From Manhattan Project to Hiroshima

                Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson about nuclear bomb: “revolutionary change in the relations of man to the universe.” Believing that it could mean “the doom of civilization,”

                      A site needed to be selected, facilities built, and a team of scientists selected. The construction of roads, laboratories, homes for the scientists, and the necessary  infrastructure of water and power started for what was initially a small community of a few hundred. The number of scientists, technicians and military personnel kept growing, and construction crews continually worked on additional projects as both staff and laboratory facilities expanded. By the time it was completed, the laboratory, built atop an isolated mesa in the New Mexico desert, would be another secret city, home to 5,800 people. At the end of 1942, Vannevar Bush told President Roosevelt that the total cost of the atomic bomb project would be around $400 million. By thetime the project ended, it had cost more than five times that — in all, the United States spent over $2 billion on the Manhattan Project.

              

                   The lab, built on the site of a boy's ranch school at Los Alamos, was ready foroccupancy by the initial staff of scientists and their families at the end of March 1943.Within a short time, Oppenheimer and Groves realized that their original calculations of how many people were needed — a hundred scientists — had been a gross underestimate. From that point, the pace of growth never stopped as more recruits and additional buildings expanded Los Alamos constantly. Groves had demanded that a workable bomb be ready by the summer of 1945.

              Oak Ridge: Isotope Separation and Reactor Operations  At Oak Ridge, the K-25 plant was the world’s first gaseous diffusion plant and produced enriched uranium for the Hiroshima bomb. At Oak Ridge, the K-25 plant was the world’s first gaseous diffusion plant and produced enriched uranium for the Hiroshima bomb.

            

              Hanford: Plutonium Production At Hanford, the major themes related to the Manhattan Project are Fuel Manufacturing, Reactor Operations, Chemical Separations, and Plutonium Finishing. The main mission of the Hanford site was plutonium production by irradiating uranium fuel rods and then extracting the plutonium for use at the Trinity site and in the Fat Man type bombs. The process by which thishighly fissionable element would be produced was nothing short

of the transmutation of matter, the alchemist?s age-old dream of turning lead into gold.

               Los Alamos: Designing, Building and Testing the Bomb 

                   The Trinit y Site

              Investing two billion dollars in an attempt to build an atomic bomb in the midst of World War II was a serious gamble. While physicists understood that enormous energy would be released when the nucleus of an atom was split, harnessing that energy would be an immensely complex challenge. The odds of accomplishing this feat before the end of the war were slim.

      Trinity was a test of an implosion-design plutonium device. The weapon's informal nickname was "The Gadget".[11] Using the same conceptual design, the Fat Man device was detonated over Nagasaki, Japan, on August 9, 1945. The Trinity detonation produced the explosive power of about 20 kilotons of TNT.

          

         Oppenheimer made thousands of decisions that affected New Mexico, but few proved more important than his acceptance of the plan to test the world’s first atomic weapon at Trinity Site, about 35 miles east of Socorro. He even chose the name “Trinity” for the spot, and today “Trinity Site” appears on most state maps. 

         

        The bomb, a plutonium implosion device, the Fat Man (FM) type of weapon, had been hoisted on top of a tower at Ground Zero. Groups of scientists and military personnel observed the test from various locations at different distances from Ground Zero. Oppenheimer and many of the top scientists were at the command location 10 miles away from the bomb, and General Groves and other military observers were at another location about 15 miles away.

On July 16, 1945, at 5:29 AM, the United States exploded the first

atomic bomb.

                                              Hiroshima And Nagasaky

      

       While the leaders of the Big Three laid plans for the future, the atomic bombing of Japan went forward on schedule. On the morning of August 6, without warning, a single American plane, flying unopposed over Hiroshima, loosed its atomic bomb over the city’s crowded streets. In the ensuing blast and firestorm, approximately 140,000 people were killed, 95 percent of them civilians.

          Among those who survived, countless numbers received hideous burns or fatal radiation poisoning.   On August 9, the Soviet Union entered the Far East war and the U.S. military unleashed its second atomic bomb over Nagasaki, killing an additional 70,000 people and wounding many others. The following day, the Japanese government—which had desperately sought a peace settlement since the spring of 1945 but had resisted the Allied demand for unconditional surrender offered to surrender if the emperor and throne were spared. When the U.S. government implicitly accepted this offer, the war came to an end.

The decision of the United States to drop two atomic bombs, on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, at the end of World War II was undoubtedly one of the most controversial acts by any government in history. The scientists working in Los Alamos knew about the Hiroshima attack on August 6, 1945, but some of them were surprised that the second bomb was dropped on Nagasaki only three days later. Eleanor Jette, whose husband, Eric Jette, worked on the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos, recalled: “Our local news of the second bomb-drop was slow coming through. Conflicting reports confused us.”

       Many of the scientists who took part in the Manhattan Project have expressed

various degrees of regret about having aided in unleashing the genie that became the specter of atomic bombs. Einstein, the man whose famous formula made all this—both nuclear weapons and civilian nuclear powern generation—possible, distanced himself from nuclear development and the Manhattan Project, even though he was the man who had written to President Roosevelt urging him to launch a nuclear research effort to counter the German atomic development. But by the time of the Trinity test, the Nazi threat had been over for two months. Einstein is reported to have often said after the war, “Had I known that the Germans would not succeed in producing an atomic bomb, I would not have lifted a finger.”