Hidden away in the mountains of northern New Mexico lay one of
the most secretive military projects in history.
The Manhattan Project was the codename for the U.S.
government’s program to develop the world’s first atomic bomb.
It was so secretive that President Roosevelt
wasn’t fully informed of all the technical details.
Vice-President Truman didn’t know it existed until after he became president.
Many members of Congress didn’t know it existed until after WWII.
The bomb was assembled in Los Alamos, New Mexico,
which housed the main research laboratory for developing and testing nuclear weapons.
Scientists worked to harness the energy of the atom to build the
most destructive weapon humankind had ever seen.
And they had to move quickly.
In 1938, scientists in a lab in Berlin had managed to split the uranium atom.
The energy released from the splitting - or fission - is enough to power a bomb.
Einstein was worried that the Nazis might be developing nuclear
weapons so he sent a letter to Roosevelt,
which convinced the President to initiate the American effort to build an atomic bomb.
In a bizarre twist, Einstein was actually forbidden from working on the Manhattan
Project because he was a left-leaning political activist and deemed a potential security risk.
General Leslie Groves appointed one of the world’s
top theoretical physicists to lead the Manhattan Project, which began in 1943.
J. Robert Oppenheimer was a well-known instructor at both the University
of California at Berkeley and the California Institute of Technology.
He handpicked most of the Los Alamos staff,
personally traveling to the best universities across America to recruit top scientists.
Oppenheimer chose New Mexico for the site’s location because of its natural beauty.
Los Alamos, in particular, was ideal for a top-secret project because it’s situated on
an isolated plateau. And the sparsely populated location was safer in case of a nuclear accident.
The U.S. army purchased over 40,000 acres of land
surrounding a private all-boys prep school and immediately began to build a community.
At its peak, about 10,000 scientists, engineers, technicians, construction workers,
military personnel, and their families lived and worked there.
They enjoyed hikes throughout the area and attended parties on the weekends
at scientists’ residences in the gated facility.
A hodge podge of laboratory buildings sprouted up at Los Alamos.
Most of the equipment was transported by the scientists themselves to maintain secrecy.
On paper, it was only referred to as “Project Y”, operated by the University of California.
And no one who went to live and work there was
allowed to tell their family or friends where they were going.
All incoming mail was addressed to the same place: P.O. Box 1663, Santa Fe.
Babies born there actually had that on their birth certificate.
Los Alamos wasn’t the only location for the Manhattan Project.
In Oak Ridge, Tennessee, scientists enriched uranium to fuel a bomb.
In Washington state, reactors were built
to produce plutonium…an entirely new substance that could also fuel a bomb.
If you worked at one site, you likely didn’t have any idea what was being
done elsewhere or even what the overall goal of the project was.
I didn’t know what I was doing, I was just doing it.
Ruth Huddleston was 18 years old when she joined the Manhattan Project.
They told us when I was in training that we were not supposed to ever
let anything leave that room. We were not supposed to tell anybody
what we were doing…not even to the people that we were working with.
Ruth was one of 10,000 young women who were responsible for ensuring that a large and
complex machine called a calutron separated isotopes of uranium, which fuelled the bomb.
Calutrons separated lighter uranium 235 from the heavier and more common uranium 238.
U-235 is highly unstable, which makes it splittable or fissionable. When it’s slammed by
a neutron, it becomes U236. It’s so unstable that it splits into two atoms. In the process, more
neutrons are released. They slam into more U-235s, causing a chain reaction and a huge explosion.
Ruth’s job was to monitor the meters on the calutron machine.
That’s her seated third back on the left.
They had a certain range that they wanted that meter to be
in. They told us if it went too far to the left or too far to the right,
it was time for us to straighten it out and get it back in that range
Her job would have normally gone to a scientist,
but there weren’t enough of them, and young men were fighting overseas. So,
the government recruited farm girls, most of whom were hired straight out of high school.
And they proved to be better at the job than scientists!
Scientists were too concerned with figuring out what had gone wrong,
whereas these young women would simply alert their supervisors when there was an issue.
They also didn’t overthink any adjustments that were needed, as a scientist might.
If they thought too much and started asking questions, there were consequences.
If somebody was being nosey and wanting to ask you everything,
and wanted to talk too much about it, for some reason they disappeared.
They lost their jobs. On July 16, 1945,
Los Alamos scientists detonated the world’s first nuclear weapon over the New Mexico desert.
The implosion-type device with a plutonium core looked like a steel
globe and was nicknamed the “Gadget” - which again speaks to its secrecy.
It was similar in design to the fat man bomb dropped on
the Japanese city of Nagasaki three weeks later.
Another atomic bomb had just devastated the Japanese city of Hiroshima.
The bombs killed hundreds of thousands of people
from exposure to the blasts and also from the long-term side effects of radiation.
When they first told us, when I first heard it,
it really bothered me, it upset me because I realized that I had helped kill a lot of people.
The horror of two atomic bombs convinced Japanese hardliners to surrender.
When the Manhattan Project was finally revealed to the world,
many were shocked to learn that such a large operation existed in secret.
At its peak, the Manhattan Project employed 130,000 people and, by the end of the war,
it had cost $2.2 billion - the equivalent of $36 billion today.
The Manhattan Project ultimately led to the Cold War arms race,
which brought with it the possibility of armageddon.
And that possibility haunts the world today.
The best and brightest scientists worked
on the Manhattan Project and changed the course of history.
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