History 4000

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History 2285

Thomas Niblock

History 4000

Dr. Morrill

July 2, 2008

This writer contends that the United States undertook a monumental effort, utilizing some of the world’s brightest minds, in the creation of a new field of science and developed a weapon unlike any the world had ever known.  The United States leadership decided that it was necessary to end a long and horrible war by the dropping of the atomic bomb on the country of Japan. Japan was a formidable enemy in that the Japanese did not care nor see any value in compromise with the United States. It is the failure of the Japanese and their lack of compromise, which resulted in the United States making use of the atomic bomb. The atomic bomb development program, named the Manhattan Project, was top secret and the program had been compartmentalized to lessen the chance of a security leak as there was great fear that another country, specifically Germany, Russia or Japan would acquire the knowledge to build the atomic bomb.

The Manhattan Program was successful enabling the design, creation, and ultimately the development of two atomic bombs fatally crippling the Japanese Empire effectively ending the war. The power of the atomic weapon was due to a force that was similar to nuclear fission itself due to the complexity of the diverse commitment, energies, and effort focused into these endeavor. Several Universities were deeply involved in this undertaking and an entire segmented program was created in which none of the program sectors were aware of the research of other program sectors. German scientists were well aware of this effort and agreed to come to the United States and join research with the United States. This research was characterized by the cooperation and collaboration among universities and various research sectors among the Manhattan Project’s efforts. Much of the  citizenry of the United States was aware that a new age of military warfare was soon to come and the majority were willing to affirm that since it was to happen the United States must be the first to develop the atomic bomb. The Manhattan Project’s success resulted from the knowledge that arose from the collaboration of many sectors and sub-sectors of the project participants, and its success ultimately benefited not only the United States but the entire world.  Secondly, this writer contends that the atomic bomb put an end to a long and brutal war, thereby saving tens of thousands of lives. The Japanese leadership was unreasonable in its demands and the United States desired to put an end to this war and because of this was willing to use the atomic bomb against Japan.

            The purpose of this study is to examine the work involved in the Manhattan Project and to attempt to determine whether the knowledge gained by the Manhattan Project and the development of the atomic bomb benefits Americans and the world. Secondly, this work intends to show that the United States was willing to use the atomic bomb only because the war had gone on so very long, so many had died, and the resources and morale of the United States were running low just as tensions were heightening across the globe. The methodology of this study is qualitative in nature and will be conducted through an extensive review of literature in this area of study and in field-specific literature including political, scientific, educational, and governmental historical literature.

            The work of Harry Lustig entitled: “To Advance and Diffuse the Knowledge of Physics” states that America, early in its history, “was not a fertile land for physics or a Mecca for physicists.” This lack of involvement in America by physicists lasted through World War I and World War II even though the physicist’s war was smaller than World War II. A significant part was played by both members and leaders in the physicists society in World War II which has been called by some to be the ‘chemists’ war.[1]

The work of Ivan Amato entitled: Pushing the Horizon: Seventy-Five Years of High Stakes Science and Technology at the Naval Research Laboratory states that World War II

“…became a showcase for the close marriage of engineering bravado with leading-edge basic science” which worked toward changing the rules. Amato states that the Manhattan Project “with its terrifying nuclear weapons… [was]…most emblematic of what could come of such a union.” [2]

The Naval Research Lab (NRL) was the site of the initiation of a program that was “top secret…with the prescient goal of developing nuclear propulsion for submarines. As a result, NRL became the first government laboratory to separate uranium isotopes, a first step to producing and harnessing nuclear chain reactions.” Amato relates that a New York Times Sunday Magazine article led to the creation of a research establishment headed by the military in Washington DC “that would soon change the world.” It is reported that a belief was stated that the government should necessarily

“…maintain a great research laboratory jointly under military and naval and civilian control. In this could be developed the continually increasing possibilities of great guns, the minutiae of new explosives, all the technique of military and naval progression without any vast expense . . . When the time came, if it ever did, we could take advantage of the knowledge gained through research work, and quickly manufacture in large quantities the very latest and most effective instruments of warfare.”[3]

            The characterization of war on the part of Edison as being “…a matter of machines rather than men…” is stated by Amato to have been “the key to a potential compromise.” In fact, Amato relates that serving as the very “…“foundation of success in modern warfare was not massive military expenditure and immediate mobilization of large standing military forces. Success would come instead through the unparalleled ability to quickly develop and manufacture the best and latest military technology via the kind of inventive insight and research that had become the modus operandi at a growing foster of science-based industrial laboratories.”[4]

The work of F.G. Gosling entitled, The Manhattan Project: Making the Atomic Bomb states of the atomic bomb that it was conceived in 1919 by Ernest Rutherford, a New Zealander, who, working in the Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge University in England “achieved the first artificial transmutation of an element when he changed several atoms of nitrogen into oxygen.”[5]  At that time the atom was believed to be in the nature of a “miniature solar system, with extremely light negatively charged particles called electrons in orbit around the much heavier positively charged nucleus.”[6] In 1939, news reached the United States of the “Hahn-Straussmann experiments and the Meitner-Frisch calculations…”[7] Following this news the scientists in America began to participate in this study.

The theory of fission was advanced by Neil’s Bohr and John A. Wheeler in their theoretical work conducted at Princeton University while Columbia University Walter H. Zinn and Herbert L. Anderson worked collaboratively with Enrico Fermi and Leo Szilard in an investigation into the “possibility of producing a nuclear chain reaction.” President Roosevelt was quite open to Uranium research in the United States and toward that end appointed Lyman J. Briggs, as director of the National Bureau of Standards, head of the Advisory Committee on Uranium which met for the first time on October 21, 1939.[8] It was the conclusion of scientists that “enriched samples of uranium-235 were necessary for further research and that the isotope might serve as a fuel source for an explosive device; thus finding the most effective method of isotope separation was a high priority.”[9] Germany started World War II in September, 1939 by invading Poland.  About the same time, Vannevar Bush, president of the Carnegie Foundation, held that it was absolutely necessary that the government “marshal the forces of science for a war that would inevitably involve the United States.”[10] A Uranium research committee was formed with the approval of President Roosevelt. The following figure labeled Figure 1 shows the organizational chart for the Manhattan Project.

Figure 1

Organizational Chart for the Manhattan Project

Source: Gosling (1999)

            The Manhattan Engineer District, according to Gosling, “operated like any other large construction company. It purchased and prepared sites, let contracts, hired personnel and subcontractors, built and maintained housing and service facilities, placed orders for materials, developed administrative and accounting procedures, and established communications networks.”[11] The difference between the Manhattan Project and other companies that were very similar in function was the urgency for quick success and the investment of “hundreds of millions of dollars in unproven and hitherto unknown processes, all done entirely in secret. Speed and secrecy were the watchwords of the Manhattan Project.”[12] Gosling states that the “one overwhelming advantage” of the project was that it became possible, under the cloak of secrecy to “make decisions with little regard for normal peacetime political considerations.”[13] Gosling relates the following of the Manhattan Project:

“The need for haste clarified priorities and shaped decision making. Unfinished research on three separate, unproven processes had to be used to freeze design plans for production facilities, even though it was recognized that later findings inevitably would dictate changes. The pilot plant stage was eliminated entirely, violating all manufacturing practices and leading to intermittent shutdowns and endless troubleshooting during trial runs in production facilities. The inherent problems of collapsing the stages between the laboratory and full production created an emotionally charged atmosphere with optimism and despair alternating with confusing frequency.” [14]

Vanveer Bush claimed that production would be ready for the bomb in 1945 however, the challenge was great.

The work of Moataz Ragheb entitled: First Human Made Reactor and Birth of Nuclear Age, states that the Oak Ridge Site was designed as site X and was where scientists “were isotopically separating the fissile U isotope from natural uranium using electromagnetic separation in 194 inch cyclotrons called Calutoronts deriving from ‘California cyclotrons’.”  The “monumental white elephant designated as the Y-12 plant” is stated to have enabled the process of electromagnetic separation. It is noted that President Truman wrote of atomic devices:[15]

“We have discovered the most terrible bomb in the history of the world. It may be the fire destruction prophesized in the Euphrates Valley Era after Noah and his fabulous Ark. This weapon is to be used against Japan. We will use it so that military objectives and soldiers and sailors are the target and not women and children. Even if the Japs are savages, ruthless, merciless and fanatic, we as the leader of the world for the common welfare cannot drop that terrible bomb on the old capital or the new. The target will be a purely military one.”[16]

It is stated that Szilard wrote a letter along with Einstein to President Roosevelt stressing that the bomb should be demonstrated to the Japanese prior to its actual use.[17] It was related that the “yield of the Trinity test was about equivalent to 19 kilotons (kT) of the high explosive Tri-Nitro-Toluene (TNT).” The energy is only partially vested in the nuclear explosion itself which is inclusive of the “kinetic energy in the fission products, most of the energy is in the prompt gamma rays, which is converted into other forms of energy within the exploding weapon primarily ionization and x rays, and most of the neutron kinetic energy, but only a small fraction of the decay energy of the fission products.”[18]

            Ragheb states that the decision to make use of the atomic bomb against two targets in Japan was “without prior demonstration or warning.” Ragheb states that the reason this decision won out was that lives of soldiers would be saved on both sides and the lives of Japanese civilians would be spared. There had already been massive loss of human life for both the Japanese and American armies. It is related, according to Amato, in the work of Daniels who was a “…newspaper editor well-versed in the power of the media…” that the role that Edison could play in public relations regarding the laboratory was crucial and specifically stating that such a department,

“…will, of course have to eventually supported by Congress with sufficient appropriations made for its proper development. . . To get this support, Congress must be made to feel that the idea is supported by the people, and I feel that our chances of getting the public interested and back of this project will be enormously increased if we can have, at the start, some man whose inventive genius is recognized by the whole world to assist us in consultation from time to time on matters of sufficient importance to bring to his attention. You are recognized by all of us as the one man above all others who can turn dreams into realities and who has at his command, in addition to his own wonderful mind, the finest facilities in the world for such work.”[19]

            It was reasonable for the American public to make the assumption that the atomic bomb was an idea that had been in the making for a long time.  Other new and terrible weapons, such as the large-scale of chemical agents used by Germany in World War I were well known. On April 22, 1915 Germany released cylinders that held 168 tons each of “ground-hugging, yellow-green chlorine gas into the trenches on the Western Front in Ypres, France.” Casualties totaled 5,000 among Allies and it had “become a chemist’s war, too. There would be no turning back-warfare and science had become inextricably connected.”[20]

            Amato relates that the Chemistry Division of the NRL “grew during wartime at a faster rate than any other division at the Laboratory. By 1945, it had grown from a prewar staff of about two dozen to a strength of about 200 researchers distributed amongst 10 sections occupying four fully equipped buildings.” Amato relates as well the basics in liquid thermal diffusion and states that this method was:

“…to put dissolved uranium hexafluoride into a column whose ends were kept at very different temperatures. Since those uranium hexafluoride molecules harboring the lighter U235 atoms diffuse slightly faster to the warmer side of the column than do those molecules with heavier uranium isotopes (mainly U238), the lighter molecules end up enriching on the warm side of the column. This U235 enriched solution then becomes the starting fluid for a next iteration in a diffusion tube and so on. In each cycle, the proportion of U235 (still forming the center of uranium-hexafluoride molecules) by the warm side of the column increases. In time, technicians would withdraw the uranium hexafluoride and then covert it into metallic uranium enriched in U235...”[21]

A pilot plant was constructed with “12 columns, each 48 feet tall” and represented the very first amounts of uranium that were slightly enriched and in substantial amounts.” This project was referred to as the ‘little riverside project by those in the know who had Laboratory clearance and it is related that the visit of Colonel Leslie R. Groves of the Army Engineers, was both ‘unexpected’ and ‘fateful’.[22]

            Groves was in charge of the top-secret Manhattan Project that officially began one day before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Amato states that while neither the NRL nor the Navy would play a role in the Manhattan Project, “liquid thermal diffusion remained the number one candidate for acquiring the material needed for nuclear propulsion…”[23] The Philadelphia plant came into being as well as did the plans for the construction at Oak Ridge, Tennessee in 1944. Amato goes on to relate that much of the uranium isotopes “…embodied in the Hiroshima and Nagasaki (the Nagasaki bomb actually was plutonium based) bombs were processed by the Abelson-Gunn method,” and testimony before the Special Committee on Atomic Energy of the U.S. Senate following the war related that the credit the Manhattan Project received was the shortening of the war ‘by a week or more…” While this might not sound like much time, in reality: “…a week of world war is different from a week of a world at peace. Just consider the human costs. Estimates of deaths during the roughly six years of World War II range up to 54 million for a weekly average of 180,000. The number of injuries was far greater. It is a strange calculus. After all, the number of Hiroshima and Nagasaki casualties due to the atomic bombs also reached into the hundreds of thousands. For the United States, at least, an earlier ending to World War II meant more lives saved and fewer families shattered by premature death and endless grief.”[24]

            Amato writes that following the test bomb being detonated by the Manhattan Project and those dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the detonations that occurred above Bikini, one in shallow water and the bombs detonated during Operations Crossroads, testing was conducted for the primary purpose of testing the impact upon military equipment, and naval ships at sea. Nuclear detonations “…provided physicists with awesome novel objects in the universe replete with all manners of interesting thermal, optical, electromagnetic, mechanical, and other effects.” From the perspective of NRL’s academically minded scientists working under a military research laboratory’s roof, nuclear blasts were almost like having suns to study on Earth. Nuclear blasts were scientifically enticing. The Manhattan Project yielded not only bombs; it also yielded thousands of scientists and engineers well-versed in the ways of nuclear reactions and their emanations. So much of the expertise that was required to scientifically observe and measure the behavior of nuclear blasts came from this wartime community.[25]

            The work of Joseph Paulin entitled: America’s Decision to Drop the Atomic Bomb on Japan states “The number of U.S. personnel killed in captivity was a matter of deep concern to American authorities. By the end of the war, the Japanese had captured 24,992 U.S. military personnel of whom 8,634 died in captivity, a staggering 35 percent. Nazi Germany, on the other hand captured 93,653 U.S. service members of whom only 833 died, a dramatically different death rate of 0.9 percent. From the beginning of the war, the Allies knew of the atrocities the Japanese were committing. For the safety of the Allied prisoners of war still in captivity, however, the American and British governments kept the reports from the public out of fear that the Japanese would retaliate and execute more prisoners.” After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the United States did not have the naval or air forces available to blockade Japan effectively. Furthermore, the American submarine fleet was not in any condition to wage war on Japan.[26]

According to Paulin, there had not been any previous operation by which to model the invasion of Japan plan upon. The enemy was characterized by its willingness to fight to the last man, woman and child. Indeed, Paulin states that the fight “in the Pacific war was intense and brutal compared to the war in Europe.” Paulin states that the use of “…tactical atomic weapons never appeared in any written strategic invasion plans, senior military leaders longingly considered their potential value. In the original plans for the invasion of Japan, we wanted nine atomic bombs for three attacks. Two were to be used for each attacking army, or six in all, in the initial attack. And then we were planning on using the other three against the Japanese reserves which we were sure would pour into the areas.” The truth of the matter is that “the decision to use the bomb was never the issue; the primary concern was how to use the new weapon against Japan. Secretary Stimson and General Marshall wanted the best option that would end the war quickly in order to stop the needless slaughter of Americans.”[27]

            Various views were at issue concerning surrender on the part of the Japanese and specifically two views were held within the American Government:

(1) The retentionists: desired to redefine the terms so as to allow the Emperor to be retained as a mere figurehead; and

(2) The abolitionists held that “the ruthless Japanese warriors system and the current political system were one in the same – both systems must be eliminated”[28]

            The work of Sandy Frank entitled: Atomic Bomb: Ultimate Failure of Diplomacy states that while President Harry Truman was unaware of it, Franklin Roosevelt in alliance with Prime Minister Winston Churchill “had developed an agenda that was significantly broader than merely bringing an expeditious end to the war with Japan.' Use of the atomic bombs would consummate their secret grand strategy for shaping the political landscape of the postwar world.” From this viewpoint, the atomic bomb was the tool that would be used in making sure that “Anglo-American global political objectives would not be seriously challenged by Joseph Stalin's desire for hegemony over Eastern Europe and the Far East.”[29]

            Another drive in the creation and development of the atomic bomb was competition between the United States and Germany in a race to see who would be successful first. Frank states that a meeting took place between the Interim Committee and Army Chief of Staff General, George Marshal with Leslie Groves in attendance. The discussions were framed around “how the two bombs expected to be ready by August should be used rather than ‘if’ they should be used. The Interim Committee concluded its work and on the first day of June, 1945 the report was presented to President Truman. It made unanimous recommendations as follows:

(1) The bomb should be used against Japan as soon as possible;

(2) The bomb should be used against a military target surrounded by other buildings; and

(3) The bomb should be used without prior warning of the nature of the weapon."

Also related to President Truman was the dual goal of winning the war and providing a demonstration of the “new Anglo, American power to Stalin.” On June 18^th the plans of the Joint Chiefs of Staff for the invasion of Japan were presented to President Truman and was a plan that called tentatively for: 

(1)   Air bombardment and blockade of Japan from bases in Okinawa, Iwo Jima, the Marianas, and the Philippines;

(2)   Assault of Kyushu on 1 November 1945, and the intensification of blockade and air bombardment; and

(3)   Invasion of the industrial heart of Japan through the Tokyo Plain, in central Honshu, tentative start date 1 March 1946.[30]

Frank notes the statement of Churchill who wrote following the July 24 meeting at Potsdam that the historic fact “remains and must be judged in the after-time, that the decision whether or not to use the atomic bomb to gain the surrender of Japan was never an issue. There was unanimous, automatic, unquestioned agreement around our table; nor did I ever hear the slightest suggestion that we should do otherwise." Truman is noted as having stated: "The final decision of where and when to use the atomic bomb was up to me. Let there be no mistake about it. I regarded the bomb as a military weapon and never had any doubt that it should be used. The top military advisors to the President recommended its use, and when I talked to Churchill he unhesitatingly told me that he favored the use of the atomic bomb if it might aid to end the war."[31]

            The work of William Lanouette entitled: Genius in the Shadows: A Biography of Leo Szilard, the Man Behind the Bomb states that Thomas Kuhn, a philosopher and historian posited that the advances of science are not always “by evolution in small and steady increments, but by revolution. Science doesn’t creep forward, he said, instead, it lurches in rare and dramatic paradigm shifts from one world view to another.” In the attempt to understand Sziliard, it was stated by Jaques Monod, the Nobel laureate that “Many of the questions seemed very unusual, startling, almost incongruous. I am not sure I understood them all, especially since he insisted on redefining the basic problems in his own terms rather than mine.” Physicist, Hans Bethe, also a Nobel laureate said of Szilard that he “was one of the most intelligent people I have ever known. His mind worked quickly and profoundly, and he was able to come to ideas that most of us appreciated only after many hours of talk.  This was his strength and, of course, also his weakness. He was always ahead of his time.  His ideas often were expressed in paradoxes, and the paradoxes were not always understood.”

            Szilard drafted a “little-known Einstein letter to Roosevelt in March of 1945…” attempting to have an influence on the nuclear arms control following the war. Sizlard further assisted in drafting the Frank Report published by the scientists for the Manhattan Project that urged “an A-bomb demonstration before dropping it on cities.” Szilard “organized a petition to Truman in July signed by 155 Manhattan Project scientists that urged the president to weight his moral responsibilities. However, the Army delayed the petition, and after the war classified it “Secret.” Lanouette states that out of fear that scientists in Germany would gain the information Szilard urged his “colleagues not to publish their nuclear research – a heresy in science at the time. However, once the Army took over in 1942, secrecy became law. After the war, Szilard said the most powerful weapon to result from the Manhattan Project was not the A-bomb but the “SECRET” stamp.”[32]

            The work of Albert I. Berger entitled: Nuclear Energy: Science Fiction’s Metaphor of Power states that it is dictated in the Science Fiction industry that the postulation of scientific concepts be “extrapolated from the existing data” and yet this has “not always been an easy standard for the genre’s writers to maintain”[33]      

The work of B. Cameron Reed entitled: Resource Letter MP-1: The Manhattan Project and Related Nuclear Research states that the ramifications of nuclear weapon development including those relating to Science, Society, Politics and Military are “at least as significant today as they were in 1945.”[34]

            It was in the wee hours of the morning on August 6, 1945 when he 590^th Composite Group took in a B-29 bomber from Titian Island and headed toward the Islands of Japan that were in excess of 1,500 miles away.  The Enola Gay released a bomb that had been named ‘Little Boy’, a 9,700-pound uranium bomb at approximately fifteen minutes past eight-o-clock a.m. The bomb detonated at 1900 feet above Hiroshima forty three seconds after it was dropped and while the Enola Gay was already over eleven miles away “the Enola Gay was rocked by the blast.” Finally the plane was hit by a second shockwave and it is noted as having been stated by the crew of the Enola Gray that the city of Hiroshima was “hidden by that awful cloud…boiling up. Mushrooming, terrible and incredibly tall.”      

More than 70,000 were killed by ‘Little Boy’ with the death toll rising in Hiroshima to 140,000 due to radiation sickness and by 1950 more than 200,000 had died and five square miles had been destroyed by the atomic bomb. Only two days following “Little Boy’ being dropped on the Japanese, the Soviet Union declared war on Japan and attacked the forces of the Japanese in Manchuria. The terms as had been set out by the Allies were effectively rejected by the Japanese by “factional struggles and communication problems.” Therefore, “conventional bombing raids on additional Japanese cities continued as scheduled.”

            On August 9 at 3:47 a.m. another atomic bomb named “fat man” was dropped on Japan at Nagasaki. Fat Man was dropped at 29,000 feet and exploded at 1,650 feet with the force of “21,000 tons of TNT.” The ‘Fat Man’ atomic bomb killed approximately 40,000 individuals and injured approximately 60,000 as well as destroying “three square miles of the city…” By the first of the following year it is related that 70,000 were dead and it is noted that that figure climbed to approximately 140,000 dead and yet, “the Japanese Leadership struggled to come to a decision, with military extremists continuing to advocate a policy of resistance to the end.” A third atomic bomb was scheduled to be dropped on Japan when the Japanese informed the Allies that if the emperor would retain his authority that the Japanese were willing to surrender. It was at this time that President Truman announced the information relating to the atomic bomb attack on Hiroshima to the America citizenry.[35]

The Manhattan Project realized great success during World War II by the collaboration comprised of some of the brightest and most able minds in science. This project was highly secretive and was conducted in a compartmentalized manner in order to ensure that there was no security leak that would enable the enemy to gain the technology of the atomic bomb. The atomic bomb was developed just in time to leverage the attack on Hiroshima and Nagasaki against the Japanese leaders and to ensure their unconditional surrender to the United States. The havoc wreaked in term of lives taken by the detonation of the atomic bomb and the resulting destruction to property.  There was never any doubt in the minds of leaders in the United States during this time that the bomb ‘would’ be used.  The only questions were when and where.

The atomic bomb was dropped on Japan by the United States in order to end a long and brutal war.  Dropping the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki was the most important decision President Truman made during his presidency.  This decision was made by a thorough and in depth analysis of the each option the United States had in ending Pacific War.  This decision was finalized by many efforts of the military leaders and scientist working collaboratively to establish the plan to end the war.  This writer contends that the United States undertook a monumental effort, utilizing some of the world’s brightest minds, in the creation of a new field of science and developed a weapon unlike any the world had ever known. United States leadership decided that it was necessary to end a long and horrible war by the dropping of the atomic bomb on the country of Japan. The dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki forced Japan to surrender and stopped an invasion that would have killed hundreds of thousands of Americans.  All the options available to Truman were feasible and could have eventually forced the Japanese to surrender. To Truman, the cost of American lives was too great to sacrifice when the United States had the ability to end the war.  Truman’s decision to this day remains one of the most controversial decisions the United States has ever made.

Notes