Cam & Ray's Cold War Podcast

* By June 18 events had progressed to the point where Admiral Leahy was able to note privately in his personal diary:
* It is my opinion that at the present time a surrender of Japan can be arranged with terms that can be accepted by Japan and that will make fully satisfactory provision for America’s defense against any future trans-Pacific aggression.
* This is two months before Hiroshima.
* But also on June 18, when Grew spoke to Truman about brokering peace with the Japanese, The President shut him down.
* He said he wanted to hold off until the Potsdam meeting.
* Which, as we know, he was putting off to coincide with the Trinity test.
* About 5000 American troops died between May and August. (page 22)
* A total of 24,000 casualties during that period.
* The Battle of Okinawa 1 April until 22 June, 1945.
* If saving American lives was the objective, why not talk peace with the Japanese during this period?
* Unfortunately we don’t know much about what Truman was thinking during these months.
* Contemporaneous documents concerning Truman’s attitude at this time are scarce.
* We have far fewer hard facts illuminating his calculations than we have concerning the thinking of Marshall, Stimson, and Grew.
* Truman did give a public speech in June where he said his main priority was minimizing the loss of American lives.
* And yet the invasion was set for November 1, 1945.
* Which everyone knew was going to be a bloodbath.
* Admiral Leahy said that he could not agree with those who said to him that unless we obtain the unconditional surrender of the Japanese that we will have lost the war.
* Which suggests at least some people were worried about the optics.
* McCloy, Assistant Secretary of War, claims that at the June 18 meeting, he strongly advocated to Truman that they should spell out terms of surrender to the Japanese, assuring them that they could keep the Emperor,
* The President said that is just what I have been thinking about. “Why don’t you draft something and take it to Jimmy Byrnes.”
* Byrnes, as we know, was acting as a special advisor to Truman and was soon to become the Sec of State.
* He also thought HE should be the President.
* And he disliked Truman.
* When McCloy took his proposal to Byrnes, it was shot down because Byrnes thought it would be considered a weakness on America’s part to conclude the war without a total surrender.
* So twice on June 18, Truman told people that he agreed with the idea of offering the Japs a deal.
* But then Byrnes said no.
* And it never happened.
* Like the official Strategic Bombing Survey of 1946, the internal War Department report concluded the atomic bomb had not been needed to end the war.
* Its assessment of the impact of the Soviet declaration of war paralleled that of American historian Ernest May: It was a “disastrous event which the Japanese leaders regarded as utter catastrophe and which they had energetically sought to prevent at any cost.…”
* Had the atomic bomb not been available or not been used, the study concluded, it is “almost a certainty that the Japanese would have capitulated upon the entry of Russia into the war.…”
* The Japanese leaders had decided to surrender and were merely looking for sufficient pretext to convince the die-hard Army Group that Japan had lost the war and must capitulate to the Allies.
* The entry of Russia into the war would almost certainly have furnished this pretext, and would have been sufficient to convince all responsible leaders that surrender was unavoidable.
* And, as we know, American leaders had been trying to get the Soviets to engage with the Japanese since a few days after Pearl Harbour.
* General George C. Marshall, June 18, 1945: “An important point about Russian participation in the war is that the impact of Russian entry on the already hopeless Japanese may well be the decisive action levering them into capitulation at that time or shortly thereafter if we land in Japan.”
* There’s plenty of evidence to suggest that the Japs also knew Russia’s entry into the war meant the end.
* On April 29, Colonel Tanemura — Chief of the Planning Bureau of the General Staff — stated: “Needless to say, moves of Soviets could be fatal in continuing the Great Asian War, and this has been the matter of greatest concern in planning of the war since before the beginning of the war.…”
* Even though Japan may have to give up Manchuria, South Sakhalin, Korea, Taiwan, Okinawa, [w]hich means reverting to the borders before the Sino-Japanese War, Japan has to avoid the Soviet entry into the war no matter what, and has to accomplish fighting with the U.S. and U.K.
* The Supreme Council for the Direction of the War held on May 11, 12, and 14, Umezu, Chief of the Imperial Japanese Army General Staff, urged the central importance of preventing a Russian attack.
* A formal Council decision taken at this time stated:
* While Japan is fighting with the U.S. and U.K., once the Soviets enter the war Japan will face inevitable defeat; therefore, whatever happens in the war with the U.S. and U.K., Japan has to try as much as possible to prevent the Soviet Union from entering the war.
* And Umezu was one of the guys who opposed the surrender in August.
* He was personally ordered by Hirohito to sign the instrument of surrender on behalf of the armed forces on September 2, 1945 and thus, was the Army’s senior representative during the surrender ceremonies on the battleship USS Missouri.
* In prison he converted to Christianity… and died of rectal cancer a few years later.
* So… thanks a lot, Jesus.
* In 1946, Albert Einstein’s wrote that in his opinion, the bombing flowed from “a desire to end the war in the Pacific by any means before Russia’s participation.”
* And that “if President Roosevelt had still been there, none of that would have been possible. He would have forbidden such an act.”
* Also in 1946, the editor of the Saturday Review of Literature, Norman Cousins—writing together with former assistant secretary of state and, subsequently, secretary of the air force Thomas K. Finletter—suggested that:
* The first error was the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. Not the making of the atomic bomb; that we were forced to do out of sheer national preservation, for the enemy was working on atomic weapons as well. It was what we did with the atomic bomb after we made it that was a mountainous blunder.…
* Can it be that we were more anxious to prevent Russia from establishing a claim for full participation in the occupation against Japan than we were to think through the implications of unleashing atomic warfare?
* On April 24, 1945, at the height of the tense stand-off with Moscow over Poland—indeed, the day after Truman’s White House session with his top advisers and his “showdown” with Molotov—Stimson sent the following letter to Truman:
* Dear Mr. President: I think it is very important that I talk with you as soon as possible on a highly secret matter. I mentioned it to you shortly after you took office but have not urged it since on account of the pressure you have been under. It, however, has such a bearing on our present foreign relations and has such an important effect upon all my thinking in this field that I think you ought to know about it without much further delay.
* The next day Truman met with both Stimson and Leslie Groves to get brief in detail about the Manhattan Project.
* It’s important to realise the timing – it happened the day after the showdown with Molotov – and Stimson’s wording about “our present foreign relations” and it having “such an important effect upon all my thinking”.
* Groves’ notes from that meeting say “A great deal of emphasis was placed on foreign relations and particularly on the Russian situation.”
* Truman and Byrnes both later said that Byrnes had brought Truman up to speed about the bomb during the first days of his Presidency.
* Including Byrnes’ belief the bomb “might well put us in a position to dictate our own terms at the end of the war.”
* And, as we know, Truman deliberately kept pushing back the date of the Potsdam meeting to coincide with the planned Trinity test.
* There’s a very interesting paragraph in Stimson’s diary from May 14.
* After having lunch with British FM Anthony Eden, Stimson met alone with Marshall and McCloy.
* He wrote:
* I told them that my own opinion was that the time now and the method now to deal with Russia was to keep our mouths shut and let our actions speak for words. The Russians will understand them better than anything else. It is a case where we have got to regain the lead and perhaps do it in a pretty rough and realistic way. They have rather taken it away from us because we have talked too much and have been too lavish with our beneficences to them. I told him this was a place where we really held all the cards. I called it a royal straight flush and we mustn’t be a fool about the way we play it. They can’t get along without our help and industries and we have coming into action a weapon which will be unique. Now the thing is not to get into unnecessary quarrels by talking too much and not to indicate any weakness by talking too much; let our actions speak for themselves.
* “Let our actions speak for themselves”.
* Sounds to me like Stimson is saying “let’s show the Russians what we’ve got… by bombing Japan.”
* On May 28, three scientists—Leo Szilard, the brainchild behind the bomb, Walter Bartky, and Harold C. Urey—met with Byrnes to discuss atomic bomb-related issues at his home in Spartanburg, South Carolina.
* They were worried about an atomic arms race between America and Russia
* Szilard subsequently reported that at their meeting, “Mr. Byrnes did not argue that it was necessary to use the bomb against the cities of Japan in order to win the war . . . ”
* He said Byrnes “was concerned about Russia’s postwar behavior.”
* “Russian troops had moved into Hungary and Rumania; Byrnes thought it would be very difficult to persuade Russia to withdraw . . . and that Russia might be more manageable if impressed by American military might.”
* “I shared Byrnes’s concern . . . but I was completely flabbergasted by the assumption that rattling the bomb might make Russia more manageable . . . .”
* So according to one source, Byrnes didn’t think they needed to use the bomb to defeat Japan.
* And we have a sense of what Stimson and Byrnes thought.
* But what about Truman?
* It’s a strange thing – we know nearly nothing about Truman’s thoughts about using the bomb from when he became President through to the dropping of them in August.
* It’s not like he wasn’t talking about it with his inner circle.
* But for some reason none of them have recorded his thoughts at the time.
* We only have his post-hoc explanations in his own memoirs.
* The man responsible for dropping the world’s only nuclear weapons used against human targets – and we have no record of what he was thinking at the time.
* We do have the record of the Interim Committee.
* So called because it was anticipated that a permanent committee to manage America’s nuclear weapons would be set up after the war.
* We’ve talked about them before.
* Stimson himself was chairman. The other members were: James F. Byrnes, former US Senator and soon to be Secretary of State, as President Truman’s personal representative; Ralph A. Bard, Under Secretary of the Navy; William L. Clayton, Assistant Secretary of State; Vannevar Bush, Director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development and president of the Carnegie Institution; Karl T. Compton, Chief of the Office of Field Service in the Office of Scientific Research and Development and president of Massachusetts Institute of Technology; James B. Conant, Chairman of the National Defense Research Committee and president of Harvard University; and George L. Harrison, an assistant to Stimson and president of the New York Life Insurance Company who later went on to be the lead guitarist of The Beatles.
* WHILE MY GUITAR GENTLY WEEPS
* Byrnes, as the President’s personal representative, was probably its most influential member.
* Most knowledgeable experts no longer credit the Interim Committee per se with significant influence on the decision to use the atomic bomb.
* In fact, so far as we know the question of whether the atomic bomb should or should not be used was never seriously discussed by the Interim Committee. Historians pondering this point have suggested that the committee simply assumed the bomb would be employed; the only thing it apparently discussed during its May 1945 deliberations was “how” to use it, not “whether.”
* The committee decided to use the bomb against Japan, on a vital war plant employing a large number of workers and closely surrounded by workers’ houses, without any warning – and the only dissent was from Bard, the Under Sec of the Navy.
* Bard later said he had the impression that instead of having a meaningful debate about how and where to use the bomb, the Committee just ratified a decision that had already been made.
* Groves was later to comment privately: “… the story as to the Interim Committee having any influence on [the decision to use the atomic bomb] … is just plain bunk.”
* One questions about the Interim Committee is whether or not they were made aware that the Japanese had been trying to surrender.
* We do know that Truman knew.
* On July 18, a handwritten entry in Truman’s journal shows him referring to the intercept of a cable from the Japs after a conversation with Churchill as the “telegram from Jap Emperor asking for peace.”
* But the public and historians didn’t get to see this until it was declassified in 1979.
* One reason Byrnes’ powerful role in the early Truman administration is often forgotten is that Truman and Byrnes subsequently had a major falling-out: Byrnes was replaced as secretary of state by George Marshall in January 1947, and after he and Truman parted ways Byrnes seemed to fade in significance.
* Byrnes was, in fact, secretary for under nineteen months (and only a brief six weeks before Japan surrendered).

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* On 15 August 1945, about a week after the bombing of Nagasaki, Truman tasked the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey to conduct a study on the effectiveness of the aerial attacks on Japan, both conventional and atomic.
* Did they have an effect on the Japanese surrender?
* The Survey team included hundreds of American officers, civilians and enlisted men, based in Japan.
* They interviewed 700 Jap military, government and industrial officials.
* And had access to hundreds of Japanese wartime documents.
* Less than a year later they published their conclusion – that Japan would likely have surrendered in 1945 without it, without a Soviet declaration of war, and without an American invasion.
* “It cannot be said that the atomic bomb convinced the leaders who effected the peace of the necessity of surrender. The decision to surrender, influenced in part by knowledge of the low state of popular morale, had been taken at least as early as 26 June at a meeting of the Supreme War Guidance Council in the presence of the Emperor.”
* It goes on to say that there wasn’t a unanimous agreement amongst the military, especially the War Minister, and the Army and Naval Chiefs of Staff.
* They wanted to fight on.
* But that’s why the Emperor was brought into the discussions to accept the Potsdam terms.
* According to the report:
* “So long as the Emperor openly supported such a policy and could be presented to the country as doing so, the military, which had fostered and lived on the idea of complete obedience to the Emperor, could not effectively rebel.”
* The report says the only thing the atomic bombings achieved was that they sped up the process.
* The War Minister and the two Chiefs of Staff were looking for a way to surrender without losing face.
* And the nuclear attacks gave them that.
* Because the military were able to conclude that there was no way of defending the home islands against further atomic attacks.
* So they could surrender without losing face.
* But the report strongly suggests the Japanese would have surrendered anyway and probably pretty quickly after the Emperor got involved.
* They had been trying to get the Soviets to intercede with the United States.
* The Soviets, as we know, kept stalling until the Potsdam Declaration on 25 July.
* Then they declared war on 9 August.
* The made the decision to surrender on August 10 and they publicly accepted the Potsdam terms on August 15.
* But in the 73 years that have passed since Hiroshima, poll after poll has shown that most Americans think that the bombings were totally justified—and, moreover, that they had saved a very significant number of lives which might otherwise have been lost in an invasion.
* 56% of Americans according to a poll in 2015.
* Which is down from 85% in 1945.
* But it’s a lot considering that the Strategic Bombing Survey concluded as early as 1946 that it wasn’t necessary to get Japan to surrender.
* And considering senior American military leaders from Admiral Leahy to MacArthur, Eisenhower and Woodrow Wilson all said they didn’t think the bombing was necessary.
* So if it wasn’t necessary, why did it happen?
* WHAT’S UP WITH THAT?
* In 1990, J. Samuel Walker, chief historian of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission wrote:
* The consensus among scholars is that the bomb was not needed to avoid an invasion of Japan and to end the war within a relatively short time. It is clear that alternatives to the bomb existed and that Truman and his advisers knew it.
* But does this mean dropping the bombs was wrong?
* Not necessarily.
* We obviously can’t put ourselves in the shoes of American leaders in 1945.
* But I think there are two questions we CAN ask.
* 1. Did American military and government leaders in 1945 think they had to use, or should use, the bomb to bring about Japan’s surrender?
* 2. why do the majority of Americans still think all these years later that it was necessary, if the historians say it wasn’t?
* I think the answer to the last question is partly to do with the media.
* Over the past fifty years most journalists have reported what government officials said about the decision as if it were fact—evidence to the contrary notwithstanding.
* And partly I think it has to do with Americans wanting to believe in the Great American Myth – that America can do no wrong.
* And when it *does* do wrong, well it was either an accident, the result of bad intel – or it was necessary.
* So how was the decision made?
* And why?
* As we have discussed in the past, the Potsdam Declaration was demanding “unconditional surrender”.
* Truman inherited this from Roosevelt.
* But what this meant was unclear.
* Did it mean, for example, that Japan, like Hawaii before it, would become an American colony?
* Did it mean the execution of the Emperor?
* We know, of course, that in the end, Truman did not hesitate to modify the “unconditional surrender” policy after the atomic bomb was used.
* The Emperor stayed.
* BTW, did you know – Currently, the Emperor of Japan is the only head of state in the world with the English title of “Emperor”.
* Although that’ll change as soon as Trump stages his false flag attacks.
* And speaking of the Emperor.
* Did you know that Hirohito’s name changed when he died?
* His posthumous name is Emperor Shōwa.
* The word Shōwa is the name of the era (Shōwa period) potentially “period of enlightened peace/harmony” or “period of radiant Japan” that corresponded with the Emperor’s reign, and was made the Emperor’s own name upon his death.
* The name Hirohito means “abundant benevolence”.
* So…. nice to know that’s how they Japanese think about his reign.
* Some Americans today seem to think that demanding an unconditional surrender was obvious back then.
* But it wasn’t so obvious to Americans at the time.
* If the goal was to end the war as quickly as possible, to prevent further American deaths, why not negotiate the quickest possible surrender on agreeable terms?
* On May 9, 1945, the Washington Post published an article that called for a CONDITIONAL surrender.
* It took the position that demanding an unconditional surrender would just drive some elements of the Japanese military to choose to die fighting rather than be enslaved or see their Emperor executed.
* The British Foreign Office had long since concluded the same thing.
* In his May 13 weekly report to London, British Ambassador Lord Halifax cited the Post editorial as an early indication of support.
* And it wasn’t only in England.
* On April 18, a Joint Intelligence Committee report to the Joint Chiefs of Staff concluded:
* [W]e believe that the Japanese Government will endeavor to find some formula for ending the war, without having the stigma of absolute “unconditional” surrender attached to it. If such a formula can be found which would be acceptable to the Allies, we believe that Japan might surrender without the invasion of Japan proper.
* That was nearly four months before Hiroshima.
* In an April 25 review of Pacific strategy, the Joint Staff Planners had gone even further in their critique of the existing language:
* The concept of “unconditional surrender” is foreign to the Japanese nature. Therefore, “unconditional surrender” should be defined in terms understandable to the Japanese, who must be convinced that destruction or national suicide is not implied. This could be done by the announcement on a government level of a “declaration of intentions” which would tell the Japanese what the future holds.… Unless a definition of unconditional surrender can be given which is acceptable to the Japanese, there is no alternative to annihilation and no prospect that the threat of absolute defeat will bring about capitulation.
* So it seems pretty clear that the highest levels of advice to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, months before Hiroshima, were making it very clear that demanding an unconditional surrender was not going to work and the language needed to change.
* But the language didn’t change.
* Now – also keep in mind that FDR died on April 12 and Hitler died on April 30.
* So things are a little crazy around this time.
* But it’s 3 months before Potsdam and nearly four months before Hiroshima.
* I know Truman had a lot of catching up to do, but ending the war with Japan was PRETTY HIGH on that list.
* And yet the language still did not change.
* Although on May 9, Truman did give a speech where he declared the unconditional surrender of Japan did NOT mean their enslavement or extermination.
* But there was no mention of what it meant for Hirohito.
* However, the Joint Chiefs took the report seriously and started discussing there was general agreement that “unconditional surrender” should refer explicitly to the armed forces of Japan and that explicit reference should now also be made to the authority of the existing Imperial Institutions.
* On May 28, 1945, Acting Secretary of State, and former ambassador to Japan, Joseph Grew visited President Truman with a proposal to conclude the war quickly.
* He argued that the Allies should modify their terms of unconditional surrender to permit Japan to retain the Imperial Institution if the people desired it.
* Grew supported America’s primary goals of destroying Japan’s military machine and blotting out the cult of militarism, but warned, “The Japanese are a fanatical people and are capable … of fighting to the last ditch and last man.”
* He went on to say, “the greatest obstacle to unconditional surrender by the Japanese is their belief that this would entail the destruction or permanent removal of the Emperor and the institution of the Throne.”
* Grew insisted that if the United States compelled the Japanese people to defend their Emperor, untold number of Americans would die.
* He recommended that America permit Japan to determine its own political structure in order to allow the country a means of saving face—a position Chang Kai-Shek also held.
* Truman agreed asked Grew to pull together a meeting with Stimson, Marshall, Forrestal and a few other guys, to discuss the issue, which he did and they met on May 29.
* Meanwhile former president Herbert Hoover, a Republican, met with Truman on May 28 and recommend that the Allies make sure to state clearly that they had no desire to destroy either the Japanese people or their government, or to interfere in the Japanese way of life.
* Truman passed Hoover’s memorandum to Grew and Stimson for comment.
* Stimson in turn referred it to staff for review.
* A week later, on June 14, a staff assessment of Hoover’s paper came back. It observed:
* The proposal of a public declaration of war aims, in effect giving definition to “unconditional surrender,” has definite merit if it is carefully handled.
* So the Washington Post, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, a former President, and the acting Secretary of State all agreed that the terms of surrender should be clarified.
* On May 29, Grew met with Marshall, Forrestal and a few other guys, who all apparently agreed that the surrender terms needed to be clarified – but claimed it was not yet time for the President to make any statements for “certain military reasons.”
* What those reasons were, they didn’t say.
* Stimson’s diaries, which were published decades later, explained the reasons – the bomb.
* Some of the people in the room weren’t aware of its existence.
* One guy who was in the room and who did know about it was Assistant Secretary of War McCloy.
* He said the guys who knew about the bomb had a meeting afterwards.
* In that meeting he said General Marshall said he thought these weapons might first be used against straight military objectives such as a large naval installation and then if no complete result was derived from the effect of that, he thought we ought to designate a number of large manufacturing areas from which the people would be warned to leave—telling the Japanese that we intend to destroy such centers.… Every effort should be made to keep our record of warning clear. We must offset by such warning methods the opprobrium which might follow from an ill-considered employment of such force.
* Which seems to suggest that one of Marshall’s reasons for wishing to delay a statement was related to the idea that the bomb would first be used against a military target.
* Thereafter a clear “warning” would be issued—including, specifically, a warning to Japanese citizens to leave any targeted cities or population centers.
* Only then would the bomb be used against an urban center.
* It is often suggested that a so-called “demonstration” of the atomic bomb was not seriously discussed at the highest levels (except once, informally over lunch, by the Interim Committee on May 31)—and, further, that a “demonstration” was impractical. In subsequent discussions the idea of a desert island explosion has often emerged (and been discounted).
* It may therefore be important to note that Marshall—one of the most respected military figures in modern history—apparently did not see insuperable obstacles to a carefully designed “demonstration”—against a military target.
* Also on May 29, the U.S. intercepted a discussion between Molotov and Japanese Ambassador Sato.
* Molotov asked Sato’s view of how long the Pacific War would last, and Sato replied:
* Japan follows Russia’s example in her desire to end hostilities as quickly as possible. The Pacific War, however, is a matter of life and death for Japan and, as a result of America’s attitude, we have no choice but to continue the fight.
* Note it was “America’s attitude” that was driving their choice to fight to the end.
* Roosevelt’s former aide Harry Hopkins, on a presidential mission to Moscow at this time, reported Stalin as saying, along similar lines, that “according to his information the Japanese would not accept unconditional surrender,” and that “if we stick to unconditional surrender the Japs will not give up and we will have to destroy them as we did Germany.”
* on June 2, 1945 An OSS report – the OSS was the predecessor to the CIA – to Truman of a late May meeting with a Japanese representative in Portugal.
* It stated that peace terms were unimportant as long as the term “unconditional surrender” was avoided.
* On June 22 the Joint Chiefs of Staff received an message that Fujimura, one of the principal Japanese Naval representatives in Europe, insisted that the Japanese would require assurances that the Emperor would be retained before surrendering.
* Look – I could go on citing evidence that the upper echelons of the American government and military all understood that clarifying the terms of the surrender involving the Emperor could have brought about an early peace.
* If ending the war as quickly as possible was the ultimate goal, why didn’t they do just that?
* I can only think of a few possible reasons.
* 1. They wanted to grind Japan in the ground as revenge for Pearl Harbour. And yet all of the indications are that the top military and political leaders of the U.S. stated they did NOT want to do that.
* 2. They didn’t want to leave Japan with any military or political capabilities. Like Stalin wanted to destroy Germany’s. But surely there was a way of doing that AND also assuring the Japanese about the future of the Emperor?
* 3. They wanted to use the bomb. If it worked. But they were pretty sure Little Boy worked. And they would know about Fat Man by mid-July.
* 4. Optics. They didn’t want it to appear as though America gave up.

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Our guest today is Alex Wellerstein, a self-described “historian of science, secrecy, and nuclear weapons”. He’s a Professor of Science and Technology Studies at the Stevens Institute of Technology. He blogs here and is on Twitter here. He is also the creator of the NUKEMAP. Alex joined us to talk about the decision to drop atomic bombs on Japan. Did Truman know Hiroshima contained civilians? Did he know the military were going to bomb Nagasaki a few days later? How much deliberation went into the question of whether or not the bomb should be used? And was it necessary to end the war with Japan? These questions and more on this episode.

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• Kistiakowsky and his team armed the device shortly after 5am and retreated to the control bunker.
• Their final task was to switch on a string of lights on the ground that would serve as an ‘aiming point’.
• The air force wanted to know what the effect of the blast would be on a B-29 30,000 feet up and some miles away.
• In case of an accident, Groves left Oppenheimer in the control bunkers and joined Bush and Conant at base camp another 5 miles to the south.
• There they picked up the countdown by FM radio.
• Those in shelters heard it over the PA system.
• Some of the scientists were with a party of onlookers 20 miles away on Compania Hill.
• Teller said, ‘We were told to lie down on the sand, turn our faces away from the blast and bury our heads in our arms. No one complied. We were determined to look the beast in the eye.’
• However, though it was not yet dawn, they smothered their faces with suntan lotion.
• Teller himself wore a pair of dark glasses and heavy gloves and pressed a welder’s glass to his face.
• At precisely 5:30am on Monday, 16 July 1945, the atomic age began.
• As the firing circuit closed, 32 detonators fired around the outside of the high-explosive shell.
• The shockwave produced hit the tamper, squeezing and liquefying it.
• The plutonium sphere inside shrank to the size of an eyeball.
• In the centre, polonium alphas kicked neutrons from the beryllium – one, two, maybe as many as nine of them.
• This was enough to start a chain reaction in the plutonium.
• It went through 80 generations in millionths of a second, generating millions of degrees of heat and millions of pounds of pressure.
• The X-rays given off super-heated the air, generating another shock wave.
• The explosion vaporized the tower and turned the asphalt around the base into green sand.
• The bomb released approximately 18.6 kilotons of power, and the New Mexico sky was suddenly brighter than many suns.
• Some observers suffered temporary blindness even though they looked at the brilliant light through smoked glass.
• Here’s an eyewitness account:
• Trinity Test, July 16, 1945 Eyewitness Report by Victor Weisskopf, an Austrian-born American theoretical physicist, one of the giants of 20th century physics.
• He died in 2002, aged 93.
• You have asked me to submit to you an eye witness account of the explosion. I was located at base camp and watched the phenomenon from a little ridge about 100 yds. east of the water tower. Groups of observers had arranged small wooden sticks at a distance of 10 yds. from our observation place in order to estimate the size of the explosion. They were arranged so that their distance corresponded to 1000 ft. at zero point. I looked at the explosion through the dark glass, but I have provided for an indirect view of the landscape in order to see the deflected light.
• When the explosion went off, I was first dazzled by this indirect light which was much stronger than I anticipated, and I was not able to concentrate upon the view through the dark glass and missed, therefore, the first stages of the explosion. When I was able to look through the dark glass I saw flames and smoke of an estimated diameter of 1000 yds. which was slowly decreasing in brightness seemingly due to more smoke development. At the same time it rose slightly above the surface. After about three seconds its intensity was so low I could remove the dark glass and look at it directly. Then I saw a reddish glowing smoke ball rising with a thick stem of dark brown color. This smoke ball was surrounded by a blue glow which clearly indicated a strong radioactivity and was certainly due to the gamma rays emitted by the cloud into the surrounding air. At that moment the cloud had about 1000 billions of curies of radioactivity whose radiation must have produced the blue glow.
• The first two or three seconds, I felt very strongly the heat radiation all over the exposed parts of my body. The part of my retina which was exposed to the indirect light from the surrounding mountains was completely blinded and I could feel traces of the after image 30 minutes after the shock.
• The reddish cloud darkened after about 10 or 20 seconds and rose rather rapidly leaving behind a thick stem of dark brown smoke. After this, I remember having seen a white hemisphere rising above the clouds in continuation of the breakthrough of the explosion cloud through the ordinary cloud level. The path of the shock wave through the clouds was plainly visible as an expanding circle all over the sky where it was covered by clouds. After about 45 seconds the sound wave arrived and it struck me as being much weaker than anticipated.
• V. Weisskopf
• I watched a great interview from 1988 with Weisskopf where he said something I agree with.
• He said a sunset is made ever more beautiful if you understand something about the science that causes it.
• Science doesn’t deprive us of beauty – it enhances it.
• A steel container weighing more than 200 tons, standing half a mile from Ground Zero, was knocked over.
• As the orange and yellow fireball stretched up and spread, a second column, narrower than the first, rose and flattened into a mushroom shape, giving the atomic age a visual image that has become the very symbol of power and awesome destruction.
• Oppenheimer then uttered his famous quote
• Later he recalled that the experience brought to his mind the legend of Prometheus, punished by Zeus for giving man fire.
• He also thought fleetingly of Alfred Nobel’s vain hope that his discovery of dynamite would end wars.
• Did you know the guy who created the Nobel Prize invented dynamite?
• He also invented gelignite and ballistite, a predecessor of cordite.
• He also owned Bofors, a company that manufactured cannon.
• It was after he read a premature obituary which condemned him for profiting from the sales of arms, that he bequeathed his fortune to institute the Nobel Prizes.
• Without telling his family!
• At base camp, Bush, Conant and Groves shook hands.
• Hubbard heard Groves say: ‘My faith in the human mind has been somewhat restored.’
• Bainbridge said to Oppenheimer immediately after the test, “Now we are all sons of bitches.”
• “My personal nightmare,” he later wrote, “was knowing that if the bomb didn’t go off or hangfired, I, as head of the test, would have to go to the tower first and seek to find out what had gone wrong.”
• In the sweepstake, Isidor I. Rabi of the MIT’s Radiation Laboratory had put his money on 18 kilotons and swept the pot.
• He broke out a bottle of whiskey and everyone had a swig.
• The terrifying destructive power of atomic weapons and the uses to which they might be put were to haunt many of the scientists from the Manhattan Project for the rest of their lives.
• But for the moment, the success of the Trinity test meant that a second type of atomic bomb could be readied for use against Japan.
• Oppenheimer and Groves wrote a report for Stimson who was now in Potsdam with Truman.
• Along with Little Boy, the untested uranium gun model Fat Man, a plutonium implosion device similar to that detonated at Trinity, now figured in American Far Eastern strategy.
• Newspaper coverage that day did not enlighten the public.
• Pre-written press releases claimed that an ammunition magazine accidentally exploded on the Alamogordo Air Base.

• Meanwhile – it was clear to the Japanese that the war was lost.
• In an attempt to achieve surrender with honour, Emperor Hirohito had instructed his ministers to open negotiations with Russia.
• On June 30, Tōgō told Naotake Satō, Japan’s ambassador in Moscow, to try to establish “firm and lasting relations of friendship.”
• Satō was to discuss the status of Manchuria and “any matter the Russians would like to bring up.”
• The Soviets responded with delaying tactics to encourage the Japanese without promising anything.
• Mostly because the Russians wanted payback for the war of 1905.
• Satō finally met with Molotov on July 11, but without result.
• On July 12, four days before the Trinity test, the Japanese Minister of Foreign Affairs Tōgō directed Naotake Satō, Japan’s ambassador in Moscow, to tell the Soviets that:
• His Majesty the Emperor, mindful of the fact that the present war daily brings greater evil and sacrifice upon the peoples of all the belligerent powers, desires from his heart that it may be quickly terminated. But so long as England and the United States insist upon unconditional surrender, the Japanese Empire has no alternative but to fight on with all its strength for the honor and existence of the Motherland.
• The Emperor proposed sending Prince Konoe as a special envoy, although he would be unable to reach Moscow before the Potsdam Conference.
• Satō advised Tōgō that in reality, “unconditional surrender or terms closely equivalent thereto” was all that Japan could expect.
• Moreover, in response to Molotov’s requests for specific proposals, Satō suggested that Tōgō’s messages were not “clear about the views of the Government and the Military with regard to the termination of the war,” thus questioning whether Tōgō’s initiative was supported by the key elements of Japan’s power structure.
• On July 17, Tōgō responded:
• Although the directing powers, and the government as well, are convinced that our war strength still can deliver considerable blows to the enemy, we are unable to feel absolutely secure peace of mind …
• Please bear particularly in mind, however, that we are not seeking the Russians’ mediation for anything like an unconditional surrender.
• In reply, Satō clarified:
• It goes without saying that in my earlier message calling for unconditional surrender or closely equivalent terms, I made an exception of the question of preserving [the imperial family].
• On July 21, speaking in the name of the cabinet, Tōgō repeated:
• With regard to unconditional surrender we are unable to consent to it under any circumstances whatever. …
• It is in order to avoid such a state of affairs that we are seeking a peace, …
• through the good offices of Russia. …
• it would also be disadvantageous and impossible, from the standpoint of foreign and domestic considerations, to make an immediate declaration of specific terms.
• American cryptographers had broken most of Japan’s codes, including the Purple code used by the Japanese Foreign Office to encode high-level diplomatic correspondence on their 97-shiki injiki Type B Cipher Machine.
• As a result, messages between Tokyo and Japan’s embassies were provided to Allied policy-makers nearly as quickly as to the intended recipients.
• However, the Russians refused to help when the Japanese put out peace feelers.
• Forty years before, Japan had soundly beaten Russia in the Russo-Japanese War, sinking two Russian fleets and putting an end to Russian expansion in the east.
• They had clashed again at the Battle of Nomonhan in Mongolia in the summer of 1939, when Japan’s attempt to invade Siberia was thwarted, weeks before Hitler’s invasion of Poland started World War II.
• Now, with the imminent defeat of the Japanese, Stalin hoped to make territorial gains.

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• Back to Alamogordo.
• The army leased a ranch in the middle of the Jornada del Muerto site and converted it into a military police station and field laboratory.
• They thoroughly vacuumed it to make a makeshift clean room and sealed its windows with black electrical tape.
• Just like Ray’s infamous kill room.
• Nearly 2 miles to the northwest, they marked out the spot for Ground Zero.
• Three concrete-roofed observation bunkers with bullet-proof glass portholes were dug 10,000 yards north, west and south of Ground Zero.
• From there, the test would be controlled and the explosion would be filmed and measured.
• Scientists wanted to determine the symmetry of the implosion and the amount of energy released.
• They also wanted to get estimates of the damage that the bomb would cause and study the behaviour of the resulting fireball.
• The biggest concern was the radioactivity the test device would release.
• It was hoped that favourable meteorological conditions would carry the radioactivity into the upper atmosphere.
• As they were proposing to do the test in the middle of the thunderstorm season, the army stood ready to evacuate the people in surrounding areas.
• Two towers were built.
• One was 800 yards south of Ground Zero.
• Made of heavy wooden beams, it was 20 feet high, topped with a broad platform like an outdoor dance floor.
• One day, the contractors returned to find that it had disappeared.
• Harvard physics professor Kenneth T. Bainbridge, recruited from MIT’s radar project, the man in charge of Project Trinity, had loaded the platform with canisters of radioactive waste from Hanford and surrounded it with 100 tons of high explosives.
• Before dawn on 7 May, he detonated the largest chemical explosion ever set off to test the instruments and procedures in a practice firing.
• The tower at Ground Zero had been prefabricated in steel and was shipped in sections to the Trinity site, where concrete footings had been sunk 20 feet into the rocky desert floor.
• The four feet were 35 feet apart and the tower rose 100 feet above the ground.
• Near the top was a platform with a removable centre section and corrugated iron sheets on three sides.
• The open side faced the camera bunker to the west.
• Above the platform was a $20,000 electrically driven heavy-duty winch.
• On 12 July, the plutonium core was taken to the test area in an army sedan.
• The non-nuclear components of the bomb left for the test site at 12:01 am on Friday the 13th.
• The idea was to put a ‘reverse English’ on the ill-luck of that day.
• ‘reverse English’ – Billiards. a spinning motion imparted to a cue ball in such a manner as to prevent it from moving in a certain direction.
• As they rode through Santa Fe in the small hours, the convoy sounded a siren.
• At midnight because the army did not want to risk some late-night drunken driver speeding out of a side street into a truck full of high explosives.
• Final assembly of “the gadget” –  which was its nickname – took place in the ranch house.
• Before it began, one of the physcists, Robert Bacher, asked for a receipt from the army.
• As Los Alamos was technically part of the University of California, he didn’t want the university to be liable for the several million dollars-worth of plutonium they were about to vaporize.
• Imagine that conversation – so…. Where’s our plutonium? Ummm we blew it up. You WHAT? That’ll be $2 billion, bucko.
• Then the team installed the neutron initiator that would trigger the explosion between the two hemispheres of plutonium.
• These were hot to the touch due to the alpha particles they were already giving off.
• HOT JAMES BROWN (Bowie FAME riff, Carlos Alomar)
• The plutonium ball was then placed inside a cylinder of U-238 tamper.
• The core was then driven out to Ground Zero, where it arrived at 3.18pm.
• The five-foot sphere of high explosives had arrived that morning.
• Remember the way a plutonium implosion bomb works is that want to compress is using convention explosives wrapped around the outside of the shell – the beer can experiment.
• This was wrapped around a hollow globe of U-238.
• At 1pm, the winch was used to hoist the 2 ton ball of high explosives from the back of the truck and lower it onto a skid.
• Norris Bradbury, the navy physicist in charge of the assembly, said ‘We were scared to death that we would drop it,’ ‘because we did not trust the hoist and it was the only bomb immediately available. It wasn’t that we were afraid of setting it off, but we might damage it in some way.’
• A white tent was erected over the assembly, ready for the cylindrical plug containing the plutonium spheres and the initiator to be slid into place in the centre of the ball of tamper inside the explosives.
• Boyce McDaniel, one of the assembly team, said   ‘Imagine our consternation when, as we started to assemble the plug in the hole, deep down in the centre of the high-explosive shell, it would not enter,’ ‘Dismayed, we halted our efforts in order not to damage the pieces, and stopped to think about it. Could we have made a mistake?’
• To maximize the density of uranium in the assembly, the clearance between the plug and the spherical shell had been reduced to a few thousandths of an inch.
• Three sets of the plugs and tamper spheres had been made back in Los Alamos.
• In the haste of their construction, not all the plugs fitted into all the holes.
• Surely they could not have brought the wrong ones.
• Then Bacher realized what had happened.
• In the heat of the ranch house, the plug had expanded, while the tamper sphere, insulated by the explosives wrapped around it, was still cool from Los Alamos.
• The world’s smartest guys forgot that heat makes shit expand.
• So feel better the next time you forget something obvious.
• Reminds me of that time I tried to insert a plug into your ass and your shit had expanded.
• The team left the metal of the plug and the sphere in contact and took a break.
• Later, when they checked the assembly again, the temperature had equalized and the plug slid smoothly into place.
• That evening, the last block of explosive was Scotch-taped into place.
• The detonators were installed the following day.
• At 8am on 15 July, the device was hoisted up the firing tower, stopping at 15 feet for a team of GIs to stack army-issue mattresses under it in case it should fall.
• While this was being done, news came that measurements from the test-firing indicated that Trinity would fail.
• Everybody blamed George Bogdanovich Kistiakowsky, the Ukrainian born physicist who ran X-Division – the team that developed the shaped charges for the imploding the ball, and also developed Wolverine’s skeleton.
• but he was adamant.
• Get it? Adamant? Wolverine’s skeleton was made of adamantium?
• he said. ‘Oppenheimer became so emotional that I offered him a month’s salary against ten dollars that our implosion charges would work,’
• While this was going on, Little Boy, the uranium bomb with its gun mechanism, was leaving Los Alamos for Kirtland Air Force Base in Albuquerque.
• From there it would be flown to San Francisco, where it would be loaded on to the USS Indianapolis and padlocked to the deck in an anonymous 15 foot crate for shipment to Tinian.
• They apparently didn’t need to test it.
• Although all of its components had been tested, no full test of a gun-type nuclear weapon occurred before the Little Boy was dropped over Hiroshima.
• Then came good news.
• After a night analysing the data from the test-firing, Hans Bethe called to say that something was wrong with the instruments and even a perfect implosion would have registered as a dud.
• ‘So I became acceptable to local high society,’ said Kistiakowsky.
• Groves, Bush, Conant, Lawrence, Farrell, Bethe, Teller and Chadwick, head of the British contingent at Los Alamos and discoverer of the neutron, arrived in the test area.
• It was pouring with rain.
• In the control bunker 5.7 miles to the south, Groves and Oppenheimer discussed what to do if the weather did not break in time for the test scheduled at 4am.
• At 3.30 they pushed the time back to 5.30, when the meteorologist Jack M. Hubbard forecast there would be a break in the weather.
• ‘You’d better be right on this, or I will hang you,’ Groves told Hubbard.
• Then he Called the governor of New Mexico, getting him out of bed to warn him that he might have to declare martial law.
• Many precautions were taken to prepare for all sorts of doomsday scenarios.
• Soldiers were posted in several nearby towns in the event that they needed to be evacuated.
• Groves, who was already concerned for the safety of Amarillo, Texas, a city of 70,000 only 300 miles away, placed a call to New Mexico Governor John J. Dempsey explaining that martial law might need to be implemented in the event of an emergency at the site.
• The Army Public Relations Department prepared somber explanations in the event that disaster occurred and lives were lost.
• I’d love to see a draft of that to see how they were prepared to spin it.
• These days Trump would just call it fake news.
• Fermi spent the wait annoying Groves.
• ‘He suddenly offered to take wagers from his fellow scientists on whether or not the bomb would ignite the atmosphere, and if so, whether it would merely destroy New Mexico or destroy the world,’ Groves recalled.
• ‘He also said that after all it wouldn’t make any difference whether the bomb went off or not because it would still have been a well worthwhile scientific experiment. For if it did fail to go off, we would have proved that an atomic explosion was not possible.’
• A betting pool was also started by scientists at Los Alamos on the possible yield of the Trinity test.
• Yields from 45,000 tons of TNT to zero were selected by the various bettors.
• Fermi was willing to bet anyone that the test would wipe out all life on Earth, with special odds on the mere destruction of the entire State of New Mexico!
• At 4am the rain stopped.

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Today we have a special guest – Jeff Hogue from the “History of the Cold War” podcast. We invited Jeff on to chat about his thoughts on the bombing of Japan.

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On 6 June, Stimson again briefed Truman on S-1.

* The briefing summarized the consensus of the Interim Committee, set up as an advisory group on atomic research.
* It’s job was the advise on the proper use of atomic weapons in wartime and to develop a position for the United States on post-war atomic policy.
* The committee comprised of Bush, Conant, Compton, the Under Secretary of the Navy, The Assistant Secretary of State and the director of the Office of War Mobilization, soon to be Secretary of State, James F. Byrnes.
* Oppenheimer, Fermi, Compton and Lawrence served as a scientific panel, while General Marshall represented the military.
* They had met on 31 May and concluded that the United States should not share its nuclear secrets and should try to retain superiority in nuclear weapons in case international relations deteriorated.
* Most present thought that the US should protect its monopoly for the present, though they realized that the secrets could not be held for long.
* It was only a matter of time before other potentially hostile countries, particularly Russia, would be capable of producing atomic weapons.
* Some thought the Soviets would catch up in 3 or 4 years.
* Groves countered with a twenty-year estimate.
* He was convinced the U.S. Had a stranglehold on the world’ supply of uranium.
* There was also some discussion of free exchange of nuclear research for peaceful purposes and the international inspection system that such an exchange would require.
* Lawrence’s suggestion that a demonstration of the atomic bomb might possibly convince the Japanese to surrender was discussed over lunch and rejected.
* No one knew whether the bomb would go off.
* If it did not, it would do much to improve Japanese morale.
* If they were warned, the Japanese might put American prisoners of war in populated areas or make an all-out effort to shoot down the plane.
* Besides, the shock value of the new weapon would be lost.
* These reasons and others convinced the group that the bomb should be dropped without warning on a dual target – a munitions factory surrounded by workers’ homes.
* Still no one realized quite how devastating the bomb would be.
* The weirdest thing about the committee meeting?
* There seems to have been no discussion about whether or not they SHOULD use the bomb – only where and when they should use it.
* On 1 June, the committee met with representatives from DuPont, Tennessee Eastman, Westinghouse and Union Carbide to get input from the contractors.
* This further convinced the Interim Committee that the US had a lead of three to ten years on the Soviet Union in making the bomb.
* As a result, in his meeting with the president on 6 June, Stimson told Truman that the Interim Committee recommended keeping S-1 a secret until Japan had been bombed.
* The attack should take place as soon as possible and without warning.
* The president was of course due to meet Churchill and Stalin in Potsdam on 17 July.
* While the British were already on board with the Manhattan Project, Truman and Stimson agreed that the president would stall if asked about atomic weapons by Stalin as it might be possible to gain concessions from Russia later in return for technical information.
* Stimson told Truman that members of the Interim Committee generally held the position that international agreements should be made in which all nuclear research would be made public and a system of inspections would be devised.
* They were even considering domestic legislation to that effect.
* However, if international agreements didn’t get worked out, the US should continue to produce as much fissionable material as possible to maintain its current position of superiority.
* Although the bomb had not yet been tested, a target selection group was set up in late April.
* It was headed by Groves and General Thomas Farrell, who had been appointed his military aide in February 1945.
* In late May, the committee, which comprised scientists as well as air force officers, listed Kokura Arsenal, Hiroshima, Niigata and Kyoto as the four best targets.
* These cities were as yet undamaged, though General Curtis LeMay’s Twentieth Air Force planned to eliminate all major Japanese cities by 1 January 1946.
* Using a single bomb to wipe out a pristine city, it was thought, would have a profound psychological impression on the Japanese and weaken military resistance.
* It was also thought that by dropping the bomb on a city that had not already been damaged, it would be easier to judge just how much destruction this new weapon wrought.
* However, Stimson vetoed Kyoto.
* Japan’s most cherished cultural centre was full of priceless art treasures.
* The Allied governments had already noted the revulsion among their populations at the bombing of Dresden, so Nagasaki replaced the ancient capital in the directive issued to the Army Air Force on 25 July.
* While decisions about the use of the atomic bomb were being made by politicians and the military, the scientists who had made it thought they should have their say.
* The scientific panel of the Interim Committee was the only way that they could communicate with the policy-makers and Compton was convinced it must have a high level of participation in the decision-making process.
* His briefing of the Met Lab staff on the findings of the Interim Committee on 2 June led to a flurry of activity.
* The Met Lab’s Committee on the Social and Political Implications of the Atomic Bomb, chaired by James Franck, issued a report advocating international control of atomic power as the only way to stop the arms race that would be inevitable if the United States bombed Japan without first demonstrating the weapon in an uninhabited area.
* The scientific panel disagreed with the Franck Report, as the Met Lab report was known.
* It concluded that no technical test would convince Japan to surrender and a military demonstration of the bomb might best further the cause of peace, but held that such a demonstration should take place only after the US informed its allies – which, of course, included the Soviet Union.
* On 21 June, the Interim Committee agreed with the position advanced by the scientific panel.
* The bomb should be used as soon as possible, without warning and against a war plant surrounded by additional buildings.
* As to informing allies, the Committee concluded that when Truman went to Berlin in mid July he should mention to Stalin that the United States was preparing to use a new kind of weapon against Japan.
* On 2 July 1945, President Truman listened as Stimson detailed the peace terms he had drawn up for Japan.
* These included demilitarization and prosecution of war criminals in exchange for governmental and economic freedom.
* Stimson returned to the Oval Office on 3 July and suggested that Truman broach the issue of the bomb with Stalin.
* It would put the Russians on notice and serve, in Stimson’s words, as a ‘badly needed equalizer’.
* Meanwhile, the test of the plutonium weapon was rescheduled for 16 July at a barren site on the Alamogordo Bombing Range known as the Jornada del Muerto, or Journey of Death, 210 miles south of Los Alamos, NM.
* Do you know what Alamogordo means?
* “large/fat cottonwood” in Spanish
* It’s also what I call my penis.
* The test and the test site were named ‘Trinity’ by Oppenheimer.
* Groves wrote to him in 1962, asking why he had picked that name and speculating that he had chosen it because it was a name commonly given to rivers and peaks in the American West, so it would be inconspicuous.
* Oppenheimer replied that he had not suggested the name on those grounds.
* ‘Why I chose the name is not clear,’ he said, ‘but I know what thoughts were in my mind. There is a poem of John Donne, written just before his death, which I know and love. From it a quotation:
* As West and East
* In all flat Maps (and I am one) are one,
* So death doth touch the Resurrection.’
* The poem was ‘Hymn to God My God, in My Sicknesse’.
* Groves was like… Ooookkkkk ….But it doesn’t explain why you picked the name Trinity.
* He was like “hey I’m just a big Matrix fan.”
* TRINITY CLIP
* So wait… You’re at a club. Some smoking hot babe walks up to you and introduces herself, and you’re first reaction is to assume she’s a hacker with the same name?
* And then tell her you thought she was a guy?
* What the fuck is wrong with this guy?
* Groves concluded that there was another, better known devotional poem by Donne that began: ‘Batter my heart, three person’d God.’
* This is the fourteenth of Donne’s Holy Sonnets and explores the theme of a destruction that might also redeem.
* Oppenheimer, like many of those who worked with him, still thought this most deadly weapon might, once and for all, put an end to war.

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* Which brings us to April 1945.
* Only weeks before Germany surrendered on May 7, FDR dies.
* And Truman takes over as POTUS.
* He knew nothing of the Manhattan Project or the atomic bomb.
* He was briefed on it immediately by Sec of War Stimson.
* By the time Truman took office, Japan was near defeat.
* Keep in mind that the bomb was developed primarily to fight the Nazis.
* But now that they are out of the picture, nobody wants a $2 billion white elephant.
* At this stage, American aircraft were attacking Japanese cities at will.
* As we mentioned recently, the B-29 was the world’s first pressurized bomber.
* So it could fly at high altitudes that the few remaining Japanese fighters couldn’t reach.
* Although kamikaze pilots did take down quite a few.
* BTW, do you know what the B stands for in B-29?
* Lots of people think it stands for “bomber”.
* But it really secretly stands for the name of the guy who came up with the name of the planes – Barry.
* It’s the Barry-29.
* A single fire-bomb raid on Tokyo in March 1945 killed nearly 100,000 people and injured over a million.
* On 13 April, the Imperial Army Air Force’s laboratory where early Japanese research on the atomic bomb had been done was hit.
* And that’s something we haven’t talked about – the Japanese attempts to build a bomb.
* In 1934, Tohoku University professor Hikosaka Tadayoshi released his “atomic physics theory”.
* Hikosaka pointed out the huge energy contained by nuclei and the possibility that both nuclear power generation and weapons could be created.
* Keep in mind that the West didn’t understand that concept until 1938 when the Germans worked it out.
* Leading Japanese physicist Nishina Yoshio was keen on utilizing nuclear fission as a military weapon, but was also justifiably concerned that other countries like the U.S., were also trying to create a nuclear weapon.
* Before the war, he was apparently friendly with Einstein and Neils Bohr
* Nishina had previously established his own Nuclear Research Laboratory to study high-energy physics in 1931 at RIKEN Institute (the Institute for Physical and Chemical Research), which had been established in 1917 in Tokyo to promote basic research.
* BTW, Ricoh, the Japanese camera company, also came out of Riken.
* In 1936 Nishina constructed a 26-inch (660 mm) cyclotron, and a 60-inch (1,500 mm), 220-ton cyclotron in 1937.
* In 1938 he also purchased a cyclotron from the University of California, Berkeley.
* After meeting Japanese director of Japan’s Army Aeronautical Department’s Technical Research Institute, lieutenant-general Yasuda Takeo (surname first), Nishina told him about the possibility of Japan building its own nuclear weapon’s arsenal.
* In April of 1941, Army Minister and later Prime Mininster Tojo Hideki (yeah, that Tojo) ordered Yasuda to look further into the possibility of Japan being able to create nuclear weapons.
* Yasuda then passed the order down to viscount Ōkōchi Masatoshi director of the RIKEN Institute, who then passed the order down to Nishina.
* By this time, Nishina had over 100 nuclear researchers.
* Japan’s Army and Navy were always in competition with one another, so perhaps it would come as no surprise that the Imperial Japanese Navy’s Technology Research Institute had been looking in to the possibility of creating nuclear weapons, too.
* They had been in talks with scientists from the Imperial University in Tokyo, for advice on constructing and possible use of nuclear weapons.
* This resulted in the formation of the Committee on Research in the Application of Nuclear Physics, chaired by Nishina, that met 10 times between July 1942 and March 1943.
* It concluded in a report that while an atomic bomb was, in principle, feasible, “it would probably be difficult even for the United States to realize the application of atomic power during the war.”
* Well… if the U.S. couldn’t do it, why should the Japanese Navy bother?
* Rather than worry about nuclear weapons, the Navy focused its attention on radar.
* But the Army still thought the awesome might of a split atom would be just dandy to use, that same Committee on Research in the Application of Nuclear Physics worked with the Army and set up the Ni-Go Project at the RIKEN complex.
* Via the Ni-Go Project, scientists were TRYING to separate uranium-235 by thermal diffusion.
* It took until February 1945, but at the RIKEN complex, scientists separated a small amount of some radioactive material… but it was not uranium-235.
* The attempt to separate the U-235 ended two months later after U.S. bombing fire-damaged the facility.
* Japan’s biggest problem in attempting to create nuclear fission was its inability to procure enough uranium for experiments.
* The Japanese Navy and Army did conduct searches for uranium ore, looking in Fukushima, of all places, as well as in conquered territories in Burma, Korea and China.
* They also tried to get some from Germany, with some 1,230 pounds (560 kilograms) of unprocessed uranium oxide sent via German submarine U-234 (interesting name).
* Do you know what the U stands for?
* Unterseeboot, literally “undersea boat”
* It was the U-234’s first and only mission into enemy territory, but on May 14, 1945 it was told to surface and surrender by German Admiral Dönitz, as Germany was offering its unconditional surrender.
* The 1,200 pounds (540 kg) of uranium disappeared.
* It was most likely transferred to the Manhattan Project’s Oak Ridge diffusion plant.
* The uranium oxide would have yielded approximately 7.7 pounds (3.5 kg) of 235U after processing, around 20% of what would have been required to arm a contemporary fission weapon.
* But, there was another Japanese plan for nuclear weapons going on at the same time as Ni-Go Project… this one called F-Go Project
* F-Go was a Navy program – another one, taking place at Kyoto’s Imperial University under the auspices of Arakatsu Bunsaku (surname first), who as the then-current No. 1 Japanese physicist had studied at Cambridge under Ernest Rutherford and at the Berlin University under Albert Einstein.
* By the time WWII concluded for Japan, he had designed and was constructing an ultracentrifuge that could spin at 60,000 rpm (rotations per minute) – current ultracentrifuge’s can spin at a speed of 1,000,000 g’s, which is approximately 9,800 kilometers per second squared, which is effing fast.
* But he didn’t manage to produce any U-235 before the end of the war.
* However – in 1946, a journalist for the Atlanta Constitution, David Snell, who had also served in the army during the war, wrote an article where he claimed Japan built and tested an A Bomb three days before the end of the war.
* They called it “genzai bakudan” (or greatest warrior).
* He claimed the project was moved to Konan, aka Hungnam, in Korea before the end of the war, because of the B-29 bombings, and that the Soviets had taken control of that area after the war and captured the Japanese atomic scientists.
* He said he learned all this from a Japanese officer, who said he was in charge of counter intelligence at the Konan project before the fall of Japan.
* He also said this was the reason the Soviets shot down the B-29 “Hog Wild” over the Hungnam region on August 29, 1945.
* David Snell went on to become Senior Editor of LIFE Magazine.
* Meanwhile… another air attack on Tokyo in May killed 83,000.
* Similar attacks followed on 67 cities, including Yokohama, Kobe, Osaka, Toyama and Nagoya.
* As more islands fell into American hands, the bombing campaign was ramped up.
* According to the Japanese government’s official statistics, air attacks killed 260,000 people and destroyed 2,210,000 houses, leaving 9,200,000 homeless.
* The Japanese just gave up.
* Much later, Mr Abe, the minister in charge of home affairs, said: ‘I believe that After the 23–24 May 1945 raid on Tokyo, civilian defence measures in that city, as well as other parts of Japan, were considered a futile effort.’
* By the end of the war, Japan was surrounded by the US and British navies, shelling the ports at will.
* Their blockade severed the islands’ supply lines.
* But the accepted view was that the Japanese would fight to the bitter end and an invasion of the home islands would be costly.
* Of course, this ignores what they would do when the U.S.S.R. Joined the Pacific War, as the Americans had urged them to do, and Stalin had agreed.
* He was scheduled to end his neutrality pact with Japan and declare war within three months of the end of the war with Germany
* Which means earliy – mid August.
* On August 3, Marshal Vasilevsky reported to Stalin that, if necessary, he could attack on the morning of August 5.
* More on that later.
* So American policy-makers clung to the idea that the successful combat delivery of one or more atomic bombs might convince the Japanese that further resistance was futile.
* There was little doubt of the determination of the Japanese to fight on.
* After the bombing of Tokyo on 9 – 10 March, Tokyo radio said: ‘If by any chance the enemy believed that he could demoralize the Japanese people, he has made a big mistake. The Emperor of Japan, on the morning of 18 March, deigned to pay an unexpected personal visit to the stricken districts of the Capital. He went on foot, exposing himself to the cold March wind. All the people, touched by his sympathy, renewed their determination to prosecute the war, saying: “This is a sacred war against the diabolical Americans.’’’
* But of course that’s typical wartime propaganda.
* American troops had suffered terribly in the face of the fanatical Japanese defence of the Pacific islands they had held.
* When American invaded the island of Iwo Jima, just south of Tokyo, 19 February – 26 March 1945, they ended up with 6,821 killed and 19,217 wounded out of a force of 70,000.
* Some 20,000 Japanese were also killed.
* “Well, this will be easy. The Japanese will surrender Iwo Jima without a fight.” – Chester W. Nimit, fleet admiral of the United States Navy said just before the landing.
* Time magazine, reporting the battle of Iwo Jima, said: “The ordinary unreasoning Jap is ignorant. Perhaps he is human. Nothing . . . indicates it.”
* The fighting became even more intense when the Americans landed on Okinawa, the first of the Japanese home islands, in April 1945.
* The battle was one of the bloodiest in the Pacific, with approximately 160,000+ casualties on both sides: at least 75,682 Allied and 84,166–117,000 Japanese, including drafted Okinawans wearing Japanese uniforms.
* 149,425 Okinawan civilians were killed, committed suicide or went missing, a significant proportion of the estimated pre-war 300,000 local population.

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• Of course, while the bomb was being designed, they had to figure out how they were going to deliver it.
• And WHO was going to deliver it.
• Way back in March 1944, the US Army Air Force, with William Sterling “Deak” Parsons and his team at Los Alamos, developed two bomb models and began testing them with B-29 bombers.
• Thin Man, named for President Roosevelt, was the design carrying the plutonium gun, while Fat Man, named for Winston Churchill, was an implosion prototype.
• Emilio Segrè, Italian-American physicist, had designed a lighter, smaller uranium bomb was later dubbed Little Boy, Thin Man’s brother.
• Thin Man, the one named for FDR, was eliminated four months later because of the predetonation problem.
• Which is ironic, because FDR himself also was eliminated a few months after that.
• The problems with figuring out how to create a reliable chain reaction meant the estimates of when a bomb could be delivered that Bush had given the President in 1943 would have to be revised.
• The new timetable was presented to Roosevelt’s Army Chief of Staff General Marshall by Groves on 7 August 1944, two months after the Allied landings on Normandy on 6 June.
• It said that small implosion weapons using uranium or plutonium would be ready in the second quarter of 1945, if experiments proved satisfactory.
• Groves was more confident that a uranium gun bomb could be delivered by 1 August 1945, and another one or two more by the end of that year.
• Marshall and Groves acknowledged that German surrender might take place by summer 1945, making it likely that Japan would be the atomic bomb’s first target.
• Expenditures on the Manhattan Project had reached $100 million a month by mid-1944.
• No one was sure that Groves’ deadline of 1 August 1945 could really be reached.
• The Germans  were by then in retreat on all fronts and the Japanese were being pushed back in the Pacific
• it wasn’t certain that a weapon would be ready for use in the war at all.
• Meanwhile, just in case a bomb was ready in time, they needed to start working out how they would deliver it.
• The US Army Air Force started training in September 1944 at Wendover Field Air Force Base in western Utah
• Where Chrissy won at craps when she was 21.
• On the border of Nevada and Utah.
• Near the Bonneville Salt Flats Raceway, about 100 miles west of Salt Lake City.
• BTW, Wendover Air Base is still there today.
• It’s a civil air base.
• But it’s one of the most intact World War II training airfields.
• Numerous films and television shows have been filmed using Wendover Field, including The Philadelphia Experiment (1984), Con Air (1995), Mulholland Falls (1996), Independence Day (1996), Hulk (2003) and The Core (2003).
• Lieutenant Colonel Paul W. Tibbets began drilling the 393rd Bombardment Squadron of the 509th Composite Wing in test drops with 5500-pound orange dummy bombs, nicknamed pumpkin bombs, on the Great Salt Lake.
• Not to be confused with the pumpkin bombs thrown by the Green Goblin.
• These had the same ballistic characteristics as Fat Man.
• Tibbets was recognized as the best bomber pilot in the Air Force.
• He had led the first B-17 bombing mission from England over occupied Europe.
• Then he had flown Eisenhower to his command post in Gibraltar before the Allied landings in northwest Africa and conducted the first bombing raids there afterwards.
• More recently, he had been a test pilot for Boeing’s new B-29 Superfortress and worked with the physics department of the University of New Mexico to determine how well the B-29 could defend itself against fighter attack.
• BTW – the Superfortress  was the single most expensive weapons project undertaken by the United States in World War II, exceeding the cost of the Manhattan Project by between $1 and 1.7 billion.
• It was the first plane to include a pressurized cabin, and dual-wheeled, tricycle landing gear.
• Those of course ended up in commerical aircraft.
• It also had an analog computer-controlled fire-control system that directed four remote machine gun turrets that could be operated by a single gunner and a fire-control officer.
• That of course ended up in James Bond’s cars.
• In September 1944, Deke Parsons and Norman Ramsey, a Columbia physicist in charge of the delivery group, briefed Tibbets.
• He was then told by his commanding officer, Major General Uzal Girard Ent, ‘You have to put together an outfit and deliver this weapon. We don’t know anything about it yet. We don’t know what it can do. You’ve got to mate it to the airplane and determine the tactics, the training and the ballistics – everything. These are all parts of your problem. This thing is going to be very big. I believe it has the potential and possibility of ending the war.’
• Given Tibbets and two other names as choices for the mission, General Ent replied without hesitation, “Paul Tibbets is the man to do it.”
• A month later, Ent was seriously injured in the crash of a B-25 on takeoff at the Fort Worth Army Airfield, Texas.
• Paralyzed from the waist down he learned to walk again using braces.
• But he died a few years later.
• Tibbets’s delivery programme was to be codenamed ‘Silverplate’.
• If Tibbets needed anything, he was to use that magic word, which had been accorded the highest priority in the service.
• Silverplate was the code reference for the United States Army Air Forces’ participation in the Manhattan Project during World War II.
• it was Originally the name for the aircraft modification project which enabled a B-29 Superfortress bomber to drop an atomic weapon.
• The original directive for the project had as its subject line “Silver Plated Project” but continued usage of the term shortened it to “Silverplate”.
• In June 1945, Tibbets and his command moved to Tinian Island in the Marianas, where the Navy SeaBees had built the world’s largest airport to accommodate the new Superfortresses, which had been manufactured specially to bomb Japan.
• From there, Tibbets and his crew began flying bombing missions over Japan to familiarize themselves with the target area.
• By then, the home islands had been bombed for more than six months.
• By early 1945, the team at Los Alamos were confident that their design for the uranium bomb was going to work.
• So they focused all of their attention on getting the implosion model for the plutonium right.
• Meanwhile Groves wanted to know whether or not the Germans had the bomb.
• In late 1943, Groves had set up a unit to find out.
• It was called Alsos, Greek for ‘grove’, and was headed by an FBI-trained army G-2 security officer, Lieutenant Colonel Boris T. Pash – his birth name was Boris Fedorovich Pashkovsky.
• Born in the U.S. but moved back to Russia with his family when he was 12.
• And they moved back to the U.S. when the Bolsheviks took over.
• He’s fluent in English, German and Russian.
• G-2 BTW refers to the military intelligence staff of a unit in the United States Army.
• It is contrasted with G–1 (personnel), G–3 (operations), G–4 (logistics) and G-5 (civil-military operations).
• Now this fucking Pash guy is a legend.
• What a fucking name – “Pash is my name and pashing is my game”.
• He needs a movie.
• Starring… Charles Muthafuckin Bronson.
• Pash is the guy who investigated Oppenheimer for his communist connections.
• Now his job is to go into Europe, even behind enemy lines, to try to find the German nuclear project, as well as arrest the scientists, get them to America before the Soviets or the French get their hands on them, and also find all of the uranium stocks the Germans had acquired.
• It was decided to bomb German nuclear facilities wherever they lay in order to deprive the Soviet Union of their technology and personnel, unless American troops could get to them first.
• Keep in mind – the French and the Soviets are American allies at this stage.
• Pash went into Normandy and then Paris in August 1944 just after D-Day and tracked down some French physicists who knew something about the German bomb project.
• He was shot at by German defenders in Paris and had to retreat.
• He then moved on to Brussel and then Strasbourg near the border of Germany by November, where he found a German physics laboratory installed in a building in the grounds of the city hospital.
• There they arrested a couple of physicists, and found papers on the German atomic project which sounded like the Germans weren’t even close to developing something.
• But it wasn’t conclusive.
• And Groves didn’t want to take any chances.
• He wanted to know the whereabouts of the 1200 tons of uranium the Germans had captured in Belgium in 1940.
• Pash had already found 31 tons of it in a French arsenal at Toulouse, where it had been secretly diverted and stored.
• Crossing the Rhine into Germany, Pash acquired a large force of men, four jeeps with machine guns mounted on them and two armoured cars, then went hunting for German atomic scientists.
• He also wanted to make sure no Nazi physicists with knowledge about how to build a bomb fell into Soviet hands.
• By the end of March 1945 he was in Heidelberg, where he captured Walther Bothe, head of the Institute of Physics, along with Germany’s only working cyclotron.
• At Stadtilm, near Weimar, he found the central office of German atomic research, though Werner Heisenberg and the rest of his group from the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute had fled south, leaving behind a small stash of uranium oxide.
• Captured documents indicated that the rest of the Belgium ore might be in a factory at Stassfurt, near Magdeburg.
• The British were there, but the Red Army was advancing fast and the area was in the occupation zone allocated to the Soviet Union at the Yalta Conference.
• Groves organized a joint British and American strike force who went into Stassfurt.
• They found the plant a mess, from both Allied bombing and looting by French workmen.
• The ore was in barrels in an open-sided shed and had obviously been there a long time; many of the barrels were broken open.
• Around 1100 tons of ore was stored there in various forms, most of it the concentrates from Belgium, along with around 8 tons of uranium oxide.
• Over the following ten days, 260 truckloads of uranium ore, sodium uranate and ferrouranium weighing about 1,000 tons, were taken away by an African-American truck company – before the Soviets arrived – IN THEIR ZONE!
• Meanwhile, Pash had discovered that Werner Heisenberg, Otto Hahn and other German scientists were in the resort town of Haigerloch in the Black Forest region of southwest Germany.
• This was still in enemy hands, though the French were breaking through there.
• But that was also a problem.
• Because Haigerloch lay in the occupation zone allocated to France.
• And Groves didn’t want the French to get their hands on nuclear secrets either!
• He tried to get the border of the occupation zones changed!
• But the State Dept wanted to know why and he refused to tell them.
• Groves, Marshall, and Stimson then decided that the area would have to be secured by American troops that would carry off what they could and destroy everything else.
• The plan, codenamed Operation Effective, called for the 13th Airborne Division to occupy the area to prevent its capture by the French, and seize an airfield that could be used to fly in an Alsos Mission team, and later to fly it out, along with captured German scientists.
• Operation Effective was scheduled for 22 April.
• Meanwhile, they took steps to delay the French advance.
• But on 20 April, the French First Army captured an intact bridge over the Neckar River at Horb and established a bridgehead.
• It was decided to send in a force on the ground instead of Operation Effective, which was cancelled.
• This time, instead of following or accompanying the front-line troops, the Alsos Mission would operate behind enemy lines.
• The Alsos Mission had taken delivery of two armored cars, four jeeps with machine gun mounts, and two .50 caliber machine guns.
• The other two jeeps would carry captured German machine guns.
• They would be accompanied by three unarmed jeeps.
• For the operation, codenamed Operation Big, Pash would command a special force called Task Force A,  built around his Alsos Mission team and the U.S. 1269th Engineer Combat Battalion
• Pash hastily raced around Stuttgart in a convoy of jeeps and trucks to beat the French to Haigerloch.
• This was to be Alsos’s first seizure of an enemy town.
• When they arrived at the town, they found white pillowcases, sheets and towels bedecking flagpoles, window shutters and broomstick handles.
• The people of Haigerloch obviously wished to surrender.
• The team quickly located the Nazi research facility  –  ‘an ingenious set-up that gave almost complete protection from aerial observation and bombardment’.
• Pash said that as he hurried to the scene, ‘I saw a box-like concrete entrance to a cave in the side of an 80-foot cliff towering above the lower level of the town. The heavy steel door was padlocked. A paper stuck on the door indicated the manager’s identity. When the manager was brought to me, he tried to convince me that he was only an accountant. When he hesitated at my command to unlock the door, I said: “Beaston, shoot the lock off the door. If he gets in the way, shoot him. The manager opened the door.’
• Inside the main chamber was a concrete pit some 10 feet in diameter.
• In the lid was a heavy metal shield covering the top of a thick metal cylinder.
• This contained a pot-shaped vessel, also made of a heavy metal.
• It was about 4 feet below the level of the floor.
• On top of the vessel was a metal frame.
• A German prisoner confirmed that the Americans had captured the Nazi uranium ‘machine’, as the German called it.
• It was an atomic pile.
• Leaving Goudsmit and his colleagues at Haigerloch, Pash moved on to nearby Hechingen, where he picked up most of the German atomic scientists.
• Otto Hahn was captured in Tailfingen two days later and they heard Werner Heisenberg was with his family in a cottage beside a lake in Bavaria.
• On 1 May, Pash set out in pursuit of Heisenberg with ten men in the two armored cars and two jeeps.
• They teamed up with the 36th Reconnaissance Troop of the U.S. 36th Infantry Division and entered Urfeld on 2 May, where Pash found Heisenberg at his home.
• The Americans became involved in firefights with German troops attempting to enter the town, and the 36th Reconnaissance Troop had to head off on another mission, leaving Pash with just seven men.
• Fortunately, the German force, which numbered about 700, offered to surrender.
• Pash returned on 3 May with the 3rd Battalion, 142nd Infantry, which took them prisoner, while Pash and his Alsos Mission team took Heisenberg into custody.
• German scientists that had been captured by the Alsos Mission were held in several camps, separate from other prisoners of war.
• After VE Day, it was decided to concentrate them in an internment camp at Kransberg Castle, codenamed “Dustbin”, as part of Operation Epsilon.
• The Castle was the personal retreat for Hermann Göring.
• It’s where the Americans stashed high-ranking non-military prisoners of war, including Albert Speer, who originally re-designed the castle as a HQ for Hitler, Wernher von Braun, Ferdinand Porsche, and the leaders of the IG Farben chemical conglomerate.
• Ten of the nuclear physicists, including Heisenberg, were then taken to England.
• They were kept at a house near Cambridge.
• The place was thoroughly bugged to determine how close the German nuclear project had been to constructing an atomic bomb by listening in to their conversations, and transcripts of their conversations were sent to Groves.
• On July 6, the microphones picked up the following conversation between Werner Heisenberg and Kurt Diebner, another German nuclear physicist, both of whom had worked on the German nuclear project and had been seized as part of the Allied Alsos Mission, Diebner in Berlin  and Heisenberg in Urfeld:
• Diebner: “I wonder whether there are microphones installed here?”
• Heisenberg: “Microphones installed? (laughing) Oh no, they’re not as cute as all that. I don’t think they know the real Gestapo methods; they’re a bit old fashioned in that respect.”
• The most interesting conversations occurred after they received the news of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, when they struggled to comprehend how the Allies had done what they could not.
• Some of the scientists indicated that they were happy that they had not been able to build a nuclear bomb for Adolf Hitler, while some of the others, more sympathetic to the Nazi party, were dismayed at having failed.
• Otto Hahn, one of those who were grateful that Germany had not built a bomb, chided those who had worked on the German project, saying “If the Americans have a uranium bomb then you’re all second-raters.”
• Some of the scientists had almost nothing to do with the nuclear project.
• Hahn, for example, had (with his assistant Fritz Strassmann) discovered nuclear fission in December 1938, – he’s known as the father of nuclear chemistry – but otherwise had no participation.
• Max von Laue was, like Hahn, an ardent anti-Nazi and had not done any work relating to wartime physics.
• Albert Einstein (who was born six days after him) wrote that Hahn was “one of the very few who stood upright and did the best he could in these years of evil”.
• In the transcripts, Hahn contemplates suicide after learning of the bombing of Hiroshima, believing himself personally responsible for the many Japanese victims.
• After seeing the German project at Haigerloch, Goudsmit, the scientist who accompaied Pash, wrote that:
• It was so obvious the whole German uranium set up was on a ludicrously small scale. Here was the central group of laboratories, and all it amounted to was a little underground cave, a wing of a small textile factory, a few rooms in an old brewery. To be sure, the laboratories were well equipped, but compared to what we were doing in the United States it was still small-time stuff. Sometimes we wondered if our government had not spent more money on our intelligence mission than the Germans had spent on their whole project.
• The Soviets BTW had their own version of Alsos but it didn’t get off the ground until Beria suggested in early in 1945.
• By the time they got to Berlin it was too late – the atomic scientists had all escaped and been picked up by the Americans.
• All except a few.
• One of those few was Nikolaus Riehl.
• A few years later, he helped the Soviets build their first uranium bomb.
• But that’s another story.

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* President Roosevelt authorized the Manhattan Project to go full steam 26 days after Fermi’s success, on 28 December 1942
* The U.S. would end up spending $2 billion on it. (about $22 billion in 2018 dollars)
* Do you know why it cost so much?
* 130,000 people
* When I thought of the Manhattan Project, I used to imagine it was a handful of guys sitting around a blackboard scribbling equations in chalk.
* Over 90% of the cost was for building factories to produce fissile material, with less than 10% for development and production of the weapons.
* Remember that you couldn’t just go to Amazon and buy pure uranium-235 or plutonium.
* It had to be made. A LOT of it had to be made.
* And they still didn’t even know how to make it.
* So they ran up parallel factories trying various methods.
* Out of that 130,000 people, do you know how many knew they were working on developing an atomic bomb?
* Probably not many.
* It was one of the best kept secrets in military history.
* Imagine – 130,000 people working on a project that didn’t know what it was for!
* And I’m not just talking about the worker bees – the management didn’t know either.
* And of course in December 1942, nobody knew how long the war would last or how long it would take to build a bomb.
* So it was highly likely they the war would be over before they figure it out.
* But they did it anyway.
* While Bush was seeking approval from the president, Oppenheimer had suggested that a bomb laboratory be set up in an isolated area.
* It would operate secretly but allow a free exchange of ideas between theoreticians and experimentalists who would work side by side.
* The site chosen was the Los Alamos Boys Ranch School in New Mexico.
* Which, BTW, used to be called just Mexico.
* The owners of the boys’ school occupying the site was eager to sell, and Groves was equally eager to buy.
* it was easy enough to get to Santa Fe by train, Los Alamos itself was virtually inaccessible, located on a mesa, or flat-topped hill, about 30 miles northwest.
* a private ranch school for boys, modeled after the Boy Scouts
* Famous graduates of the school include William S. Burroughs and Gore Vidal
* The official name for the site during the war was Project Y.
* It was only after the war, when it’s existence became public, that it was referred to as Los Alamos.
* Oppenheimer was put in charge, despite him being a leftie and the fact he didn’t have a Noble Prize when many of the people working in the team did.
* But he was apparently a great leader.
* According to some of the other scientists who worked there, nobody else in that laboratory even came close to him in his knowledge.
* There was human warmth as well.
* Everybody certainly had the impression that Oppenheimer cared what each particular person was doing.
* In talking to someone he made it clear that that person’s work was important for the success of the whole project.
* He seems to have the ability to walk into a room where a major scientific debate was going on, listen, sum up everyone’s points, and then when he left, everyone knew what the right answer was.
* He insisted that everyone at Los Alamos could know everything about the project – they weren’t relegated to their particular piece of the puzzle.
* He created a spirit where everyone felt important and involved.
* Meanwhile, on the production side of things, they still had challenges.
* Huge amounts of material had to be obtained.
* But that’s just the start of their problems.
* More than three million board cubic feet of timber were required, for instance, and the magnets needed so much copper for windings that the Army had to substitute silver, borrowing almost 15,000 tons of silver bullion from the US Treasury.
* They couldn’t get enough vacuum tubes, generators, regulators and other equipment
* Keep in mind that nobody had ever done this before, so they didn’t know what they needed.
* A lot of it was in flux.
* Last-minute design changes continued to frustrate equipment manufacturers – who of course were still kept in the dark about what was going on.
* And there were major performance issues with other parts of the project.
* Oppenheimer discovered that he needed three times more fissionable material would be required for a bomb than earlier estimates had indicated.
* Even if things had been going well with the teams trying to create U235, at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, it was possible that they might not produce enough purified U-235 in time.
* But things weren’t going well.
* The two teams trying to create Uranium 235, one using electromagnetic separation and the other using gaseous diffusion, at Oak Ridge, had equipment malfunctions and breakdowns or just couldn’t get it working.
* Things on that front were behind schedule.
* Even going into 1944, neither method was producing results.
* So Oppenheimer turned to the Navy.
* Even though the bomb project was in the hands of the Army, the Navy were pursuing their own atomic project – to provide a source of fuel for submarines.
* And they were working on a completely different way to create U235 – thermal diffusion.
* This was under a guy called Abelson.
* Oppenheimer suggested Groves go to meet with Abelson and offer to help funds his project if they could share the U235.
* Abelson agreed.
* Abelson had been working with 100 convection columns in his plant.
* In 90 days, Groves had a 2142-column plant built in Oak Ridge.
* There was also a third major facility in Hanford, Washington, run by Du Pont, trying to produce plutonium.
* Interesting story about Hanford.
* It was the location of a booming agricultural town.
* About halfway between Seattle and Spokane.
* But the government came in and gave all 1500 residents eviction notices.
* They were told the government would purchase their properties – mostly farms – at a price to be determined by the government and they had between 2 and 30 days to move.
* People asked why?
* They were told “we can’t tell you. It’s top secret.”
* They were purchased at low prices.
* And they weren’t allowed to harvest their last crops, despite a bumper year with high prices.
* Some farms were leveled while the families were still in the homes.
* One guy remembered his father received $500 for a 10-acre irrigated farm.
* Out of that was deducted back taxes and electricity bills, leaving about $300.
* “The well alone and the irrigation system cost $1,100,” he said.
* Many of the displaced residents believe they are entitled to the same kind of payments that interned Americans of Japanese descent received from the government.
* “The government stole our property,”
* Groves wrote in his memoirs that he regretted paying too much for the farms, a comment that still rankles many survivors.
* Then the government leveled the town except for the high school, which was used for the management offices of the plutonium project.
* DuPont and the army co-ordinated efforts to recruit labourers from all over the country And 50,000 workers were shipped in over the next year.
* a sea of tents and wooden barracks where there was little to do and nowhere to go.
* Ground-breaking for the water-cooling plant for the 100-B pile, took place on 27 August, less than two weeks before Italy’s surrender to the Allies on 8 September.
* On 10 October, work gangs began laying the first of 390 tons of structural steel, 17,400 cubic yards of concrete, 50,000 concrete blocks and 71,000 concrete bricks.
* That was just to make the 40 foot windowless building the pile sat in.
* Groves had a hard time getting Du Pont on board.
* Apparently they had copped some PR flack after WWI for war profiteering.
* founded in July 1802 as a gunpowder mill by French-American chemist and industrialist Éleuthère Irénée du Pont.
* using capital raised in France and gunpowder machinery imported from France.
* The company was started at the Eleutherian Mills, on the Brandywine Creek, near Wilmington, Delaware, two years after he and his family left France to escape the French Revolution and religious persecutions against Huguenot Protestants.
* The company began as a manufacturer of gunpowder, as du Pont noticed that the industry in North America was lagging behind Europe.
* The company grew quickly, and by the mid-19th century had become the largest supplier of gunpowder to the United States military, supplying half the powder used by the Union Army during the American Civil War.
* They went on to develop nylon, Teflon, Mylar, Kevlar, and Lycra among other things.
* Eventually they agreed to help Groves build and operate his plutonium pile for costs plus one dolllar.
* The scientists at Hanford were from The Metallurgical Laboratory (or Met Lab) – a scientific laboratory at the University of Chicago that was established in February 1942 to study plutonium.
* But getting plutonium to go fissile was a different process than uranium.
* The problem was with the firing mechanism.
* Essentially, to detonate an atomic bomb, all you need to do is put together a critical mass which will then explode spontaneously.
* Putting it together must be done rapidly, otherwise predetonation would only produce a small explosion, which would blow the bomb apart before the optimal mass was achieved.
* One way to do this was to use a gun to fire a fissionable projectile into a fissionable target.
* This might work with uranium, but would work with plutonium only if absolute purification of plutonium could be achieved.
* Unable to purify the plutonium sufficiently, bomb designers came up with the idea of using high explosives to compress a sphere of plutonium into a supercritical mass, releasing neutrons and causing a chain reaction.
* However, no one yet knew exactly how much plutonium would be needed.
* Would Hanford be able to produce enough?
* As they tested the plutonium approach later in 1944, they couldn’t get it to create a chain reaction.
* It would start off okay but then the reaction would taper off.
* They eventually figured out it was something they called ‘xenon poisoning’.
* The chain reaction would produce the element xenon, which would then start absorbing neutrons faster than the pile could create them, slowing down the chain reaction.
* On Christmas Day in 1944, the figured out the solution was just increasing the number of tubes containing irradiated uranium slugs.
* By the end of January 1945, they had produced enough plutonium nitrate to send it to Los Alamos.
* Colonel Franklin T. Matthias from Groves’s staff then carried the first small batch of plutonium nitrate by train from Portland to Los Angeles, where he turned it over to a security courier from Los Alamos.
* It arrived there on 2 February.
* After that, small subcritical batches in metal containers within wooden crates were despatched by Army ambulance, in convoy, via Boise, Salt Lake City, Grand Junction and Pueblo to Los Alamos, New Mexico.
* It was also known, theoretically, that it would be possible to create a fusion, or hydrogen, bomb.
* Just as when heavy nuclei break up, or fission, energy is given off, so when light nuclei are forced together by immense temperatures and pressures, they fuse, giving off energy.
* The fusion of hydrogen atoms, producing helium, is the energy that powers the sun.
* If it could be made, a thermonuclear, or fusion, device would be considerably more powerful than either a uranium or plutonium device, though it would need a fission bomb as a detonator.
* Research on the hydrogen bomb – or the Super, as it was called at Los Alamos – was always a distant second in priority, but Oppenheimer thought that it was too important to ignore.
* After considerable deliberation, he gave Edward Teller permission to devote himself to the Super.
* At Los Alamos, Oppenheimer had put together a stellar team of the country’s leading physcists.
* As well as a few British physicists.
* One member of the British contingent was the Soviet agent Klaus Fuchs, who had been passing nuclear information to the Russians since 1942 and continued doing so until 1949 when he was caught and convicted of espionage.
* The problem with the plutonium implosion method was to achieve symmetrical implosions.
* The high-explosive shell would melt the metal core, so it was difficult to compress the material uniformly without some of it squirting out of the side.
* One of they physicists The problem he found was to achieve symmetrical implosions. The high-explosive shell would melt the metal core, so it was difficult to compress the material uniformly without some of it squirting out of the side. Parsons mocked: ‘To my mind he is gradually working up to what I shall refer to as the Beer-Can Experiment. As soon as he gets his explosives properly organized, we will see this done. The point to watch for is whether he can blow in a beer can without splattering the beer.’ called it the Beer-Can Experiment.
* “As soon as he gets his explosives properly organized, we will see this done. The point to watch for is whether he can blow in a beer can without splattering the beer.”
* John Von Neumann and Teller worked out that if you could squeeze a hollow shell of plutonium into a solid ball, you could put together a critical mass much quicker than you could firing it from a gun.
* it would be possible to squeeze a solid subcritical sphere of plutonium to such unearthly densities that it would detonate.
* This would avoid the problems of compressing hollow shells.
* The high speed of the compression would prevent predetonation; the plutonium would not have to be so pure and you would need less of it.
* In other words, you could make a more reliable bomb more quickly.
* It would also be smaller, and therefore much easier to fit in a plane.

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