“My arms were badly burned and there seemed to be something dripping from my fingertips…
I saw a schoolgirl with her eye hanging out of its socket.
People looked like ghosts, bleeding and trying to walk before collapsing…
I looked down and saw a man clutching a hole in his stomach, trying to stop his organs
from spilling out.
The smell of burning flesh was overpowering.”
That’s an answer to the question of “What happened after the Manhattan Project.”
It is a description of what one survivor of the atomic bomb said happened right after
the bomb hit his home town of Hiroshima in the morning of August 6th, 1945.
We are sure you now know what this project was all about: creating a nuclear bomb.
Three days after the Hiroshima blast and the city of Nagasaki was hit.
In all, reports tell us these two warheads, named “Little Boy” and “Fat Man”,
killed in total 292,325 in Hiroshima and 165,409 in Nagasaki.
The devastation was unapparelled; the world had never seen such destruction, and the scientists
working on the Manhattan Project had done their job well.
The Allied politicians and military men rejoiced, the upstart Japan was shocked to its core,
sent down to its knees; it was a disturbing coup de grace at the end of the second world
war, a death blow and a warning of things that might come.
That warning remained in people’s minds for years; we are still aware of what power
governments possess to wipe out masses of populations with the push of a button, but
thankfully we no longer sit on our sofas chilled to the bone as some TV program tells us what
to do when the strike comes.
Thankfully the powers that be know very well that any kind of nuclear attack is a zero-sum
game, tit for tat, everyone loses.
We might now ask the question, what were those guys thinking when they decided to work on
a project that could possibly end with large parts of humanity being blitzed from existence?
That’s what we are going to answer today.
It actually all started in Germany, because it was there that three very clever men called
Otto Hahn, Lise Meitner and Fritz Strassman discovered nuclear fission.
What does that mean?
Well, it’s basically…er…we will let a scientist explain:
“Nuclear fission is a reaction wherein a heavy nucleus is bombarded by neutrons and
thus becomes unstable, which causes it to decompose into two nuclei with equivalent
size and magnitude, with a great detachment of energy and the emission of two or three
neutrons.”
There is a crude term for this and that is “splitting the atom”.
All that energy released can be a dangerous thing, as described by the Japanese man who
witnessed carnage all around him on that dark day in ’45.
Anyway, after this discovery the word on the lab concourse was that it could possibly be
used to make a bomb, a very powerful bomb.
The Germans were on it, and word got out to the Allied powers that some scientists over
there were working on creating “extremely powerful bombs of a new type.”
But to cut a long story short, scientists all over the place were aware of the potential
of creating a big bomb using nuclear fission.
President Franklin D. Roosevelt got a team together, and it was agreed that uranium was
needed because it could “provide a possible source of bombs with a destructiveness vastly
greater than anything now known.”
They knew this because an Italian man called Enrico Fermi had been working on nuclear chain
reactions.
He is sometimes called “the architect of the nuclear age.”
It was discovered that uranium isotopes called U-235 and U-238 could be used for the fission
needed to create the explosion, but the former was better.
Over in Britain they had their own project to create the atomic bomb, and that was led
by an Austrian scientist called Otto Frisch and a German-born British man called Rudolf
Peierls.
We don’t want to bombard you with lots of names, but you should know the making of the
atomic bomb was a massive collaboration and not some eureka moment for some lone wolf
messing about with isotopes in a dimly-lit lab.
Over in the UK they thought they had discovered a way to actually create such a bomb small
enough to be carried by a bomber plane.
This was big news and it didn’t escape the Americans.
In the U.S. they soon discovered that the British atomic bomb project was bigger and
more advanced.
Britain then told America that it could have access to any of its scientists and scientific
research relating to the atomic bomb, but the problem for a while was that this research
didn’t always get to the right people in the USA.
It was actually an Australian physicist Mark Oliphant who managed to visit the states and
say, “Hey, physicists, there is a lot of stuff you just haven’t seen that those whinging
Poms have been working on.”
We doubt he said it like that, but soon enough anyway the American physicists had a lot to
work with.
Ok, so we will have to cut a very long story into a shorter story.
So, we know lots of people were collaborating on this project from many places, and we know
there was a very real fear that the Germans were ahead.
Let’s now think of the USA coming in and corralling all these scientists so they could
communicate and work under one roof.
This was by order of the President and the military would take control of the project.
Not that politicians or military men knew much about nuclear fission, so an American
physicist called Robert Oppenheimer was made director.
He is sometimes called “the father of the atomic bomb”, but as we said, this was a
complicated endeavor and there was no one inventor.
This project was codenamed “The Manhattan Project” by the American military, but also
had the official codename of “Development of Substitute Materials.”
One of those names would stick.
The race was on.
This is how General Leslie Groves and the Chief of Foreign Intelligence for the Manhattan
Project explained why this race was so important, “The Manhattan Project was built on fear:
fear that the enemy had the bomb, or would have it before we could develop it.
The scientists knew this to be the case because they were refugees from Germany, a large number
of them, and they had studied under the Germans before the war broke out.”
Another leading scientist on the project said this, “I think everyone was terrified that
we were wrong, and the Germans were ahead of us.…
Germany led the civilized world of physics in every aspect, at the time war set in, when
Hitler lowered the boom.
It was a very frightening time.”
The thing is, all these people couldn’t have been further from knowing the truth.
They were leaps ahead of the Germans, and that’s partly because they had some of the
best German scientists who had defected on board.
Still, the Manhattan Project had to be huge and it was costly.
It’s said in all about 130,000 people worked on it and it cost about $2 billion.
That might not sound like much but it would be somewhere in the region of $25 billion
in today’s money.
For the Germans and the Allies the problem was creating something out of extremely difficult
to create raw materials that could be dropped from the sky and then detonated.
This was no easy task, and huge factories and labs had to be built to make it a reality.
As one German scientist said after he heard about Hiroshima, it must have taken “factories
large as the United States to make that much uranium-235!"
Just so you know, the first bomb was dropped by a parachute from a U.S. B29 bomber called
Enola Gay.
The bomb exploded 600 feet above the ground.
At the point of explosion the air temperature was around one million degrees Celsius.
On the ground at the hypocenter the temperature was between 3,000 and 4,000°C. A mushroom
cloud rose about 10,000 feet, a fascinating thing to see to some people from far away,
but below lay the ruins of a Japanese city and its scorched and dead inhabitants.
A few minutes before that, lots of people were said to be looking up at the sky wondering
what those bombers were doing.
We tell you this because in the 1940s this is exactly what the scientists were trying
to create.
For years materials were collected and scientists worked on how to create this bomb.
In 1942, two plants built reactors to create plutonium and also electromagnetic, centrifuge,
and gaseous diffusion plants were built to produce uranium-235.
In 1943, raw materials were very much being created, but then bomb design had to be thought
about.
In 1944, bomb models were tested and later that year dummy bombs called Pumpkins were
dropped in tests.
In early 1945 leaders Roosevelt, Churchill, and Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin all met to
discuss the imminent end of the war.
Not long after and the American leader died.
His last words were, “I have a terrific headache.”
A few months later and a plutonium implosion bomb was tested in New Mexico.
The new President Truman then told Stalin that America had an ace in the hole, a bomb
like no other.
On July 26th President Truman, Chinese President Chiang Kai-Shek, and the new British Prime
Minister Clement Atlee issued the Potsdam Proclamation to Japan, asking that the country
give up the fight and surrender.
A few days later and Japan replied.
“No.”
As you know, on August 6th Little Man was dropped and three days day later Nagasaki
was hit.
On August 14th Japan surrendered.
That’s the end of the Manhattan Project, a multi-lingual, global project that cost
a ton of money and human life.
In case you’re wondering how all that science fitted into one place at the end of the day,
it goes a bit like this.
The bomb dropped on Hiroshima acted a bit like a gun.
It was tube-shaped with half of a nuclear charge at one end and the other half (the
moving part) at the other end.
A normal explosive charge was put behind the moving part and you might say that was the
near end of the barrel.
When the charge was detonated, the bullet went down the tube and hit the charge at the
other end, sometimes called a “spike”.
Then the two halves of the nuclear materials were brought together and held together, and
the result of this was a chain reaction.
The fuel became what’s called supercritical, and the explosion came next.
The Manhattan Project was both a success and a bloody wart on the history of mankind.
Some might say these weapons of mass destruction might have prevented other wars, but that’s
a debate we are not going to get into today.
We will leave you with the words of Oppenheimer.
“I have become death, the destroyer of worlds.”
That’s maybe a lot to take in.
What do you think about this project and what do you think about what happened in Japan
or nuclear weapons in general?
Tell us in the comments.
Also, be sure to check out our other show Nuclear vs Hydrogen Bomb.
Thanks for watching, and as always, don’t forget to like, share and subscribe.
See you next time.