“The only use for an atomic bomb is to keep somebody else from using one.”                                                                                                                                                    – George Wald

A few months ago, the first article of this Nuclear Weapons Debate series was posted, which you can read here – The Nuclear Weapons Debate Part 1 -What are they?

This time, let’s talk about a certain endeavour, taken up by certain accomplished people, to rival a certain fascist German political party, that has revolutionized the world we live in.

The Manhattan Project was a research and development project based in the United States which aimed to create the world’s first nuclear weapons. But it wasn’t any ordinary scientific quest – the project was fraught with violence, espionage, misery, strategy, uneasiness, and plenty of determination. It took place during World War II – I guess that explains a lot. When Hitler’s around, nothing’s like it seems.

In 1938, German physicists Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann achieved a daunting task – they managed to split the uranium atom. This greatly increased the possibility of the Germans developing an atomic bomb.

Several of the refugees who came to America to escape from Nazi Germany and other fascist countries were scientists. They feared, knowing of Germany’s discovery, that the Nazis would perfect an atomic bomb, which would spell definite disaster for the Allies of WWII. Scientists like Enrico Fermi warned US government officials of this.

The fears of the refugee scientists were confirmed by the Einstein-Szilard letter, a letter drafted by Leo Szilard and Eugene Wigner and signed by Albert Einstein, which was then sent to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Finally, the issues raised by the scientists were taken seriously. Although progress was quite slow, several government conferences and meetings were set up, and USA decided that the creation of the atomic bomb was inevitable; they just had to beat the Germans to it.

In 1941, the Office of Scientific Research and Development was created, with Vannevar Bush as director. The S-1 uranium committee was established to oversee the nation’s foray into nuclear weapons development.

The US Army Corps of Engineers was in charge of the construction of the various laboratories and manufacturing facilities where the scientists could work. The Corps’ Manhattan District was in charge of managing the construction, as most of the research had been done in Manhattan’s Columbia University. The Army’s part of the project was initially referred to as ‘Development of Substitute Materials’, but after concerns that it would draw attention, the name changed. Usually, the Army’s engineer districts used the name of the city in which they were located, hence the Army’s part of the project was termed the Manhattan Engineering District. Soon, ‘Manhattan’ became the commonly used term for the project – surprisingly enough, as it spanned an entire country and included several others as well.

It came to USA’s awareness that the British were working on a similar nuclear weapons development project. They realised that with the collaborative efforts of both these Allied nations, the production of the atomic bomb would advance at a faster rate. Ideas could be shared, and based on those ideas, they could amend their existing project. Thus, Harold Urey and several of his colleagues visited England, and a cooperative project was decided upon. Several British scientists came to USA to join the project. Canada also agreed to a joint effort with the Americans.

To create an atomic bomb, the Americans needed to separate the two isotopes uranium-235 and uranium-238 from each other. In order to quicken the process so that a solution could be reached as soon as possible, three different techniques were attempted to achieve the aforementioned isotope separation. The team at the University of California, Berkeley investigated electromagnetic separation, Columbia University studied gaseous diffusion, and the Carnegie Institute at Washington looked into thermal diffusion.

These methods produced varying degrees of success, but success nonetheless. Thus, a large tract of land was cleared as a production site for the Manhattan Project near Knoxville, Tennessee. The production facility was known as Clinton Engineer Works, and the large area of land where the production took place, and remained a secret from the rest of the world, later became the city of Oak Ridge.

Just imagine. An entire city created, to make a weapon that destroyed.

Another tract was cleared near the Columbia River in Washington, called the Hanford Site. Here, the Hanford Engineer Works was established as the plutonium production facility.

The technology of the nuclear reactor itself was being looked into, with Harold Urey researching the idea of ‘heavy water’ – water which contains a large quantity of the hydrogen isotope deuterium, rather than the more common protium.  Meanwhile, Arthur Compton studied the usage of graphite to control the speed of fast neutrons, a  concept that is still used to this day.

Leslie Groves was an officer of the US Army Corps of Engineers, who later became the overall director of the project. Groves needed someone to be the head of Project Y, the group that would design and build the bomb itself. One of the scientists, Arthur Compton, recommended J. Robert Oppenheimer, a distinguished physics professor at UC Berkeley, for the job. In 1943, Oppenheimer joined the Manhattan Project – and remains a legend in the minds of many even today.

The location of Project Y had to be in a highly remote area. After much consideration, the site of Y was chosen to be an isolated mesa in Los Alamos, New Mexico.

Uranium was the key raw material for the project. It was fuel for the reactors, could be transformed into plutonium, and used in the atomic bomb itself. After production began, uranium was extracted from its ore and refined, isotopes were separated using the various aforementioned processes.

Similar processes were applied to plutonium, which was usually obtained by bombarding uranium with neutrons. To produce the fissionable plutonium-239, uranium-238 had to undergo nuclear transmutation. In this process, isotopes of elements are converted into other isotopes, by modifying the number of protons and neutrons in the atomic nucleus. This method, developed in the metallurgical laboratory of the University of Chicago, created plutonium-239, which was a key component in the production of nuclear weapons.

The Manhattan Project had become a serious, full-fledged endeavour. Approximately 130,000 workers were hired to top-secret facilities, where people worked tirelessly at producing an atomic bomb. The original fund of $6000 that was allocated for the Manhattan Project grew to become 2 billion dollars.

By 1945, enough plutonium-239 had been produced for a nuclear explosion.  Weapons development had reached a significant point, where it was actually feasible to schedule a field test for the atomic bomb. The original plan was a controlled fizzle, but Oppenheimer insisted on a full-fledged test for an accurate result.

However, preparing such a test was an extremely difficult task. Complex equipment needed to be arranged at the appropriate places so that a foolproof diagnosis of the bomb’s efficacy could be completed.

Kenneth Bainbridge, a professor of physics at Harvard, was in charge of preparing for the test. He chose the bombing range near the Alamogordo Air Base – 120 miles from Alburqueque, New Mexico – as the location for the test. It was codenamed Trinity.

A lot of work had been put into the weapon design. The fissionable material produced at the plants had to be reduced to a metal and the metal had to be made into the required shape.

For a nuclear explosion to take place, fissionable material had to be brought together rapidly to form a super-critical mass. The weapon that had been created thus used a method of implosion to detonate. Through implosion, a sub-critical mass of plutonium-239 could be made into a super-critical mass that explodes. The sub-critical plutonium-239 was placed in a spherical ‘pit’, and a shell of highly explosive material was placed around it, wired to detonators. There were also ‘lenses’ that focused the explosion inward, into the ‘pit’. When the explosives are set off, the pit of Pu-239 gets squeezed inward rapidly, increasing its density. The detonation of the explosives is strong enough to increase the density of the pit till the point where it becomes super-critical, and explodes.

 

Yup. Not an easy affair.

At 5:30 am on July 16, 1945, the first ever atomic bomb exploded, and the Trinity test was successful. It exploded with energy equivalent to 20 kilotons of trinitrotoluene [TNT.] The mushroom cloud formed by the bomb was 12.1 km in height and the explosion was heard all the way in El Paso, Texas.

A month later, two other bombs were manufactured; one using uranium-235 and the other using plutonium-239. They were called Little Boy and Fat Man. On the 6th and 9th of August, 1945, these two atomic bombs were dropped on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as USA’s response to Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbour and involvement in WWII. Approximately 129,000 lives were lost.

This was the Manhattan Project – a quest by some of the greatest minds on Earth to create something truly mighty in its power. What is shocking about the project though, is that it was such a hard effort; hundreds of thousands of workers and scientists and military personnel spending countless hours on their objective. People devoting themselves to a scientific endeavour. Never have we seen such a massive collaborative effort for a scientific goal. But, that scientific goal is a device that annihilates lives and destroys everything it touches.

Is war the only successful motive? Can people not work together to create something that would benefit humanity as a whole, and not just a certain country? Nuclear energy is an absolutely awe-inspiring force, but instead of utilizing it to further our energy production requirements, we spend billions of dollars to create weapons of massive destruction [WMDs] from it.

And what did the USA do just months after developing the first ever atomic bomb? They bombed two cities. Cities with living people. Hundreds of thousands of innocent people, who may have had nothing to do with Pearl Harbour, and been completely oblivious to the Second World War – all of them killed. And all for an act of petty vengeance. Japan attacked Pearl Harbour, so America responds by destroying entire cities with a weapon like no other, with the power to signal impending doom for the people of the Earth.

This reckless motive and usage tells us that the Manhattan Project was not a scientific quest, but an intellectual war. It was a race with the Nazis to create the most dastardly invention in history. It wasn’t fueled by scientific curiosity, it was fueled by an urge to go ahead of the Nazis and then destroy them. No matter how brilliant it might have been, and how many good things came of it – nuclear weapons and the Manhattan Project were fuelled by hatred, and intended to destroy.

The Manhattan Project was a great feat of science, but at the same time, misguided and immoral. Nuclear weapons are the children of science and evil, and destruction is its child. Perhaps this conflict can be best emoted by a remark made by Robert Oppenheimer after the Trinity test was completed. He said that the massive nuclear explosion had brought to his mind a line from the Bhagavad Gita, an ancient Hindu scripture. The words were:

“Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”

Adieu.