We tell a lot of stories about science and politics on Crash Course.
But it’s hard to get much more political than the Manhattan Project.
This is the story of the bomb that earned a capital B and the scars it left on twentieth
century science and culture.
It’s… not a happy story—sorry in advance.
[INTRO MUSIC PLAYS]
The story picks up where we left off last
time, with Einstein writing the president of his new homeland, the United States, urging
him to build a nuclear weapon before Hitler.
But how did Al even know about this amazingly powerful weapon?
For that, we turn to Hungarian–American physicist Leó Szilárd.
Szilárd read about Ernest Rutherford’s work with electrons and, in 1933, realized
that it was theoretically possible to split apart an atom’s juicy center and create
nuclear fission—releasing vast amounts of energy… and thus splitting apart another
atom… and another… and another.
Thus, Szilárd came up with the idea of a nuclear chain reaction.
Which could mean a new form of energy!
Orrrrr… a superweapon.
Szilárd, with the help of hotshot Italian physicist Enrico Fermi
quickly patented the idea of a nuclear reactor, or atomic pile, in 1934.
This device would cause a self-sustaining nuclear reaction.
Then, in 1938, German physicists actually achieved fission in the lab.
...and also Hitler annexed Austria, and a year later, Poland.
War descended again onto the world.
Szilárd decided that only his and Fermi’s invention could save it.
So he drafted a letter to President Roosevelt, with some input from a couple of other physicists.
Only, Szilárd wasn’t famous enough to just, you know, high-five Roosevelt and get a nuclear
weapons program off the ground.
But he knew someone who was.
Albert Einstein, the most famous scientist in the world—possibly ever—signed Szilárd’s
letter.
It’s only two pages and totally worth Googling.
It basically said, there’s the possibility of this new super weapon… and the Germans
might get it first.
Now, let’s be clear: Einstein was a pacifist.
But he was also, well, a very smart, deeply pragmatic person.
In his mind, the only question was—would the Americans, Germans, or Russians split
the atom first?
And he foresaw a potentially very bad ending for Germany, the Jewish people, the free world,
and science…
He foresaw literally the end of the world.
What happened next is… really, really hard to understand from today’s perspective:
the U.S. government, with a little help from Canada, ran an enormously expensive and secret
weapons program for four years.
Secret even from Congress.
There were no leaks.
So almost no one on earth understood the possibility of nuclear physics until it was too late.
This program was code-named the Manhattan Project.
And it was perhaps the first and clearest example of Big Science: government-sponsored,
multi-year, multi-sited, field-defining work.
The Manhattan Project involved 43,000 people, including a who’s-who of European and North
American scientists in the 40s, from Szilárd and Fermi to the great Hungarian-American
mathematician and computer scientist, John von Neumann.
The Project had several different parts, but most of the science-ing happened in a couple
of places.
Take us on a fateful ride, ThoughtBubble:
First stop: the University of Chicago underneath the football stadium.
Yep, that’s right: the biggest science ever got physically started in a place no one would
ever look for it—which sounds like the plot of a B-movie.
There, in December of 1942, Enrico Fermi, the “architect of the nuclear age,” created
the very first controlled nuclear chain reaction—Chicago Pile 1.
Keep in mind, the Europeans who’d fled Hitler and the Americans and Canadians who were now
managing their novel experiments had no idea how far Hitler’s team might have gotten.
Everything was secret, new, and a guess.
This was science at war.
Second stop: the mines on the Navajo Nation, which includes parts of Arizona, New Mexico,
and Utah.
Here, starting in 1944, the people who call themselves the Diné mined a yellow rock containing
naturally high amounts of the heavy metal uranium.
The Diné would continue to mine the nation’s uranium for decades, until 1989, long after
the peak of the Cold War.
No one knows the full extent of the radiation exposure, but we can uncontroversially say
that mining radioactive ore led to higher rates of lung cancer.
The U.S. government didn’t act to address this problem until 1990.
A long, long time after World War Two.
Okay, back in time, third stop: Los Alamos Laboratory in New Mexico.
Here, American physics boss Julius Robert Oppenheimer, AKA “the father of the atomic
bomb,” oversaw the Project’s scientific research and the design of the nuclear weapons.
And on July 16, 1945, the team led by Oppenheimer set off the world’s first atomic explosion
at the Trinity site near Los Alamos.
The bomb was much bigger than anyone had anticipated.
A large mushroom cloud appeared high over the desert.
The test was a success. Famously, Oppenheimer summed up the moment
by quoting the epic Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad Gita: “I am become Death, destroyer of worlds.”
In the story, this is a line that Vishnu says when he takes on a fearsome, multi-armed form.
Which meant, basically, that Oppenheimer recognized two things: developing a nuclear weapon was
like being a god.
And this weapon was about appearing more fearsome to one’s enemies.
Thanks Thought bubble.
By mid-1945, the biggest enemy of the democratic world was no longer Germany.
The Allies had invaded and retaken France in June.
Now, the United States wanted to end the Pacific War, with Japan.
And the United States now had a totally new weapon, one that created devastation on an
unprecedented scale.
The only choice left was whether or not to use it.
Most historians today agree that the reason for dropping the bomb cited at the time—that
is, to prevent a long, drawn-out war with Japan—is wrong.
Part of the challenge in writing the bomb’s history, especially right after the war, was
that many official documents were classified.
Once documents began to be declassified, such as Truman’s diaries at the Potsdam Conference,
which became publicly available in 1978, historians began to change the narrative of why Truman
dropped the bomb.
President Truman—Roosevelt had died earlier in 1945—was aware that Japan was militarily
weak.
An American victory was basically inevitable.
Truman was also quite aware of the number of casualties that would result from the use
of an atomic bomb.
The decision to drop it was a well-informed one.
Besides immediate military victory, two other reasons factored into this decision.
One, to justify its monumental cost.
And two, to intimidate all enemies—present and future—of the United States.
On August 6, 1945, the Enola Gay—a B-29 Superfortress bomber named after the mother
of the pilot—took off from an island six hours away from Japan.
At just after eight in the morning, Hiroshima-time, the Enola Gay dropped a ten-thousand-pound
uranium-235 bomb nicknamed Little Boy that exploded over the city.
This was the first and deadliest atomic bombing in history.
Three days later, on August 9, 1945, the United States dropped a second atomic weapon, a plutonium-239
weapon nicknamed Fat Man, on another port city, Nagasaki.
About two hundred thousand people died in the two bombings and couple of months after.
Japan surrendered unconditionally.
It remains the only nation to have been attacked using an atomic weapon.
The long-term impact was unknown and unknowable: even the scientists who created the bomb didn’t
know what would happen, although they had some pretty strong guesses.
After the war, Oppenheimer became director of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton,
and now there’s an opera about him.
Japan rebuilt.
The United States experienced an unprecedented economic boom.
Yet the end of World War Two and the revelation of the Manhattan Project did not bring about
world peace—but a smoldering global super-conflict called the Cold War, between the Soviet Union
and the United States.
The stakes?
Control of most of the world.
The rules of this game?
Nuclear physics.
The units of success?
Number of atomic bombs.
Size of atomic bombs.
Aaand… that’s it.
Yeah, weird for the conflict that pretty much organized global politics for forty years.
Okay, so what did the physicists come up with?
The thermonuclear or hydrogen bomb, which used fusion or the joining together of nuclei
to create an even bigger reaction than the first-generation, fission reactors had been
able to.
The United States invented this one, too.
The Teller–Ulam design, named after physicists Edward Teller and Stanisław Ulam, is still
secret, to this day.
Which is… kind of amazing.
Teller… was intense.
He advocated for using thermonuclear weapons for all kinds of reasons, including digging
out convenient, giant artificial harbors.
You know, a totally justifiable use of a novel superweapon!
Jokes aside, the United States and USSR continued to build and test these weapons.
Between 1946 and 1958, the U.S. tested a series of gigantic nuclear bombs at Bikini Atoll,
which caused permanent damage, displacing the Bikini Islanders.
Forever.
From their own nation.
This is just one of the most heinous examples of the lasting social and ecological damage
of nuclear physics.
Nuclear fission used for energy production has not been blameless.
You might have heard of the terrible accidents at Three Mile Island in 1979, Chernobyl in
1986, and Fukushima Daiichi in 2011.
You may not have heard about the accident in 2014 at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant
in New Mexico: when the wrong brand of kitty litter was used in containment, a drum of
nuclear waste exploded.
Nuclear waste is incredibly dangerous for thousands of years.
And there is literally tons of it, and no one knows what to do with it!
So it all comes down to… kitty litter.
Aaanyway, we’ll return to the Anthropocene, or the physical signs of global ecological
collapse, a little later.
The different applications of nuclear energy are still hotly debated today.
And so are the different ways of telling the history of this technology.
For example, when the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum tried to mark the anniversary
of dropping the atomic bomb on Hiroshima with an exhibit, in the 1990s, a debate erupted:
was the United States justified in using this weapon?
How should historians of technology think about weapons?
In fact, this became known as the History Wars!
On the application-side, many groups of scientists, such as the Union of Concerned Scientists,
have criticized nuclear weapons and energy programs as unnecessary.
That is, these can been seen as good examples of the problem of creating shiny, new technologies
simply for technology’s sake.
Or maybe, as social scientist Carol Cohn pointed out in 1987, in her classic portrait of the
U.S. culture of strategizing about global nuclear war, “Sex and Death in the Rational
World of Defense Intellectuals,” the whole point of building bigger, better weapons of
mass destruction was just to prove you had the bigger… bomb.
Next time—the world is still, sigh, at war: it’s time to examine antibiotics, Nazi science,
and the rise of biomedicine.
Crash Course History of Science is filmed in the Dr. Cheryl C. Kinney studio in Missoula,
Montana and it’s made with the help of all this nice people and our animation team is
Thought Cafe.
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