Redactions

The Hiroshima Phone Call (1945)

by Alex Wellerstein, published April 4th, 2012

Telephone calls are one of those fairly ephemeral forms of communication that don’t usually end up in the archival record. There are exceptions, though, especially in areas where security was a top concern. FBI files, for example, often contain telephone transcripts recorded without the knowledge of the participants — an awful thing for civil liberties, but a fairly useful thing for an historian!

General Groves had several transcripts of his telephone conversations taken and written out. Whyis a good question — one I don’t know the answer to. But the ones that are in the archives are mostly of rather momentous importance, and so I guess it would not be unreasonable to assume that Groves considered them to be part of the essential record of the Manhattan Project, which he was fastidious about preserving — in part because he feared being endlessly cross-examined by Congressional committees in the early postwar period.1

This week’s document is a rather amazing telephone conversation between Groves and Oppenheimer on the afternoon of August 6, 1945 — not long after Groves himself learned about the bombing of Hiroshima.2

Click on the image to view the full PDF.

Some curious excerpts of this curious conversation between “Gen. G” and “Dr. O” follow! Read the full post »

  1. On Groves’ fears of death-by-committee, see esp. Stanley Goldberg, “General Groves and the atomic West: The making and meaning of Hanford,” in Bruce Hevly and John Findlay, eds., The atomic West (Seattle, Wash.: University of Washington Press, 1998), 39-89. [↩]
  2. Citation: Transcript of a telephone conversation between Leslie R. Groves and J. Robert Oppenheimer (6 August 1945), Manhattan Engineer District (MED) records, Records of the Army Corps of Engineers, RG 77, National Archives and Records Administration, Box 86, “Groves, L.R. Lt. Gen. – Telephone conversations.” [↩]

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Meditations

Do We Want Another Manhattan Project?

by Alex Wellerstein, published April 2nd, 2012

Some time back, I set up a Google Alert to forward me, on a daily basis, any news stories that mention the phrase “Manhattan Project.” The not-terribly-surprising result is that I get to see exactly how often people call for new Manhattan Project-like efforts to solve various technical or political problems of our times.

It turns out to be something that is very often called for. More than I had expected. Each and every day, more or less, someone, somewhere, is invoking the Manhattan Project as the be-all and end-all for intense problem solving.

One of the silver Manhattan Project pins issued after the war to individuals who worked on the Manhattan Project for over a year. From my personal collection.

Here is what people seem to mean by calling for a new Manhattan Project:

  • Round up all the experts on a given subject. All of them.
  • Give them near unlimited resources and allow them to follow each and every possible lead towards solving the problem. Each and every one of them. Even redundantly.
  • Expect positive results in three to five years, give or take. What else could the outcome of such an effort be be?

Well, that sounds find and dandy if you support whatever the outcome is meant to be — renewable energy, bird flu studies, understanding autism, fertilizer, nuclear fusion, fighting cancer (just to name a few such ideas floated in the last two weeks alone) — and you believe that it actually works that way.

But here’s the rub: this is a really lousy way to think about what the Manhattan Project was.

Here’s what the Manhattan Project means to me, as an historian of, well, the Manhattan Project:

  • Spend a fantastical amount of resources — diverting it from other necessary projects — on something which is actually a huge gamble. We tend to gloss over the fact today that when they started pouring money into the bomb work in 1942 and 1943, there were really quite long odds that it would pay off, and it was a lot harder to pull off than they had originally estimated when they OK’d the project.
  • Invest so much into it that the penalty for calling off the work, even if the initial purpose is no longer relevant or feasible, would be institutionally impossible. In fact, invest so much effort into it that the question of whether it ought to be pushed towards completion is essentially unraisable amongst the highest echelon of planners.
  • Do all of the above with essentially no external oversight or independent auditing. This is actually a requirement for spending money on such a wildly improbable project at any time when resources are considered scarce — which is always.1
  • Keep all long-term or big-picture planning in the hands of a deliberately small cabal, and rigidly work to keep dissenting views out of view of those who might actually care about them.
  • After completing your goal, instead of dismantling the infrastructure and moving on to other problems, you actually expand it considerably, making it several times larger than anyone would have guessed during the initial project.

Now, I hear you saying, “well, Alex, obviously no one who invokes the Manhattan Project means any of that!” Oh, I know. That’s the problem — we’ve turned “the Manhattan Project” into a vague metaphor for scientific effort. But it’s highly misleading. The Manhattan Project was an unusual, somewhat dubious enterprise that had massive, world-affecting consequences. Ignoring that not only misunderstands the Manhattan Project, it misunderstands what happens when you pour essentially unlimited resources into a given field — which actually is the primary goal of those who use this metaphor.

The problem is, the Manhattan Project “worked,” if by “worked” you mean, “produced atomic bombs for use in the Pacific theatre during World War II.” It almost didn’t work — there are plenty of reasons to believe that the war would have been over fairly soon with or without the bombs (the main historical question is not whether it would soon end, but on what terms and at what costs). But because it did “work,” it seems inevitable and even like a good gamble. But the odds were actually incredible long, and it was an incredible accomplishment to actually get that much done in that amount of time — a flattering fact for those who worked on it, but something we tend to gloss over since we know how the story ends.2

The other problem is that many of the other models one might use had much more ambiguous results. Do we want a “War on Cancer” for our present problems? Probably not, since that didn’t actually end cancer. (It did many good things, to be sure! But it also showed us that “cancer” is a fantastically bigger medical problem to surmount than many people had realized.)

Do we want a “Apollo program” instead? Maybe — getting to the moon first is seen as more or less good thing today by most Americans. But it also has overtones of technical innovation for propaganda’s sake, and in its own time, the technical accomplishments were noticeably complicated by a rupturing domestic scene (riots, Civil Rights, Vietnam, etc.). Of course, the fact that the popular attitude is something along the lines of “we went to the moon, and then space got boring,” doesn’t help. Still, it is probably a more realistic model for what one might want, in terms of time horizons, expenditures, and programs that are actually compatible with democratic institutions.

Ironically, a public call for a new “Manhattan Project” is also something of a logical contradiction. There was no public call for the original Manhattan Project — it was a very private, secret effort by a small group of insiders running off of specialized knowledge that most of the world wasn’t aware even existed. General Groves would have loathed (and would have attempted to censor) an actual public call for making atomic bombs in the 1940s, because it would have completely defeated the goals of the Manhattan Project as they actually existed — secrecy, winning the “race,” avoiding audits, and so on. Calling for a Manhattan Project makes about as much sense as ordering up your own surprise party.

  1. See my previous post on the Origins of the Nuclear Black Budget for a discussion of these kinds of issues. [↩]
  2. I’d be remiss not to cite Michael Gordin’s provocative book, Five Days in August: How World War II Became a Nuclear War, which interrogates the “what do we mean by work?” question in wonderful detail. I wrote a review of it awhile back, which you can read here if you are interested. [↩]

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Visions

Trinity’s cloud (1945)

by Alex Wellerstein, published March 30th, 2012

The mushroom cloud has long been the symbol of what it meant to set off a nuclear weapon. But, as Spencer Weart noted in his Nuclear Fear (I haven’t checked to see if it is in the new edition, The Rise of Nuclear Fear, yet), it wasn’t always so, nor necessarily so. There are other words in English you could describe such a cloud, though “mushroom” has nice symbolic connotations. But more to the point I want to make here, you don’t necessarily have to focus on the cloud in its most mushroom-y stage. There are lots of ways to photograph a nuclear explosion, and the ideal mushroom cloud shape represents just one particular point in time in the evolution of the nuclear effects.

Case in point, the “standard” image of the “Trinity” shot (July 16, 1945), is not of a mushroom cloud, but as a blobby fireball, milliseconds after detonation:1

It’s kind of curious, isn’t it, that these sorts of images are the most common? I haven’t traced out the whole story here, but the obvious reason for this is that these are the images that were first distributed about the test in the wake of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. (There’s one of the “fireball” photos inside the Princeton University Press edition of the Smyth Report, for example.)

Why the fireball and not the cloud? One might be tempted to say it has something to do with wanting to underplay the fallout, but of course they did distribute photos of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki mushroom clouds. I suspect that the reason isn’t terribly deep — that, perhaps, whomever chose the photos was more impressed by the massive fireball with its uncanny spherical shape than they were by a mere mushroom cloud, which, without a sense of scale, is indistinguishable from many other large explosions. But this is just speculation. I’ve never found much documentation on the release of the “Trinity” photos — just a memo from a year later (the summer of 1946) which said, interestingly, that the decision to declassify all of the tiny-time scale “Trinity” photos (like the ones linked above) was made after consultation with none other than Klaus Fuchs.

The other common photo of “Trinity” is the Jack Aeby photo, perhaps most famous these days as being the cover of Richard Rhodes’ Making of the Atomic Bomb. It is later than the millisecond photos, obviously, but is still very early in the cloud formation.

Below are some alternative views of “Trinity,” from Los Alamos National Laboratory’s archives. They show considerably different stages of the cloud development, and are pretty interesting images for that reason:

I find all of these ones to be much more ominous than either the fireball or the Aeby photos — they are dark, they are smokey, they are not friendly. The last one in particular looks like something ancient and terrible. Which arguably is as correct an interpretation of the “Trinity” test as the more common narrative about inspiring achievement.

  1. All of these images come from Los Alamos National Laboratory; their file names reflect their index numbers within the LANL system. [↩]

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Redactions

Insuring the Bomb (1944)

by Alex Wellerstein, published March 28th, 2012

Nuclear technology has had an odd relationship to insurance in the United States. Why? Because it is high-risk, low-probability technology — no underwriter wants to contemplate insuring against a full meltdown disaster, as rare as they are. The result of this is that in the United States, under the 1957 Price-Anderson Nuclear Industries Indemnity Act, the American public essentially acts as the underwriters for all nuclear power plants. It’s an arrangement that is understandably controversial amongst a diverse group of critics.

But the history of odd nuclear insurance arrangements dates back much earlier.

In December 1942, the University of California agreed, at the insistence of J. Robert Oppenheimer and Ernest O. Lawrence, to become the manager of the secret Los Alamos laboratory. Well, in truth, they agreed to manage some kind of laboratory — they didn’t know it was at Los Alamos. They didn’t even know what state it was in, much less what it was supposed to be doing. As manager, their job was to procure supplies and manage personnel employment.1

And, as a consequence, purchase insurance for the lab. Which is one of many things that made the UC’s secretary and finance officer, Robert Mackenzie Underhill, unhappy. Because what prudent finance officer would let such a project be uninsured against hazards? But it’s awful hard to find insurance when you don’t know where the project is much less what is to be insured against.

Robert M. Underhill: the UC’s financial watchdog, and the only Regent who knew about the bomb.

The amazing fact is, nobody in the UC management hierarchy had a clue what they were doing at this secret lab. It was really that secret. In February 1943, Underhill had finally managed to weasel out of the Army that the secret physics project was in New Mexico — so that they could purchase insurance for it.

It was not until November 1943 — nearly a year after the UC had taken on management responsibilities — that Ernest Lawrence decided it was necessary to let Underhill just a teensy bit in on the secret. Not because Lawrence cared too much what Underhill thought, but because he felt it might expedite Underhill’s activity (and general financial conservatism) if the latter considered the program an important undertaking.

In Underhill’s recollection, Lawrence went to Underhill’s office, locked the door, and pulled down the curtains. Lawrence asked him, “You know what they’re doing down in Los Alamos?” Underhill said no — he knew only that Oppenheimer was running a “scientific study in physics.” Lawrence then filled him in that the UC was now thoroughly enmeshed in the production of atomic bombs. Amazingly, Underhill remained the only top UC official to know the purpose of the project; even the UC President, Robert Sproul, was not filled in. (And in fact, he got in trouble later in the war for speculating publicly that they were working on a death ray — a little too close to the truth, as it turned out.)

This week’s document is a teletype from General Groves to Oppenheimer from February 1944, instructing the latter as to what to tell Underhill about the hazards to be insured against at an unspecified site.2

Click image to view full PDF.

The “hazards present at the site,” Groves told Oppenheimer to relate to Underhill, involve:

  1. Exposure to radiant energy or emitted particles from radioactive materials or from high voltage sources or machines “classify secret reference eidme” (I am not sure what this last bit means, other than perhaps to say that item #1 here is classified secret)
  2. Exposure to explosion due to high explosives
  3. Exposure to toxic materials comprising uranium [and?] any compound thereof fluorine or hydrofluoric acid

From the context, I would think the site was Los Alamos — high explosives, radiation, uranium. February 1944 seems a little late to be specifying this sort of thing, but it may either be a sub-site of Los Alamos, or they might just be back-dating things.

Norris Bradbury (L) and Robert Underhill (R), signing the UC lab management contract renewal in 1952.

Underhill is a curious figure in the history of the bomb. He saw the whole enterprise as a dubious matter for the UC to be tied up in, and shows up at various junctures trying to protect the UC’s financial and legal interests. That the UC would have and be able to act on its own financial and legal interests in this situation — and not just roll over at the request of the Army — is what I find so interesting about these little episodes.

It’s common to see the bomb as this immovable, in-opposable force in American life and politics, but there are all sorts of little compromises that had to be made, especially in the early days, to get it off the ground.

  1. The best one-stop shop for information about the early involvement of the University of California in management of Los Alamos and later Livermore is Gregg Herken, “The University of California, the Federal Weapons Labs, and the Founding of the Atomic West,” in Bruce William Hevly and John M. Findlay, eds., The Atomic West (Seattle, Wash.: University of Washington Press, 1998), 119-135. The change-over from UC management to privatized management in the early 2000s was quite controversial; Hugh Gusterson’s recent article in BAS, The assault on Los Alamos National Laboratory: A drama in three acts, is a must-read on the current management situation. [↩]
  2. Citation: Teletype from Leslie R. Groves to J. Robert Oppenheimer (January 1944), copy in Nuclear Testing Archive, Las Vegas, NV, document NV0317507. [↩]

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Visions

Uncle Sam says Shush

by Alex Wellerstein, published March 23rd, 2012

There’s a time-honored tradition of using scary posters to remind your employees that dire and deadly consequences will follow from their indiscretions. Creating an aura of “security consciousness” has been the goal, and during World War II in particular, posters of the “Loose Lips Sink Ships” variety were produced by the metric ton.

My favorite World War II secrecy poster is one that I haven’t seen much online, but is sold as a postcard at the National Archives at College Park:

This one was created by Robert S. Sloan, who did a number of American propaganda posters during World War II. I love its starkness and simplicity, and its darkly ominous quality. It’s also a beautiful inversion of the standard James Montgomery Flagg poster from 1917 — it is still focused on Uncle Sam and his index finger, but instead of saying that he wants you, he’s saying, shhhhh. It’s a symbolic, perhaps, of the way in which technical secrecy becomes predominant in World War II, as the reliance on new weapons becomes more standardized, and the number of civilian contractors involved in war production went up considerably.

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