TechStuff Takes Manhattan (Project)

of the Manhattan Project. So so I'd like to say all listeners, if you have not heard part one of this product, of this podcast or this series, then I implore you. Maybe maybe that's too strong a word. I don't know. No, I think implore is a good word, because otherwise there's gonna be a lot of player It's gonna be like watching season four Lost. It'll be like it'll be like if you if you've heard, hey, that Game of Thrones show is supposed to be really good,

let me just watch this one episode. You won't know who any of the people are or why they're doing what they're doing. Uh So, here's a quick previously on tech stuff. We ended up covering the physics that led

up to the discovery of fission. We also covered the political landscape, the fact that World War two was well, first it was building, you know, the world was building up to World War two, and then World War two breaks out, and how that ended up creating a fast track in the United States for research into fission, specifically in the weaponization of fission, using using atomic science to create a weapon, because there was the very real threat that the Nazis we're working on their own program for

such a thing, and even before the United States was pulled into the war, UH, there was this this need.

Einstein himself had expressed concern. And we also talked about sort of the the players that we're all doing various lines of research into the separate separation of of ions of uranium, because, as it turns out, you two thirty five is really what you want if you're trying to achieve nuclear fission, especially a sustainable chain reaction, but you two thirty eight is overwhelmingly the more abundant version of uranium that's found in nature, and separating the two is

not an easy task. So we have multiple areas of research looking into ways to do that and also a need to find a way to weaponize it. We concluded Part one. This is just to set us up apart to we concluded part one talking about how there was the Army Corps of Engineers have become involved, and there is a fellow named James C. Marshall who was initially in charge. James C. Marshall's headquarters were located in Manhattan

and specifically was the Manhattan Energy District. Was the code name for it, and the secret project, super secret project to develop atomic weapons became known as the Manhattan Project, even after those headquarters were no longer in Manhattan. Yeah, you know, if you find a name that works, you stick,

you stick with the name. And it's one of those it's one of those common misconceptions because as as we've mentioned on the previous episode, this uh Manhattan Project did not occur, not only did not occur in just Manhattan or just in Mexico, but it occurred in areas across the across the US. There's some really cool stuff that's going to happen. There are towns that only exist because of the Manhattan Project. They would not have otherwise grown

up where they are. And to really get into this, at this stage, the very early days of the Manhattan Project as an official thing. There were some tensions that were already building up between the scientific community, the various research centers that were looking into this, and the army that was more or less kind of facilitating it, you know,

sort of in charge. But also mainly their purpose was to make sure that the scientists were going to have the facilities and resources that they would need in order to do what they needed to do, and also the ones to crack the whip on the timeline. Yeah. Well, as it turns out, the army moves a certain pace that the scientists didn't find particularly helpful. That you know,

the essentially bureaucracy got in the way things. Things slowed down, and the scientists were not entirely happy with the way Marshall was running things. So in September nineteen forty two, the Army decides to replace Mark Shoal with Colonel Leslie R. Groves, who, after, you know, six days after becoming the head of the Manhattan Project, was promoted to brigadier general. So calling him colonel Groves is misleading since he was almost immediately a

brigadier general. Gross was instrumental in bringing the Pentagon or building the Pentagon. He was he was one of the people very much in charge of that project. And he also had a background as an engineer, so he understood the needs of building facilities, you know what, what actually is required to do this, and he knew how to work on this in a very uh aggressive timeline. I guess it is the best way to put it. So

Groves moves in. And then there were all these different sites that the scientists had identified as being potentially ideal for the Manhattan Project, and Marshall had been very slowly investigating them. Groves, on the other hand, said all right, let's do it to get them, let's get her done. Uh So Groves relok at the headquarters from Manhattan to d C. But of course it was already known as the Manhattan Project. It was not going to be called

the d C Project. It got stuck that way, and he made Colonel Kenneth D. Nichols, who was James Marshall's deputy, into his chief aid on the project. Marshall himself became a district engineer within the program, and that's where he really excelled within the Manhattan Project because his his talents were considerable. It's just they were better suited for a different, h different job than overseeing the entire project. I see

what you're saying. Yeah, because, as it turns out, you know, you want someone who's aggressive so that things can get started, but you also want people who observe the need for caution when you're handling nuclear materials. It's important. Marshall was not fired. No, he was just simply reassigned. It was one of those things where the need for this project was clear, but how to organize it was something that was kind of up in the air for a little bit.

Is the first time anybody was doing something like this as far as exactly, you know, the ancient Egyptians. No. Uh, so at the same time that this is going on, Vanavar Bush. If you don't know who that is, you need to listen to our last episode. Yeah, I think that's just gonna get more difficult from this point forward. Uh set up the Military Policy Committee, which would be made up of a representative from the Army, a representative from the Navy, and one from the Office of Scientific

Research and Development. If you recall, Bush himself was the head of the Office of Scientific Research and Development, but was constantly moving up because his considerable talents in also getting things done. Bush I think was probably one of the best at figuring out who would be ideal to run certain parts of this project. Like he was really good at matching the people with the parts of the project that needed them. Um very visionary kind of guy.

Also very very effective at being a liaison between the big the big machine and then these brilliant scientists. Uh yeah. He seemed to know how to handle people no matter what background they came from, and those folks are invaluable. I mean, you can find people who are really smart and really talented, but if they don't know how to how to interact with other people, they don't go very far. Bush, however,

was not one of those guys. Um and Groves himself made it clear that the pursuit of multiple lines of research for that isotopes separation, that was something that could not go on forever. That really what needed to happen was the project needed to settle on the you know, one, one line or maybe two lines of inquiry to really

concentrate their effort. Even if it turned out those were not the most uh efficient, it would mean that they could at least concentrate their their you know, their workforce because at the time these scientists have their pet projects, which some of them have, even if they some of them already kind of indicate that this will be enormously expensive unless there's some breakthrough. And and you had groups that had very different views on the efficacy of various methodologies.

For example, the British loved the idea of gaseous diffusion for isotope separation. Meanwhile, you have Oppenheimer who was demonstrating that the electromagnetic version of isotope separation could be incredibly effective. It's just that he was working on a smaller scale, right, but the scale that he was working on, if he could scale up, he was pretty sure this methodology would be incredibly fruitful. So he was arguing quite strongly for that.

So you had all these different camps coming in, and then you had other versions as well. There were just two of them, and that's what Grows was saying, Okay, guys, really, by the end of this year, by the end of let's really settle on a specific one so that we can actually make a weapon that will make a difference

in this war. Because at the rate we're going, by the time we create a weapon, peace will have broken out and then we'll just feel like jackasses, or it would be a situation where if we don't get there, someone is going to because the paranoid at that time was so very high. Right Even first of all, there was not really any There was no way of knowing what was going on in the Nazi camps, so it could very well be that Nazi scientists were much closer there.

That was legitimate fear. But beyond that, there were already tensions between the United States and other nations, specifically the Soviet Union, and so there was also a real fear that Soviet Union could be investigating this as well. And so even if the weapon weren't used in World War Two, it would be really important for the United States interests for there to be such a weapon period. In fact, that's going to play apart when we get to the

point of actually deploying said weapon. But anyway, November uh there was one of the methods of isotope separation that just did not pan out, and that was using centricus centrifuges. And it's because the centrifuge machines were not dependable. They would break down too frequently, so it wasn't that the methodology was bad, it was that the machinery itself was

not dependable. Yeah. So um, I mean if you remember the stucks Net story, you know those were centrifuges that were set to spend at the wrong speed which ended up causing uh, some pretty big issues. Yeah. So you know, it's it's something that we've known about for since the nineteen forties, is that if you don't get the machinery to work correctly, then you're not going to be producing the you two thirty five that you need. So electromagnetic separation was the big winner so far with you to

thirty five. Guess diffusion was promising enough to still be in the running for consideration, and the Brits. The Brits were still very much behind that. Plutonium, which was a completely separate line of inquiry. Remember most of this was focused on uranium. Plutonium was ended up getting a big boost as well. The Metallurgical Laboratory in Chicago, which had just recently brought Enrico Fermi on. He had been working at Columbia and he had moved over to the Metallurgical

Laboratory in Chicago. They produced a small amount of pure plutonium. They had uranium piles and plutonium was a byproduct of the process they were using, and so they were saying, well, plutonium is a better Uh. It's it's more apt to undergo fission than you is. The problem is making enough plutonium for that to be effective. So it was promising. But when we're talking small amount of pure plutonium, it's microscopic, that's how small. So not useful for any sort of

practical Yeah. Nothing, nothing at all except for the fact that saying we've proven that it works, so so if we can, if we can scale this up, then it could be a promising means of generating plutonium. And it was Glenn Seaboards team. If you don't know who Seaboard is, you need to listen to the last episode. Uh. Figured out how to separate the plutonium from a radiated uranium. Uh.

And then you had the theoretical physicists. So these are the guys who you know, You had the the experimental ones who are actually making theory, you know, putting theory too to the test. But the theoretical physicists, who are led by Oppenheimer, we're refining their calculations to figure out exactly how much fission norble material would be needed to

create a working bomb. Now, the Brits had come forward and said probably between five to ten um After there after they work with Oppenheimer and the other theorists, they said, yeah, we think that might be an underestimation. Yeah, you might

need twice as much. By the way, they would change this again later on, and each time the goalposts will moved further outlet we need to we need we're going to need more material based on our calculations to make a truly UH reactive system where there is a sustainable chain reaction. So Oppenheimer was recommending research into a fusion bomb,

not just fission. UH. Fusion bomb would actually be triggered by initially a fission reaction, So you'd have to have fissionable material first, and then you would the energy from that That interact sin would provide the necessary energy to facilitate a fusion reaction, which could be much more powerful. This would be the super bomb. Hydrogen bomb was one of those things that was bandied about quite a bit in these early days. But frankly, everyone's like, let's let's

crack fission first. Finish your breakfast. Yeah, exactly, but but s one, the Office of Science and Research authorize some research into light materials, deuterium being the main one to look into the possibility of a fusion bomb, so they didn't want to discount it or dismiss it. But they also didn't want to put all the eggs in the

fusion basket. Right. Well, it's you know, if you consider just from what what you outlined earlier, it's at it's complicating a process that we have yet to successfully do, you know, or complete. Right, And so then Groves decides, Okay, since peaches out, that's not gonna work. It's it's it will take us too long to refine the process for

it to be practical. Let's focus right now on the pile research that's what generates plutonium, the electromagnetic research, and the gases diffusion research, and we're gonna skip the pilot plant stage go straight to full scale production. In other words, normally you would create a slightly larger pilot plant to make certain that the things you had tested in the laboratory still work at the plant stage. But if they

don't work, then you can tweak things. Because the pilot plant isn't so large or so the infrastructure is not so rigid that you can't shift things around. So the idea being that you find the ideal operating conditions at the pilot plant stage, then you scale up to full scale.

They're skipping pilot plant and saying we don't have time for it, which is a dangerous Yeah, literally and figuratively right, because figuratively you could say, well, we built this facility based upon our best estimation and it turns out that was off, and now we're stuck with it and we have to use an unideal situation to do whatever it is we need to do. Literally, you're dealing with radioactive material and if it gets out of control, that would

be devastating. December second, nineteen forty two, Enrico Fermi and his team demonstrate in front of a group of dignitaries a nuclear chain reaction which lasted for twenty eight minutes until firm me shut it down. So that was this is where we get one of the most famous exchanges from the Manhattan Project, and it was when Compton who called Conant. Those names will be familiar, Yeah, So Compton called Conan and they had the following exchange, up, who do you want to be Do you want to be

Compton or Conan? I will you know what, I'll be comfort cool? I go ahead, m ring ring, Hello, the Italian navigator has landed in the New World. How were the natives very friendly? And that was that was the way of describing Not only was the the experiment of success, but it it impressed the dignitaries who were there to

see it. So that was that was there coded some semi coded, like improvised way of of saying what had happened without you know, squeezing or or or or or dropping information that might be you know, pretty sensitive over

a telephone line. No, you did. You did a bang up job with these with these notes and UH when I saw when I first saw this, it made me want to go into a rabbit hole of finding all of the recorded UH code word conversations of this time because it must sound so bizarre because people are saying it with gravity, but they're saying stuff like um, they're saying stuff like the rabbit has left the hutch. The

rabbit has left the hutch. And then the person on the other line is like green and someone goes and hangs up, you know right, and you're like, does there

any record of what this actually meant. I mean, the probably the most famous quote out of all of the Manhattan Project, I would argue, comes from Oppenheimer absolutely and spawned so many, um, so many things ranging from uh out and out conspiracy theories to uh just fascinating biographies to to spoil it because I mean, I'll forget about time we get around for the part where the bomb is being tested. Oppenheimer's famous quote, and you've probably heard

it before as I am become deaf, the destroyer of worlds. Yeah, and he um. He has a quotation where he explains that because that's some ominous stuff, that's like a nick even the bad Seed songs. Sure it, sure is. It were there with red right hand, if I were, if I were just hanging out, if you and I were hanging out when when the bomb dropped and someone said that they would immediately become a dangerous person, I would

seriously wonder like, should we have you around? Yeah, for a moment I thought you were going to say, Like if we were out and I just turned to you and said, hey, Jonathan, I am become death of the straight of worlds, I would take that as something to really mull over and possibly start to look for the nearest exit, especially if we were if we were just going down the street to a food truck or something. Right, Yeah, we're just heading out to the one over in the

parking lot. Yeah, talking about tuoting your own horn. But there is a context of this, so yeah, and we can shut that. We'll get there a little bit later. In December two, the US government allocated half a billion dollars, which would eventually grow to more than two billion dollars dollars to fund further development. By the way, those costs, that's just the official numbers. There could be tons and

tons that are tied into it in one way or another. Uh. And and not to mention funds that didn't come directly from the United States government, right, right, And that's that's a huge part of this. The truth of the matter is that we probably will never know for sure, but we do know that two billion, although it may be the sticker price was not, was not the the entirety of it. Yeah. And in fact, when we say we

may never know, no one may might know. Right. It's it's it's such a huge undertaking that it's very unlikely there's a document anywhere that has the full tally. It's just it's it's just too big. It's too big. Yeah, So it's not it's not like a conspiracy as much as it is a tremendously difficult calculation. Exactly, I've got the I've got the inflation number too. There, what's that? And so we said two billion in nineteen Okay, so let's let just just do some math here. Let me

get my advocates out two billion. Oh, you have to use smaller values. I was on a calculator. You have to smaller values. So just a lot of money will leave it. Okay, yes, a significant amount of cash. So the money went on to establish full scale gaseous diffusion plants, full scale plutonium plants, and smaller electro magnetic plants, power plants, you know, like the manufacturing facilities, not not like biological plants.

That doesn't come along until much later. Yes, uh, and vanavar Bush said the earliest a bomb could be expected would be early nineteen forty five, and he was actually trying to be a little conservative because the earlier reports had suggested that if things worked out, there might be a weapon ready as early as nineteen forty four. But Bush was thinking, you know, I'm gonna pad that out a little bit. And as it turns out, even that

was optimistic. Early optimistic. Plutonium was looking promising, but people were worried that the the radioactive pile approach, which is what for ME was using, wasn't going to be scalable. That they'd be able to produce plutonium, but it would be at such small amounts that it would take way too long to have enough for it to be a weapon, especially considering that they want to build more than one because they have to test it and they're still not

absolutely sure how much they need per weapon. Right, and Uh, the demonstrations for ME had shown revealed that there could be a chain reaction, but the reaction was at too slow a rate for it to be used potentially as a weapon. Uh. The idea being that, yeah, you could do this to to generate energy, like it could be a nuclear power plant. The chain reaction would allow you to to harness in that respect, but it wouldn't be so fast to create an explosive event, so it would

not be useful as a weapon. Um. However, more research would go into that. Also forms approach was at such a slow rate of of energy release that they did not need any sort of cooling system. So, um, there was no need for the very advanced cooling systems that you will find in nuclear power plants these days, which was kind of interesting to me. And there were three different competing designs for nuclear piles. One was water a water cooled model which was developed by Gail Young and

Eugene Wigner. One was a liquid metal cooled approach headed by our good friend Leo listened to the last, and the last was a helium cooled pile, which was headed by Thomas V. Moore who was an engineer. Yeah, I had a great nickname. It is called may West, um presumably because the design included spherical segments in the outer show l of the facility and May West was built. I don't mean the Actress. I mean I do mean the Actress, but I really mean the the actual facility

name nicknamed may West. That was its official name, by the way. Scale Yeah. Right, So Groves demanded that the Metallurgical Lab come up with a unified approach. Uh not not. You know, he wasn't gonna say, all right, look, let's have all three of these progress at the same time. Because he was already dealing with a branch further up right, he was saying, plutonium is just one of the legs of research they're already funding, the other two being electromagnetic

and gasees diffusion. So he didn't want plutonium research to then split into three separate groups as well. That would just become unmanageable. So UH, a small facility would be headed by Fermi and shut down in ninety three. So Fermi's research could end up informing the next stage UM. They would then be able to decide if that was in fact the way they wanted to go. Plus they could take all the plutonium that was made by that

that's part of the research and set that aside. May West would be built and ready for operation by March ninety four, and its design would allow it to produce a hundred grams of plutonium per day, which was significantly more than firm's approach. UM and good old Leo was allowed to continue research on liquid metal cooling systems kind of on his own right because it wasn't as a priority, right, Yeah,

it wasn't. It didn't look as promising too, Grows, and so even the Grows was like, look, you had to settle on one. Technically, all three continued. UM Again, they didn't want to draw any conclusions too early on, and

it turned out that they backed the wrong horse men. Meanwhile, Glee Glenn Seaboard's work and plutonium extraction made it possible to separate plutonium from a radiated uranium, which was an important step because both plutonium and radiated uranium were byproducts of this pile research, and you have to separate the two if you want to get the fissionable material necessary to create the chain reactions. UM. So S one felt

that the plutonium experiments could potentially be dangerous. Uh, and so they were there's thinking, maybe we should, um, maybe we should start separating out some of these facilities, like maybe we shouldn't co locate the isaid the plutonium separation facility with the nuclear pile facility. Let's go back to your basket phrase. Let's know, why do we need to keep all our disasters in one basket? And then and then this also, you know, needs to be in an

unpopulated area. Yes, because if you recall from the first episode, the nuclear pile research was largely taking place in an old racket court underneath the grandstand at the University of Chicago. UM so not you know, they're they're the facility or the The department actually was saying, yeah, we kind of wish you had come to us before you decided to

use that area because this is kind of scary. Um. So they started looking around for potential partners to help build the facility and it Uh, there was one specifically that they looked at, and they required a lot of um oh, corsion is the wrong word, but convincing for them to take part in it. It was a DuPont um and DuPont was not super keen on doing this. It actually did take quite a few conversations before they

came on board, but they would ultimately build the facility. UM. And also in two Oppenheimer suggested the location of Los Alamos, New Mexico, as one of the three sites the Manhattan Project would use to pursue the effort of building an atomic bomb. Very remote location. Oppenheimer himself owned a ranch that was neighboring Los Alamos, so he thought of it as being remote enough for it to be a useful

test site and development site. Also, there were very few people who were there uh, and the ones who were there could be convinced to move by offering them a decent amount of money for their their land, especially considering that the value of the land at the time was pretty low because like what's out there, very little. Yeah, there was a boys school that was out there, but Groves went up and offered to buy it from from the schools, offered to buy the land, and they said,

all right, we'll relocate and they left UM. So in ninety three in eastern Tennessee, work was well underway on several facilities. There was the plutonium plant that was designated X ten. That was the electromagnetic facility which was Y twelve, and a Ghasius diffusion plant which was called K twenty five UH. And this was a site that was located

west of Knoxville, Tennessee. It was nineties square my miles or fifty nine thousand acres and it became a military reservation with the official name of Clinton Engineer Works UM. By the summer nine three, the Manhattan Project headquarters would move from Washington to the site in Tennessee, and eventually that that military site grew into a full fledged town that today is called Oak Ridge. Got A got a

little tangent for you here, what's happen. So my my family, my extended family, is from the Tri Cities area, which is uh in the very very tip of Tennessee, up in the mountains, and for a time members of my family lived and worked around the area that would be

known as Oak Ridge. And it was sort of an open secret that something was going on, but people really didn't have any any idea that um any idea how big oak Ridge would actually become, to the point where I think at some point it was power providing like power to one seven of the power it was actually drawing one one some of the power of the entire country,

not of Tennessee, of the entire United States. One seventh of the power being generated in the United States was dedicated to powering the facilities at what would become Oak Ridge.

That it was never called oak Ridge during the duration of the Manhattan Project that would come later, but eventually it did grow into a full fledged town because they these projects were enormous and needed a huge variety of workers to make things run, everything from administrative staff to the people who actually operated the machinery and the controls, the people who were transporting materials, that there was support staff to support all of that. It just it quickly

grew into and a full fledged town. Um. And so this was and a lot of people didn't know what they were working on and beyond like their actual day to day jobs, they didn't know what the end goal was, right, And it's something that happens today even in other large scale projects that it's the compartmentalization of information and one of the you know, it's kind of an ugly truth that gets sensationalized a lot, but I think we'll we'll

explore it later on in the show. Uh. The primary reason for this at this time was the complete, completely consuming paranoia on the part of the military of spine and espionage and not you know, this wasn't some um hair brained fantastical thing. This was a valid concern. Yea. As it turns out, it was so valid that it ended up not being paranoid enough. In Washington State, we

have the third of the three sites. The projects set up headquarters in Hanford, and they created another boom town, another town that was specifically meant to help push the

the goals of the Manhattan Project. UH. Hanford would become home to the water cooling pile facilities and the chemical separation plants, which were called the Queen Mary's And that only really makes sense if you see a picture of them, because it looks almost like the shape of the stuff that's above ground looks like it's in the shape of an old ocean liner, as if you had taken a Queen Mary ocean liner and buried it in the ground, so only the very top is visible. That's why they

were called that. Uh So, in the in the spring of Oppenheimer had another lab set up in Los Alamos, New Mexico. He began to suspect that it might take three times as much material, not two times as much as they had previously estimated, to make a working bomb.

By the way, part of the reason why the atomic bombs ended up being so incredibly devastating is because they kept on thinking that they were going to need more and more visionable material, and it turned out that some of the earlier estimations might have been a little more on the dot than they had worried about. Nine. Both the Y twelve, which was that electromagnetic plant, and the K twenty five, that's the gasiest diffusion plant, experienced problems uh.

They were having issues all the way from too and project scientists decided to take a look at another method of isotope separation called thermal diffusion, which had previously been under consideration but kind of dismissed as being too slow and too poorly understood to rely upon as a reliable means of getting a weapon built, because you know, they it might pan out in the long run, but in

wartime consideration, it's not practical. At this point, they started to revisit it UM and with both of those facilities having issues, there was a lot of incentive to look at it again because if either the other two didn't pan out because of technical difficulties, because because of skipping that pilot plant step, they needed to have a fallback plan.

So Oppenheimer suggested to Grows that they build a thermal diffusion plant at Oak Ridge, and Grows agreed and co located it with the power plant for the K twenty five UM, which the reason for that was the K The power plant would create steam, which would turn turbines that generates electricity basic power plant design. So they decided, well, that steam is really hot, we can then use that as part of the thermal diffusion process to provide the

heat and the thermal meaning heat. Uh, this would be the best way of doing it. We wouldn't have to build another facility to generate steam. We could just co locate it with this other one. So we've got all the science about the fissionable materials, but there's a whole other section we got to talk about two, the actual development of the bomb itself. Oh yes, that is. That is going to be an important part of this story,

isn't it. So so you've got you've got the science going on about how do we create this chain reaction? But then you think, well, what about the actual device that's going to hold this material and initiate that chain relation? Uh? And there were some different approaches for that too. So they started working on the ordinance aspects. That's essentially the physical manifestation of this bomb, like the physical parts. They called it the gadget um. So in order to do this, uh,

they were looking at multiple methods. One was this creating two subcritical masses of ficionable material that would come together so that you know, when they're separated, everything's kosher. You don't have to worry about it blowing up. Relatively for purposes and then bringing them together. That's what would allow the very rapid fission process to occur, releasing enormous amounts

of energy in the process. Thus you get the big boom. Uh. So they started looking into ways they could do this, and they had to figure out how to do it precisely at a high speed, and they had to make sure that at whatever they did would not cause a predetonation, because that would be bad. You don't want your bomb going off before you you planned on it going off. Um. So one of the things they were looking at was the gun method, which was essentially firing a plug of

fissionable material into a subcritical mass, turning it into critical um. So, think of it as it's a bomb has within it an actual gun. There's a barrel, it's got a plug of this stuff. When the trigger is pulled, essentially it fires that plug into the subcritical mass and then starts the the chain reaction. All this happens in a second. I mean, it's it's incredible how fast it happens. But

there are some things that can go wrong. Yes, there are things that can go wrong, and one of those things is it maybe that it doesn't start the reaction fast enough. So that was one of the deals. They wanted to test this theory both with you two thirty five and with plutonium approaches. And there was another approach that was looked at as well, not just using the gun,

but what if you were to create an implosion. Uh So an implosion would be too you would create shock waves that would then uh end up instigating this this chain reaction. Um. And the person who started looking at implosion tests first really was Seth H Neddermeyer uh and he was kind of left to his own devices to look into this, and um he uh ended up looking at it along with John von Neumann, who was Hungarian refugee who visited Los Alumos late. He was looking at

various ways to create a reliable bomb as well. So you've got the nuclear physicists all working on the fuel and uh fissionable material side, and then you have the other like mechanical engineers looking at well, how can we make this a practical weapon. So so sort of like two parallel versions of research. Also, there was some friction between net or Meyer and Navy captain named William S.

Dieck Parsons. He was actually in charge of ordinance So when you've got a guy who's working on one of the methods, the implosion method and the guy was in charge of it not getting along that was an issue. Uh. And so you had to have kind of liaisons with that as well, so that you did have some ego battles going on. UM people who thought that things needed to go a certain way and other folks who felt

very strongly that that was not the appropriate direction. So a lot of drama going on behind the scenes as well, not just with the technology and the science, but with personalities, which is always kind of interesting. Ah. Then you had the Army Air Force involved there. You've got like so many different departments that there's departmental issues as well. Uh. Parsons group was developing two bomb models by March nineteen four and to test he wanted to test these with

B twenty nines. These are essentially the methodology without the actual bomb materials and UM and they named them thin Man, which was named after President Roosevelt. That used the plutonium gun design, so firing a plug plutonium into fissionable material. Yes. And then you had fat Man, which was named after Winston Churchill, that was an implosion prototype. So you had the implosion one needed a larger form factor, thus fat Man,

and then you had thin Man. Uh. You also had a smaller uranium gadget called Little Boy, which was using a uranium gun. So so you had the plutonium gun and the uranium gun. Uh. The plutonium gun eventually was abandoned because it turned out that plutonium to thirty nine could pick up a neutron and become plutonium to forty and increase the chances of predetonation, which we have already established is a bad thing. So they said, well, if we're going to use plutonium, we can't use the gun method.

It would only really work with the implosion method. So the thin Man variation on these bombs that was abandoned. So you had a fat Man and Little Boy versions and that was it because otherwise it was too dangerous. But this this also meant that the approaches were requiring the the timeline to extend a bit. They were not going to make that early deadline of a working bomb, and at this point in the war, the the tiger

is turning yes yeah. And in fact, on the Army Corps of Engineer's side, you had Groves and Marshall meeting together and discussing what's happening, and their estimation was that by the time a bomb would be ready, they were being quoted that on August one would be the earliest that a bomb would be available. They were pretty sure

that by then Germany was going to have surrendered. The tides were turning enough where it looked like it was just Germany was on borrowed time, however, and the Pacific

theater Japan would likely fight to the very end. The Japanese culture was such that there was very little chance of Japan's government reconciling, at least in a way that the West found um acceptable, because the West was going to demand that Japan dismantled its empirical system, and that was so deeply ingrained in Japanese culture it was unlikely to happen until just catastrophic losses were experienced on Japan's side.

The economies of well, the economies of all all the countries involved at some point shifted greatly, as they do during times of war, but the Japanese economy at the time was a war powered economy, like it was necessary to keep the cycle going. Yeah, so pretty grim, uh, and but it became more and more apparent to the Army Corps of Engineers that, in fact, if they were able to produce a working bomb, the target was not going to be Germany, it was going to be Japan.

They knew this in early ninety five. They were pretty sure. Um by mid expenditures were around a hundred million dollars per month, and in late nineteen In early ninety five, progress at oak Ridge meant that the August first deadline actually started to look realistic. It didn't, you know. At first they were they were worried that even August first

might be too aggressive. But the early problems that have been plaguing the facilities had largely been worked out, and now all the different lines of research were starting to be fruitful. So at this point they weren't even saying which version is going to work. They were they were pretty sure there was going to be at least two. The plutonium implosion bomb like it was very promising, and the uranium gadget bomb, the the gun method look like

it was very promising. So, uh, then they started looking into how they were going to to actually build these. Meanwhile, Hanford up in Washington, their plutonium facilities had some problems early there was an issue with what was called zenon poisoning, which was not for the employees. They were this was the this was the nuclear fuel. Yeah, the xenon um.

The process was producing xenon, and the problem was that the way the chain reaction works, if you remember from our our previous episode, AH, these radioactive elements when they decay, give off fast moving neutrons which can then trigger another another particle to to undergo fission. And thus it ends up reducing fast moving neutrons. And as long as it's reduced, it's as long as it's producing more than one of those fast moving neutrons, this becomes a a an expanding

chain reaction. It's like you know, you tell two friends and they tell two friends and they that sort of thing. Um. So, the problem was that xenon, which was being produced by this uh, this process, could accept neutrons so readily that it would end up preventing a chain reaction from happening, essentially like come on over here, boys were good. And then because the neutrons were being accepted by zenon, they

were not triggering further fission. And so once they figured that out, they were able to take advantage of something DuPont had absolutely insisted upon when it agreed to build the facilities. UH, they had designed the facility to allow for operation at greater power levels, which originally the scientists were saying we don't or actually is really the Army Corps of Engineers saying we don't want this. It's too expensive,

it's it's not necessary. We've been told that it should work at these lower power levels, and DuPont said, no, we're gonna have to insist, and as it turns out, that was the right decision. So by operating at the

greater power levels, that overwhelmed the xenon. So, in other words, it was generating neutrons at a rate so fast that the xenon was not going to be able to accept them at the rate they were coming out, so it was allowing that chain reaction to occur after all, So the Hanford facility began producing plutonium and significant amounts and sent the first shipment to Los Alamos in February. So the plutonium gun method of bomb design did not work.

The only way the plutonium was going to be useful is if they could prove the implosion method would work. So that's where the focus shifted at that point. They knew the gun design was a bust, so they started looking significantly into implosion. So by late nine they were pretty sure that the uranium gun method was viable, so that was gonna be the little boy version of the bomb. Uh. They froze that design, meaning they said, all right, this is definitely what we are going to build. They froze

it in February. Plutonium. Uh, their work with that was obviously taking a little longer. They knew the gun design wasn't going to work. But once they figured out the implosion design, that got approved in March, and they scheduled a test for the fourth of July, the biggest fireworks you'd ever see. However, they actually moved it back to July because of weather actually, and they named it the Trinity Test, and it happened at five thirty in the morning.

So interesting thing they the uranium gun method was so certain they didn't test it. They never they never, they never tested the bomb before they used it. But the plutonium method, they weren't sure. So they build this plutonium bomb, the implosion based bomb. At five thirty in the morning on July, they fire it. They used a firing tower to hold the bomb and to to kind of approximate where the bomb would be before it detonated, because the

bombs detonate before they hit the ground. Yeah. Yeah, it's not like there's a tip on the bomb that hits the ground. Their their program to get to a certain elevation, built to get to a certain elevation and then explode above the ground because it maximizes the damage. Yeah. This is where this, by the way, is also where our conversation it's gonna get pretty heavy because we're now talking about actual physical damage and the law of human life.

So while we were maybe a little cavalier, I don't know even if cavaliers word, but we were playful at points. This is where this show is really going to get serious, because we're talking about real human beings. So this test was phenomenally impressive and successful from a weaponization point of view. It vaporized the firing tower, it turned asphalt into sand, and it turned sand into glass. Uh. The explosion knocked over a two hundred tons steel container that was a

half mile from ground zero. The steel container had been built and designed and put down as part of the test, but they didn't intend to actually use it. On the July sixte test, it was literally just standing where they had left it, and it knocked it over. Um. The explosion was bright enough to cause temporary blindness and observers, even those who were wearing goggles with smoke glass lenses, they knew it was going to be bright, they had no idea how bright it was going to be, and

some of them lost their vision for a while. Glass would shatter and houses a hundred twenty five miles from the explosion point, and it was equivalent to fifteen thousand to twenty thousand tons of T and T they had estimated it would be about equivalent to five thousand tons. And this goes back to the earlier statements with this. Also, by the way, the day that Oppenheimer creeps out everyone but uh and and the where it was whoops instead of whoops, he says, I become of the death destroyer

of world. Yeah, and just just briefly on that the the reason that he said that. There's a great quotation from him here says we knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, a few people cried, most people were silent. I remember the line from the Hindu scripture the Bahagavad Gita. Visi Nu was trying to persuade the prince that he should do his duty, and to impress him, takes on his multi armed form and says, now I've become Death, the destroyer of worlds. I suppose

we all thought that one way or another. You know, I'm not sure. I'm not sure if they did. But this, uh yeah, in this, in this day, um, you know, you have to think about how how you would feel a hundred miles away this thing blows up and the I don't know blame is the right word, but because they kept upping the amount they thought they needed, that's what happened. And those people who witnessed the detonation and

participated in it were very lucky to survive. And and you think about this, like, you know, they didn't have a full understanding of what the long term effects were going to be of this, not just you know, the initial effects are devastating enough, but the long term effects continue to end up, you know, causing damage and killing years after the initial explosion. We'll get into some figures

a little bit, so, uh. I think this is also one of those points where there's that moment of realization that the thing you've been working so hard, the thing that previously had just been theory that you had based it upon observations of the energy that was released in these nuclear reactions, something that you knew was possible but had not actually seen for yourself, now is reality. It is no longer abstract thought, is no longer the realm of calculations on a sheet of paper. Now it's real.

And that's got to be a heavy, heavy moment, Yeah, especially when you consider what the intended purposes. On April, President Roosevelt dies and Vice President Harry S. Truman is sworn in as president. Here's how secret the Manhattan Project was, despite the fact that it employed around a hundred thirty thousand people at one time or another, Truman didn't know about on it detonated a nuclear weapon. Yeah, and the vice president didn't know about it. He didn't know about No.

At this point in April, they hadn't quite hadn't done so. But in April they hadn't happened yet. But Truman, they were well on their way to the test. Truman had no idea. He was briefed on it as part of becoming president during war, which is, you know, a pretty tough gig, no matter how you look at it. But Truman understood the relevance of the project and he supported it. Uh. You know. Plus it's pretty late in the game. They were they had built the thing pretty much there, just

just needed a tested at that point. Um. So on the political side, Germany had surrendered and it was clear that Japan was going to lose the conflict, but it was probably going to fight until the very end. So it was going to require a massive invasion of Japan using you know, a coordinated effort with the Allied forces in order to make it happen. No telling how many people would die on both sides of that, uh, and it was going to be it was going to to

extend the war even further. And so there was a very serious discussion about what do we do. Do we go forward with invasion plans or do we actually use this weapon we have this we have designed now. The US informed Churchill of the success of the the test, and Churchill was all for it until he found out it was nicknamed fat Boy fat Man. Yeah yeah, fat Man named after him. Yeah no, uh uh yeah, he I don't know if he ever. I don't know when he got the memo on that part, but he was

totally on board. Truman told Stalin, Uh, he had been told by his his advisors, Hey, don't tell Stalin. Stalin's kind of a bad guy. You don't want to You don't want to let him know about this ahead of time. But Truman felt that it was necessary to preserve the uneasy piece between the United States and the so of the Union, So he told Stalin of the development of the weapon and told told Song without the presence of an interpreter, it's just Truman and Stalin, and Stalin was

very composed. And it turns out the reason he was composed was because he already I knew about it. Um, he already knew about it because despite the paranoia, there was a Soviet spy amongst the Brits who were working alongside the Americans on the Manhattan Project. So um, yeah, we'll talk a little bit about him in a second. But the US wanted unconditional surrender of Japan, the dismantling

of the imperial system, and Japan wanted to surrender. Based on intercepted messages between Tokyo and Moscow, but not under the conditions that the Americans were demanding. Japan I believe still wanted to maintain some of the territory. Yeah, and they didn't want to abandon the empire approach of their government like that was that was a big deal. And and United States was like, no, your empire, the imperial method has to go. It can we want democracy, we

want a different system of government. Yeah. So it was, I mean, it was a tall order and Japan was not like the Japanese government was not in a position that could easily capitulate to those demands. So things are moving out ahead. And on August six, the and Nola gay A B twenty nine bomber piloted by Colonel Paul Tibbots, released a nine thousand, seven hundred pound uranium gun bomb called Little Boy. This remember this is the one that

had never been tested. They knew, they were confident it would work, but they had never actually tested this bomb. And it was released in approximately eight fifteen am thirty one thousand feet above Hiroshima, Japan, and forty three seconds later it detonated. At that point, it was at an altitude of nineteen feet above the city and initial explosion

killed seventy thousand people, more or less instantly. Yeah, uh where this is where you hear about people's shadows being burned into the walls behind them because of the intense energy that was released by this bomb. By nine fifty the death count would be closer to two hundred thousand, So that seventy thousand those that was initial where again instantaneous, not even a moment to think it's just over. But another hundred thirty thousand would die due to radiation sickness,

So an agonizing fate for so many. Nearly all the buildings in a five square mile radius were either leveled completely or just severely damaged to the point where there was no chance of using them again. They would need to be taken down. Truman announced the Hiroshima raid that evening to the American public, which was the first time that the United States revealed to the general public that

they had been working on an atomic weapon. This was the first time the Manhattan Project had been unveiled in a sense that it existed right. They didn't go into any details about how much work had gone into it and what had happened, but that this was the first time. So again a hundred thod people had worked on it. Many of those people this was the first time they found out what their work was, what the result was like.

They didn't know necessarily. There were very few of that hundred thirty thousand who actually knew what the purpose of the Manhattan Project really was, which is phenomenal. It's hard and in hindsight, it's hard for us to imagine that. I'm sure at the time it was a job, you know, you were working on science. Yeah, and and the h and communication worked differently because pre internet. Yeah so um the United States and in the wake of this, calls

for Japan's surrender according to the earlier terms. Japan did not immediately respond, which then led to the August ninth bombing of Nagasaki. Uh. This was the plutonium implosion method. This was the one that they had tested previously. This was called fat Man, and it was carried by a plane named Box Box Car and b O C K not b O X, and Nagasaki was actually the secondary target.

The primary target was the Kokura arsenal, which would have been more of a military target than Nagasaki was, but weather prevented the pilot, Charles Sweeney, from flying over it, he felt that there was too low of a chance that he would be able to drop the bomb on the intended target, so he swapped swapped out to his

secondary target, which was Nagasaki. It was dropped at an altitude of twenty nine thousand feet and detonated one thousand, six hundred fifty feet above Nagasaki at eleven oh one am and exploded with a force of twenty one thousand tons of TNT. Now, it killed forty thousand people and injured another sixty thousand on that initial explosion, and the eventual death toll was calculated at around a hundred forty thousand, largely because Nagasaki did not have the same population density

as Hiroshima. Wasn't that it wasn't that this was a less devastating bomb. It was that, due to the geography, it affected fewer people. So in the space of just a few days, Japan lost three ultimately would lose three. The initial would be closer to a hundred ten thousand. Yeah, in two bombings, uh devastating, absolutely devastating. Um The Manhattan Project itself would continue because while it had built these bombs specifically for the purpose of bringing World War two

to an end. Uh, the research was going to continue on and it would and officially in nineteen seven and hand over the research into atomic weaponry to a new group, the Atomic Energy Commission, which we talked about extensively when we took covered Area fifty one. Atomic Energy Commission was important during the the establishment of Area fifty one. So I mentioned that there had been a spy who reported

to the Soviet Union. That would be a Klauss Fuchs, who was part of the British contention of scientists who worked on the Manhattan Project. It was not discovered until nineteen forty nine that he was actually a Soviet agent. So throughout the entirety of the Manhattan Project, all the way to the point where it was over, he was feeding information to the Soviet Union. He was caught and convicted of espionage and was eventually released in nineteen fifty nine.

He then moved to what was then East Germany. Kids, if you don't know that there was an East Germany, there was for a while, you need to look it up. He was eventually Uh, he eventually rather provided information that helped China develop its first atomic bomb, right. Yeah, So you may have heard stories recently UM or in the past few years about a scientist named A Q. Kahan continually linked to other countries acquiring nuclear weaponry or knowledge

of the atomic process. UH. This is UM class food. Fuchs is like the original version of that and did quite a bit to propagate this technology. Also, UM, the Manhattan Project, on balance is fairly lucky that he's the kind of spy. He was a spy sent to feed information rather than to stymy the progress. It made a contribution. The goal of ending World War two was shared obviously

by both Stalin and UH the United States. UM, but obviously Stalin also had a very strong interest in gaining that information or on behalf of Soviet Union so that the United States would not have the upper hand for very long in what would then become the Cold War. Another important person that we didn't really mention. I mean, there's so many, there are times there's there's just the list of names connected to the Manhattan Project as incredibly long,

hundred thirty thousand as it turns out. UM. But another important person on the physics side was Edward Teller, a theoretical physicist. He was the one who was really pushing for the development of the hydrogen bomb. In fact, he has been referred to as the father of the hydrogen bomb, a name he did not like. Um, they called it the super bomb during the Manhattan Project, and eventually it would be developed, uh, not really not used, but but

developed and tested. So that is the story of the Manhattan Project from the beginning all the way to the development and deployment of the two atomic bombs that were dropped on Japan. Yeah, and we touched on a lot of things that are stories in themselves, the U S

s RS program. I think Stalin learned of the U S program or the US intentions in which and then there's this there's this story that I think you mentioned in part one about what happens to um, the scientists who are held consentially or not in the German program. And uh, you know operation paper Clip, but you get more rocketry. That's more rocketry on the U S side. But the USSR forcibly abducted some scientists from the German

program very strange times. There's there's tons of stuff we could talk about, and in fact, I'm sure stuff they don't want you to know. US covered quite a bit of this materiality or two. Yeah, So I highly recommend you go check out that show just in general, but especially if you want to hit and more about you know,

the tactics that were employed. This was I mean, there are no games higher stakes than this, right, this is this is incredibly grim stuff when you boil it down to what's actually the end goal and what is happening. And as a result, Uh, there are nations and people who will you know, there's no there's no limit to what they will the tactics they will employ to achieve the goal because the goal the stakes are so high, and uh, sometimes that leads to stories of heroism, which

is amazing. Sometimes it leads to stories of that is dirty, underhanded stuff, you know that uprooting people whether they are quote unquote on the wrong side or not, and then forcing them to work on your behalf. In some cases, there were people who were more than willing to do that because to them the science was what was important. They were that their ultimate moral compass, which can I work on the science? Yeah, and it wasn't so much who who is the person like, I'm not the one

who decides who this gets used on. I'm the one who figures out whether or not it works. Um, it's just it's an odd story and there's so many of them. But on all sides, so can I ask you, um and tell me if this is to tell me, if this is too much of a heavier speculative thing, what's that? Do you think the world is a better place with

this technology? Who? Boy? I quarrel with it myself. I think I think nuclear power certainly has some very important applications, uh, some of which are incredibly beneficial to humanity, even with the problematic nuclear fuel and nuclear waste issues. Um. So on that side, I think that it was incredibly important and benefits From a weaponry side, I think it just caused enormous amounts of harm beyond the obvious of the people who lost their lives as a result of the

bombs being dropped. There are stories of people who who uh may have developed cancer just from working on the projects. Whether or not that's actually the cause, it's impossible to say because they're just too many vectors to take into account, but it seems like it's a likely source at least for some of the cases, if not many of them. Um. I mean the Cold War was awful. I mean it led to the space race, which was awesome, and a lot of a lot of the world changing or civilization

changing technology that we have today comes from times of conflict. Yeah, it's true. I mean, we would not be where we are today without that conflict. But I don't necessarily think that that's put us in a great place. I mean, there's certainly there are current conflicts in the world, cold and otherwise that. Uh, the presence of nuclear weapons have made far more complex and higher stakes than would otherwise exist.

And I'm not a big fan of that, So I mean, and ultimately, I do believe that the Allied Powers would have won World War Two without the use of atomic weapons. You know, it would have happened. The question is how long would it have taken and how much more would Japan. Would Japan have suffered more due to the nature of the war than it did from the bombs. That's a question that's impossible to answer because there's no way of

knowing how it would have turned out otherwise. Um, And ultimately you start to wonder if perhaps the bombing of Japan was not only to force Japan to capitulate to the United States demands and the Allied demands of surrender, but also perhaps a demonstration of the United States is superiority and weaponry to say, Hey, everybody in the world, pay attention, because this is what we can do now. And I would like to think that that was if apart the smallest of parts. But something deep inside me

worries about that. Well, one thing, um, you know, when one thing that I really enjoy about seeing him with you on this episode is that this series rather is that this is a story that a lot of people sort of no have a cursory knowledge, and it's it's good to have. It's good to have this resource that kind of goes from stem to stern. And I want

to say that I really appreciate it. Every time you're an opportunity be on your show, I'll go ahead and say something I usually say at the end, which is, if you are interested not only in the past of technology, but also in the future, che out forward thinking the video series which has been going like Gangbusters and the

audio podcast. Yeah this is um you know, I highly recommend you check out all the stuff sites and all the stuff podcasts, but stuff they don't want you to know, in particular, dovetails so well with so much of what I do either with forward Thinking. It's like it's like it's like the two sides of the coin type deal. It's true. Yeah, the there's the if those shows were roommates, Yeah, yours,

it's like the odd couple. Yeah. Yeah for for stuff that I'll want you to know would be the creepy one in the basement, and forward Thinking is the Collie g Willickers. Guys, it sure is pretty outside. Yeah, but we hang out. Yeah, hang out. Also, I thought you would be interested to hear this. Ben Uh. The very next episode I will be recording will be with Joe McCormick, and we are going to cover what technologies would stick around the longest in a post apocalyptic scenario, So it

kind of dovetails with this episode. That's fascinating. Um, I wait to hear it. It will be It'll be a fun conversation and I'm sure we'll devolve into a lot of discussions about our favorite post fund olyptics stories. In fact, I know it well because it's in the notes. So we're going to wrap this up. Guys. If you enjoyed this episode, let me know, send me an email, let me know what else you would like to hear about

here on tech Stuff. The address is tech stuff at how stuff works dot com, or you can drop me a line on Facebook, Twitter, or Tumbler to handle I use at all. Three is tech stuff hs W and I'll talk to you again and really soon. For more on this and bathings, another topic is it how stuff works dot com.