. Groves, the hardnosed efficiency expert who had previously displayed his organizational prowess. Groves requested J. Robert Oppenheimer as his chief researcher in the Los Alamos facility, and recruited many other men and women into the ranks of the project. Groves ran a very tight ship and employed very few people to his personal cabinet. Groves’s policy throughout the construction of the bombs could be described as “quality, not quantity.” This leader helped keep the scientists and engineers on task, critically examining their work and making improvements where necessary.

            The enemy in this epic would be a two-headed enemy, in both Germany and Japan. The beginning of the project was devoted to countering a German nuclear threat, be later evolved into a fight against the Japanese to help end the war in the Pacific. An earlier quote said that the United States was losing an estimated 300 men an hour as a result of the war. The scientists and military leaders of this project could not allow that sort of carnage to continue. The scientists worked day and night to expedite the process in which these bombs were being made.

            The tragic ending comes on August 6, 1945, when the first bomb was finally dropped on Japan. Then, on August 9, 1945, the second bomb was detonated over Nagasaki. Between the two, over 140,000 lives were taken in an instant, and countless others died later due to radiation poisoning. Oppenheimer lamenting over the realization of the devices he created said, “I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad-Gita. Vishnu is trying to persuade the Prince that he should do his duty and to impress him takes on his multi-armed form and says, ‘Now, I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.’ I suppose we all thought that one way or another.”

            No one involved in this project wanted the outcome to happen the way it did; but if there was a way for the war to end without all of this being necessary, it would have happened. The truly tragic consequence of the whole Manhattan Project was that the United States government asked a select few men and women to be responsible not only for the lives of the people in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but they are also forced to bear the burden for any future uses of the atomic bomb on civilian populations. In this way, our heroes became the very enemy they were trying to destroy.

Conclusion

            This writer’s intentions are to impress upon the reader the struggles that the Manhattan Project was faced with. These struggles, the arduous task of keeping the largest multi-nation scientific undertaking in the history of the world a complete secret to the lay citizen, prolific health and safety risks involved in the creation of nuclear devices, and the ever present threat of espionage from the Soviet Union, were overcome because of the direct influence of the people that filled its ranks, the leadership under General Groves, and the belief that the work that these scientists and engineers would one day create a better, safer world. The Manhattan Project was a success, and there would not have been nuclear weapons in the hands of the United States had it not.

Notes: