The Manhattan Project,Secrecy And J.Robert Oppenheimer



J.Robert Oppenheimer


The "Manhattan Project",according to Wills in "Bomb Power",was a miracle within the larger miracle of wartime productivity.It was a triumph of secrecy,of vast tax moneys unaccounted for,of research compelled,of resources commandeered,of human tasks assigned and huge sites built or expanded.The director of the scientific work was J.Robert Oppenheimer.He persuaded General Groves,military leader of the project,that scientists had to explore problems together,criticize one another's work and develop one another's insights to be successful.Oppenheimer was able to recruit superstars of physics,including famous men driven from Europe by repression.This immigrant talent and American scientists worked together as a team to bring solutions to the project.Groves had a team of security men spying on the scientists even in their isolated community and resented the use of foreign languages his security team could not understand and report on.

The average age of the scientists was twenty-four.Theoretical physicists(atomic particle physics) tend to do their best work when they are very young.Some scientists refused to join the mysterious program they were sounded out for.The military authorities debated what to do with people who knew what was going on at Los Alamos but either refused to join in or left the confines.Groves wanted to draft them to Los Alamos or send them to some distant military outpost to be watched until the end of the war.One of the security officers,Boris Pash,wanted to take them out to sea for questioning(Russian style) and not return with them if needed.Pash was also convinced that Oppenheimer was a Communist.Groves knew he could not succeed without Oppenheimer's essential contributions as leader of the scientific team but he put Pash in the compound to spy continually on Oppenheimer.

It surprised many that Grove put Oppenheimer in charge of the physicists.Edward Teller thought Hans Bethe should have been put in charge(a German was politically insensitive).Oppenheimer's Berkeley colleague Ernest O Lawrence might have been a more obvious choice but Groves didn't want him away from his vital work on the cyclotron he was perfecting for creating the high-energy beam needed to bombard atoms and split them.

When the Bomb was successfully exploded on July 16,1945, in a test code-named Trinity,it proved more powerful than the scientists had expected.President Truman would call the Bomb"the greatest thing in history" and his revelation of it to the nation"the happiest announcement I ever made".The military-industrial complex,with a poisonous admixture of government and secrecy,had scored a triumph that would show the way to many government activities.It offered a model for dealing with the Russians,Germans,Communists and Nazis.The secrecy that had enveloped Los Alamos would quietly cross the entire American landscape in the years to come.

More from "Bomb Power" in the near future.