Modern Marvels: The Manhattan Project - Full Episode (S9, E21) | History

to make peace scientists built the ultimate weapon of war to fight fascism they unleashed the power of the atom theoretical brilliance and engineering grit gave birth to an ethical nightmare the atom bomb now the Manhattan Project on modern marvels [Music] [Music] at 5:30 a. m. July 16 1945 scientists and dignitaries awaited the detonation of the first atomic bomb in a desolate area of the New Mexico desert known aptly as were nada del muerto or journey of death they had taken bets on how much power their creation might unleash but many wondered whether the weapon would work at all there was however one certainty if the atomic bomb detonated the world would never be the same this story is the great tragic epic of the 20th century if I were going to give it a theme the theme would be humankind invents the means of its own destruction and in order to do so scientists engineers and the army teamed up in an effort dubbed the Manhattan Project in the short span of two years they built an industrial complex with sites across the country that would rival the size of the automotive industry to manufacture fuel for the bomb they built the fifth largest town in the state of Tennessee that consumed 1/10 of the electrical power generated in the United States the bomb builders spent well over 2 billion dollars almost 30 billion in today's market to detonate the first man-made atomic explosion just twenty eight months after scientists set foot in a lab at the Manhattan projects Los Alamos New Mexico facility nonetheless that July morning in 1945 many of the world's top physicists watched anxiously at the test site 200 miles south of Los Alamos awaiting the results of their labors but this film town had really begun 12 years before when many of these scientists escaped the coming of fascism to Europe once Hitler took power in 1933 the Jews of Europe especially the Jews of Germany were under a direct threat and some of the best scientists in the country happened to be Jewish Hans bethe was one Edward Teller was one Leo Szilard was one fine steinem's and one by one they fled Europe to the United States scientists found refuge at American universities in 1938 dramatic news arrived from Germany German scientists had split the atom by bombarding uranium with neutrons which caused instability in the uranium nucleus during this split mass was lost and was converted into kinetic energy they had discovered fission and with it opened a Pandora's box if each of those neutrons goes into another uranium nucleus and causes fishing then the first fishing has led to more than two frictions in the next generation and you can see that each successive generation has many more neutrons and this causes an explosive chain reaction if two masses of highly fissionable uranium in the form of a sphere and a plug could be brought together with sufficient speed inside a bomb an exponentially increasing chain reaction with explosive force would result the implications of the discovery of the fission of uranium would be obvious to scientists in Nazi Germany and this frightened Leo's a lard a forty-year-old emigres physicist from hungary politically astute so lard wanted to warn President Roosevelt but knew that he lacked the stature to do so imagine men with heavy foreign accents say they have figured out a way to make a bomb no bigger than an ordinary bomb that could blow up a city you might well think they were crackpots and throw them out of your office so Lord wrote a letter to the President and sought a prominent ally to sign it Albert Einstein is a lard who didn't drive a car enlisted the help of his friend Edward Teller an eminent theoretical physicist to drive him to Einsteins summer house on Long Island Ashton Eadie Bertie Botts Allah has it as the few questions about it and then said yes yes it said it on October 11th 1939 in response to Einstein and zu Lords letter of warning President Roosevelt formed the Advisory Committee on uranium but this abstract new discovery became a low priority for a leadership distracted by a world war that was now two months old a recent refugee of that war 37 year old physicist Enrico Fermi narrowly escaped with his Jewish wife Laura they used the opportunity of going to Sweden to collect the Nobel Prize to take to go from there and then go on to the United States so that the fascist authorities in Italy at that time didn't know that they were actually not going to be returning to Italy together with Leo salar de Colombia Fermi tackled the first obstacle to the bomb the question of whether or not a sustained chain reaction could be induced in a uranium reactor without the successively doubling power of the chain reaction a bomb would be an impossibility Jeremy was one of the few scientists who was talented both in theory and in practice he loved getting his hands dirty Leo Szilard was the antithesis of Enrico Fermi so lard usually slept late he soaked in the bathtub to get fresh ideas while in the bathtub the Lord remained focused on the competition the German bomb effort he convinced scientists in the US whose community thrived on openness to censor their own papers so that they would not inadvertently help the Germans as the US bomb effort was taking its first tentative steps news that the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin had begun actively pursuing uranium research rippled through the American scientific community it would take nothing short of a disaster to move the president to take decisive action and a disaster was not far off prior to 1933 Germany produced the most Nobel laureate scientists after that date scientists in the United States received the most honors on December 7th 1941 the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor sinking 19 US naval vessels and killing more than 2,000 soldiers the next day the u.

s. declared war on Japan World War two was no longer just Europe's war America's entry into the war had a galvanizing effect on its moribund atomic bomb effort President Roosevelt approved production of the weapon and turned the nuclear program over to the Army Brigadier General Leslie R grows an expert engineer and administrator was placed at the head of the Manhattan Engineer District named after the project's initial headquarters in New York City general groves having just finished building the Pentagon was absolutely disgusted to recite the Manhattan Project as it came to be called he was sure it was a boondoggle he was sure you could never do such a thing but at the University of Chicago zallard and Fermi were taking the first steps in proving groves wrong they were trying to demonstrate that the fission process could be harnessed by launching a sustained chain reaction in uranium they built the first primitive reactor in a squash court beneath the stands of the university's football stadium the reactor consisted of a pile in which a fission reaction could be initiated and controlled they did it by piling layers of graphite and then embedding balls of uranium so that when the neutrons started flying through they would be slowed by the graphite collide with the uranium release more neutrons and those neutrons would continue in the chain reaction pattern this momentous achievement only detectable by a Geiger meant that the fishin process could be sustained nuclear energy could be released in a controlled way as in a reactor or perhaps cataclysmically as in a bomb it was so crazy that you could put a bunch of rain together with graphite and the thing would spring to life the bomb effort went into high gear its first priority was the lack of weapons-grade fuel fission is more readily produced in a rare uranium isotope uranium-235 that occurs naturally at a ratio of 1 to 139 - it's less useful twin uranium 238 chemically identical the isotopes were almost impossible to separate the only workable method in 1942 was electromagnetic separation in this process a mass spectrometer used for separating electrically charged particles according to their mass sent a stream of uranium atoms past a magnet atoms of the later isotope u-235 would be deflected more than those of the heavier u-238 and will be captured one atom at a time scientists at Columbia University championed a competing mode of separation gaseous diffusion this method passed the isotope through a porous barrier that separated the lighter isotope from its heavier counterpart but it proved to be technically challenging in a square centimeter but sizable thumbnail you've got to have hundreds of millions of pores and they have to all be the same size if they're too big the gas flows through without any separation if they're too small the gas gets in there and condenses on the surface those rule so Manabe Stovall's but if a suitable barrier could be manufactured it promised a greater yield than the electromagnetic process both techniques would have to be done on a massive scale and would prove extremely costly and if they worked they would provide fuel for a bomb that would be designed in a remote area of New Mexico Grove selected a bomb design site in Los Alamos an isolated location in the mountains at an elevation of 7,000 feet and accessible by only one Road general groves wanted it to be inland too far for enemy planes or submarines he wanted it to be beautiful where he said he could keep a bunch of prima donnas and Muse in November of 1942 the army purchased 54,000 acres for four hundred and forty thousand dollars under the guise of using them as a demolition range to head up the installation groves an expert judge of men chose a most unlikely candidate J robert Oppenheimer a gifted physics professor Oppenheimer had a reputation for being temperamental perhaps not suited to a highly stressful assignment whose advisors that often hammer would be a disaster people told him that Oppenheimer couldn't run a hot dog stand Oppenheimer was a fascinating and complicated man fundamentally he seems to have had some of the qualities of an actor he was different things to different people Oppenheimer drew luminaries like Enrico Fermi Hans bethe and Edward Teller to the facility as well as technicians fresh out of college laboratory personnel grew from 250 in 1943 to 2,500 in 1945 there were lots of babies born general gross at one point asked Oppenheimer if he couldn't do something about that he said he didn't think so the one place that they had to keep expanding was the maternity ward at the hospital during the fall of 1942 the theoretical physicists at Los Alamos began the difficult process of trying to determine how much u-235 it would take to make a bomb and the scientists tell him well it could be X amount but that's a plus or minus by a factor of ten groves is absolutely staggered he uses the illustration that well you're giving a wedding and you say it's 400 people but maybe a thousand will turn up or maybe ten so how can you make any sort of plans with that range this kind of uncertainty only served to fuel fears that the Nazis might be closer to building a bomb in early fall of 1942 general groves purchased fifty nine thousand acres in Oak Ridge Tennessee this would become the main site for uranium production in the United States you on December 28th 1942 President Roosevelt approved an additional 500 million dollar investment in the Manhattan Project the first priority to build the massive industrial facilities that would produce the fissionable material to fuel the atom bomb Robert Oppenheimer's team of physicists doubled the amount of uranium-235 thought necessary to achieve critical mass and sustained an explosive chain reaction to 200 kilograms their calculation made without adequate samples of u-235 for tests would prove to be 10 times the required amount the scientists at Los Alamos also studied tampers barrier materials that would slow the expansion of the critical mass and reflect neutrons back to feed the fission process inside the bomb determined to have the atom bomb ready for use in the war general groves notified contractors in Oak Ridge Tennessee that they had a scant six months to build the massive electromagnetic calutron designed by ernest lawrence at the University of California in Berkeley these calutron would be used to separate u-235 from u-238 Lawrence was to some extent an engineer he was comfortable with a soldering iron and with wrenches and with the tools of the trade with building machines in February 1943 construction began on the calutron site that was given the deliberately nondescript codename y12 these gigantic structures contained multiple calutron box-shaped collection units that were configured in a racetrack layout a magnetic field passed throughout the entire oval of galya Tron's causing the divergence of streams of u-235 and u-238 so that the separated isotopes could be collected a single calutron could capture a mere 10 grams of u-235 daily a staggering total of 1152 would be built by war's end because of the intense time constraints groves could not afford to build pilot plants facilities to test the scaling up of the laboratory processes they're physically building Oakridge and y12 the electron-electron magnetic separation plan before the design drawings had even been approved it's incredible that you would never do this in civilian life and you would never do it short of a wartime emergency that is dire they turned the the alpha-1 racetrack on to make the the first uranium and everything goes haywire that the magnets are so strong that they pull nails out of the wall groves arrived and shut the plant down his response was characteristic of his approach since the racetracks were not operating to capacity more would have to be built to supply the bombs as a result the town of Oak Ridge continued to grow to house an expanding workforce 75,000 people would ultimately come to live at the site grows used creative means to recruit them with hard-to-get construction workers during the war the solution was to put out ads saying we can't tell you what you'll be doing but there'll be steak every night on the table once hired workers were instructed to be evasive about what they were doing if anybody asks you would you make an overage you tell them you're making the the lights for the lightning bugs are that you're making the holes for the donuts ha ha meanwhile at Los Alamos design work was underway on the gadget as the test bomb came to be known the main obstacle was how to quickly assemble to smaller sub critical masses into one larger explosive one the bomb design that they came up with was a gun design inside the bomb a cannon would fire one piece of radioactive fuel into another at 3,000 feet per second the pieces would have to come together fast enough to prevent spontaneously emitted neutrons from melting the fuel causing the bomb to fizzle rather than explode but the engineering aspects were daunting it's one thing to say you can shoot a piece uranium at a second piece but how do you do it how fast does it have to go how do you stop it at the end how do you keep it together long enough as a mass so that it does go high order and give me an atomic bomb Oppenheimer led the effort to overcome these obstacles by setting an example for his team at Los Alamos in the middle of the night something to be done in would walk Robert just at the right time to see how it went he was interested and everything in the explosives and the mechanics in chemistry and this is what makes all the big laboratory of thousands of people working together go here Oppenheimer was living on coffee and martinis and cigarettes Rose was eating with them and chocolate samplers and sleeping sadly whereas the Oppenheimer was anguish you know they were they were just so different but they seemed to be able to mesh and they certainly had a common goal and this common goal was about to reach a new level as scientists refined the design of the gadget a new man-made element plutonium was gaining favor as a possible fuel identified in 1941 plutonium was almost twice as likely to undergo fission as uranium-235 they could be produced on a large scale by irradiating uranium and nuclear reactors in order to produce plutonium three production reactors were designed by engineers at the University of Chicago that would be built in Hanford Washington groves initiated the construction at Hanford on August 27th 1943 with a labor force that had been recruited to the area numbers as high as 60,000 construction workers living in tents out on the Hanford reservation the government went in and bought up a half a million acres out in the desert of Eastern Washington created this remote construction site and literally in a matter of months constructed large-scale engineered structures for plutonium production but groves was not content to rely on just two approaches y12 and Hanford to produce the weapons-grade fuel for the bomb by September 1943 he had begun construction on a third k-25 a gigantic gaseous diffusion plant at Oak Ridge in the diffusion process a gaseous compound uranium hexafluoride passes through a cascade of barriers each one giving a slight enrichment of the lighter isotope u-235 the difficulty lay in finding a barrier that would not be degraded by the very corrosive gas scientists and engineers were not able to manufacture a satisfactory barrier until a year after site construction began on K 25 [Music] a building that would ultimately cover a more area than any structure ever built the u-shaped measured half a mile long by a thousand feet wide with an area of 2 million square feet it contained a series of sealed containers and cascades that ran the length of the building [Music] Oakridge continued to grow and by the end of the war it was the fifth largest town in Tennessee the total power consumption during the key 25 operation during the war in their Manhattan district was about 10% of the electrical power electrical energy in the United States if you look at the size the scope of the k25 site in the Manhattan Project I don't think there's been any engineering feat to date comparable to what was done within the time frame it was looking less and less likely that enough u-235 could be produced to impact the war at the same time the alternative plutonium was proving to be equally tricky impurities in this new element were leading to increased Neutron activity that would cause bombs to predetonate to fizzle before the two halves joined in a critical mass there are production problems at Oak Ridge they're not sure they can even make any uranium at that point uranium-235 and so if they can't use plutonium in a gun there may in fact not even be an atomic bomb it's a real crisis it's at that point that I think Oppenheimer's talent comes to the fore where he brings in the people new people in fact and he reorganized his los alamos that brings people in to solve the problem of how to make a plutonium bomb the plutonium bombs new configuration called for an outer shell of explosives that would direct symmetrical shockwaves inward compressing a subcritical central mass of plutonium the resulting increase in the density would shrink distances between nuclei thus starting the explosive chain reaction nobody had ever taken high explosives wrap them around something and got a Symetra like of symmetrical explosion and so there weren't even sure they could do that technically it was a very very tough engineering problem so from May 1944 until about aux de 44 the laboratory wrestles with its problem by late 1944 k-25 the gaseous diffusion plant was producing enriched u-235 that ran through the magnetic calutron to effect a further enrichment this one-two punch generated enough fuel for one gun type bomb but if as military strategists thought it would take more than one bomb to break the enemy's will then it was crucial that the upcoming test of the new plutonium implosion bomb work all this uncertainty only served to heighten tensions at Los Alamos as scientists and engineers prepared for the first detonation of an atomic weapon if the implosion design was successful it might bring an end to the war as a substitute for copper which was in short supply during World War two the US Army borrowed almost 15,000 tons of silver from the US Treasury to wind in two coils for the calutron electromagnets you weapon design for the uranium gun bomb was completed by February 1945 confidence in the weapon was high they named it little boy for its relatively small size ten feet long and less than 10,000 pounds designers considered a test prior to combat use unnecessary and impossible since there was only enough u-235 from one bomb the design for the more complicated plutonium fueled implosion device dubbed fat man for its rotund shape was approved in March and a test was scheduled for July in preparation for deployment of the weapons Colonel Paul Tibbets a veteran combat pilot with extensive b-29 experience was selected and placed at the head of a new unit the 509th composite group the unit began training at Wendover Field Utah dropping 50 500-pound orange dummy bombs on April 12 1945 President Roosevelt died in Warm Springs Georgia bringing vice president harry s truman into the oval office secrecy on the manhattan project had been so tight that truman was not privy to the bomb developments and had to be briefed extensively in his first weeks in office less than one month later german armed forces in europe surrendered but japan did not in June 1945 Tibbits and his unit moved to Tinian Island in the Pacific 1,450 miles from Tokyo where the Navy Seabees had built the world's largest airport to accommodate Boeing's new b-29 Superfortresses Island was selected because it was within striking range of Japan number two it had the longest runways number three it had the facilities there to modify the area where we're gonna load them up I wanted to have my crews fly over enemy territory because they were not used to flying over enemy territory I wanted to get practice flying being shot at flying alone half a world away in the morning of July 16 1945 in the New Mexico desert 200 miles south of Los Alamos scientists and dignitaries awaited the results of the first test of an atomic weapon Oppenheimer had given the test of the implosion device the codename Trinity a reference to a devotional poem by 17th century English poet John Donne the poem explores the paradox of a God that destroys in order to renew but on the morning of the Trinity test the implosion device did not look particularly imposing atop a tower 100 feet high one of the guys said that really the Trinity device was a tremendous debt to 3m because most of it was held together with masking tape it was a garage bomb basically and it literally takes about three days to assemble one of these wartime devices think of them as crude laboratory devices they're not production designs you don't roll them off an assembly line you've got to worry about have we done everything right what's missing and there are stories where people's last minute have a nightmare that they put something together wrong actually go back in and discover that open Serta this wire backwards or that one the scientists waited anxiously at their posts some feared success because of speculation that the bomb might ignite the atmosphere and destroy the world teller was was twenty miles away at Campania Hill with Lawrence and teller mostly scared everybody to death because he was putting suntan lotion on his face and in his in his hands and as a guard against the ultraviolet from the bomb this is 20 miles away all the scientists were 20 miles away but most feared had done especially since a blank test of the explosive surrounding the core had failed just days before sensors showed that they had not fired simultaneously and would not have compressed the core properly it's really unnerving when the bike shot failed the normal anxiety that one might have had with a device on which you had worked but had never been tested fully I was heightened by the by the failure of the blank shot general groves was lying on the ground in the prone position facing away from the blast what he said was going through his mind was what was he going to do when the timer got to zero and nothing happened [Music] at 5:30 a. m.

July 16 1945 the world entered the Atomic Age with an intense flash a sudden wave of heat followed by a tremendous shock wave the ball of fire extended 40,000 feet the bomb packed a punch equivalent to 20,000 tons of TNT the high end of most of the scientists predictions completely vaporizing the steel tower and heating the desert sand into glass for a radius of 800 yards what a copy was I hadn't thought the heat of the fireball would heat my face exactly as it's sunrise it became brighter and brighter and rose and I knew that soon it will be used over Japan and then it will not be just an experiment groves returned to Washington to report the results to Secretary of War Henry Stimson and to make preparations for the use of the bomb against Japan later that day groves had his photograph taken for the publicity that would accompany the bombing of Hiroshima I said a general look down about there Tokyo he put his hands on his hips and says no I won't look at Tokyo yet but I'll look somewhere close to it so he did and I made the picture in a little wherever he was looking was probably Hiroshima although Trinity had been a success questions remained about fat man the gadget Trinity was not long it could've been dropped it was a gadget sitting on top of a tower so could the bomb work that would certainly have been in the military we test them in action moreover the untested little boy would only get one chance to work the only way we could know for sure is if we actually test it but we don't have enough uranium so we're gonna have to look at this and say our calculations look good our engineering looks good but we don't know and so little boy goes into combat as an untested weapon the course of the war the work of thousands the expenditure of billions and the fate of more than 100,000 Japanese soldiers and civilians hung in the balance in the morning of August 6 1945 as the Enola Gay flew 31,000 feet over Hiroshima on its way home from delivering the uranium bomb to Tinian Island the USS Indianapolis was torpedoed and sunk by a Japanese submarine of the eleven hundred and ninety-six men aboard only 315 were saved in June of 1945 155 Manhattan Project scientists signed a petition calling for a demonstration of the atomic bomb over an uninhabited area prior to its use against Japan general groves heard about the petition in order that it not be circulated in Los Alamos then to undermine the petition he conducted a poll of Atomic Scientists what do you think of a demonstration to his chagrin 83% of the people answering the poll said some sort of demonstration was preferable to bombing civilians so then groves saw to it that the petition was bottled up at Oak Ridge until after the bombs fell on Japan there was however a strong support particularly at the highest levels of government and the military to use the bomb swiftly against Japanese cities there was every incentive to use this weapon to scare the Japanese into surrender before the Russians got in on the post-war settlement what our military leaders feared was what happened in Korea where there was a North Japan and a South Japan and the North Japan was communist in the South Japan was capitalist moreover the assault on the Japanese mainland scheduled for November of 1945 would include a million and a half Allied soldiers casualties in the Pacific indicated that losses would be heavy by the end of the Second World War we were so angry at the Japanese they had started the war they had fought furiously and brutally they had slaughtered civilians we had by that time totally destroyed their Air Force we had totally destroyed their Navy and yet they wouldn't surrender in the spring of 1945 general groves chose populated Japanese cities as potential targets to demonstrate the bombs destructive power and in the war as quickly as possible once selected the cities on his short list were off-limits to Allied bombing raids they would be saved in order to be destroyed the final decision rested with the president and was made on June 1st after a conversation with his Secretary of State James burns and one point Byrnes said to Truman mr. president what will you tell the American people at your impeachment in 1946 when they find out that you had a weapon that could have ended the war and saved American lives and you decided not to use it I think that probably was the decisive argument for Troon he'd been in World War one and he knew what it was to fight and die and I think he was interested in stopping it as quick as he could and I certainly admired the man for what he did let there be no mistake we shall completely destroy Japan's power to make war if they do not now accept our terms they may expect a rain of ruin from the air the like of which has never been seen on this earth at 2:45 a. m.

on August 6th Paul Tibbets lifted the Enola Gay off the runway on Tinian Island I thought the airplane will probably go down in history and I wanted be sure that in my mind there could be no other b-29 that would have the same name my mother's name was oleg a fit the bill because i knew there could not be two Enola gays on August 6th 1945 at 8:15 a. m.