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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