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Oak Ridge, Tennessee is a small American town just like any other.
They’ve got a Walmart, a Dollar General, an Aldi, a thermonuclear weapons development
site, and two McDonald’s and yet from 1942 to 1945, Oak Ridge, which at the time was
the fifth largest town in Tennessee, did not exist and this isn’t like how Canada doesn’t
exist.
Oak Ridge actually did exist but nobody knew about it.
In October, 1942, the 1,000 or so residents of the area came home to find notes on their
doors telling them they had six weeks to get out—the government had acquired their land
through eminent domain.
I’m sure that was a bummer but too bad—there was a war going on.
Wait, are we allowed to make World War Two jokes yet?
Eh I’m not sure but I do need to stop…
Stalin.
So, in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, after all the fences and buildings went up in a matter of
months, the recruited workers were told next to nothing.
All they knew was that their work would end the war.
Spoiler alert, it did, because they were building the atomic bomb in what was known as the Manhattan
Project.
The name supposedly originated from the fact that the sites were quite similar to New York—they
used about the same amount of electricity due to all the machinery, the air was toxic,
they had to overpay the residents to convince them to live in bad conditions, and the people
all thought they were more important than they were.
The bad guys in World War Two were not great so it was pretty important that the US didn’t
accidentally leak information to Axis spies.
Therefore, the entire 75,000 person town of Oak Ridge, Tennessee was 100% confidential—not
even the Vice President knew it existed.
When the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima that was the first time that all but a select few
individuals even knew such a bomb existed.
It was pretty, you know, bombshell news.
The way the government kept this enormous operation confidential was just as ingenious
as the technology they were building.
Oak Ridge did not exist on any map.
Houses were built outside the town and brought in to be placed so as few construction workers
as possible would enter.
Every single piece of mail going in and out was searched and read through not only to
make sure there we no details of the work going on within the fences but also to be
sure that nobody was including codes that communicated details.
There were signs like this all around the town reminding everyone that what they were
doing was secret but, in the governments mind, with 75,000 people, it was inevitable that
a few spies would get in.
For that reason, almost everyone had no clue what they were doing but not in the in the
way that I have no clue what I’m doing making comedic YouTube videos.
The workers literally did not know what they were building.
According to one estimate, only a few dozen people knew that the atomic bomb existed before
the bombing of Hiroshima even though hundreds of thousands of people at Oak Ridge and other
Manhattan Project sites built it.
The workers learned about what they were building from the newspaper the day after the bomb
dropped.
Each and every individual would have a single task and the only people who knew how it related
to other tasks were the few highest ranked scientists.
One individual, for example, was tasked with watching a dial, turning a valve when it reached
100, and that was it.
He had no idea why he was doing that.
The individual tasks were tiny and mundane—it was like working at McDonald’s except that
at McDonald’s what you make kills Americans too.
Another individual working in the laundry was told to hold up a machine to each article
of clothing and listen for a clicking sound.
Little did she know she was checking for radiation using a geiger counter.
Security officers roamed all around Oak Ridge and monitored for anything suspicious.
Groups of more than seven and having the same person over repeatedly was considered suspicious
so residents avoided that since they knew that, if the security officers were suspicious
in the slightest, even if it was unproven, they would get kicked out for good.
If a leak was proven, the resident would either be jailed for 10 years or fined the equivalent
of $100,000.
Overall, the bad guys in this war were really bad so Americans were really into the idea
of winning so even those that had a good idea what was going on in Oak Ridge kept silent
out of a sense of patriotism—not wanting to let out information that could help the
enemy.
Throughout this all, however, Oak Ridge had stores and restaurants and even sports teams.
Oak Ridge looked like a regular American town—just one that built the most deadly weapon that
has ever existed.
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