RACHEL BRONSON: December 2, 1942-- here at the University of Chicago, you get the first
sustained nuclear chain reaction.
This was a huge scientific discovery.
It had the potential to electrify the planet in the most positive ways, but it also had the
potential to end World War II.
ROGER TILBROOK: The scientists all understood that the Germans had been the first to find
fission, and they felt absolute drive to beat them to the next step, which was a bomb.
Los Alamos was already working under Oppenheimer.
Many of the scientists at Chicago-- Fermi, Szilard, Teller-- went out to join him.
RACHEL BRONSON: And they're able by 1945 to figure out that they can weaponize it.
Many of the scientists who were working on the Manhattan Project were building the bomb
so that they could outpace the Germans.
ROBERT ROSNER: But the bomb was completed after Germany had already surrendered.
RACHEL BRONSON: Now, suddenly, the conversation shifts because if it's going to be used, it's
going to be used on Japan.
EDWARD KOLB: There were two places where scientists were thinking about what should happen after
the bomb was developed.
One was in Los Alamos and the other was here at the University of Chicago
in the Metallurgical Laboratory.
KENNETTE BENEDICT: The people at the Metallurgical Lab began to think about the ramifications
of this use of energy.
They were asked by the President to put together a report
in June of 1945. That became the Franck Report.
They said as citizens, we feel it's our responsibility to tell the world
how dangerous this new weapon is.
RACHEL BRONSON: The majority of Manhattan Project scientists want to demonstrate it
so the Japanese know that we have it, but they don't want to use it.
But there are some who feel we should drop it on the Japanese and use it as a weapon
of war.
ROGER TILBROOK: Looking at all the potential deaths the way the Japanese had fought, Truman
had to make a decision.
There would probably be less death dropping the bomb than there would be having people
fighting on the beaches in every village of the Japanese archipelago.
RACHEL BRONSON: He wants to act to make sure that he can end this war as fast as possible
and there is considerable support for that.
And we know the story then.
In August of 1945, it's dropped first on Hiroshima and then on Nagasaki.
The world is absolutely terrified.
They now see the destructive powers of a nuclear weapon.
What the scientists know is this is just the beginning of the destruction that these weapons
can yield.
ROBERT ROSNER: From today's perspective, historians are not unanimous about whether or not the
bomb project itself was in fact worthwhile.
Did it save lives or not?
It's not clear. And I suspect that that dispute will never really end.
KENNETTE BENEDICT: It was a very difficult time.
Some scientists who had gone to Hiroshima after the bomb was dropped were appalled at
what they saw.
Bob Wilson, who later became the director of Fermilab, gave up working on weapons after that.
I think many of them understood this as a weapon of genocide.
RACHEL BRONSON: Here at the University of Chicago, President Hutchins calls a conference
to figure out how to manage the implications of this new power that we have.
KENNETTE BENEDICT: Huge debates around the clock.
Almost immobilization of the campus.
EDWARD KOLB: And this brought in not only atomic scientists who worked on the project
but people from the law, the humanities, philosophy, social sciences.
KENNETTE BENEDICT: It was a major effort by the scientists to speak to the world beyond
the university and beyond the laboratories to talk about
what the consequences were of this bomb.
EDWARD KOLB: For the first time, physicists really had to think about what they were doing,
why they were doing it, what would be the implications of further research
on nuclear energy?
RACHEL BRONSON: What you have here at the University of Chicago as well as they create
a bulletin-- The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.
In November of 1945, a six-page bulletin quickly becomes the voice of scientists speaking to
the public, engaging the public on this new world.
KENNETTE BENEDICT: The scientists used the Bulletin as an outlet to tell the public very
quickly how close we were to the end of civilization, and they also saw that secrecy was how the
bomb was born.
And secrecy would keep the bomb from being understood by the broad public.
JOSEPH MASCO: What the nuclear revolution does for the US is it completely changes the
relationship to the future, and the future from '45 on has two major tracks.
One, the perfectability of society.
The other that society might not last through tomorrow.
Nuclear technologies are world making and world breaking technologies.
ERIC ISAACS: The Manhattan Project, of course, in World War II changed the way we think about
bringing together scientists, engineers, industry, and government under one roof.
That concept spawned a new age of science.
What one might call "big science."
EDWARD KOLB: The Manhattan Project led directly to the founding of national laboratories--
centers that are funded by the United States government that brings together scientists
from all over the world to do science that's too large to be done
at any one individual institution.
ERIC ISAACS: Creating what became Argonne National Labs, what became the James Franck
Institute, what became the Enrico Fermi Institute, enabled the University of Chicago
to retain some of these great minds.
EDWARD KOLB: Our understanding of nuclear physics became deeper, and it continued.
And it led to things like nuclear reactors, nuclear medicine, and an understanding of
the physics inside the nucleus.
Also, in chemistry, we can't do the engineering of building a bomb until we understand the
chemistry of the components that go into the bomb.
ERIC ISAACS: Basic science led to applying science to create the bomb
to create nuclear power.
And then that accelerated discovery that had to happen to create the bomb
came back to science.
MARYELLEN GIGER: In the early 1950s, the Atomic Energy Commission funded the Argonne Cancer
Research Hospital which later became the Franklin McLean Institute.
They investigated means to use radiation to treat cancer as well as use it to see inside
the body through imaging.
SUZET MCKINNEY: The way that nuclear imaging works is the patient
is administered a radioactive substance.
The behavior of the substance is really the factor that is indicative of whether or not
disease is present.
It's an important medical technology because oftentimes, it can help the clinician identify
a disease or improper functioning at an early stage.
When these new advancements come about, they can have negative implications, but they can
also have very positive implications that guide our scientific inquiry, discovery, and
also the way we practice medicine to help keep people healthier, happier, and safer.
ERIC ISAACS: After the atomic bomb, it was realized by people like Enrico Fermi, Leo
Szilard, and Arthur Holly Compton who were here at the University,
that a project as big as the Manhattan Project really needed to continue,
but for civilian use. To do good things for society–
for example, to produce electricity.
So with the University of Chicago, they established essentially what became Argonne National Labs
to build the next set of scientific experiments around nuclear reactors.
ROGER BLOMQUIST: Argonne has been a leader in the field of nuclear energy since its inception.
That's its mission.
ROGER TILBROOK: Every type of nuclear reactor that provides power in the world has been
developed or initially researched here at Argonne.
ROGER BLOMQUIST: In the world, something like 10% or 11% of our electricity is generated
with nuclear energy.
It's close to 20% in the United States today.
ERIC ISAACS: Nuclear power is the largest supplier of carbon-free energy in this country.
ROGER BLOMQUIST: What makes nuclear energy special amongst the forms of energy?
Its energy density.
The environmental impacts of, for example, the fuel cycle, are about a million times
less for nuclear energy than they are for any sort of fossil-based system, and it's
the energy density that's the key.
The promise of advanced reactors comes in a couple of areas.
Fast neutron reactors are 100 times more efficient with uranium than our
current generation of reactors.
The other very nice feature of fast neutron reactors is they denature the spent fuel from
having long half-life materials into having short half-life materials.
So right now we need a repository that will last 300,000 years.
A fast neutron reactor will eliminate almost all of those long half-lifed items so that
we're down to about 300 years.
JOSEPH MASCO: Between '45 and '47 there is a bit of a debate on the implications of the
success of the Manhattan Project creating a technological revolution, but also the dangers
of city-killing technology being unleashed into international politics.
The fear of a nuclear Pearl Harbor informs the production
of our modern intelligence agencies.
Secondarily, the president is empowered as the entity that controls the bomb.
Unprecedentedly powerful in terms of his ability to decide life and death on the planet.
The Manhattan Project naturalizes the reliance on secrecy to build technologies, to fund
projects outside of public view.
JOHN MEARSHEIMER: With the coming of nuclear weapons, defense issues or military matters
become more important because there's always the possibility
that those weapons will be used.
JOSEPH MASCO: The whole point of having a bomb is to threaten to use it
and to deter other people from warfare.
Its chief virtue is the production of fear.
JOHN MEARSHEIMER: Nuclear weapons are the ultimate deterrent.
If you just look around, you see no evidence that the existing nuclear states-- all nine
of them-- have any interest in giving up their nuclear weapons.
And you also see that there are a number of countries that don't have nuclear weapons
that would like to acquire them if they could.
I think we can learn two things from the North Korean nuclear crisis.
First of all, if you have a country like the United States that runs around the world threatening
regime change, you're going to give countries very powerful incentives
to acquire nuclear weapons.
The second thing that you learn is that once a country gets nuclear weapons, it's almost
impossible to get that country to give them up.
JOSEPH MASCO: Where is their collective leadership in the international system interested in
reducing nuclear confrontation and nuclear tensions?
JOHN MEARSHEIMER: The best way to prevent proliferation is for the great powers to cooperate
with each other to thwart potential proliferators.
If the great powers are fighting with each other and competing with each other and not
cooperating, it's going to be very hard to prevent proliferation.
RACHEL BRONSON: A whole new architecture needs to be built
and there seems to be no appetite for it.
We should be aspiring to a world without nuclear weapons.
Many will point out that a world with zero nuclear weapons makes everyone vulnerable
to the one who decides to have one, so this is not an easy strategic issue to overcome.
But we need really the best minds to think about it.
How do we get to a world without nuclear weapons?
And if we can't get there, how do we keep the ones that we have as safe
and away from being used as possible?
ROBERT ROSNER: What lessons have we learned from all this?
It is always said that ignoring history one does at one's peril,
and I think that's absolutely correct.
EDWARD KOLB: Scientists have a responsibility to advance science.
That's what we do.
That's what we're trained to do.
That's our life.
But we also have a responsibility to communicate with the public, politicians, policymakers,
and they as citizens have to be receptive to this communication.
What we've learned from the past is that it is possible to come together as a nation, to
come together as academics, to do big things.
We can solve big problems.
The University of Chicago I think is ideally situated to continue to address these challenges
and like in the Manhattan Project, take big and bold steps to really innovate.
RACHEL BRONSON: Today's challenges aren't going to be solved
by relying on what's come in the past.
We need everybody involved in this issue.
We need the artists, we need the scientists.
We need the policymakers.
We need the editors.
We need the journalists.
We need the best minds, more so now than ever.
So the question really is,
what's your contribution going to be?