You may be surprised to hear that in Colorado, they tried using nuclear bombs for a very unique...
The Scale of the Manhattan Project
DC Aromory; Source: Google LIFE image archive.
The Magnitude of the Manhattan Project
The Manhattan Project is not only a fascinating success story due to its direct result of producing the first nuclear weapons; it was also impressive for its massive scale. The project was a major source of employment, just as the nation was recovering from the Great Depression. Over its course, it employed more than 600,000 people (this is partially due to a high turnover rate), with 125,310 active employees at its peak (just 22 months after the project began). Given these stats, the background and security clearances for new hires alone was a substantial undertaking – especially without computers. The volume of military background investigations that the FBI handled was so high that they turned the DC Armory (a multi-purpose sports arena which is still in existence), into a temporary filing facility.
Early into the project, the FBI was adding 400,000 file cards a month to its archives. By 1944, the agency contained millions of file cards and fingerprint records. The project also cost over $2 billion, which may not sound like much at first. However, that’s about $23 billion today. As a side note, the amount the US spent fighting WWII equates to over $4 trillion in today’s currency! For those who are still unimpressed by these statistics, there is one last component that puts this project on another level: the secrecy. The idea of such a large-scale project remaining a secret over several years is both incredible and somewhat unnerving, if you imagine what secret operations may currently be under way.
From Army Engineer to Director of the Manhattan Project
Leslie groves as Major General
Leslie Richard Groves grew up on military bases, as his father was an army chaplain. Naturally, he was drawn to the military, and joined the United States Military Academy at West Point, New York, in 1916, when he was 19 years old. He graduated fourth in his class in 1918, just 10 days before the armistice that ended WWI.
He had some previous education in engineering, and chose the Corps of Engineers as his branch. Over the next two decades, he received additional education in engineering as he completed his real-world engineering duties, advancing him into leadership positions. As the US mobilized for WWII, he oversaw all army construction – a monumental effort. He led the army in building airfields, camps, munitions plants, and even the US Pentagon. Meanwhile, the army was growing from just over 100,000 to 8,000,000 during the war.
Pentagon Construction
In 1942, the Army Corps of Engineers was put in charge of the Manhattan Project, with Groves as its head. Suddenly, his already enormous amount of responsibility was multiplied. In this new role, he oversaw construction, the selection of Manhattan Project sites and personnel, security operations to maintain secrecy, coordination of the transportation of five-ton atomic bombs, and more.
Then, in 1945, he was at the center of coordinating the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Not three months later, he was quoted as saying, “We will be misguided in our intentions if we point at one single thing and say that it will prevent war, unless, of course, that thing happens to be the will, the determination and the resolve of people everywhere that nations will never again clash on the battlefield.”
Leslie Groves with Robert Oppenheimer
Groves retired from the army three years later in 1948, and then finally shared his Manhattan Project secrets in his 1962 book, “Now It Can Be Told.”
Although he was such a key leader in the creation of the atomic bomb, and an incredible military leader, he ultimately wanted peace. He said, “People who talk of outlawing the atomic bomb are mistaken. What needs to be outlawed is war.”
“The key to the utilization of atomic energy for world peace will be found in the will of all people to restrict its use for the betterment of mankind.”
The Father of the Atomic Bomb
J. Robert Oppenheimer, an American theoretical physicist, is known by many as the “father of the atomic bomb.” Oppenheimer, born in 1904, was incredibly bright throughout his life. He lectured at the New York Mineralogical Club when he was 12 years old, and he later earned a degree in chemistry from Harvard within three years. He received his doctorate in Germany in 1927, and worked as a well-known physicist for several years in the United States before being asked to be a lead physicist in the Manhattan Project in 1942.
The Army gave him a budget of $2 million as head of the Los Alamos Laboratory in the hopes that he and his team would develop an atomic weapon before Germany, which, as we know, was a success. He met some challenges along the way, but he proved to be a great leader in addition to a brilliant scientist, and his team worked together to overcome any difficulties that arose to succeed in building the first atomic bomb. He is quoted as saying, “There must be no barriers to freedom of inquiry… There is no place for dogma in science. The scientist is free, and must be free to ask any question, to doubt any assertion, to seek for any evidence, to correct any errors. Our political life is also predicated on openness. We know that the only way to avoid error is to detect it and the only way to detect it is to be free to inquire. And we know that as long as men are free to ask what they must, free to say what they think, free to think what they will, freedom can never be lost, and science can never regress.”
Though Oppenheimer was not a devout Hindu, he had an appreciation for Hinduism and the philosophy behind it. He quoted the Bhagavad-Gita, a Hindu scripture, as he watched the effects of the detonation of his creation in 1945. He famously said, “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”
One of the themes of the Bhagavad-Gita is the dharma, or holy duty, which is a practice that helped Oppenheimer rationalize his work on the project. He is speculated to have found some inspiration in the idea of fighting for a higher purpose, which in the case of building the atomic bomb, was to stop the forces of fascism.
“When we deny the evil within ourselves, we dehumanize ourselves, and we deprive ourselves not only of our own destiny but of any possibility of dealing with the evil of others.”
“First Lady of Los Alamos”
Dorothy McKibbin visiting the entrance to the Santa Fe office
Dorothy McKibbin was the Atomic Secretary during the Manhattan Project. She is the woman who kept the many Manhattan Project’s secrets. She also brought together the technicians, scientists and others involved together in order to work together to bring about their shared goal of creating atomic weapons for the United States of America.
A man named Joe Stevenson was the manager of Project Y, the Los Alamos National Laboratory. When Stevenson met McKibbin, he offered her a mysterious position. He was not allowed to tell her any details about the job and gave her only 24 hours to decide. She ultimately decided to take on whatever challenges that would come with this new position. Stevenson set her up to organize the many people and equipment that would pass through Santa Fe’s checkpoint before entering the Los Alamos Facility.
She was basically a defense against espionage due to her close watch over the city and those who entered it. Due to her success at the Santa Fe office, Oppenheimer assigned her to be in charge of a large entry of workers staying at a lodge in Santa Fe. She was in charge of receiving them, getting to know them and organizing their affairs. The large number of workers never showed up, so Dorothy turned the lodge into a rest resort for Los Alamos scientists.
Another assignment she received was to scan the skies for Janese Fire Balloons. She also witnessed the Trinity Test take place and saw the sky light up from the nuclear test.
Los Alamos Laboratory in the 1940s
Dorothy’s devotion to the project as well as the city she lived in led her to stay in Santa Fe even after her job was over. She continued to watch over the city and was deemed a Living Treasure of Santa Fe as well as the First Lady of Los Alamos and the Gatekeeper of Santa Fe. Important figures of the Manhattan Project including Robert Oppenheimer respected her for her attitude and hard work. In an interview Dorothy was asked about how well she knew the area to which she responded,
“I knew the scene. I knew the area and the Pueblos and the dances and things to do and so forth, and I loved doing it. I would go into a museum with someone and find what they wanted. If they were painters, I would take them in there, go to the Folk Art Laboratory of Anthropology. The whole thing has just been fun.”
Even from this short quote we can tell that she had a passion for this place. She enjoyed knowing the ins and outs and sharing that information with new arrivals.
She even met Klaus Fuchs, a German theoretical physicist and atomic spy who supplied information from the American, British, and Canadian Manhattan Project to the Soviet Union during and shortly after World War II. He came through her office and she described him in the same interview:
“He was very shy. He was very good-looking, I thought. He was very nice-looking. He was tall and straight. He had a nice head. Everybody liked him very much. He was so quiet and so gentle. The wives thought he would be fine to babysit for them, which he often did.”
She explained that nobody suspected him and everyone was very shocked to find out that he was a spy.
109 E Palace, Santa Fe, NM was the secret entrance all Los Alamos workers entered through
After many years of dedication to the city, Dorothy McKibbin died at her home in Santa Fe on December 17, 1985. She is highly revered for her hard work and contributions to the Manhattan Project and earned the title, “First Lady of Los Alamos.”
We may not often hear stories of women’s roles during the Manhattan Project. One notable woman named Jane Puckett had a great influence on the future atomic bomb.
Women were not allowed to enroll in the engineering program at the University of Tennessee in the 1940s, so Jane graduated with a degree in business statistics.
Jane was also very accomplished athletically. She founded a Swim Club and even ended up in the Tennessee Sports Hall of Fame in 2002 in the category of swim/dive.
Upon graduating, Jane was offered a position at the Y-12 laboratories in Oak Ridge of a mathematician-statistician. Jane’s top secret job was to collect data and create equations to separate uranium-235 from natural uranium.
Her statistical background allowed her to lead the production of the formula for uranium-235 separation, which was the fissile material for the “Little Boy,” an atomic bomb.
This was a major win for the creation of atomic bombs.
Learn more about Jane’s impact in the book titled, “The Girls of Atomic City” written by Denise Kiernan.
