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How to find information about the Manhattan Project

The Department of Energy releases declassified Manhattan Project-related reports and documents on its  OpenNet  website. This searchable database includes bibliographical references to all documents declassified and made publicly available after October 1, 1994. Some documents can be viewed as full text. This website also provides a comprehensive Manhattan District History.

To start your research into Columbia's role in the Manhattan Project, read Laurence Lippsett's article "The race to make the bomb. The Manhattan Project: Columbia's wartime secret." The article appeared in Columbia College Today , Spring/Summer 1995, 18-21, 45. 

• The Manhattan Project: Columbia's wartime secret Lippsett, Laurence. "The race to make the bomb. The Manhattan Project: Columbia's wartime secret." Columbia College Today, Spring/Summer 1995, pp. 18-21, 45.
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The following are the most often consulted resources available at the University Archives. Archival collections are  non-circulating  and  can only be viewed in the Rare Book & Manuscript Library's reading room  (RBML).  In order to use the University Archives collections at the RBML, y ou will be required to register your own Special Collections Research Account before your visit and to validate the account in person with government-issued photo identification or Columbia ID card. Once you have created your Special Collections Research Account , you will be able to request materials directly from the finding aid: click the check box located on the right for the box(es) you need, and then scroll back to the top of the container list document and click “Submit Request” button in the red-rimmed box at top. This should lead you directly to your Special Collections Research Account to complete the request form.

• Annual Reports The Annual Reports of the President and Treasurer to the Trustees offer a yearly "state of the University" from 1891 to 1946. You can find statements about Columbia's role in the 1945 Annual Report presented to the Trustees (starting on page 14).  
• Central Files, 1890-1984 Central Files contain the core administrative records of the University. The records that comprise Central Files originated in the Office of the President starting in 1890 and continue through the present. Central Files chiefly contains correspondence (sent and received) between Columbia University administrators and other University officers, faculty, trustees, and individuals and organizations from outside the University. Box 301, folder 1 contains the August 6 and 14, 1945 telegrams from War Department to President Butler about continuing the secrecy of atomic bomb research. In addition to the War Department, Central Files includes correspondence with Fermi, Dunning, US Atomic Energy Commission, etc.  
• George Braxton Pegram papers, 1903-1958 Nuclear physicist, professor of physics, and Dean of Graduate Faculties at Columbia University, Pegram conducted a great deal of defense-related research and was responsible for the famous meeting between Franklin Delano Roosevelt and American nuclear scientists prior to World War II that eventually led to the establishment of the Manhattan Project. The National Defense Research Committee contracts for work on uranium and the Physics Department, correspondence, 1940-1947 (declassified in 1960), can be found in the "Atomic Energy Commission" folder in Box 41. There is also a folder titled "Atomic Bomb Discussion" in this box. Box 41 is stored offsite and must be requested at least 48 business hours in advance of use in our reading room.  
• Historical Photograph Collection - Series V: Atomic Energy A small series of images related to atomic research conducted by Columbia. Included are images of the Nevis and Pupin Laboratories and a 1948 exhibit about atomic energy; including the Seventh Biennial Award Dinner for The Atomic Bomb Project, sponsored by Chemical & Metallurgical Engineering; Waldorf-Astoria, 1946.  
• "Atomic Energy Research, 1930s-1980s" in Box 6 folder 5
• "Manhattan Project, 1940s-2000s" in Box 41, folder 10
• "SAM Labs--Manhattan Project, 1940s-1990s" in Box 48, folder 3

For more information on how to access our collections, check out our Research & Access website. If you have any questions about how to find materials or how to access materials, please contact [email protected] .

Archival collections are  non-circulating  and  can only be viewed in the Rare Book & Manuscript Library's reading room  (RBML).  In order to use the University Archives collections at the RBML, y ou will be required to register your own Special Collections Research Account before your visit and to validate the account in person with government-issued photo identification or Columbia ID card. Once you have created your Special Collections Research Account , you will be able to request materials directly from the finding aid: click the check box located on the right for the box(es) you need, and then scroll back to the top of the container list document and click “Submit Request” button in the red-rimmed box at top. This should lead you directly to your Special Collections Research Account to complete the request form.

• C. S. (Chien-shiung) Wu Papers The collection consists of speeches, reports, publications, research notes, and correspondence. The bulk of the collection relates to Wu's involvement in the American Physical Society as well as her research activities. The correspondence is chiefly professional, relating to C. S. Wu's physics research, professional commitments, appointments, meetings, conferences, and publications. Correspondence also includes letters from individuals around the world praising Wu for her accomplishments, asking advice, arranging speaking engagements, discussing administrative matters, and trading research notes, as well as information on publications and other topics. In addition, the collection contains information on Wu's involvement in the development of an affirmative action program at Columbia University in the 1970s.  
• Selig Hecht papers, 1914-1937 Professor of biophysics at Columbia University, 1926-1947, and author of Explaining the Atom (1947).  
• Dana Paul Mitchel Papers, [ca. 1925]-1960 Professional and personal correspondence, administrative records, manuscript lecture notes, and some miscellaneous printed materials. The general correspondence file, 1927-1958, contains letters, both personal and professional, with colleagues, with and about his students, about laboratory equipment, about weapons for the Army and Navy, and with industry concerning his research.  
• Department of Physics Historical records, 1862-1997 This collection is made up of an assortment of historical material, consisting of photographs, negatives, faculty and guest lecturer correspondence, biographical materials for some of the faculty, programs from various lecture series given at Columbia, publications, picture postcards, and even a sheet of commemorative postage stamps. These documents were collected in The Columbia Physics Department: a brief history , a booklet of reproductions of some of the archival documents, correspondence, and photographs relating to the history of the Physics department of Columbia. It includes listing and photos of Columbia's Nobel Laureates and discussion of Columbia's involvement in the Manhattan Project. Correspondents include Niels Bohr, Albert Einstein, Enrico Fermi, H. A. Lorentz, R. A. Millikan, and Max Planck.  
• Department of Physics records, 1870-1983 This collection contains records of the Physics Department of Columbia University and several of its affiliated research laboratories: the Columbia Radiation Laboratory, the Pupin Cyclotron Laboratory, the Nevis Cyclotron Laboratory, and the Pegram Nuclear Physics Laboratory.  
• Columbia Alumni News Alumni News served as a Columbia news magazine in its earlier days, publishing biweekly issues during the academic year. The first September 1945 issue has as its main article " Columbia and the Atomic Bomb " as Columbia's role was no longer secret.    

Columbia News online article: Shea, Christopher D. " Seen 'Oppenheimer'? Learn About Columbia's Role in Building the First Atom Bomb,  24 July 2023.   

• Oral Histories The Columbia Center for Oral History Archives is one of the largest oral history collections in the United States. The Manhattan Project is discussed in a number of interviews under a number of projects. To search for these interviews,  begin by exploring the Oral History Portal . When you have found an oral history interview that interests you, please click the link to view the Full CLIO record .The CLIO record will include information about restrictions and whether or not this interview is open to researchers. You can request the transcripts to be read at the Rare Book & Manuscript Library's reading room by using your Special Collections Research Account . For more information, please visit the Oral History Archives website .

About the images

Top - Two graduate students assembling graphite blocks for the nuclear reactor. (Scan #3114)  Historical Photograph Collection ,  , University Archives, Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Columbia University Libraries.

Right - "Two leaders in atom work at Columbia -- Dr. John R. Dunning (right), one of the country's pioneer atomic scientists, points out to Dr. Pegram the workings of his "atomic pinball machine," which he uses to explain atomic energy to the public." (Scan #0638) Historical Photograph Collection ,  University Archives, Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Columbia University Libraries.

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Legacies of the Manhattan Project: Reflections on 75 Years of a Nuclear World . Edited by Michael Mays

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Taylor E Rose, Legacies of the Manhattan Project: Reflections on 75 Years of a Nuclear World . Edited by Michael Mays, Western Historical Quarterly , Volume 52, Issue 3, Autumn 2021, Pages 359–360, https://doi.org/10.1093/whq/whab067

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Histories of the Manhattan Project seem to come readymade. The 1938 discovery of nuclear fission, Franklin Roosevelt’s 1941 approval of the U.S. atomic program, and the August 1945 bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki provide scholars with tidy periodizing events and a natural narrative thrust. The Cold War historian Richard Rhodes framed the story this way in his seminal study, The Making of the Atomic Bomb (1986), and many since have followed suit. But the legacies of that epoch-making half-decade, as Michael Mays indicates in his introduction to this impressive new collection of essays, have been anything but compact and linear. The book’s ten chapters of original research by emerging scholars demonstrate the multiplicity of ways in which nuclear science, however hermetically sealed, seeped into American social life, from journalism to environmentalism to colleges to candy. Collectively, they scope out new directions in the themes, methodologies, and insights of “post-Rhodesian” (p. 1) historiography.

Legacies emerged out of a 2017 symposium in Richland, Washington convened through the Hanford History Project (HHP), an initiative that Mays leads at WSU Tri-Cities. Since its founding in 2014, the HHP has advised the National Park Service’s telling of the capacious and politically delicate history of U.S. nuclearity for the Manhattan Project National Historic Park (MAPR). Congress mandated MAPR—also in 2014—with a seemingly impossible task: to transform “three geographically dispersed ‘Secret Cities’ sites” (p. 2) in Hanford, Wash., Los Alamos, N.M., and Oak Ridge, Tenn. into a singular public history experience with digestible, relatable interpretation. Complicating things further, all three physical locations bear the scars of their secretive, industrial, radioactive histories, presenting “issues of access, public safety, and security” (p. 2) requiring oversight by the Department of Energy.

If the backdrop is messy, the scholarship throughout Legacies is rigorous, focused, and critical. Some authors, like Hilary Dickerson and David P.D. Munns, expand on long-established threads in the literature, such as the inconsistency of newspaper censorship or the fruitful but problematic collaboration between military science and U.S. universities, respectively. Others, like Daisy Henwood and Laura J. Harkewicz, build on more recent lines of inquiry. Henwood invokes literary criticism to unpack firsthand experiences of “slow violence” (p. 134, from Rob Nixon), while Harkewicz traces identity formation and “biological citizenship” (p. 154, from Adriana Petryna) through the Northern Marshall Islands Radiological Survey.

As with any edited volume, readers will find certain chapters more interesting, helpful, and convincing than others. For scholars of the U.S. West, M.S. Gerber’s materialist environmental history of radionuclides in the Columbia River or Ellen D. McGehee’s site-specific study of implosion physics at Los Alamos should resonate most strongly. Other themes in the field, especially the influence of U.S. settler colonialism and wartime imperialism on nuclear science, lurk just below the surface but remain underdeveloped. In any event, if the cup-overfloweth feel of Legacies ’s concluding roundtable discussion is any indication, the NPS certainly has its work cut out with MAPR. The Manhattan Project may have folded shortly after the war ended, but like the bomb itself, its radiating, enduring effects continue to demand urgent reflection in the twenty-first century.

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Milestone Documents

Manhattan Project Notebook (1942)

Citation: Notebook recording the first controlled, self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction, December 2, 1942; Records of the Atomic Energy Commission; Record Group 326; National Archives.

View in the National Archives Catalog

This notebook records an experiment of the Manhattan Project, the all-out, but highly secret, effort of the federal government to build an atomic bomb during World War II. Recorded here is the world's first controlled, self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction, achieved on December 2, 1942.

Eight months after the United States entered World War II, the federal government launched the Manhattan Project, an all-out, but highly secret, effort to build an atomic bomb – and to build one before the Germans did. The task was to translate the vast energy released by atomic fission into a weapon of unprecedented power.

On December 2, 1942, a group of distinguished physicists, working under top-secret conditions in an unpretentious laboratory at the University of Chicago, took a crucial step towards this goal: they created the world’s first controlled, self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction. Nobel prize-winning physicist Enrico Fermi directed the experiment.

Fermi directed the construction of a pile of graphite and uranium bricks and wooden timbers, assembled in the precise arrangement necessary to start and stop a nuclear chain reaction. Cadmium rods inserted into the pile regulated the nuclear reaction to prevent it from “burning” itself out of control. Had it not been controlled, the experiment could have released a catastrophic amount of energy, wreaking havoc in the middle of the densely populated city of Chicago.

“We’re cooking!” was the exuberant reaction recorded when the experiment succeeded. The data shown on these notebook pages is the record of the nuclear reactor’s response to the movement of the control rods.

Less than three years later, the first atomic weapon would be tested in New Mexico on July 16, 1945. Though originally created for potential use against Germany, the war in Europe ended on May 8, 1945. After a successful test at the Trinity site, President Truman decided to use two atomic weapons to end the war on the Pacific front. On August 6th and 9th, the United States dropped atomic bombs on the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, leading to hundreds of thousands of deaths. Within days, Japan surrendered and World War II was over.

However, the creation of these new destructive weapons would intensify a new type of conflict – the Cold War between the two remaining global superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union. When the Soviet Union tested their own atomic weapon in 1949, an arms race between the United States and the U.S.S.R. began.

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Manhattan Project

The Story of the Century

• © 2020
• Bruce Cameron Reed 0

Emeritus, Alma College, Bedford, Canada

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• Is the only popular-level treatment of the Manhattan Project by a recognized expert on the topic
• Covers all aspects of the project from the underlying science to the effects of atomic bombs
• Includes a wealth of photos and details on leading personalities and significant research sites

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Table of contents (9 chapters)

Front matter, the big picture: a survey of the manhattan project.

Bruce Cameron Reed

From Atoms to Nuclei: An Inward Journey

Organizing: coordinating government and army support 1939–1943, piles and secret cities, u, pu, cew and hew: securing fissile material, los alamos, trinity , and tinian, the german nuclear program: the third reich and atomic energy.

• Hiroshima and Nagasaki

Back Matter

• Popular account of Manhatten Project
• Science, Society and the A-Bomb
• Nuclear Weapon development
• Atomic Bomb history
• Los Alamos and the bomb
• Robert Oppenheimer

About this book

Though thousands of articles and books have been published on various aspects of the Manhattan Project, this book is the first comprehensive single-volume history prepared by a specialist for curious readers without a scientific background. 

This project, the United States Army’s program to develop and deploy atomic weapons in World War II, was a pivotal event in human history. The author presents a wide-ranging survey that not only tells the story of how the project was organized and carried out, but also introduces the leading personalities involved and features simplified but accurate descriptions of the underlying science and the engineering challenges. The technical points are illustrated by reader-friendly graphics.  . 

Authors and Affiliations

About the author.

Bruce Cameron Reed  is the Charles A. Dana   professor of Physics at Alma College (Michigan), emeritus. He has published four textbooks and over 50 journal papers and semi-popular articles on the Manhattan Project; two of the texts are with Springer. In 2009 he was selected as Fellow of the American Physical Society in recognition of his contributions to promoting understanding of the history and physics of the Project.

Bibliographic Information

Book Title : Manhattan Project

Book Subtitle : The Story of the Century

Authors : Bruce Cameron Reed

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45734-1

Publisher : Springer Cham

eBook Packages : Physics and Astronomy , Physics and Astronomy (R0)

Copyright Information : Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020

Hardcover ISBN : 978-3-030-45733-4 Published: 03 June 2020

Softcover ISBN : 978-3-030-45736-5 Published: 03 June 2021

eBook ISBN : 978-3-030-45734-1 Published: 02 June 2020

Edition Number : 1

Number of Pages : XIV, 553

Number of Illustrations : 127 b/w illustrations, 25 illustrations in colour

Topics : Popular Science in Physics , History and Philosophical Foundations of Physics , Nuclear Physics, Heavy Ions, Hadrons , Nuclear Chemistry

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Course: US history   >   Unit 7

• Beginning of World War II
• 1940 - Axis gains momentum in World War II
• 1941 Axis momentum accelerates in WW2
• Pearl Harbor
• FDR and World War II
• Japanese internment
• American women and World War II
• 1942 Tide turning in World War II in Europe
• World War II in the Pacific in 1942
• 1943 Axis losing in Europe
• American progress in the Pacific in 1944
• 1944 - Allies advance further in Europe
• 1945 - End of World War II

The Manhattan Project and the atomic bomb

• The United Nations
• The Second World War
• Shaping American national identity from 1890 to 1945
• The United States detonated two atomic bombs over the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, killing 210,000 people—children, women, and men.
• President Truman authorized the use of the atom bombs in an effort to bring about Japan’s surrender in the Second World War . In the days following the bombings Japan surrendered.
• The Manhattan Project was the US government program during World War II that developed and built these first atomic bombs.
• Detonation of these first nuclear bombs signaled arrival of a frightening new Atomic Age .

The Manhattan Project

Hiroshima and nagasaki, was the bombing of hiroshima and nagasaki necessary, what do you think.

• David M. Kennedy, Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929–1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 658-668.
• See Kennedy, Freedom from Fear , 658-668.
• See Ira Katznelson, Fear Itself: The New Deal and The Origins of Our Time (New York: Liveright Publishing, 2013), 349.
• See Katznelson, Fear Itself , 350.
• Katznelson, Fear Itself , 614.

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Encyclopedia of the History of Science

Manhattan project.

• Alex Wellerstein – Stevens Institute of Technology

The Manhattan Project was the Anglo-American effort to build nuclear weapons during World War II. It is commonly regarded as one of the most successful, if controversial, mega-projects of the 20th century, bringing together scientific expertise, industrial production, and military coordination to create an entirely new industry, and new form of weaponry, in an unusually compressed timescale. Within the literature of the history of science and technology, the Manhattan Project has been examined from a number of different vantage points, often centering on the role of the thousands of academic scientists in hundreds of centers who participated in the weaponization of a new scientific discovery to facilitate the mass slaughter of civilians, but also portraying the project as a prototype of future military-industrial-academic collaborations.

Historiographical background

The Manhattan Project per se specifically refers to the overarching weapons-production program begun in late 1942, and not to earlier research and pilot programs. It is related to but not exactly the same as the Manhattan Engineer District, the division of the US Army Corps of Engineers that was in charge of implementing the development of the atomic bomb, and which maintained control over the technology until January 1947, when the civilian US Atomic Energy Commission took over all production operations.

This definitional issue is not an insubstantial one. If one assigns the moniker of the Manhattan Project to the earliest investigations into nuclear fission, it results in a significantly different narrative about the purpose and origins of the weapons project, and obscures the distinct change of direction that took place in late 1942. At times, it was in the interest of government officials involved in making the atomic bomb to stress the continuity with earlier research, as the original motivation for the project (fear of the Nazis) was seen as easier to justify than the later stages of it. 1

The background story of events leading to the Manhattan Project has been told in several different modes. The most common is as the history of physics: the discovery of X-rays in 1895 led directly to new theories and models of the world that, in turn, posed questions about the fundamental nature of atomic structure. These in turn led to the discovery of nuclear fission, through which subatomic neutrons can be made to split heavy atomic nuclei (like uranium) and release extremely large amounts of energy. The discovery of the nuclear chain reaction suggested that this energy release could be exponentially amplified by human intervention. This mode of background story is favored in popular accounts and was also the one preferred by the scientists who crafted the first version of this history, in part because it reflected their institutional interests (the promotion of basic scientific research), but also because it fit in with their historical self-identification as physicists. 2

There have been other ways to frame this story. Historians of technology in particular have tended to look at the continuities with other industrial-governmental operations in the United States, such as the Tennessee Valley Authority, and some historians of science have also emphasized the important bureaucratic aspects necessary as a prerequisite for undertaking such an extremely risky project. And several historians of science have also emphasized that the “first” nuclear age, ranging from the discovery of radioactivity and ending with the discovery of fission, was responsible for many of the scientific and cultural frameworks that were later applied to the problem of atomic weapons. 3

An endeavor as large as the Manhattan Project can contain multitudes of historical frameworks simultaneously. It is difficult to overemphasize the scale of the work. Its wartime cost ($2 billion 1945 USD, around $30-50 billion USD today, depending on the conversion factors used) was more impressive at the time than it is in the context of later American military expenditures (for comparison, the most expensive wartime project by the United States was the research and production of the B-29 Superfortress, which cost about $3 billion 1945 USD). Its cost alone does not do justice to its scale, however. At its peak, it employed over 125,000 direct staff members, and probably a larger number of additional people were involved through the subcontracted labor that fed raw resources into the project. Because of the high rate of labor turnover on the project, some 500,000 Americans worked on some aspect of the sprawling Manhattan Project, almost 1% of the entire US civilian labor force during World War II. In 1943, the project was estimated to be consuming approximately over half of all Army construction labor and steel production, and the Oak Ridge site alone used approximately 1% of the electrical power produced for the entire country. The Manhattan Project was responsible for the generation of thousands of new inventions, as represented by patent claims processed in secret by the project, which if filed would have represented some 1% of all patents in force at the end of World War II. And while much attention has been given to the “big three” project production sites (Hanford, Los Alamos, and Oak Ridge), the total project sites across the United States number into the hundreds, including work done at over two dozen universities. It was not merely a scientific research project: it entailed the creation of an entirely new industry as well as the military coordination required to mobilize its byproducts as usable weapons, all under an unusually heavy cloak of military and governmental secrecy. 4

All of this, it should be emphasized, was done on a project that literally emerged in part out of a genre of science fiction and carried a significant risk of failure. 5 As it was, the project just managed to produce three atomic bombs by the summer of 1945; had it been delayed a few months more, it very easily could not have produced nuclear weapons prior to an American invasion of Japan, or the end of the war by some other means. This possibility of failure was acutely felt by those who worked on the project at the time, though knowledge of its outcome has led many narratives about its history to carry an air of inevitability. 6 Most exceptional about the Manhattan Project was its haste: all of its major activity took place within the span of three years (1942-1945), which is still the world-record for any nuclear weapons production program.

The decision to make the atomic bomb

The Manhattan Project, and the atomic bomb itself, could not have been imagined as plausible prior to the discovery of nuclear fission by Otto Hahn, Fritz Strassman, Lise Meitner, and Otto Frisch in the winter of 1938. Nuclear fission — the splitting of heavy nuclei (originally uranium) through the bombardment of neutrons — and the subsequent (early 1939) concept of the nuclear chain reaction provided the first concrete mechanism towards controlling the rate of nuclear reactions and inducing them towards exponential reactions that might cause explosions. For the context of the Manhattan Project, it suffices to note that by the early 1940, scientists in several nations (France, Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States, with Japan following in 1941 and the Soviet Union in 1942) had petitioned their governments to support further research into the possible military applications of the fissioning of uranium. 7

The early programs of Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States are of brief note in relation to the later Manhattan Project. In Germany, a Uranverein (“Uranium Club”) was created under the auspices of the Reich Research Council with the blessing of Army Ordnance, and had the goal of exploring whether nuclear reactions could have military application, notably through the use of nuclear reactors. Similar work was undertaken by the Uranium Committee in the United States, created within the National Bureau of Standards in late 1939 by US President Franklin D. Roosevelt as a result of the urging of a letter signed by Albert Einstein (drafted at the impetus and with the input of Leo Szilard, the Hungarian refugee physicist who had first conceived of the nuclear chain reaction). In the United Kingdom, similarly, a small group of scientists sparked by the concerns of continental refugees, later known as the MAUD Committee, commenced with research at a small scale. 8

None of these efforts started in 1939 constituted a nuclear weapons production program. Their goals were, in essence, to answer the question of feasibility regarding the military application of nuclear fission, whether in terms of nuclear reactors (machines that produced controlled nuclear fission reactions) or weapons (machines that produced explosive reactions). Their work was, by the later standards of the Manhattan Project, extremely small scale. To put it into perspective, the entire budget expended by the US government on nuclear fission research between 1939 and 1941 was around $15 million USD. For the year of 1944, by contrast, the Army spent on average $2.5 million USD per day on the effort. 9

This early work proceeded at a pace not exceptionally different from “normal” scientific research. Innumerable uncertainties, unknowns, and questions existed; it was not at all clear that the technology was weaponizable in the short term. In Germany, in early 1942, the work was reviewed by Army Ordnance with the question of whether it was worth committing to a major effort — whether it would play a favorable role in the war’s outcome. The decision was negative. Though the idea of a nuclear weapon was judged technically feasible, the expense, risks, and time-scale involved, coupled with the German belief that the war would conclude in the near-term in their favor, motivated them to pursue only a relatively small nuclear reactor development program and not an expansive weapons program. (If the nuclear reactor program had been successful in producing a working reactor, it is possible that might have changed their position on the feasibility of nuclear weapons, though even then it is hard to imagine, with the knowledge of the state of Germany in the later portion of the war, that the program would have been successful in producing a weapon in time to be useful.) Though the German program has often been judged negatively (e.g., as “failure” in the “race” for the atomic bomb), considerable careful scholarship has demonstrated that the German understanding of the feasibility of nuclear weapons in 1942 was not a matter of ignorance so much as it was a decision of resource-allocation and risk-assessment. 10

The effort of the United States, left to its own devices, very well could have gone the same way. The early program was not exceptionally well-managed (it was, some participants later argued, plagued by too much secrecy at too early a period of time), and the top American scientist-administrators who controlled the direction of American wartime research and development, such as Vannevar Bush and James B. Conant, were skeptical that the effort was worth a great expenditure of resources and scientific manpower. Again, the problem here was not so much a lack of understanding, but perhaps too much understanding: it was felt that the technical difficulties of producing fuel for the weapon (enriched uranium) were extraordinarily high and that the coming war’s requirements for scientific manpower were going to be large even without such a program. 11

The British program, by contrast, came to very different conclusions. Otto Frisch and Rudolf Peierls, two refugee scientists from Europe who especially feared the prospect of Nazis armed with nuclear weapons, concluded through theoretical calculation that the enriched-uranium fuel requirements for a bomb would be considerably smaller than had been believed (they were in retrospect overly optimistic; ironically, the Germans actually made more accurate predictions about this), and that while the effort would be a significantly risky undertaking for the wartime United Kingdom, it would be a feasible undertaking for either the United States or Germany. These conclusions were codified by the MAUD Committee, with the recommendations that they be sent to American scientific authorities, meant both to warn them of the German possibility and encourage them to broader action. This occurred in the spring of 1941, though the report was not given broad circulation. In the summer of 1941, the British sent a scientific emissary to the United States to investigate the lack of action, and this emissary (Mark Oliphant) succeeded in getting the attention and interest of several key American scientists (the aforementioned Bush, along with Ernest Lawrence, Arthur Compton, and Harold Urey). 12

The American program was soon completely re-organized and renamed. Gone was the revealing moniker of the Uranium Committee, and in its place the work was renamed the S-1 Committee, the blandness of the name a sure sign of its newfound perceived importance. This work was not yet a weapon production program: the goal of the S-1 work was to produce proof-of-concept facilities that would demonstrate the means by which uranium could be enriched and a new element, plutonium, could be produced from nuclear reactors. 13

The S-1 work began in the fall of 1941, under the auspices of the Office for Scientific Research and Development, the civilian agency created by Roosevelt at the behest of Vannevar Bush (who would oversee it), to coordinate scientific research and development for defense purposes. By the summer of 1942, Bush was confident enough in the enterprise to recommend to Roosevelt that an all-out “crash” effort to develop an atomic bomb should be put into place, with the majority of the organization taken over by the US Army Corps of Engineers. The initial work had its offices in New York City, near to the headquarters of major industrial contractors and the scientific work being done at Columbia University, and the new organization was thus named the Manhattan Engineer District. The recommendation was based on technical promise, but also on the strong and, at the time authentic, belief that the Germans could be even farther ahead at that point and that they were in a genuine “race” for the bomb. 14

In several reports in the summer and winter of 1942, Bush and Conant recommended Roosevelt increase the effort involved in fission research. Though their optimism was somewhat tempered by the end of the year (in June, they believed weapons would be ready by 1944; in December, they believed that they would have six bombs by the first half of 1945), they recommended an all-out effort that would cost $400 million USD, to be dispensed through secret channels. These funds would be used to construct several plants for the enrichment of uranium, as well as the construction of at least one industrial-sized nuclear reactor and the facilities necessary to create plutonium. Roosevelt approved their initiatives without reservation, and the Army Corps of Engineers was brought in to coordinate the work of constructing the requisite plants; at this point, the American effort was indeed a weapons-production program, with the aim of producing usable weapons within the span of the war, though the specifics of their use had not yet been discussed. 15

To reiterate: The American decision to develop nuclear weapons was hardly straightforward. Despite American scientists’ conclusion that producing nuclear weapons would be extremely difficult, key figures in the conduct of wartime science were convinced by the United Kingdom’s advocacy that it was a risk worth taking. The peculiar structure of American wartime scientific planning also meant that the question was given considerably little oversight — all information on the issue was funneled from Bush to Roosevelt, who himself approved the creation of a sweeping program without apparent consultation with any outside bodies or advisors. Had the overall program been somewhat more bureaucratically controlled, with further stakeholders involved in the decision-making process, it is very easy to imagine that at the very least any initiative would have been delayed or avoided altogether. The development of nuclear weapons during World War II is, in many ways, an unexpected and improbable outcome, and instead of asking why other nations did not develop such weapons, it is more fruitful to look instead at the various contingent and at times even coincidental factors that led to the United States being the only nation to pursue such a program with vigor.

The work of the Manhattan Project

In the initial stages of the American fission effort (1939-1942), scientists at a variety of university laboratories — notably Columbia University, the University of Chicago, and the University of California–Berkeley, among many others— identified key processes for the development of the “fissile material” fuel that is necessary for a nuclear weapon to operate.

The first approach considered was the isotopic enrichment of uranium. (Chemical elements can vary in the number of neutrons in their nucleus, and these different forms are known as isotopes.) It was discovered as early as 1939 that only one isotope of uranium was fissionable by neutrons of all energies, and by 1941 it was understood that to make a fission weapon required a reasonably pure amount of material that met this criterion. Less than 1% of the uranium as mined is the fissile uranium-235 isotope, with the other 99% being uranium-238, which inhibits nuclear chain reactions. It was understood by 1941 that to make a weapon the fissile uranium-235 would need to be separated from the non-fissile uranium-238, and that because they were chemically identical this could only be accomplished through physical means that relied on the small (three neutron) mass difference between the atoms. Isotopic separation had been undertaken for other elements (for example, the separation of the hydrogen isotope deuterium from the bulk of natural water), but never on a scale of the sort contemplated for the separation of uranium. 16

Several methods were proposed and explored at small scales at various research sites in the United States. The preferred candidates by the end of the first year of the Manhattan Project (1942) were:

Electromagnetic separation, in which powerful magnetic fields were used to create looping streams of uranium ions that would slightly concentrate the lighter isotope at the fringes. This work was related to the cyclotron concept pioneered by Ernest Lawrence at the University of California, and the bulk of the research took place at his Radiation Laboratory.

Gaseous diffusion, in which a gaseous form of uranium was forced through a porous barrier consisting of extremely fine passageways. The gas molecules containing the lighter isotope would navigate the barrier slightly faster than the gas molecules containing the heavier isotope, although the effect would have to be magnified through many stages before it resulted in significant separation. This work was originally explored primarily at Columbia University under the guidance of Harold Urey and others.

Thermal diffusion, in which extreme heat and cold were applied to opposite sides of a long column of uranium gas, which also resulted in slight separation, with the lighter uranium isotope concentrating at one end. This was initially investigated by Philip Abelson at the Naval Research Laboratory.

Centrifugal enrichment, in which the rapid spinning of a uranium gas allowed for the slight concentration of the lighter element at the center of the whirling mixture, a process that would also require a large number of “stages” to be successful. This was pursued by physicist Jesse W. Beams at the University of Virginia and at the Standard Oil Development Company in New Jersey. 17

Over the course of 1943, centrifugal enrichment proved less promising than the other methods, and by 1944 the method was essentially abandoned (though it would, in the postwar period, be perfected by German and Austrian scientists working in the Soviet Union). Because it was unclear which of the other techniques would be most successful at scale, both the electromagnetic and gaseous diffusion methods were pursued with great gusto, and arguably constituted the most substantial portion of the Manhattan Project. The construction and operation of the two massive facilities required for these methods (the Y-12 facility for the electromagnetic method, and K-25 facility for the gaseous diffusion method) alone made up 52% of the cost of the overall project, and all of the Oak Ridge facilities together totaled 63% of the entire project cost. While thermal diffusion was initially imagined as a competitor process, difficulties in achieving the desired level of enrichment led to all three methods being “chained” together as a sequence: the raw uranium would be enriched from the natural level of 0.72% uranium-235 to 0.86% at the thermal diffusion plant, and its output would then be enriched to 23% at the gaseous diffusion plant, and then finally enriched to an average level of 84% at the electromagnetic plants. 18

The plants for the production of enriched uranium were constructed in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, an isolated site that was chosen primarily for its proximity to the large electrical resources provided by the Tennessee Valley Authority. The Oak Ridge site (Site X) employed over 45,000 people for construction at its peak, and had a similar number of employees on the payroll for managing its continued operations once built. A “secret city,” the facility relied on heavy compartmentalization (“need to know”) so that practically none of its thousands of employees had any real knowledge of what they were producing. Every aspect of life in Oak Ridge was controlled by contractors and the military, in the aim of producing weapons-grade material in maximum haste and with a minimum of security breaches. Situated in the Jim Crow South, the facility was entirely segregated by law, and living conditions between African-Americans and whites varied dramatically. Various industrial contractors managed the different plants (for example, the Union Carbide and Carbon Corporation operated K-25, and the Tennessee Eastman Corporation operated Y-12). 19

In the process of researching the possibility of nuclear fission, another road to a bomb had made itself clear. Nuclear reactors had been contemplated as early as nuclear weapons. Where a nuclear weapon requires high concentrations of fissile material to function, a reactor does not: a controlled nuclear reaction (as opposed to an explosive one) can be developed through natural or slightly-enriched uranium through the use of a substance called a “moderator,” which slows the neutrons released from fission reactions. Under the right conditions, this allows a chain reaction to proceed even in unenriched material, and the reaction is considerably slower, and much more controllable, than the kind of reaction that occurs inside of a bomb.

Nuclear reactors had been explored as possible energy sources, though engineering difficulties would make this use of them more difficult than was anticipated (the first nuclear reactors for power purposes in the United States did not go critical until 1958). More importantly for the wartime planners, it was realized that the plentiful uranium-238 isotope, while not fissile, could still be quite useful. When uranium-238 absorbs a neutron, it does not undergo fission, but instead transmutes into uranium-239. Uranium-239, however, is unstable, and through a series of nuclear decays becomes, in the span of a few days, the artificial element plutonium-239. Isolated for the first time in February 1941, plutonium was calculated and confirmed to have very favorable nuclear properties (it is even more reactive than uranium-235, and thus even less of it is necessary for a chain reaction). 20

The first controlled nuclear reaction was achieved in December 1942 at the University of Chicago, by a team led by Enrico Fermi. The first reactor, Chicago Pile-1, used purified graphite as its moderator and 47 tons of natural (unenriched) uranium in the form of metal ingots. Even while the pilot Chicago Pile-1 reactor was still being constructed, plans were being made for the creation of considerably larger, industrial-sized nuclear reactors at a remote site in Hanford, Washington, constructed and operated by E.I. du Pont Nemours & Co. (DuPont). The Hanford site (Site W) was chosen largely for its proximity to the Columbia River, whose water would be used for cooling purposes. On dusty land near the river, three large graphite-moderated reactors were constructed starting in 1943, with the first reactor going critical in September 1944. A massive chemical facility known as a “canyon” was constructed nearby, by which, largely through automation and remote control, the irradiated fuel of the reactors was chemically stripped of its plutonium. This process involved dangerously radioactive materials, chemically noxious substances (powerful acids), and was fairly inefficient (every ton of uranium fuel that was processed yielded 225 grams of plutonium). 21

The labor conditions at Hanford varied considerably from Oak Ridge. Where Oak Ridge was imagined as a cohesive community, Hanford was not, and employed an abundance of cheap labor in far inferior work conditions (and those at Oak Ridge were not so great to begin with). The radioactive and chemical wastes at the site were treated in an expedient, temporary fashion, with the idea that in the less-hurried future they would be more properly eliminated. Subsequent administrations continued this approach for decades. Hanford became regarded as the most radioactively contaminated site in the United States, and since the end of the Cold War has been involved in expensive cleanup and remediation efforts. The Hanford project constituted about 21% of the total cost of the Manhattan Project. 22

The work of these two sites — Oak Ridge and Hanford — constituted the vast bulk of the labor and expense of the Manhattan Project (roughly 80% of both). Without fuel, there could be no atomic bomb: it was and remains a key chokepoint in the development of nuclear weapons. As a result, it is important to conceptualize the Manhattan Project as much more than just basic science alone: without an all-out military-industrial effort, the United States would not have had an atomic bomb by the end of World War II.

The head of the Manhattan Project’s entire operation was Brigadier General Leslie R. Groves, a West-Point trained engineer who had previously been instrumental in the construction of the Pentagon building. Groves had accepted the assignment reluctantly, liking neither the risk of failure nor the fact that it was a home-front assignment. But once he accepted the job, he was determined to see it through to success. His unrelenting drive resulted in the Manhattan Project being given the top level of priority of all wartime projects in the United States, which allowed him nearly unfettered access to the resources and labor necessary to build a new atomic empire. Groves amplified the degree of secrecy surrounding the project through his application of compartmentalization (which he considered “the very heart of security”), and his own autonomous domestic and even foreign intelligence and counter-intelligence operations, making the Manhattan Project a virtual government agency of its own. (Despite these precautions, the project was, it later was discovered, compromised to the Soviet Union by several well-placed spies.) While it is uncharacteristic to associate the success or failure of massive projects with single individuals, it has been plausibly argued that Groves was perhaps the most “indispensable” individual to the project’s success, and that his willingness to accelerate and amplify the work being done in the face of setbacks, and to bully his way through military and civilian resistance, was essential to the project achieving its results when it did. 23

Though the scientific research on the project was initially dispersed among several American universities, as the work moved further into the production phase civilian and military advisors to the project concurred that the most sensitive research work, specifically that on the design of the bomb itself, should be located somewhere more secure than a university campus in a major city. Bush, Conant, and Arthur Compton had all come to the conclusion that a separate, isolated laboratory should be created for this final phase of the work. In late 1942, Groves identified Berkeley theoretical physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer as his preferred candidate for leading the as-yet-created laboratory, and on Oppenheimer’s recommendation identified a remote boys’ school in Los Alamos, New Mexico, as the location for the work. Initially imagined to be fairly small, the Los Alamos laboratory (Site Y) soon became a sprawling operation that took on a wide variety of research projects in the service of developing the atomic bomb, ending the war with over 2,500 people working at the site. 24

Though the work of the bomb was even at the time most associated with physicists, it is worth noting that at Los Alamos, there were roughly equal numbers of physicists, chemists, metallurgists, and engineers. The physics-centric narrative, promulgated in part by the physicists themselves after the war (in part because the physics of the atomic bomb was easier to declassify than other aspects), obscures the multidisciplinary research work that was required to turn table-top laboratory science into a working weapon. 25

It is not exceptionally hyperbolic to say that the Los Alamos laboratory brought together the greatest concentration of scientific luminaries working on a single project that the world had ever seen. It was also highly international in its composition, with a significant number of the top-tier scientists having been refugees from war-torn Europe. This included a significant British delegation of scientists, part of an Anglo-American alliance negotiated by Winston Churchill and Roosevelt. For the scientists who went to the laboratory, especially the junior scientists who were able to work and mingle with their heroes, the endeavor took on the air of a focused and intensive scientific summer camp, and the numerous memoirs about the period at times underemphasize that the goal was to produce weapons of mass destruction for military purposes. 26

Los Alamos grew because the difficulty and scope of the work grew. Notably a key setback motivated a massive reorganization of the laboratory in the summer of 1944, when it was found that plutonium produced by nuclear reactors (as opposed to the small samples of plutonium that had been produced in particle accelerators) could not be easily used in a weapon. The original plan for an atomic bomb design was relatively simple: two pieces of fissile material would be brought together rapidly as a “critical mass” (the amount of material necessary to sustain an uncontrolled chain reaction) by simply shooting one piece into the other through a gun barrel using conventional explosives. This “gun-type” design still involved significant engineering considerations, but compared to the rest of the difficulties of the project it was considered relatively straightforward. 27

The first reactor-bred samples of plutonium, however, led to the realization that the new element could not be used in such a configuration. The presence of a contaminating isotope (plutonium-240) increased the background neutron rate of reactor-bred plutonium to levels that would pre-detonate the weapon were two pieces of material to be shot together, leading to a significantly reduced explosion (designated a “fizzle”). Only a much faster method of achieving a critical mass could be used. A promising, though ambitious, method had been previously proposed, known as “implosion.” This required the creation of specialized “lenses” of high explosives, arranged as a sphere around a subcritical ball of plutonium, that upon simultaneous detonation would symmetrically squeeze the fuel to over twice its original density. If executed correctly, this increase in density would mean that the plutonium in question would have achieved a critical mass and also explode. But the degree of simultaneity necessary to compress a bare sphere of metal symmetrically is incredibly high, a form of explosives engineering that had scarcely any precedent. Oppenheimer reorganized Los Alamos around the implosion problem, in a desperate attempt to render the plutonium method a worthwhile investment. Modeling the compressive forces, much less achieving them (and the levels of electrical simultaneity necessary) required yet another massive multidisciplinary effort. 28

As of summer 1944, there were two designs considered feasible: the “gun-type” bomb which relied upon enriched uranium from Oak Ridge, and the “implosion” bomb which relied upon separated plutonium from Hanford. The manufacture of the factories that produced this fuel required raw materials, equipment, and logistics from many dozens of sites, and together with the facilities that were involved with producing the other components of the bomb, there were several hundred discrete locations involved in the Manhattan Project itself, differing dramatically in size, location, and character. To choose a few interesting examples: a former playhouse in Dayton, Ohio, was converted into the site for the production of the highly-radioactive and highly-toxic substance polonium, which was to be used as a neutron source in the bombs, without any knowledge of the residents who lived around it; most of the uranium for the project was procured from the Congo; and a major reactor research site was created in Quebec, Canada, as part of the British contribution to the work. 29

The uncertainties involved in the implosion design meant that the scientists were not confident that it would work and, if it did work, how efficient, and thus explosive, it would be. A full-scale test of the implosion design was decided upon, at a remote site at the White Sands Proving Ground, 60 miles from Alamogordo, New Mexico. On July 16, 1945, the test, dubbed “Trinity” by Oppenheimer, was even more successful than expected, exploding with the violence of 20,000 tons of TNT equivalent (20 kilotons, in the new standard of explosive power developed by the project participants). 30 (They had considerably more confidence in the gun-type bomb, and in any case, lacked enough enriched uranium to contemplate a test of it.)

Along with the work of the creation of the key materials for the bombs and the weapons designs themselves, additional thought was put into the question of “delivery,” the effort that would be required to detonate the bomb over a target. This aspect of the project, more a concern of engineering than science per se, was itself nontrivial: the atomic bombs were exceptionally heavy by the standards of the time, and the implosion bomb in particular had an ungainly egg-like shape. The “Silverplate” program created modified versions of the B-29 Superfortress long-range heavy bombers (most of their armaments and all of their armor were removed so that they could fly higher and faster with the heavy bombs), while Project Alberta, headquartered at Wendover Army Air Field in Utah, developed the ballistic cases of the weapons while training crews in the practice of delivering such weapons with relative accuracy. 31

The use of the bombs and the legacy of the project

All of the above has been told with a minimum of attention to the ultimate questions of the Manhattan Project: whether and how to use the bombs. Indeed, from late 1944 through mid-1945, as the notion of the atomic bomb moved from the possible to the real, a large amount of policy and military planning began to go into effect. Notably, this project that had been ostensibly created to counter the threat of a German atomic bomb shifted almost imperceptibly into one dedicated to the first use of such a weapon onto Japan. By the time that serious planning for use of the weapon was beginning, in late 1944, Manhattan Project officials were more or less convinced that Germany was no longer a possible target, and posed no atomic threat.

Two committees were particularly important. The first was the Interim Committee, created by the Secretary of War, Henry Stimson, at the request of Bush and Conant in late 1944. This committee was ostensibly concerned with matters affecting the “interim” period that would exist between the use of the bombs as a weapon (or some other revelation of their existence to the world) and the creation of permanent peacetime authorities (both domestic and international) for the future control of nuclear weapons. This “interim” remit however proved extremely expansive, covering everything from the consideration of the use of the bombs in war (because that would presumably affect what came afterwards) to the preparation of press releases and plans for both domestic legislation and for the introduction of proposals to the nascent United Nations for the international regulation of nuclear technology. A Scientific Panel composed of Oppenheimer, Compton, Fermi, and Lawrence were consulted on several topics, including the postwar priorities for new nuclear research, as well as the question (sparked by a committee of scientists at the University of Chicago headed by physicist James Franck) of whether the United States would be better served by first demonstrating their new weapon in a non-violent way to Japan, rather than by using it militarily (the Scientific Panel ruled against the demonstration idea). 32

The second committee, the Target Committee, consisted of military and scientific representatives who met three times in the spring of 1945 to make the final recommendations as to exactly how the weapons ought to be used. While the initial idea of the atomic bomb was flexible enough to imagine a variety of uses (for example, against a naval base such as Japan’s Harbor of Truk), the weapon as developed, through a multitude of small and seemingly inconsequential technical decisions, was one whose idealized use could only really be against a large urban target — a city. The scientists on the Target Committee, including Oppenheimer, were themselves enthusiastic about the possibility, and agreed that the weapon could not be effectively used against a small or purely military target. In the meeting notes, it is evident that they regarded the destruction of a large urban area containing at least one “military” (their scare quotes) facility to be the real marker of success for the weapon, apt to produce an awed and terrified reaction not only among the Japanese, but the rest of the world. The Target Committee recommended that the cities of Kyoto, Yokohama, Hiroshima, and Kokura be considered as possible targets (the final target list of Hiroshima, Kokura, Niigata, and Nagasaki was not agreed upon until late summer). 33 (No systematic consideration was made of using the weapon in the European theatre of the war, because it was clear that the war in Germany would be over by the time the bombs were ready for use. 34 )

Between these two committees, one can see both that the planning involved in the “use of the bombs” was much more than the short-term, and that several key scientists were themselves involved in some of these determinations. Bush, Conant, and Oppenheimer are in particular marked by their concern with the question of the postwar situation: all foresaw a world in which secret nuclear arms races would abound, and in which new weapons (like the hydrogen bomb and the ballistic missile) would greatly multiply the power of the weapons and their threat. Stimson was particularly convinced by such overtures, regarding the bomb as not merely a new weapon, but “as a new relationship of man to the universe,” as he opined at one Interim Committee meeting. These particular, well-connected historical actors addressed this fear with a hope for future international control of atomic energy, and believed that the best means of effecting this was to make the first use of the bomb particularly horrific, a wake-up call to the rest of the world. 35

One should not get the impression, however, that scientific perspectives were in general consulted on such policy matters. At Los Alamos, Oppenheimer worked to explicitly discourage discussions of long-term policy or even the question of the use of bombs, arguing that such matters were for political authorities to decide and not the scientific participants. (That he himself felt free to violate this notion repeatedly was, after the war, noted by several of his critics.) The high-intensity work at Los Alamos in the spring and summer of 1945 very nearly precluded such discussions in any event.

Other scientists, particularly Franck and colleagues at the University of Chicago, organized several committees for the discussion of “postwar problems,” as they put it, including the continued application of secrecy after the war (they were against it), and the need for funding postwar peaceful nuclear research (they were for it). One of these committees, on “Political and Social Problems,” penned a carefully-argued plea against the first use of the atomic bomb against a city. The Franck Report, as it was called, was considered by the Interim Committee, but opposed by Oppenheimer and several other high-ranking scientists who were consulted on the matter.

Leo Szilard, who had initially proposed the nuclear fission chain reaction and was involved in the creation of the first reactors, attempted in vain to raise substantive policy questions and was actively inhibited by the military chain of command. In short, the scientists who were in positions of influence lobbied strongly along lines that were acceptable to the military and political authorities, and the handful of others who were motivated to influence authorities in a different direction were deliberately blocked. 36

News of the successful results of the “Trinity” test was conveyed to Secretary of War Stimson and President Truman, both attending the Potsdam Conference, immediately after its detonation. By late July 1945, a strike order was drafted (by Groves) and approved (by Stimson) which specified that the “first special bomb” could be dropped “after about 3 August 1945” on one of the four approved targets. Another clause specified that, “additional bombs will be delivered on the above targets as soon as made ready by the project staff.” The weapon components were shipped to the island of Tinian in the South Pacific, along with a team of scientists and engineers who were necessary to assemble them. The 20th Air Force, led by Maj. Gen. Curtis LeMay, the architect of the firebombing campaign against Japan, aided in the logistics of “delivering” the weapons. 37

Weather conditions delayed the dropping of the first bomb, the gun-type weapon code-named “Little Boy,” over the city of Hiroshima until August 6, 1945. The mission was a success by the standards of the project: the city was completely disabled and about half of its occupants were killed, around 90% of them civilians. A coordinated “publicity” campaign was immediately launched by Manhattan Project officials to inform the world about the new weapon, including a Presidential press release and numerous newspaper stories written by a New York Times science journalist, William L. Laurence, who was “embedded” in (or co-opted by) the project. With no immediate response from the Japanese (they were, it was later discovered, verifying the truth of said statements, which was a difficult thing to do given the disruption of infrastructure caused by the bombing), and weather conditions increasingly unfavorable, the date of the second bombing attack was moved up by the forces on Tinian to August 9, 1945. This effort, using the implosion weapon code-named “Fat Man,” was more problematic: numerous errors and mishaps characterized the bombing run, with the bomb being detonated somewhat off-target on the secondary target city, Nagasaki. On August 10, 1945, Groves reported to his superiors that a third bomb would be ready for use by August 17, which resulted in the immediate order by Truman to halt further bombing until explicit Presidential authorization was given. Japan attempted to surrender with a condition (preservation of the Emperor) on August 10, which was rejected by the United States. After continued conventional bombing and a failed coup attempt, Japan surrendered unconditionally on August 14. The exact cause of surrender remains controversial: another “shocking” event, from the perspective of the Japanese high command, took place in that time period, namely the declaration of war against Japan by the previously-neutral Soviet Union, and the overwhelming Soviet invasion of Manchuria. Historians have long debated whether the atomic bombings, the Soviet invasion, or some combination of the two were responsible for the final decision to surrender, but in the Anglo-American sphere it has been common since 1945 to attribute it almost exclusively to the atomic bomb attacks, in part as an explicit justification of said attacks. 38

There have been many historical interpretations and arguments, both scholarly and popular, regarding the political decisions behind the use of the atomic bombs. Briefly, the crafters of the “orthodox” interpretation argued that the bombs were dropped exclusively to end the war as soon as possible, and were the product of a rational, deliberative process that took into account a delicate moral calculus, and had, on balance, a positive effect. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this interpretation was created very deliberately by a small group of Americans directly involved in the high-level atomic policymaking — Conant, Compton, Groves, Stimson, and Truman, among others — and was mobilized only in late 1946, when criticisms of the bombings were beginning to mount. The most important American critics from the time of the necessity of the bombings were, interestingly, high-ranking members of the US military, who felt their accomplishments were being overshadowed by a technological marvel. The various alternative (“revisionist”) positions have argued that the bombs were dropped to satisfy geopolitical concerns (e.g., to “scare Russia”), were unnecessary (e.g., the Japanese were “on the verge of surrender”), or were inhumane to the point of being war crimes (e.g., the deliberate massacre of tens of thousands of non-combatants). These debates have continued in various forms, and with various degrees of vehemence, over the decades, with a peak around the 50th anniversary of the bombings (1995), symbolized by the controversy over the Smithsonian Museum exhibit of the Enola Gay , the B-29 which dropped the bomb over Hiroshima. Both versions of the story have evidence in their favor, though both also have a tendency to “over-rationalize” a process that was in many ways quite haphazard. In general, historians of science and technology have tended to downplay the importance of high-level political deliberation, and instead emphasize the momentum that the project developed and the inordinate amount of resources consumed as it moved towards completion, making the use of the weapons almost inevitable. 39

The Manhattan Engineer District continued to exist, as an organizational entity, into the immediate postwar period. Despite the wartime attempts to streamline the question of transition into peacetime, there were significant delays. Some of these were inherent to the questions of broader nuclear policy: what should the peacetime footing of the new nuclear industry be? Should the United States proceed on a program to create more atomic bombs, and should it pursue greater innovation in their designs, or should it be angling for a world where atomic weapon development was intentionally limited through international agreements? Other delays, notably over legislation governing the domestic regulation and control of nuclear technology, were encouraged by former project scientists: a “Scientists’ Movement” formed specifically to derail the legislation proposed by the military which would, in the scientists’ eyes, maintain an undue degree of military control over atomic energy research and production. Organizations of scientists, such as the Federation of Atomic Scientists (later renamed Federation of American Scientists), composed largely of Manhattan Project veterans, engaged in lobbying Congress and the American people in favor of policies they considered crucial to avoiding a future arms race and future nuclear weapons use. Their policies were boiled down to a simple marketing mantra: “No secret, no defense, international control.” In short, an American monopoly on the atomic bomb could not be kept indefinitely in a world with arms races, no technology was likely to emerge that would render the threat of nuclear weapons impotent, and the only solution was an international treaty controlling the spread of the weapons.

The Scientists’ Movement had its one major success in pushing for the McMahon Bill, which in its initial form more closely followed their positions (but in its final form as the Atomic Energy Act of 1946 undermined many of them). The Act established a wholly civilian Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), in deliberate contrast to the military-run wartime operation. The AEC would take over all Manhattan Project operations starting in January of 1947, officially ending the Project. 40

The scientists involved in the Manhattan Project had mixed feelings about the legacy of their work. They had, in their eyes, opened up entirely new questions about the role of science in society. Even during the war, scientists at Los Alamos began to contemplate scenarios that would have previously been almost unthinkable: the ability, through the application of basic scientific discoveries, for civilization to render itself extinct. The Super, or hydrogen bomb, which had been envisioned as a possibility as early as 1941, put this in the starkest terms. At the end of the war, Los Alamos scientists calculated that while it might take the detonation of 10,000-100,000 implosion-style weapons “to bring the radioactive content of the Earth’s atmosphere to a dangerously high level,” it might require only “10 to 100 Supers” to do the same. When both the hydrogen bomb and the general question of proliferation became hot topics of debate only a few years after the war, the high level of engagement by scientists in questions of policy was seen by many as an explicit referendum on their seeming lack of concern when designing and making the first atomic bombs. The ethical questions of the “social responsibility of scientists” raised by the Manhattan Project—as well as the groundwork laid for close integration of universities and corporations in developing science useful for military applications—would resonate throughout the Cold War. 41

The Manhattan Project remains one of the prototypical examples of a massive and resource-intensive scientific-industrial-military-governmental collaboration that produced world-shattering results in an unusually short amount of time (the production phase of the project ran only 2.5 years, which is still the record for any national nuclear weapons program). As a result, there have been many invocations of the Manhattan Project as a symbol of technoscientific success: there are frequently calls for “Manhattan Projects” for things as diverse as solar power, cybersecurity, and cancer. But invoking the Manhattan Project as a symbol of intensive resource investment ignores many important factors, notably its decidedly undemocratic nature, its extensive use of militarized secrecy, its vast budget overruns, and the deep, difficult questions raised in its wake about whether it had resulted in a better or worse world.

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———, 2015. The Physics of the Manhattan Project . 3rd ed. Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer.

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Wellerstein, Alex, 2010. “Knowledge and the Bomb: Nuclear Secrecy in the United States, 1939-2008.” Ph.D. diss., Harvard University.

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In particular, a letter to President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed by Albert Einstein and warning of potential German development of atomic bombs has been central to the official histories, to the point of distorting both the letter’s contents (which do not argue for building, much less using, an atomic bomb) and its impact (it was less directly important to the making of the bomb than is often implied). To put the reasons for its prominence simply, if Einstein was in favor of something, who would dare oppose it? That Einstein was deliberately excluded from the Manhattan Project as a security risk makes for a somewhat bitter irony. See Jerome 2002. ↩

For examples of a physics-driven narrative, see Rhodes 1986; De Groot 2005; Badash 1995; Kevles 1987; and Smyth 1946. See also Kragh 1999, esp. chapter 18. ↩

E.g., Hughes 1989, chapter 5; Hounshell 1988, chapter 16; Reed 2014; Hewlett and Anderson 1962; Weart 2012; Campos 2015. ↩

The recently-declassified Manhattan District History is the source of immensely useful details on the operation of the project; see Wellerstein 2014 for contextual notes and copies of the files. Personnel figures come from Manhattan District History , Book 1, Volume 8 (“Personnel”), notably figures in Appendix A (charts 1, 1.1, and 6). The figures for 1943 were cited by a skeptical James Byrnes, head of the Office of War Mobilization, in an attempt to learn more about the project: James Byrnes to Henry Stimson (11 September 1943), Harrison-Bundy File, Roll 1, Target 8, Folder 8, “Manhattan (District) Project.” On the electrical supply, see Reed 2014, on 203; on patents, see Wellerstein 2008, on 78-79; on secrecy, see Wellerstein 2010. ↩

On the influence of science fiction imagery for early advocates of the effort, notably the work of H.G. Wells, which influenced both scientists and politicians, see Rhodes 1986, Farmelo 2013, and Weart 2012. ↩

Goldberg 1998, Groves 1962. ↩

Rhodes 1986, Hewlett and Anderson 1962, Weart 1976, Weart 2012, Kragh 1999. ↩

Walker 1989, Walker 1995, Weart 1976, Rhodes 1986, Gowing 1964, Farmelo 2013. ↩

Manhattan District History, Book 1, Volume 5 (“Fiscal Procedures”), Appendix B, table 3. ↩

Walker 1989, esp. chapter 2. ↩

Hewlett and Anderson 1962, Goldberg 1992. ↩

Rhodes 1986, Farmelo 2013. ↩

Hewlett and Anderson 1962, Reed 2014. ↩

Ibid. On the creation of the Manhattan Engineer District, see Jones 1985 and Norris 2002. The project had several code-names in the early days, including the Development of Substitute Materials, but in the end the blandness of the geographic nomenclature was appealing from a security standpoint. ↩

Reed 2015. ↩

On the various methods, see Jones 1985, chapters 6-8. ↩

On centrifuges, see Kemp 2012. On the other enrichment, see Reed 2015, chapter 5. For cost breakdowns of specific programs (here and elsewhere), see Hewlett and Anderson 1962, appendix 2. ↩

Jones 1985, chapters 6-8; Kiernan 2013. ↩

Jones 1985, chapter 9. Reed 2014 also contains an excellent overview of the technical processes, and Reed 2015 goes into even more depth. Personnel figures come from Manhattan District History , Book 1, Volume 8 (“Personnel”), notably figures in Appendix A (charts 1, 1.1, and 6). ↩

The 225-gram figure comes from Hanford Site History of Operations, 1 January 1944-20 March 1945, Book 4, Nuclear Testing Archive, Las Vegas, Nevada, document NV0716547: https://www.osti.gov/opennet/detail.jsp?osti-id=905678 . The Nuclear Testing Archive, available through the Department of Energy’s OpenNet website, is an immensely useful collection of records related to the American wartime and Cold War nuclear program. ↩

Findlay and Hevly 2011; Brown 2013. ↩

Norris 2002; Groves 1962, quote on 140. ↩

Bird & Sherwin 2005, Herken 2002, Thorpe 2006; data on staff at Los Alamos comes from Hawkins et al. 1983, on 484. ↩

Hoddeson et al. 1993; Schwartz 2008; Galison 1997, chapter 4; on the distribution of scientists by discipline, see the division graph in Hawkins et al. 1983, on 487. ↩

Hewlett and Anderson 1962. Of the memoirs, none demonstrates this disconnect in tone more than Feynman 1986. ↩

Hoddeson et al. 1993, chapters 7 and 13. ↩

Hoddeson et al. 1993, chapters 7 and 13; see also Reed 2014 and Reed 2015. ↩

Manhattan District History covers most of this far-flung work. On American efforts to acquire uranium during the war, see Helmreich 1986. Total uranium comes from Manhattan District History , Book 5, Volume 6 (“Electromagnetic Project – Operations”), Top Secret Appendix; plutonium data comes from C.S. Garner, “49 Interim Processing Program No. 24,” (30 August 1945), DOE OpenNet Document ALLAOSTI126018: https://www.osti.gov/opennet/detail.jsp?osti-id=896738 . ↩

Szasz 1984. ↩

Gordin 2007; Coster-Mullen 2013. Coster-Mullen’s book, though self-published (and constantly being updated), contains a wealth of primary sources, notes, and detailed information about the construction and deployment of the first atomic bombs. ↩

Hewlett and Anderson 1962, chapters 10-11; Sherwin 1987; Smith 1965. ↩

Malloy 2007. ↩

According to Groves’ later recollection, Roosevelt expressed some interest in using the weapon against Germany in December 1944. However, no weapons were yet available. See Norris 2002, 334. ↩

Sherwin 1987, with Stimson’s quote on 296. ↩

Smith 1965, Badash 1995, Norris 2002. ↩

Gordin 2007, Coster-Mullen 2013, Hasegawa 2005. ↩

Coster-Mullen 2013, Wellerstein 2010, Gordin 2007, Weart 2012, Walker 2005, Hasegawa 2005. ↩

Walker 2005, Walker 2016, Nobile 1995, Kohn 1996. For those who emphasize the “momentum” of the project, see Goldberg 1998, Gordin 2007, and Malloy 2007. ↩

Bernstein 1974, Hewlett and Anderson 1962, Smith 1965, Barnhart 2007. ↩

Manhattan District History , Book 8, Volume 2 (“Los Alamos–Technical”), on XIII-10. On the H-bomb, see Galison and Bernstein 1989. On later work and controversies, see, e.g., Leslie 1993. ↩

Alex Wellerstein, "Manhattan Project," Encyclopedia of the History of Science (April 2019), accessed 28 April 2024. https://doi.org/10.34758/swph-yq79 .

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History of Manhattan Project in US Research Paper

Introduction, the new technology derived from the manhattan project, benefits and dangers of the new technology, social and cultural effects of the manhattan project, political and technological effects of the manhattan project, the manhattan project and its use in medical science.

The Manhattan Project was a code name for a military project that was conducted during World War II between 1942 and 1946. It is however believed to have officially started in 1939 after President Roosevelt responded to a letter written by the famous physicist, Albert Einstein, expressing his concern that nuclear weapons were being developed by the Nazis. This concern was also fuelled by recent research that had shown uranium could produce large chain reactions that could be used in powerful bombs.

The purpose of the Manhattan project was to develop atomic bombs that were the first to ever be created in the world. The atomic bombs would be used in the War against Germany by countries such as the United States, the United Kingdom and Canada. The atomic bombs were made of nuclear material that would biologically destroy a large section of the target area and its inhabitants.

Albert Einstein drafted his letter to the President together with Leo Szilard who had escaped the Nazi regime in Germany to the United States. Both Einstein and Szilard believed that the German’s were creating nuclear weapons that would be used in destroying countries that opposed Fascist oppression.

President Roosevelt responded to Einstein’s letter by informing him that he had set up a committee that would be used to conduct research on uranium and its use in atomic bombs. President Roosevelt appointed Robert Oppenheimer to head the Manhattan Project and to oversee the research and project facilities that were based in various parts of America (Gosling, 1999).

The Manhattan project derived its name from the location of its early operation centers which was Manhattan Island in New York City. The island was chosen because of its port facilities as well as a large military presence. Other locations that were used in the production and research of the atomic bombs included New Mexico, Tennessee, Richland, Washington, Canada, Oak Ridge and Los Alamos. These locations were chosen because of their remoteness and because they allowed for secrecy of the research facilities.

The secrecy and remoteness made it possible to obtain large supplies of raw materials and labor as well as make decisions without any political interference. The amount of money that was invested in the project amounted to $2.2 billion dollars that was mostly used in conducting research on the effects of uranium and how this compound could be used in developing atomic bombs (Gosling, 1999).

The Manhattan Project has been considered by many chemical and nuclear scientists to be the revolution in technology, warfare and moral ethics. The technology that was used in creating the atomic bomb was viewed to be more advanced and developed than the scientific technology that existed before that time.

The high level of scientific and technological innovations used in separating the uranium neutrons was used in the development of chemical weapons and technology that would be used by the US military and scientific institutions (Hughes, 2002).

The Federation of American Scientists (FAS) was a nonpartisan organization established in 1945 by scientists and chemical engineers who were involved in the Manhattan Project. This organization was created because of the important part that science and technology played during the development of the atomic bomb.

The main goal of the FAS was to develop and advance scientific technology that would be used in providing solutions to security and scientific problems in the US. The main programs that fell under the FAS included the strategic security program, the bio security program, the earth systems program and the educational technologies program (FAS, 2010).

The strategic security program was developed to control atomic energy developed during the Manhattan Project. The program was focused on reducing the risks that came from nuclear exposure. The technologies that emerged from this program included portable air defense systems and chemical, nuclear weapons.

The bio security program concentrated on researching on ways that would be used to balance science and security. The scientific and technological work that emerged from the bio security program included biodefense research and biosecurity policies. The educational technologies program focused on how innovative technologies derived from the Project could be used for teaching and learning purposes (FAS, 2010).

The program designed and developed games and learning tools that would be used in the learning process. A major project of the educational technologies program is the Immune Attack game simulation that teaches high school students the inner workings of the body by navigating a tiny drone through the various circulatory and immune systems within the human body.

The Immune Attack project developed by FAS was a program that was meant to introduce molecular and cellular biology in a more visual way to high school and college students.

The earth systems program was developed to examine how the earth’s natural resources interacted with international security. This program was developed as a means of allowing people to use technology to better their lives. The technological innovations that emerged from this program included prefabricated components, composite materials, indoor air quality, and energy efficiency (FAS, 2010)

Since the development of the bomb, chemical scientists and physicists the world over continued to conduct research on how nuclear or atomic technology could be used to make even more powerful bombs. Research into how nuclear energy could be used to power submarines, ships and power whole cities was also been conducted.

This research was mostly based on the Atomic Energy Commission’s (AEC) atomic energy research program that saw the development of the hydrogen bomb, the nuclear-powered submarine and the first public utility nuclear power plant in the United States (Herrera, 2006).

The research was also based on the technology that went into the creation of the atomic bomb has been used in creating volatile anesthetic agents such as methoxyflurane, halothane and halogenated ethers. The atomic bomb technology also improved the research information that existed on organofluorine chemistry and halogen agents. This was possible when the chemical engineers and nuclear physicists developing the bomb conducted the exercise of separating uranium 235 from uranium 238 (Angelo, 2004).

The collaboration that has taken place over the years between state, military, industry and university specialists in the development of military and scientific technology has been a result of the Manhattan Project. The institutions that were used in creating the atomic bomb in the Manhattan Project formed the foundations of postwar technology.

The most important wartime technology organization that emerged in the US was the National Defense Research Committee which was later changed to the Organization for Scientific Research and Development (OSRD).

This organization oversaw many scientific and technological projects that were used during and before World War II. The two most important projects that emerged from the OSRD included radar research and uranium project research work. The radar research which was later renamed to Radlab developed 150 technological innovations in the form of radar and electronic systems (Herrera, 2006).

The energy crisis that took place in 1973 saw the United States experiencing a sharp increase in fuel and oil prices as well as related oil products. Until the energy crisis, energy research and development activities were mostly focused on the development of nuclear power which was under the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC).

The commission was formed by the U.S. Congress after the Manhattan Project to manage civilian and military projects that were related to nuclear and atomic energy in 1946. To respond to the energy crisis, the US Congress incorporated the research and project facilities that were used in the Manhattan Project into the Energy Research and Development Administration (ERDA) and the Atomic Energy Commission (Stine, 2009).

The technologies were proposed to improve the energy problem that was being experienced by the United States included developing alternative technology vehicles that would require less harmful energy sources, developing and building energy efficient buildings that would use no more than 50 percent of the energy used by buildings of a similar size and type, constructing a large scale solar thermal power plant that would be capable of generating 300 megawatts or more at a cheaper cost.

Other technologies included developing biofuels that do not exceed 105 percent and developing carbon capture facilities that will be used in large scale coal burning (Stine, 2009).

Some of the scientists who were involved in the Project used radionucleides in localizing radioactive isotopes that would be used in destroying cancerous cells. Before the Project was started, cancer patients were mostly treated through surgery which most of the times was not successful.

But after the Project was completed radiographic and chemotherapy technology was developed by engineers involved in the project to treat cancerous cells and tumors. This involved introducing the radioactive isotopes in the radiographic and chemotherapy treatments (Lenoir & Hays, 2010).

The Manhattan Project also saw the improvement and development of Aerospace technology such as the American heavy bombers (B-29 Super fortress) that were used in the Japan bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The sophisticated weaponry used these bombers included the bombsights, radar technology and high performance engines that would be used in bombing locations. This technology mostly relied on the scientific innovations that were used in the Manhattan Project (Kelly & Rhodes, 2007).

While the Manhattan Project achieved its goal of creating the first atomic bomb, there were several benefits and dangers that emerged from the technology that was used to develop the bomb. The benefits of the Manhattan project and the technology used in developing the nuclear weapons were used in the medical field to perform radiography operations as well as chemotherapy for cancer patients.

The atomic bomb technology was also used in developing CAT scan machines that would be used in hospitals and medical practices. Another benefit of the Manhattan Project and its technology was that it led to the end of World War II and the Cold War (Elish, 2008).

The fact that the United States possessed a powerful weapon that would cause devastating effects such as those experienced in Hiroshima ended any form of communist era and dictatorship.

The large scale defense program also paved the way for other government research installations that would be used in developing military weapons. The technology that was used in developing the nuclear bombs also paved the way for scientific research work that would be used in developing alternative energy sources from oil such as nuclear or atomic power.

The project also demonstrated the fast response of the government and top scientists when it came to responding to the Nazi threat. The development of the bomb in such a short period of time also showed that the US government was determined to protect the livelihoods of American citizens regardless of the consequences. The dangers or pitfalls of the Manhattan Project were in evidence after the Hiroshima bombings in Japan (Kelly & Rhodes, 2007).

The rain that accompanied the bomb explosion was heavily contaminated with radioactive particles that led to radiation poisoning on the affected civilians. High levels of poisoning led to the death of many innocent people while those who survived the bombings suffered from sever burns, vomiting, hair loss, loss of eyesight, nausea and vomiting. The Manhattan Project was also infiltrated by spies from the Soviet Union who were also keen in developing nuclear weapons.

Klaus Fuchs was a Soviet spy who had infiltrated the Los Alamos research facility as a scientist. Fuchs gathered information and technology that was used in developing the atomic bomb and relayed it to the Soviet Union who speeded up the development of the Soviet bomb. Another Soviet spy was Donald Maclean who also relayed information on the potential of the atomic bomb to the Soviet Union (Kelly & Rhodes, 2007).

Other spies included Theodore Hall, Allan Nunn May and Bruno Pontecorvo who all served as scientists in the Manhattan Project. Such a high number of spies in the United States created an environment of anxiety and fear amongst the American Citizens feared an attack by the German Nazis. The Manhattan Project also increased the emotional and psychological well being of American civilians and civilians in the rest of the world because of the threat of nuclear power and its devastating consequences.

The period of World War II and the Cold War saw the United States experiencing the varied and far reaching effects of the two wars. The country experienced an increase in economic activity and the production, manufacturing industry began to pick up. There were notable developments in aerospace, electronic and atomic energy technology which was mostly attributed to the Manhattan Project.

While the Manhattan Project was lauded by many to be a major breakthrough in research and development as well as in energy technology, there were fundamental forces that would seem unethical in today’s socio cultural context that drove the creation of this historical technological achievement (Koistinen, 2004).

These forces included the ability to change the program from a threat or cause of national concern to a concrete goal that can be used in future innovations and the future use of the technology that was used in developing the atomic bomb. The first factor describes the goal of the Manhattan Project which was to respond to a threat of enemy development of a nuclear bomb by the Nazis in Germany.

The second factor describes the use of the technology which was primarily shifted to the government which had little or no concern on the environment and the devastating consequences of the nuclear weapons on innocent civilians (Stine, 2009).

Most of the researchers who took part in the Manhattan Project weighed their ethical values when they got involved in the development of a weapon that would cause unprecedented death and destruction when released to the general population. The risks had to be outweighed against the anticipated benefits of using the biological product during the war.

The knowledge that the US government was in possession of nuclear weapons also created some levels of apprehension and anxiety amongst the American citizens. This was at a time when the country was experiencing poor economic growth and the American citizens were struggling to make ends meet. The quality of life during World War II and the Cold War was also poor as many American’s lived under the constant fear of being attacked by the Soviet’s and the Germans (Koistinen, 2004).

The Manhattan Project marked the beginning of nuclear science that transformed the everyday lives of the average American. Civilians found themselves within a new global context that was characterized by the presence of dangerous atomic bombs and nuclear weapons.

The detonation of the first atomic bomb in Hiroshima and Nagasaki marked the end of one era and the beginning of another. The localized effects of the Manhattan Project challenged the social purpose of the project as well as the ethical practices of the US government, politicians, scientists and engineers involved in the making of the bomb.

The bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was viewed by most Americans to be an unthinkable engagement by the government in ending human life. The nuclear bomb was seen to be an incomprehensible national and cultural project whose effects constantly exceeded the modern logistics needed to build nuclear facilities.

The communities that were most affected by the Manhattan Project included the Los Alamos community in New Mexico where most of the nuclear tests were performed. The community members benefited from the research facility as they were able to gain employment in the laboratories (Masco, 2006).

The political and technological effects of the Manhattan Project were felt on different levels which were the individual, domestic and the international level. On the individual level, many people who were involved in the Project had their ethics and moral values tested when they were called upon to create a nuclear weapon that would kill many people within a certain radius. The ethical and moral integrity of the scientific and engineering team was put to the test because of the nuclear bombs.

Robert Oppenheimer who was the lead director of the Manhattan Project faced several ethical dilemmas as a scientist because of his role in the creation of a deadly weapon that was deemed to be illegal and detrimental to both human beings and the natural environment.

When President Roosevelt died, the helm of presidency was continued by Harry Truman who and made the decision to drop the bomb in Hiroshima after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. His decision was viewed by many people around the world to have been unnecessary as it lead to the loss of thousands of innocent civilian lives in Hiroshima. The bomb also caused unnecessary health complications to civilians who were within the radius of the nuclear bomb explosion (Edmondson, 2009).

The domestic effects of the Manhattan Project were felt in the United States when the money used in developing the bomb would be used in developing the country’s defense budget from that period to the present. The creation of the atomic bomb also made the United States to be the world’s superpower when it came to its military and defense.

The negative effects of the project to the United States residents was that it created a certain amount of fear in the American residents as they feared infiltration by communist dictators and sympathizers. This fear saw Senator Joseph McCarthy performing a witch hunt in the US that was meant to flash out the communist sympathizers and spies from the country. The result of this witch hunt was the destruction of many civilian lives that were suspected to be communist sympathizers (Kelly & Rhodes, 2007).

The international effects of the Manhattan Project saw the face of world politics during that time changing completely. After the Hiroshima bombings in Japan, the Soviet Union began developing itself to be the next country to develop nuclear power. The country was able to gain information on how to create an atomic bomb from Klaus Fuchs who was a Manhattan Project scientist and Soviet spy.

This situation created a security dilemma between the two countries as each increased its nuclear arsenal to counter any attacks from the other. The effects of this situation were that each of the countries sunk a huge amount of funds in developing the nuclear arsenals which saw them facing huge debts. There was also emotional and psychological effects on US citizens who lived with anxiety and fear of being attacked by the Soviet Union at any time (Kelly & Rhodes, 2007).

Since the end of the Cold War, policy makers have raised concerns over importance of federal investment in scientific research. Policy makers have called for a new contract to be developed between science and society that would foster a closer working relationship between scientific laboratories and scientific academicians. Such a model for the science and society contract is known as the Human Genome Initiative.

This initiative has been viewed as a potential Manhattan Project for biological work among scientists, engineers and physicists who are mostly concerned with the commercial production of biomedical technology that will be used in medical science. The Human Genome Initiative incorporates the same approaches and techniques that were used by the Manhattan Project in developing warfare weapons that would be used during the Cold War (Lenoir & Hays, 2010).

Lenoir and Hays (2010) note that after the Cold War there has always been a Manhattan Project in the field of biomedicine and medical science. The scientists and physicists who were involved in the Manhattan Project research contemplated on how to incorporate the project’s plans into various military and civilian fields such as physics, biophysics and nuclear medicine.

One of the initial research efforts that preceded the Manhattan Project was the use of radionucleides in physiological studies to localize radioactive isotopes that would be used in destroying cancerous cells.

These research efforts began in 1923 and they became fully operational in 1943 when the Manhattan Project was fully underway. The Manhattan Project also created a substantial amount of medical research programs that were used in the medical care of project workers that were based in Oak Ridge, Washington and Hanford. These programs were seen to be important as they created the means of reducing the hazardous side effects of radioactive materials (Lenoir & Hays, 2004).

The Manhattan Project has been viewed as the genesis of research and development in the field of scientific technology and atomic energy creation. The various locations that were used during the Manhattan Project were converted into research laboratories and institutions that are now being used for further scientific and technological developments. The creation of the atomic and nuclear bombs heralded the emergence of nuclear energy that could be used in powering huge cities and supporting the energy consumption of civilians.

The project also ensured that there were theoretical breakthroughs in the field of nuclear physics and chemistry that has improved experimentation and research work in the field. The Manhattan Project is therefore an important program in the history of the world because of the technological developments that were invented during the period of the project.

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Edmonson, N., (2009), Technological foundations of cyclical economic growth: the case of the United States economy . New Jersey: Transaction publishers.

Elish, D., (2008). The Manhattan Project . Canada: Children’s Press.

Federation of American Scientists (FAS) (2010). Programs. Web.

Gosling, F.G., (1999). The Manhattan Project: making the atomic bomb . Washington: History Division, Department of Energy.

Herrera, G.L., (2006). Technology and international transformation: the railroad, the atom bomb and the politics of technological change . Albany, New York : State University of New York Press.

Hughes, J., (2002). The Manhattan Project: big science and the atom bomb . New York: Columbia University Press.

Kelly, C.C., & Rhodes, R., (2007). The Manhattan Project: the birth of the atomic bomb in the words of its creators, eyewitnesses and historians . New York: Black Dog and Leventhal Publishers.

Koistinen, P. A.C., (2004). Arsenal of World War II: The Political Economy of American Warfare, 1940-1945 . Lawrence, Kansas: University Press of Kansas.

Lenoir, T., & Hays, M., (2010). The Manhattan project for biomedicine . Web.

Masco, J., (2006). The nuclear borderlands: the Manhattan project post Cold War . New Jersey: Princeton University Press.

Stine, D.D., (2009). The Manhattan Project, the Apollo program, and the federal energy technology R&D programs: a comparative analysis . New York: Gale Cengage Learning.

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IvyPanda. (2024, February 8). History of Manhattan Project in US. https://ivypanda.com/essays/manhattan-project/

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IvyPanda . 2024. "History of Manhattan Project in US." February 8, 2024. https://ivypanda.com/essays/manhattan-project/.

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Bibliography

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July 21, 2023

Oppenheimer Almost Discovered Black Holes Before He Became ‘Destroyer of Worlds’

Before leading the Manhattan Project, J. Robert Oppenheimer co-authored a paper explaining that the most massive stars must eventually become what we would now call a black hole

By Meghan Bartels

J. Robert Oppenheimer ( right ) applied the principles of general relativity developed by Albert Einstein ( left ) to determine that what we now know as a black hole can form under certain circumstances.

Corbis Historical via Getty Images

J. Robert Oppenheimer, now the protagonist of a much-anticipated film hitting theaters on July 21, is today most known for his scientific leadership of the U.S. Manhattan Project, the World War II–era crash program to build the first-ever atomic bombs. But just a few years earlier, Oppenheimer had found himself pondering very different “weapons” of mass destruction: black holes—although it would be decades before that name arose.

“It was influential; it was visionary,” says Feryal Özel, an astrophysicist at the Georgia Institute of Technology, of Oppenheimer’s work on black holes and neutron stars, the superdense corpses of expired massive stars. “He has a lasting impact.” Özel is a founding member of the Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration, which released the first-ever image of a black hole in 2019 —80 years after Oppenheimer co-authored a paper theorizing that such objects could exist.

Özel isn’t the only leading modern physicist to admire Oppenheimer’s work on black holes. “It stands up completely; there are no flaws,” says Kip Thorne, an emeritus professor of physics at the California Institute of Technology. Thorne won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2017 for his work with the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO), which in 2015 detected gravitational waves from two colliding black holes . “It went so far beyond anything that anybody else had ever done,” Thorne says of Oppenheimer’s “tour de force” paper exploring black holes, which runs only five pages long. “It is amazing what is contained there.”

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Oppenheimer’s brief foray into astrophysics began with a 1938 paper about neutron stars, which continued in a 1939 installment that further incorporated the principles of Einstein’s general theory of relativity. He then published a third paper on black holes on September 1, 1939—but at the time, it was scarcely noticed because this was the very day Germany invaded Poland, launching World War II. Oppenheimer never wrote on the topic again.

Even if it hadn’t been overshadowed by war, Oppenheimer’s work on neutron stars and black holes “was not understood to be terribly significant at the time,” says Cathryn Carson, a historian of science at the University of California, Berkeley.

Each paper was written with a different member of the swarm of graduate students and postdoctoral scholars that Oppenheimer carefully cultivated. These protégés facilitated his ability to jump between research topics—and ultimately, according to Thorne and others, represent one of his most important contributions to physics.

Oppenheimer’s climactic third paper, written with his student Hartland Snyder, explores the implications of general relativity on the universe’s most massive stars. Although the physicists needed to include some assumptions to simplify the question, they determined that a large enough star would gravitationally collapse indefinitely—and within a finite amount of time, meaning that the objects we now know as black holes could exist.

“Eventually there should emerge what we would now call a singularity at the origin, a point of infinite density where, in some sense, spacetime itself rips, and there should become what we would now call an event horizon,” says David Kaiser, a physicist and historian of science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “This is all in that paper—not in the modern vocabulary, but the mathematics is absolutely recognizable to us today.”

In the decades since Oppenheimer and Snyder’s black hole bombshell, scientists have confirmed that the same principles hold even without the simplifying assumptions initially put in place. Thorne says that the paper is particularly staggering, given contemporary work from an even more famous physicist—the one who developed general relativity in the first place.

“[Albert] Einstein published almost simultaneously a paper in which he argued that you cannot have a star or any object shrink to the size of what we now call the gravitational radius or the size of a black hole,” Thorne says. “Einstein was completely wrong.”

But despite the merit of Oppenheimer and Snyder’s work on black holes, the topic simmered on physicists’ back burner for decades—and today is perhaps best known as a sobering example of how brilliant ideas can be overlooked, says Manuel Ortega-Rodríguez, a theoretical physicist at the University of Costa Rica.

“It struck me as really, really interesting and fascinating and scary that such an idea was there for like 25 years, and nobody paid attention,” he says. “That means that today we could have an equally revolutionary idea right now that the community is ignoring.”

Spies Who Spilled Atomic Bomb Secrets

As part of the Soviet Union’s spy ring, these Americans and Britons leveraged their access to military secrets to help Russia become a nuclear power

Marian Smith Holmes

Digital Editorial Director

Despite being an ally during World War II, the Soviet Union launched an all-out espionage effort to uncover the military and defense secrets of the United States and Britain in the 1940s. Within days of Britain's highly classified decision in 1941 to begin research on building an atomic bomb, an informant in the British civil service notified the Soviets. As the top-secret plan to build the bomb, called the Manhattan Project, took shape in the United States, the Soviet spy ring got wind of it before the FBI knew of the secret program's existence. Barely four years after the United States dropped two atomic bombs on Japan in August 1945, the Soviet Union detonated its own in August 1949, much sooner that expected.

The Soviets did not lack for available recruits for spying, says John Earl Haynes, espionage historian and author of Early Cold War Spies . What drove these college-educated Americans and Britons to sell their nations' atomic secrets? Some were ideologically motivated, enamored of communist beliefs, explains Haynes. Others were motivated by the notion of nuclear parity; one way to prevent a nuclear war, they reasoned, was to make sure that no nation had a monopoly on that awesome power.

For many years, the depth of Soviet spying was unknown. The big breakthrough began in 1946 when the United States, working with Britain, deciphered the code Moscow used to send its telegraph cables. Venona, as the decoding project was named, remained an official secret until it was declassified in 1995. Because government authorities did not want to reveal that they had cracked the Russian code, Venona evidence could not be used in court, but it could trigger investigations and surveillance hoping to nail suspects in the act of spying or extract a confession from them. As Venona decryption improved in the late 1940s and early 1950s, it blew the cover of several spies.

Investigations resulted in the execution or imprisonment of a dozen or more people who had passed atomic secrets to the Soviets, but no one knows how many spies got away. Here are some of the ones we know about:

John Cairncross Considered the first atomic spy, John Cairncross was eventually identified as one of the Cambridge Five, a group of upper-middle class young men who had met at Cambridge University in the 1930s, became passionate communists and eventually Soviet spies during World War II and into the 1950s. In his position as secretary to the chairman of Britain's scientific advisory committee, Cairncross gained access to a high-level report in the fall of 1941 that confirmed the feasibility of a uranium bomb. He promptly leaked the information to Moscow agents. In 1951 when British agents closed in on other members of the Cambridge spy ring, Cairncross was interrogated after documents in his handwriting were discovered in a suspect's apartment. Ultimately he was not charged, and according to some reports, asked by British officials to resign and keep quiet. He moved to the United States where he taught French literature at Northwestern University. In 1964, questioned again, he admitted to spying for Russia against Germany in WWII, but denied giving any information harmful to Britain. He went to work for the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization in Rome and later lived in France. Cairncross returned to England a few months before his death in 1995, and went to his grave insisting that the information he gave Moscow was "relatively innocuous." In the late 1990s when Russia under its new democracy made public its KGB files from the last 70 years, the documents revealed that Cairncross was indeed the agent who provided "highly secret documentation [of] the British Government to organise and develop the work on atomic energy."

Klaus Fuchs Dubbed the most important atomic spy in history, Klaus Fuchs was a primary physicist on the Manhattan Project and a lead scientist at Britain's nuclear facility by 1949. Just weeks after the Soviets exploded their atomic bomb in August 1949, a Venona decryption of a 1944 message revealed that information describing important scientific processes related to construction of the A-bomb had been sent from the United Sates to Moscow. FBI agents identified Klaus Fuchs as the author.

Born in Germany in 1911, Fuchs joined the Communist Party as student, and fled to England during the rise of Nazism in 1933. Attending Bristol and Edinburgh universities, he excelled in physics. Because he was a German national he was interned for several months in Canada but returned and cleared to work on atomic research in England. By the time he became a British citizen in 1942, he had already contacted the Soviet Embassy in London and volunteered his services as a spy. He was transferred to the Los Alamos lab and began handing over detailed information about the bomb construction, including sketches and dimensions. When he returned to England in 1946, he went to work at Britain's nuclear research facility, and passed information on creating a hydrogen bomb to the Soviet Union. In December 1949, authorities, alerted by the Venona cable, questioned him. In a matter of few weeks, Fuchs confessed all. He was tried and sentenced to 14 years in prison. After serving nine years he was released to East Germany, where he resumed work as a scientist. He died in 1988.

Theodore Hall For nearly half a century Fuchs was thought to have been the most significant spy at Los Alamos, but the secrets Ted Hall divulged to the Soviets preceded Fuchs and were also very critical. A Harvard graduate at age 18, Hall, at 19, was the youngest scientist on the Manhattan project in 1944. Unlike Fuchs and the Rosenbergs, he got away with his misdeeds. Hall worked on experiments for the bomb that was dropped on Nagasaki, the same type that the Soviet detonated in 1949. As a boy, Hall witnessed his family suffer during the Great Depression and his brother advised him to drop the family name Holtzberg to escape anti-Semitism. Such harsh realities of the American system affected young Hall, who joined the Marxist John Reed Club upon arrival at Harvard. When he was recruited to work at Los Alamos, he was haunted, he explained decades later, by thoughts of how to spare humanity the devastation of nuclear power. Finally, on leave in New York in October 1944, he decided to equalize the playing field, contacted the Soviets and volunteered to keep them apprised of the bomb research.

With the help of his courier and Harvard colleague, Saville Sax (a fervent communist and aspiring writer), Hall used coded references to Walt Whitman's  Leaves of Grass  to set up meeting times. In December 1944 Hall delivered what was probably the first atomic secret from Los Alamos, an update on the creation of the plutonium bomb. In the fall of 1946 he enrolled in University of Chicago, and was working on his PhD in 1950 when the FBI turned its spotlight on him. His real name had surfaced in a decrypted message. But Fuch's courier, Harry Gold who was already in prison, could not identify him as the man, other than Fuchs, that he had collected secrets from. Hall never went to trial. After a career in radiobiology, he moved to Great Britain and worked as a biophysicist until his retirement. When the 1995 Venona declassifications confirmed his spying from five decades earlier, he explained his motivations in a written statement: "It seemed to me that an American monopoly was dangerous and should be prevented. I was not the only scientist to take that view." He died in 1999 at age 74.

Harry Gold, David Greenglass, Ethel and Julius Rosenberg When Klaus Fuchs confessed in January 1950, his revelations would lead to the arrest of the man to whom he had passed the atomic secrets in New Mexico, even though the courier had used an alias. Harry Gold, a 39-year-old Philadelphia chemist had been ferrying stolen information, mainly from American industries, to the Soviets since 1935. When the FBI found a map of Santa Fe in Gold's home, he panicked and told all. Convicted in 1951 and sentenced to 30 years, his confession put authorities on the trail to other spies, most famously Julius and Ethel Rosenberg and Ethel's brother David Greenglass. After being drafted into the Army, David Greenglass was transferred to Los Alamos in 1944, where he worked as a machinist. Encouraged by his brother-in-law, Julius Rosenberg, a New York engineer and devoted communist who actively recruited his friends to spy, Greenglass soon began supplying information from Los Alamos.

In addition to Fuchs and Hall, Greenglass was the third mole at the Manhattan Project, although they did not know of each other's covert work. In 1950 as the atomic spy network unraveled, Gold, who had picked up material from Greenglass in New Mexico, positively identified Greenglass as his contact. That identification turned the investigation away from Ted Hall, who initially was a suspect. Greenglass confessed, implicating his wife, his sister and his brother-in law. To lessen their punishment, his wife came forward, providing details of her husband and her in-laws' involvement. She and Greenglass had given Julius Rosenberg handwritten documents and drawings of the bomb, and Rosenberg had devised a cut-up Jell-O box as a signal. The Venona decryptions also corroborated the extent of Julius Rosenberg's spy ring, though they were not made public. The Rosenbergs, however, denied everything and adamantly refused to name names or answer many questions. They were found guilty, sentenced to death in 1951 and despite pleas for clemency, executed on June 19, 1953 in the electric chair at Sing-Sing prison in New York. Because they chose to cooperate, Greenglass received 15 years and his wife was never formally charged.

Lona Cohen Lona Cohen and her husband Morris were American communists who made a career of industrial espionage for the Soviets. But in August 1945, she picked up some Manhattan Project secrets from Ted Hall and smuggled them past security in a tissue box. Soon after the United States dropped the atomic bombs on Japan, authorities ramped up security for the scientists in the Los Alamos region. After rendezvousing with Hall in Albuquerque and stuffing Hall's sketch and documents under the tissues, Lona discovered that agents were searching and questioning train passengers. Posing as a hapless woman who had misplaced her ticket, she successfully distracted police, who handed her the "forgotten" box of tissues, whose secret papers she spirited to her Soviet handlers.

When the investigations and trials of the early 1950s got scorchingly close, the Cohens fled to Moscow. In 1961 the couple, under aliases, resurfaced in a London suburb, living as Canadian antiquarian booksellers, a cover for their continued spying. Their spy paraphernalia included a radio transmitter stashed under the refrigerator, fake passports, and antique books concealing stolen information. At their trial the Cohens refused to spill their secrets, once again thwarting any lead to Ted Hall's spying. They received 20 years, but in 1969 were released in exchange for Britons incarcerated in the Soviet Union. Both received that country's highest hero award before their deaths in the 1990s.

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Brian Wolly is the digital editor of Smithsonian.com

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New Group Joins the Political Fight Over Disinformation Online

The group intends to fight what its leader, Nina Jankowicz, and others have described as a coordinated campaign by conservatives and their allies to undermine researchers who study disinformation.

By Steven Lee Myers and Jim Rutenberg

Two years ago, Nina Jankowicz briefly led an agency at the Department of Homeland Security created to fight disinformation — the establishment of which provoked a political and legal battle over the government’s role in policing lies and other harmful content online that continues to reverberate.

Now she has re-entered the fray with a new nonprofit organization intended to fight what she and others have described as a coordinated campaign by conservatives and others to undermine researchers, like her, who study the sources of disinformation.

Already a lightning rod for critics of her work on the subject, Ms. Jankowicz inaugurated the organization with a letter accusing three Republican committee chairmen in the House of Representatives of abusing their subpoena powers to silence think tanks and universities that expose the sources of disinformation.

“These tactics echo the dark days of McCarthyism, but with a frightening 21st-century twist,” she wrote in the letter on Monday with the organization’s co-founder Carlos Álvarez-Aranyos, a public-relations consultant who in 2020 was involved in efforts to defend the integrity of the American voting system.

The inception of the group, the American Sunlight Project, reflects how divisive the issue of identifying and combating disinformation has become as the 2024 presidential election approaches. It also represents a tacit admission that the informal networks formed at major universities and research organizations to address the explosion of disinformation online have failed to mount a substantial defense against a campaign, waged largely on the right, depicting their work as part of an effort to silence conservatives.

Taking place in the courts, in conservative media and on the Republican-led House Judiciary Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government, the campaign has largely succeeded in eviscerating efforts to monitor disinformation, especially around the integrity of the American election system.

Many of the nation’s most prominent researchers, facing lawsuits, subpoenas and physical threats, have pulled back.

“More and more researchers were getting swept up by this, and their institutions weren’t either allowing them to respond or responding in a way that really just was not rising to meet the moment,” Ms. Jankowicz said in an interview. “And the problem with that, obviously, is that if we don’t push back on these campaigns, then that’s the prevailing narrative.”

That narrative is prevailing at a time when social media companies have abandoned or cut back efforts to enforce their own policies against certain types of content.

Many experts have warned that the problem of false or misleading content is only going to increase with the advent of artificial intelligence.

“Disinformation will remain an issue as long as the strategic gains of engaging in it, promoting it and profiting from it outweigh consequences for spreading it,” Common Cause, the nonpartisan public interest group, wrote in a report published last week that warned of a new wave of disinformation around this year’s vote.

Ms. Jankowicz said her group would run advertisements about the broad threats and effects of disinformation and produce investigative reports on the backgrounds and financing of groups conducting disinformation campaigns — including those targeting the researchers.

She has joined with two veteran political strategists: Mr. Álvarez-Aranyos, formerly a communications strategist for Protect Democracy, a nonpartisan group that seeks to counter domestic authoritarian threats, and Eddie Vale, formerly of American Bridge, a liberal group devoted to gathering opposition research into Republicans.

The organization’s advisory board includes Katie Harbath, a former Facebook executive who was previously a top digital strategist for Senate Republicans; Ineke Mushovic, a founder of the Movement Advancement Project , a think tank that tracks threats to democracy and gay, lesbian and transgender issues; and Benjamin Wittes, a national security legal expert at the Brookings Institution and editor in chief of Lawfare .

“We need to be a little bit more aggressive about how we think about defending the research community,” Mr. Wittes said in an interview, portraying the attacks against it as part of “a coordinated assault on those who have sought to counter disinformation and election interference.”

In the letter to congressional Republicans, Ms. Jankowicz noted the appearance of a fake robocall in President Biden’s voice discouraging voters in New Hampshire from voting in the state’s primary and artificially generated images of former President Donald J. Trump with Black supporters, as well as renewed efforts by China and Russia to spread disinformation to American audiences.

The American Sunlight Project has been established as a nonprofit under the section of the Internal Revenue Code that allows it greater leeway to lobby than tax-exempt charities known as 501(c)(3)s. It also does not have to disclose its donors, which Ms. Jankowicz declined to do, though she said the project had initial commitments of $1 million in donations.

The budget pales in comparison with those behind the counteroffensive like America First Legal, the Trump-aligned group that, with a war chest in the tens of millions of dollars, has sued researchers at Stanford and the University of Washington over their collaboration with government officials to combat misinformation about voting and Covid-19.

The Supreme Court is expected to rule soon in a federal lawsuit filed by the attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana accusing government agencies of using the researchers as proxies to pressure social media platforms to take down or restrict the reach of accounts.

The idea for the American Sunlight Project grew out of Ms. Jankowicz’s experience in 2022 when she was appointed executive director of a newly created Disinformation Governance Board at the Department of Homeland Security.

From the instant the board became public, it faced fierce criticism portraying it as an Orwellian Ministry of Truth that would censor dissenting voices in violation of the First Amendment, though in reality it had only an advisory role and no enforcement authority.

Ms. Jankowicz, an expert on Russian disinformation who once served as an adviser to Ukraine’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, stepped down shortly after her appointment. Even then, she faced such a torrent of personal threats online that she hired a security consultant. The board was suspended and then, after a short review, abolished.

“I think we’re existing in an information environment where it is very easy to weaponize information and to make it seem sinister,” Mr. Álvarez-Aranyos said. “And I think we’re looking for transparency. I mean, this is sunlight in the very literal sense.”

Ms. Jankowicz said that she was aware that her involvement with the new group would draw out her critics, but that she was well positioned to lead it because she had already “gone through the worst of it.”

Steven Lee Myers covers misinformation and disinformation from San Francisco. Since joining The Times in 1989, he has reported from around the world, including Moscow, Baghdad, Beijing and Seoul. More about Steven Lee Myers

Jim Rutenberg is a writer at large for The Times and The New York Times Magazine and writes most often about media and politics. More about Jim Rutenberg

Align Your Steps: Optimizing Sampling Schedules in Diffusion Models

Diffusion models (DMs) have established themselves as the state-of-the-art generative modeling approach in the visual domain and beyond. A crucial drawback of DMs is their slow sampling speed, relying on many sequential function evaluations through large neural networks. Sampling from DMs can be seen as solving a differential equation through a discretized set of noise levels known as the sampling schedule. While past works primarily focused on deriving efficient solvers, little attention has been given to finding optimal sampling schedules, and the entire literature relies on hand-crafted heuristics. In this work, for the first time, we propose Align Your Steps, a general and principled approach to optimizing the sampling schedules of DMs for high-quality outputs. We leverage methods from stochastic calculus and find optimal schedules specific to different solvers, trained DMs and datasets. We evaluate our novel approach on several image, video as well as 2D toy data synthesis benchmarks, using a variety of different solvers, and observe that our optimized schedules outperform previous handcrafted schedules in almost all experiments. Our method demonstrates the untapped potential of sampling schedule optimization, especially in the few-step synthesis regime.

Our optimized schedules can be used at inference time in a plug-and-play fashion. Please see our quickstart guide to get started with using our schedules in diffusers and the colab notebook for example code with Stable Diffusion 1.5 and SDXL.

The sampling schedule is iteratively optimized to reduce the discretization error. As the optimization proceeds, the generated images become sharper and more detailed.

Optimizing Sampling Schedules in Diffusion Models

Diffusion models (DMs) have proven themselves to be extremely reliable probabilistic generative models that can produce high-quality data. They have been successfully applied to applications such as image synthesis, image super-resolution, image-to-image translation, image editing, inpainting, video synthesis, text-to-3d generation, and even planning. However, sampling from DMs corresponds to solving a generative Stochastic or Ordinary Differential Equation (SDE/ODE) in reverse time and requires multiple sequential forward passes through a large neural network, limiting their real-time applicability.

Solving SDE/ODEs within the interval \([t_{min}, t_{max}]\) works by discretizing it into \(n\) smaller sub-intervals \(t_{min} = t_0 < t_1 < \dots < t_{n}=t_{max}\) called a sampling schedule, and numerically solving the differential equation between consecutive \(t_i\) values. Currently, most prior works adopt one of a handful of heuristic schedules, such as simple polynomials and cosine functions, and little effort has gone into optimizing this schedule. We attempt to fill this gap by introducing a principled approach for optimizing the schedule in a dataset and model specific manner, resulting in improved outputs given the same compute budget.

Assuming that \( P_{true} \) represents the distribution of running the reverse-time SDE (defined by the learnt model) exactly, and \( P_{disc} \) represents the distribution of solving it with Stochastic-DDIM and a sampling schedule, using the Girsanov theorem an upper bound can be derived for the Kullback-Leibler divergence between these two distributions (simplified; see paper for details) \[ D_{KL}(P_{true} || P_{disc}) \leq \underbrace{ \sum_{i=1}^{n} \int_{t_{i-1}}^{t_{i}} \frac{1}{t^3} \mathbb{E}_{x_t \sim p_t, x_{t_i} \sim p_{t_i | t}} || D_{\theta}(x_t, t) - D_{\theta}(x_{t_i}, t_i) ||_2^2 \ dt }_{= KLUB(t_0, t_1, \dots, t_n)} + constant \] A similar Kullback-Leibler Upper Bound (KLUB) can be found for other stochastic SDE solvers. Given this, we formulate the problem of optimizing the sampling schedule as minimizing the KLUB term with respect to its time discretization, i.e. the sampling scheduling. Monte-Carlo integration with importance sampling is used to estimate the expectation values and the schedule is optimized iteratively. We showcase the benefits of optimizing schedules on a 2D toy distribution (see visualization below).

Modeling a 2D toy distribution: Samples in (b), (c), and (d) are generated using 8 steps of SDE-DPM-Solver++(2M) with EDM, LogSNR, and AYS schedules, respectively. Each image consists of 100,000 sampled points.

Experimental Results

To evaluate the usefulness of optimized schedules, we performed rigorous quantitative experiments on standard image generation benchmarks (CIFAR10, FFHQ, ImageNet), and found that these schedules result in consistent improvements across the board in image quality (measured by FID) for a large variety of popular samplers. We also performed a user study for text-to-image models (specifically Stable Diffusion 1.5), and found that on average images generated with these schedules are preferred twice as much . Please see the paper for these results and evaluations.

Below, we showcase some text-to-image examples that illustrate how using an optimized schedule can generate images with more visual details and better text-alignment given the same number of forward evaluations (NFEs). We provide side-by-side comparisons between our optimized schedules against two of the most popular schedules used in practice (EDM and Time-Uniform). All images are generated with a stochastic ( casino ) or deterministic ( lock ) version of DPM-Solver++(2M) with 10 steps. Hover over the images for zoom-ins.

Stable Diffusion 1.5

casino Text prompt: "1girl, blue dress, blue hair, ponytail, studying at the library, focused" Model: Dreamshaper 8

casino Text prompt: "An enchanting forest path with sunlight filtering through the dense canopy, highlighting the vibrant greens and the soft, mossy floor"

casino Text prompt: "A digital Illustration of the Babel tower, 4k, detailed, trending in artstation, fantasy vivid colors"

casino Text prompt: "A glass-blown vase with a complex swirl of colors, illuminated by sunlight, casting a mosaic of shadows on a white table"

casino Text prompt: "A delicate glass pendant holding a single, luminous firefly, its glow casting warm, dancing shadows on the wearer's neck"

casino Text prompt: "A wise old owl wearing a velvet smoking jacket and spectacles, with a pipe in its beak, seated in a vintage leather armchair"

casino Text prompt: "A close-up portrait of a baby wearing a tiny spider-man costume, trending on artstation" Model: Dreamshaper 8

DeepFloyd-IF

casino Text prompt: "Capybara podcast neon sign"

casino Text prompt: "Long-exposure night photography of a starry sky over a mountain range, with light trails"

casino Text prompt: "A tranquil village nestled in a lush valley, with small, cozy houses dotting the landscape, surrounded by towering, snow-capped mountains under a clear blue sky. A gentle river meanders through the village, reflecting the warm glow of the sunrise"

casino Text prompt: "An ancient library buried beneath the earth, its halls lit by glowing crystals, with scrolls and tomes stacked in endless rows"

casino Text prompt: "A bustling spaceport on a distant planet, with ships of various designs taking off against a backdrop of twin moons"

casino Text prompt: "A set of ancient armor, standing as if worn by an invisible warrior, in front of a backdrop of medieval banners and weaponry."

casino Text prompt: "An elephant painting a colorful abstract masterpiece with its trunk, in a studio surrounded by amused onlookers."

casino Text prompt: "Tiger in construction gear, perched on aged wooden docks, formidable, curious, tiger on the waterfront, textured, vibrant, atmospheric, sharp focus, lifelike, professional lighting, cinematic, 8K"

casino Text prompt: "Cluttered house in the woods, anime, oil painting, high resolution, cottagecore, ghibli inspired, 4k"

casino Text prompt: "An old, creepy dollhouse in a dusty attic, with dolls posed in unsettling positions. Cobwebs, dim lighting, and the shadows of unseen presences create a chilling scene"

lock Text prompt: "A stunning, intricately detailed painting of a sunset in a forest valley, blending the rich, symmetrical styles of Dan Mumford and Marc Simonetti with astrophotography elements"

lock Text prompt: "Create a photorealistic scene of a powerful storm with swirling, dark clouds and fierce winds approaching a coastal village. Show villagers preparing for the storm, with detailed architecture reflecting a fantasy world"

lock Text prompt: "Cyberpunk cityscape with towering skyscrapers, neon signs, and flying cars"

Stable Video Diffusion

We also studied the effect of optimized schedules in video generation using the open-source image-to-video model Stable Video Diffusion. We find that using optimized schedules leads to more stable videos with less color distortions as the video progresses. Below we show side-by-side comparisons of videos generated with 10 DDIM steps using the two different schedules.

Amirmojtaba Sabour, Sanja Fidler, Karsten Kreis

VASA-1: Lifelike Audio-Driven Talking Faces Generated in Real Time

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