Redactions

General Groves Meets the Press (1945)

by Alex Wellerstein, published April 18th, 2012

Since I’ve already been engaged in some Oak Ridgery earlier in the week, I thought I might continue the trend. This week’s document is the transcript of a press conference given by Secretary of War Robert P. Patterson and General Leslie R. Groves at Oak Ridge on September 29, 1945.1

It’s one of the few press conferences that Groves gave during this time, one of the few times early on in which he actually made personal appearances with the press, as opposed to his more carefully-constructed, only-by-paper publicity campaigns.2

Click to view document (sorry about the poor resolution — blame NARA and their low-res online versions)

It’s a fascinating exchange between the press and the deacons of secrecy, at the secret city itself.

Question: “What is the Army’s position on the release of the secret?”
Patterson: “I am not in a position to say that. A decision as to policy is to be made by the President and is to be made very shortly and I prefer not to say anything about that, but you won’t have to wait long.”

You won’t have to wait long. One wonders what this refers to. Truman did issue various requests for the secret to be “kept” around about this time, as a temporary measure. The Attlee-Truman-King statement was issued in November, which had a very ambiguous take on the question of secrecy (see section 6 in particular, which suggests short-term secrecy is important, but that long-term secrecy is ineffective), and then there is the entire Baruch plan debacle.

Question: “How many people actually knew what you were doing?”
Patterson: “I don’t think anyone could answer that question.”
Question: “Less than 100?”
Patterson: “I would say more than that but that would be pure speculation.”

“Actually knew what you were doing” refers, presumably, to the fact that the end goal was making an atomic bomb. It’s quite a bit more than 100 (if you include, for example, the weapons designers at Los Alamos), but it’s an interesting list to consider. I’ve played with creating a table of “who knew” myself; it has some interesting parts of it (Vice President Harry Truman: did not know. Soviet Premier Josef Stalin: did know. Most workers at Oak Ridge and Hanford: did not know. Most members of Congress: did not know.) but  never quite did enough to justify an entire table.

Question: “Is there anything to the rumor that you are making a super bomb that would make the Nagasaki bomb look small?”
Patterson: “I don’t know.”
Groves: “I don’t think the Nagasaki bomb was made obsolete. That bomb could never be made obsolete. Those we used are pretty super.” [last sentence hand-written] …
Question: “Is there such a thing being planned as a super bomb?”
Groves: “No, I don’t think so. They talk about airplanes that will go around the world, etcetera. This thing has just started and no one knows just what will develop.”

This is, as far as I know, the first published reference to a rumor of a possible “Super” bomb, the hydrogen bomb, in the public domain — as early as September 1945! Note how sneaky Groves is in the first instance. He doesn’t deny anything, he doesn’t confirm anything. He’s evasive but in a way that doesn’t actually give anything away. He’s right, of course, that no matter how you slice it, 20 kilotons is going to be a pretty big bang. His second statement is more dishonest; he knew that there was a “Super” bomb being contemplated.

Click to continue: Groves gets asked about radioactivity at Hiroshima…

  1. The photo of Groves is actually from Hanford; I couldn’t find any of him giving talks at Oak Ridge. Photo is from the Hanford DDRS database, item N1D0029056. [↩]
  2. Transcript, “Press Conference — Secretary of War Robert P. Patterson — Clinton Engineer Works,” (29 September 1945), National Archives and Records Administration, available online through their ARC website under the identifier 281581. [↩]

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Meditations

Oak Ridge Confidential, or Baseball for Bombs

by Alex Wellerstein, published April 16th, 2012

Oak Ridge, Tennessee, has the dubious honor of having been one of the few places in the United States that qualified for the label of “secret city.” What we usually have in this country are secret sites, but Oak Ridge was more than a site. During World War II, Oak Ridge had a population of 75,000 people, making it the fifth largest city in the state — one that didn’t appear on official maps.

The Department of Energy has recently been digitizing a large number of photographs of life at Oak Ridge, and it seemed like a good time to talk about the place. I would be remiss not to send interested readers to Frank Munger’s Atomic City Underground, which is a site that lives and breathes Oak Ridgery seven days a week. Some of my favorites from the new photos:

Oak Ridge was big for a secret city. Even the presence of “secret cities” or secret sites on a massive scale were pretty novel for the United States at the time. The only pre-World War II analog that I’ve come across is the lewisite (chemical gas) production facility during World War I known as “the Mousetrap” (once you enter, you never leave), where James B. Conant (future atomic administrator) worked as a young chemist.1

Most of the personnel at Oak Ridge were in construction of some sort. It’s easy to see why, when you look at what they made there. The job of producing fissile material (enriching uranium, in this case) was mostly a construction job. No shock, then, that it was the Army Corps of Engineers who were called in to run the project in 1942, and that the guy they chose to head the whole project (Gen. Leslie Groves) had recently constructed the Pentagon — still the world’s largest office building by area. I like to point out to students that all of the world’s nuclear fission research in 1938 could fit onto an average-sized dinner table; in less than a decade, it spanned an entire country.

The K-25 gaseous diffusion plant, at the time the largest single factory under one roof in the entire world.

The level of secrecy and compartmentalization at Oak Ridge created a number of practical problems for those running the site. It wasn’t just that Oak Ridge was cut off from the outside world, which it was. It was also cut off from the rest of the Manhattan Project, kept under tight compartmentalization restrictions.

The vast majority of those working at Oak Ridge during the war had no idea what they were working on. They knew it involved building very large facilities, that there were various health hazards involved, and that supposedly it was an important war project. All of those who were there thought they had signed up to do their part, yet the war in Europe seemed to end without any intervention on their part.

The National Archives has a great transcript of a radio show from 1947 that sheds a lot of interesting light on what it was like for your average technician to work at Oak Ridge. Here’s a quote from George Turner, who apparently managed workers:

Well it wasn’t that the job was tough… it was confusing. You see, now one knew what was being made in Oak Ridge, not even me, and a lot of the people thought they were wasting their time here. It was up to me to explain to the dissatisfied workers that they were doing a very important job. When they asked me what, I ‘d have to tell them it was a secret. But I almost went crazy myself trying to figure out what was going on. One man came up to me and said, “I thought this was a war job.” “It is,” I said. He looked at me very unbelieving. “Well I’ve been here two months now,” he stated, “And I’ve been watching those two smoke stacks outside every day, and no smoke has ever come out of them… There’s something funny going on around here and I’m getting out.”

The smoke stacks, it goes on to explain, were intake stacks, pulling fresh air in to the plant. It also describes how the railroad cars full of freight — uranium — always left empty, another suspicious looking thing.

Rumors abounded about what the plant was meant to accomplish, both inside and outside of it. These rumors were, of course, carefully cataloged by Manhattan Project security officials. The most amusing one I’ve come across for Oak Ridge was that it was actually a model socialist community being created by Eleanor Roosevelt as a prototype for future Communist domination of the United States. Nothing encourages nonsense like a vacuum of information.

More compartmentalization stories follow, along with the unusual solution proposed by Manhattan Project administrators…

  1. This period of Conant’s life is covered wonderfully in James Hershberg’s James B. Conant: Harvard to Hiroshima and the Making of the Nuclear Age (New York: Knopf, 1993), chapter 3. [↩]

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Visions

The Atomic Energy Commission Seal (1949)

by Alex Wellerstein, published April 13th, 2012

Jeffrey Lewis recently posted at ACW a rare piece of stationery that contains the seal of the General Department of Atomic Energy in North Korea. I thought it was interesting:

It’s basically the Juche Tower surrounded by some standard graphical representations of electron orbitals. (I also learned, from talking to a friend last week, that the North Korean missile names like Taepodong-2, Nodong, etc., are Western designations given based on the region in which they were first seen by intelligence agencies. The exception to this so far was the Unha-3 rocket that fizzled yesterday, which got its name from the fact that it basically had “Unha-3” written on the side of it. Unha apparently means something like Galaxy or The Milky Way. All of this was news to me, but I’m not a Korea-watcher. But I’m digressing.)

It got me thinking back to a topic I’m perennially interested in, which is the way in which atomic energy programs are self-represented. I have a long post in the works about the origins of the emblem/seal/logo of the International Atomic Energy Agency, which has an interesting story behind it. But for today, I want to share some things I found in the National Archives relating to the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) seal.

A cast-aluminum, painted version of the AEC seal. The Department of Energy’s History Office had one of these on its walls the last time I visited.

The AEC seal is one of those great totems of the atomic age. A largely symmetrical and stylized representation of an atom (the highly toxic beryllium, but who’s counting?), it is strikingly more straightforward than the seals of its successor organizations, the Energy Research and Development Administration and the Department of Energy:

ERDA’s seal is entirely misleading (unless one interprets that “sun” to be an exploding nuclear fireball, I suppose), while the DOE’s is a design-by-committee monstrosity. (You can imagine the committee meeting. “Let’s have sun, and an atom, and an oil well, and a windmill, and, uh, a turbine, I guess, and maybe, um, lightning? And all of it on a shield. With a bald eagle’s head on top of it. That would look so killer.”)

By contrast, the AEC seal is simple, efficient, and reasonably accurate. A real triumph of late-1940s government graphic design. It also reproduces well when reduced in size, which is more than you can say about the DOE logo:

So where’d it come from? One thing that I was surprised to come across in the AEC’s records is the fact that the famous AEC seal was created no sooner than January1949 — two years after the AEC was created (the AEC officially came into existence and took over from the Manhattan Project in January 1947, but was being organized and meeting as early as 1946). For the first few years, they didn’t use a seal at all, they just wrote “ATOMIC ENERGY COMMISSION” on everything.

Not exactly the historical revelation of the year, but it’s interesting how easily we take for granted something like this. I guess I had always assumed that the seal was born with the organization.

Read on to see an early draft design…

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Redactions

The Draft and the Bomb (1942)

by Alex Wellerstein, published April 11th, 2012

One of my basic rules as an historian is look at boring stuff. It’s not exactly what’s going to convince people to sign up for the profession, but maybe that’s a good thing, considering the current job market. But it’s an important thing to do. Keep in mind that I said one should look at boring stuff — that’s not the same thing as writing boring stuff.

Why the boring stuff? Because there is often interesting stuff hidden in boring stuff. And because most historians seem to avoid boring stuff, it means you can sometimes find real gems in places nobody had ever thought to look for them.1

So here’s a case in point. Buried within the copious archives of the atomic bomb are folders and folders about draft deferments during World War II. Pretty boring, huh? But it actually becomes an interesting place to contemplate the long reach of secrecy policies.

A draft board interrogates a future soldier, September 1942 (Time/Life)

Conscription for World War II started in 1940, when the US was not yet a participant in the war. It ramped up after Pearl Harbor and ended up drafting 11 million men; some 200,000 per month at the height of it. Early on, the choice of who got drafted, and who got deferment, was handled by local draft boards. (Just as an aside, while looking at pictures of WWII draft boards, I came across this one. Unusual facial hair for a guy running a draft board, eh?)

The early work on the atomic bomb, before it fully became the Manhattan Project and was still exclusively under the Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD), wasn’t exempt from having its scientists and technicians drafted. They had to write letters to these local draft boards, explaining, in cryptic terms, that the young man in question was actually doing important and irreplaceable war work. And sometimes these local boards would balk, thinking that these fellows were just trying to get out of their patriotic duty, and the officials from the OSRD would have to find a way to convince them that they couldn’t be drafted, without, of course, spilling the beans on the actual war project they were working on. One of the trickiest parts of the Manhattan Project was the fact that it was a secret; that there was a secret was the secret.

Even so, the early deferment requests were often quite specific — a blanket “don’t draft this scientist” request didn’t work on the draft boards coming only from the OSRD. The fact that a given scientist was a “cyclotron engineer” and working at the “Metallurgical Laboratory at the University of Chicago” on “one of the most important projects being conducted by this office [the OSRD]” was disclosed to one Selective Service director at Jefferson City, Missouri. Interestingly, if one had access to all of these deferment letters, one could come up with a pretty good description of the kind of staff specialties required for the early American bomb project, and the sites they took place at.

In theory, anyone could be drafted, no matter what project they were working on, if they were replaceable. Just being on a wartime project wasn’t an excuse for getting out of the draft — you actually had to be doing something that couldn’t just be done by someone else. (Ergo the citation of the special skills — being a “cyclotron engineer” — above.)

This week’s document comes from Norman Hilberry, at the Metallurgical Laboratory at Chicago, to Harry T. Wensel at the OSRD, and relates to the problem of draft deferments. Specifically, it takes up the problem of having any Met Lab research assistants being drafted, even if they are quite generic in their skill levels — because they had been exposed to secrets.2

Click to view PDF.

As Hilberry wrote, even those with very minor roles at the Met Lab had a pretty good idea of what was going on:

All of these men are in possession of certain general information concerning the nature of our work. In the case of the Research Assistants, in many instances they occupy positions of considerable responsibility and consequently have a considerable knowledge of the nature of the problem and the progress being made. Even in the case of Laboratory Assistants, the nature of the problem and the mode of attack are obvious. It is true that in neither case do the men have detailed knowledge except perhaps in some particular phase, but were it possible for us to gain as much knowledge of Axis progress as any one of these men possess, it would be inestimable assistance.

Without deferments, these men would be going straight into the armed forces, and straight into the front lines, “consequently opening a possible line of information to the Axis should any of these men subsequently be captured.” While unlikely, there was a “finite possibility” that this could occur, and if the Axis were looking for such people, it might find them even easier.

Keep reading…

  1. My work on the Manhattan Project patenting program came out of just this kind of methodology — looking at folders that don’t obviously “fit” into the standard narrative and don’t sound very interesting. [↩]
  2. Citation: Norman Hilberry to Harry T. Wensel (7 September 1942), in Bush-Conant File Relating the Development of the Atomic Bomb, 1940-1945, Records of the Office of Scientific Research and Development, RG 227, microfilm publication M1392, National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, D.C., n.d. (ca. 1990), Roll 6, Target 13, Folder 65, “Deferments, General, A to G [1942].” [↩]

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Visions

Atomic TIME (Magazine)

by Alex Wellerstein, published April 6th, 2012

Time magazine has featured the bomb on its covers regularly over the years, and its cover archives are actually searchable online. Some of them are pretty iconic, others are just plain weird. Below are a few of my favorites, annotated and in chronological order.

First on the list, chronologically and thematically, is the July 1, 1946 issue featuring Albert Einstein (“All matter is speed and flame”) and a mushroom cloud (which is interestingly an amalgam of the Trinity and the Nagasaki clouds) across which, amazingly, “E=mc2” is emblazoned. This is visually fascinating for at least two reasons: 1. Einstein = E=mc2 = the atomic bomb! Has the connection between theoretical physics and nuclear weapons ever been stated in a graphically more oversimplified way? 2. Einstein is wearing a suit! This might not sound very exciting, but consider that in both of Einstein’s two other Time covers from his lifetime (1929, 1938), he was exclusively wearing pajamas. Because that’s what kooky, head-in-the-clouds theoretical physicists do, right? Until the bomb comes along, and then they get serious and put on a tie. (And shortly thereafter, the FBI shows up.)

Next we have our good buddy J. Robert Oppenheimer (“What we don’t understand, we explain to each other”), from November 8, 1948. Here we essentially have the emblematic physicist-of-the-state — a concerned, serious, well-dressed man surrounded by an ocean of equations. The drawing of Oppenheimer (which is on display in the National Portrait Gallery, I can attest) captures his likeness well (compare with this Eisenstaedt photo, which is very similar), and also captures the ice-blue cool of his eyes (something which is not evident in the black and white photos of him, but can be seen in some photos of him when he was elderly). But moreover, it is a stunning contrast to the Oppenheimer depicted in 1954, just after losing his security clearance, who looks drawn and severe. Also note that when Edward Teller got his Time cover, in 1957, the visual scheme was essentially identical. I like to see this parallel as signifying, in a clean, visual way, Oppenheimer’s decline and Teller’s ascent as the model of what it meant to be a “government scientist” in the early Cold War. Both of these covers are framed in my office — the Yin and Yang of the early atomic age.

There are a lot of other “atomic portrait” photos — David Lilienthal (1947) and a flaming electric horse; Gordon Dean (1952) with a mushroom-cloud periodic table; Lewis Strauss (1953) with a searing radioactive sun, Archbishop Bernadin (1982) using his papal powers to bombard you with ICBMs and doves, just to pick a few creative ones — but none of them “do it for me” as much as the Oppenheimer one does.

The cover for the April 12, 1954, issue of Time is easy to underestimate. It’s clearly recognizable as the mushroom cloud from the first hydrogen bomb test, Ivy Mike, from November 1952. But it’s being shown in April 1954, not long after the Castle Bravo testing accident (in which an island of Marshallese and a Japanese fishing boat, along with a considerable amount of fish in the Pacific Ocean, were irradiated). Why didn’t they put this on the cover in 1952? Because the test was secret, and images from it weren’t widely released until April 1954. So even though it was a year and a half late, it still had a lot of symbolic relevance. And notice that Time chose not to depict it in color, but instead went with an austere black, white, and red scheme. (Life magazine also featured an Ivy Mike image on the cover that week, but chose the fireball instead of the cloud.)

Click here to see the rest of them.

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