An Existential Threat

Had fission been discovered in some other era, it might not have set off alarms. But its discovery in Berlin in December 1938, weeks after Munich and Kristallnacht, raised the Nazi threat level to CRITICAL – albeit, for Szilard, Wigner, and a few other nuclear physicists. Even without the bomb, Hitler and fascism would, over the next 6 years, account for the deaths of an astonishing 45 million Europeans, including 27 million Soviets (1 in 6) and the 6 million victims of Hitler’s “Final Solution to the Jewish Question” (2 out of 3 of all European Jews). Our story’s drama hinges on our getting today’s audience to absorb the existential threat created by the chance intersection in late 1938 of Hitler’s megalomania and fission’s discovery – the possibility of Hitler with the bomb.

The clock was ticking, but three years would pass before FDR would write Bush: “I think the whole thing should be pushed not only in regard to development, but also with regard to time. This is very much of the essence.” As the climate scientist Bill McKibben has said of today’s great looming threat, climate change, “It’s a timed test. If you don’t solve it fast, then you don’t solve it.”

Missing: The Fuel Story

People are puzzled to learn that the Manhattan Project workforce numbered more than 600,000.  Their surprise owes to the fact that the story told usually centers on the scientific struggle at Los Alamos – often all but ignoring Oak Ridge and Hanford. The story of the production of the two fissile fuels – every bit as important as the bomb-design story – needs to be restored. Arguably, the fuel story – with its interplay between scientists, engineers, builders, and others; its staggering engineering and management challenges – is the more interesting and relatable angle.

Photo: The K-25 gaseous diffusion plant at Oak Ridge, the largest building in the US when completed in 1944. Bohr had it right in 1939, when he said that producing kilograms of an isotope – invisible bits of nothing – would require building a “huge factory.”

Developers

Groves, caricatured in some films, is mischaracterized in nearly all. True, he’s a blunt, ambitious, mission-first Army officer. There are plenty of those in 1942. But what distinguishes Groves is that he has spent the prior year driving the largest development project in history – America’s World War II mobilization construction – while observing his boss, Somervell, secure Congressional funding, outmaneuver FDR, and steer the Construction Division from the Quartermaster Corps to the Corps of Engineers. The experience has transformed the 44-year-old Groves into a big-time operator – using the Corps to drive American industry, building everything from the Pentagon to airfields to munitions plants. In the month of June 1942 alone, he signs $10 billion (2019$) in construction contracts; he is one of few qualified to lead a project that will spend $35 billion in 3 years.  Groves brings a developer’s vision to the Manhattan Project – relentlessly pushing to deliver the facilities Bush and Conant’s scientists require. (Meanwhile, Somervell, selected by Marshall and promoted to 4-star rank, leads the 2-million-strong Army Service Forces (ASF) – the global logistics and administrative organization supporting the Army and Army Air Force that help win World War II.)

Photos: Somervell and Groves, Army Engineers who graduated sixth and fourth, respectively, in the West Point classes of 1914 and 1918. The Pentagon in 1943.

Bush’s Institutional Innovation and Big Science

America’s bomb effort would almost certainly have died in Act 2 (1940-1941) were it not for Bush… “the paradigm of the engineer – a man who got things done.” Bush knows technology could play a decisive role in the coming war; the government needs to step in and fund university R&D. Time is of the essence – yet it takes Briggs’ Uranium Committee 17 weeks to deliver the first $100,000 (2019$; 0.0003% of the ultimate investment) to Fermi and Szilard at Columbia. Bush’s NDRC – coming three months later in June 1940 – promises to fix that. Informed by his experience at multiple institutions – MIT, NACA, and CIW – Bush introduces what Conant later calls a “revolutionary scheme”: rather than centralize war-related research, the NDRC (and subsequently, the OSRD) will conduct “federalism by contract” – networking leading university laboratories on weapons R&D projects.  OSRD-led research during the war, totaling $7.5 billion, produces, in addition to the bomb, radar, the proximity fuse, and antimalarial medicines. Bush’s 1945 summary of the OSRD’s wartime work, Science, The Endless Frontier, calls for expanded government funding of science – setting the stage for our era of Big Science, which is marked by megaprojects like the Apollo Mission and CERN’s Large Hadron Collider, and feeding the rise of the military-industrial complex Eisenhower challenges in 1961.

Photo: Bush’s “federalism by contract” as illustrated in the 1946 March of Time newsreel “Atomic Power.”

An All-Star Team and “The Hungarian Conspiracy”

Hitler’s fanatical antisemitism, scientific ignorance, and strategic blunders redound to the benefit of the Allies’ bomb work. Perhaps his most fateful mistake: passage of the April 1933 Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service – barring non-Aryans from university professorships. It sets off an exodus of leading Jewish scientists (Einstein, Fermi, Szilard, Wigner, Teller, Meitner, Frisch, Peierls, Placzek, Bethe, Pauli, Rabi, Segre, Ulam, Weisskopf, von Neumann and others – a veritable all-star team of theoreticians and experimentalists, including eleven past and future Nobel Prize winners), who flee continental Europe and join the opposing teams in Britain and America. Szilard learns the difference a day can make, escaping Berlin the day before the Nazis first impose travel restrictions on Jews. Following his chain-reaction insight, he is increasingly alert. Upon hearing the news of fission, he is quick to test for – and find – secondary neutrons. “That night there was very little doubt in my mind that the world was headed for grief.” Szilard is the catalyst throughout Act 1 (1939). He pulls Wigner and Teller into his marketing contrivance, the Association for Scientific Research. (Tuve approvingly labels the three “the Hungarian conspiracy.”) Wigner prompts Fermi’s meeting with the Navy. Szilard and Wigner recruit Einstein. Szilard recruits Sachs and ghostwrites Einstein’s letter; he chases funding and begs and borrows materials for experimentation. Szilard and Fermi – a mismatched but complementary pair – partner in early 1940 in pursuit of a chain reaction. Fermi – the “Italian navigator” – gets the credit for achieving the first controlled chain reaction in December 1942, but it’s Szilard who, in earlier iterations, surfaced the idea of a graphite moderator, confirmed its suitability, and envisioned a lattice arrangement (not to mention, Szilard who, in 1933, imagined the chain reaction). On 2 December 1942 Szilard watches from the balcony of the Stagg Field squash court as Fermi steers CP-1 to the chain reaction he had imagined, while crossing the street in London some eight years before. “There was a crowd there and then Fermi and I stayed there alone. I shook hands with Fermi and said I thought this day would go down as a black day in the history of mankind.”

Photo: The team at the Met Lab at the University of Chicago in 1943, with Fermi and Zinn on the left; Woods and Szilard, on the right.

A Story-Driven History

Straightforward political drama drives Acts 1 and 2. A threat is perceived; a warning, communicated; action, proposed. Will an adequate response be authorized and funded in time? Key stories: Szilard and Rabi debate a 10% risk, the “wop” Fermi briefs Hooper’s team, Szilard and Wigner seek out Einstein, etc.… “Enemy aliens” Frisch and Peierls investigate fission, Conant learns the British find a bomb plausible, Oliphant learns Briggs has deposited the MAUD draft in his safe, etc.… Act 3 (execution: the Manhattan Project, 1942-1945) presents a bigger and more complicated storytelling challenge. Rather than stick with a strict chronology and rotate between locations, or separately recount the chronology for each location, our preliminary concept calls for three episodes centered on three general topics – 1) construction, 2) (industrial) engineering, and 3) (bomb) design – the first two episodes weighted towards Oak Ridge and Hanford (with updates on the work at Los Alamos); the third, to Los Alamos (with updates on the race to produce the fuels). The three episodes will reveal the different cultures and illustrate recurring themes through more of the history’s signature stories: Bush resists Groves’ selection, Nichols requisitions the Treasury’s silver, Groves negotiates the Project’s WPB priority… the boomtowns take shape, Y-12’s start-up crashes to a halt, Nichols’ Y-12 operators (the “Calutron Girls”) beat Oppie’s physicists, Oppie discovers his plutonium pre-detonation problem, Dupont overrules the Met Lab on the reactor specifications, Ferguson builds S-50 in less than 90 days, etc., etc.

Photo: The “Calutron Girls.”

Missing: Uranium

For all its importance to the story, documentaries on the making of the bomb have skipped the great background story of uranium. (Imagine watching a documentary about the oil industry without ever seeing crude oil.) One has to turn to science shows like Uranium – Twisting the Dragon’s Tail (2015) to see pitchblende, uranium ore, and yellow cake. Groves introduces Sengier at the start of Now It Can Be Told, acknowledging the huge significance of his shipping 1,250 tons of uranium ore from the Congo to Staten Island in 1940 – a decision that freed the Project from the enormous task of mining the resource. The ore from Shinkolobwe was exceptionally rich in uranium oxide – over 65% on average, a hundred times the concentration of American and Canadian ores. Shinkolobwe pulls up a relatable thread of relevant, interesting, and sometimes shocking stories: King Leopold II and the late-nineteenth-century rape of the Congo; Madame Curie’s year-long separation of a gram of radium, radium’s use (in cancer treatment and on watch dials), and its soaring value; Union Miniere du Haut Katanga’s mining operation and Sengier’s role, and the 1935 closing of Shinkolobwe after a collapse in radium’s price, owing to competition from Canada’s Eldorado Mine, and the residual supply of “worthless” ore (similar to the tailings at Joachimstal); finally, Sengier’s discussions with Joliot-Curie and Tizard in May 1939 that inform him that he controls the equivalent of Black Panther’s (fictional) vibranium.

Photos: Groves and Sengier in 1945. A colorful sample of uraninite. A postcard of Union Miniere’s mine, featuring the French spelling “Chinkolobwe.”

Hurry Up!

The discovery of fission launches a 6-year race. At the outset, physicists vie for credit for findings related to the new discovery. By the time Hitler invades Poland in September 1939, Germany, France, America, Britain, Russia, and Japan are conducting bomb-related fission research. By Pearl Harbor, the race has narrowed to America (supported by its British and Canadian allies) and Germany.  As the threat of Hitler with the weapon diminishes in 1944, the mounting death toll in Europe and the Pacific drives Manhattan Project scientists like John Wheeler. In July, he receives a two-word postcard from his brother Joe, an infantryman serving in the brutal Italian campaign. “Hurry up!” Months later, Wheeler learns Joe is dead. From Wheeler’s memoir:

“Joe hoped for a miraculous means of ending a terrible war… I am convinced that the United States…could have had an atomic bomb sooner and ended the war sooner – perhaps a year sooner…if scientific and political leaders had committed themselves to the task earlier. Between mid-1944 and mid-1945, more than 3 million lives were lost in battle… Government-sanctioned murders accounted for at least 12 million more, including the intensified killing of Jews in the Holocaust. The total is so unimaginably great, the loss so horrible, that it staggers the mind. Yet one cannot escape the conclusion that an atomic bomb program started a year earlier and concluded a year sooner would have spared 15 million lives, my brother Joe’s among them.”

Photos: Collecting bodies after the February 1945 firebombing of Dresden. “Dead Americans at Buna Beach” – the first photograph of battle deaths to be published in the US during the war, September 1943.

Analog: The Oil, Refining, and Auto Industries

STEM graduates might appreciate just how quickly the Manhattan Project industrializes fission, but a broader audience could benefit from a yardstick based on more familiar technologies. A good analog exists: the evolution of the oil, refining, and auto industries – which, respectively, took a raw resource (oil), refined it into fuels (gasoline and diesel), and developed internal combustion engines (reciprocating and rotary) to power machines (horseless carriages…cars and trucks). A resource… fuels… and engines. Amazingly, Manhattan accomplished in six years what took the oil, refining, and auto industries roughly six decades – transforming laboratory work and scientific hypotheses into industrial processes and practical output. The story of the bomb is almost as much about project management, engineering, and construction as it is about science.

Photo: Henry Ford’s first horseless carriage – the 2-cylinder, 4-horsepower “Quadricycle” – in 1896.

“The Manhattan Project of…” and “Hitler’s Bomb”

The Manhattan Project has long been held up as an example of what the United States can accomplish.  While true, the idea misses the point that, absent conditions created by Hitler – primarily, a looming world war – FDR might not have been able to bypass Congress and commit the extraordinary resources required. The Corps of Engineers’ budget for mobilization construction eventually tops $270 billion (2019$), allowing FDR to bury the Project’s $35 billion in line items labeled “Procurement of New Materials” and “Expediting Production.” In a sense, the bomb can be credited to Hitler. His antisemitic policies force Jewish scientists to flee Germany; fear he will get the bomb causes the same scientists to sound the alarm; most important, his warmongering gives rise to the enormous American mobilization effort. Absent Hitler, the first practical application of fission would almost certainly have been nuclear power, and it’s plausible that scientists and politicians might have established the means to preempt development of a bomb in the 1940s.

Photo:  A 1941 Series 700 barracks, designed to house 63 Army recruits during basic training – one of 30,000 temporary buildings constructed during World War II to provide housing for 5.3 million trainees.

Missing: Essential Allies

In retrospect, only the US had the means to build the bomb during the war: the talent, wealth, industry, and, distinct from other nations, physical security. For all that, the US would not have had the bomb in 1945 were it not for the efforts of two allies that go unmentioned in most film accounts. First, Sengier ships some 1,250 tons of exceptionally high-grade uranium ore from Shinkolobwe to Staten Island in December 1940, creating the essential inventory the Project acquires two years later. Then, at a point in mid-1941 when Bush is considering shelving the American effort in favor of other R&D, Oliphant travels to Berkeley to rouse Lawrence, who prompts Compton, who persuades Conant, who circles back to Bush. The Churchill-endorsed MAUD Report arrives a week later, giving Bush the answers he has sought for six months: preliminary concepts for producing fissile fuel and assembling a weapon appear feasible and could yield a bomb in time to affect this war. So persuaded, Bush secures FDR’s approval of an expanded and accelerated bomb effort on October 9 – a month before Compton delivers his feasibility report. Years later, Szilard writes of Oliphant: “If Congress knew the true history of the atomic energy project, I have no doubt but that it would create a special medal to be given to meddling foreigners, and Dr. Oliphant would be the first to receive one.” (In fairness, Szilard, the catalyst of Act 1, would be first in line for the award.)

Photos: Churchill and Einstein in 1933. Oliphant, visiting Lawrence at Berkeley on September 22, 1941.

Missing: Multiple Cultures

Despite notable weakness in plotting and style, the first film account of the Manhattan Project, MGM’s 1947 The Beginning or the End, gave much better coverage to important aspects of the history than many of the films, docudramas, and documentaries that began appearing in the 1980s. Working in the months immediately after the war, and drawing on Manhattan members’ fresh impressions, the scriptwriters captured a truth ignored by later filmmakers: a technological enterprise as vast and complex as the Manhattan Project depends on the collaboration of multiple disciplines. The 110-minute film made an effort to present a cross-section of the Project’s diverse elements – acknowledging the British and Canadians, and introducing corporate leaders involved in the fuel story by name (Dupont’s Carpenter, Kellex’s Keith, et al). In restoring the larger, three-act story, we need to include not only the scientists, (military) project managers, and policy-makers, but also the engineers, builders, and corporate executives; to introduce their distinct cultures and biases; and to show how they overcame their differences and adjusted their processes to accomplish the mission. Each group faced enormous challenges. For instance, builders had to expedite the construction of enormous factories before plans were completed, and engineers had to invent and finalize industrial designs without benefit of pilot plant testing. Each had to gamble – and bet on their enterprise partners.

Photos:  Title screens from the trailer for the 1947 film The Beginning or the End.

Decisions

Whole films have focused on the 1945 decision to drop the bomb. To better understand that final decision, we need to observe key decision-making over the course of the three-act drama, and do so not backwards from present, but forwards from fission’s discovery on the eve of war. While the most consequential, the decision to drop the bomb was one of a half-dozen top-level policy calls in Acts 1-2 that advance the effort (FDR’s October 1939 remark to Watson to “take action”; FDR’s June 1940 instruction to Bush to absorb Briggs’ passive Uranium Committee, FDR’s October 1941 agreement with Bush’s proposal to expand and accelerate the S-1’s work; the June 1942 “OK FDR” approval of Bush’s proposal for what would become the Manhattan District; and Conant and Bush’s September 1942 call for new leadership, that led to the selection of Groves and launch of the Manhattan Project). That series of decisions can engage an audience wondering how today’s political leaders are going to respond to the threat posed by climate change. And decision-making during Act 3 (Conant’s decision to run three “horses” and skip pilot plants; Groves’ decisions to refit and expand Y-12, to retool the barrier plant, and build S-50; etc.) can remind the audience of the mindset driving the enterprise and set the stage for Stimson’s Interim Committee, Franck’s report, and Truman’s decision.

Photo: Bush and Pegram (minus Conant) reenacting the 6 December 1941 Cosmos Club meeting for the 1946 March of Time newsreel “Atomic Power.”

Primer: Energy

Our story’s impact rests, in part, on the fact that fission isn’t tens or hundreds or thousands of times more powerful than other other energy sources – but millions of times greater. Off the chart. Our challenge: conveying that power. Meitner and Frisch’s initial calculation that a 0.5 eV neutron yields a 2 MeV fission – an 8 million-fold increase – is stunning, but only nuclear physicists think in electron-volts. Shifting to a familiar unit, one gram, others note that the fission of a U235 atom can make a grain of sand jump, and that there are 2.5e+21 atoms in a gram of U235 – but the average person lives in a world of low-order exponents (e.g., financial standouts are millionaires or billionaires; the largest economies are measured in trillions). We need a straightforward metaphor.  The Project’s PR team and journalists of the day compared the fissile materials to chemical energy sources (coal, oil, TNT).  Today’s infographics could add impact. Beyond the magnitude, lies a second point that needs to be conveyed: the fundamental difference between chemical and atomic reactions. It’s easy to imagine reactions that follow from the physical mixing of two ingredients; we do that all the time. It’s harder to imagine radioactivity – as Becquerel noted, it was almost like magic.

Photo: A graphic from the 1945 newsreel “Atom Bomb and Reds Doom Japan” – comparing a single bomb’s fissile fuel to 20,000 tons of TNT (200 times larger than the 100-ton test conducted at Trinity in June 1945) and, more relatable to an audience that might have used several tons of coal to heat a home over a winter, 5 million pounds of coal – 2,500 tons.

Missing: Acts 1 and 2

The Manhattan Project – the subject of numerous documentaries – is only half the story of the making of the bomb. The full 1938-1945 history needs its Act 1 (threat identified and acknowledged) and Act 2 (solution conceived, feasibility assessed, authority issued) – the first half of the 6-year race – restored. Complex issues aren’t simply identified one moment; attacked, the next. Politics intervenes; most projects never make it to Act 3 (execution). The Germans and French are the first to get underway in 1939, but their initiatives are quickly lost amidst other war priorities once combat ensues. The Americans act in October 1939 but soon stall. The British start last but advance quickest and help salvage the uncertain American effort in 1941. Acts 1 and 2 are when the critical path is most variable – filled with the sort of relatable drama that propelled the 2018 Hulu docudrama The Looming Tower (covering the failure to respond to Al Qaeda’s threat in time to prevent the 9/11 attacks). The ’40-’41 critical path is just short enough to permit production of bombs in mid-’45. Quicker resolution of the issues of the threat and feasibility might have seen production of a bomb in mid-’44, saving millions of lives. Those are the stakes.

Photos: Szilard, catalyst of America’s Act 1, talking to Lawrence at the APS annual meeting in Washington in April 1935; and with Einstein, re-enacting their August 1939 meeting (which yields the widely misunderstood letter to FDR) for the 1946 newsreel “Atomic Power.”

Scaling Up – Lab Science… and Organizations

The fuel story centers on an amazing, billion-fold, industrial scaling-up of lab science. In turn, that achievement hinges on an extraordinary organizational expansion, pulled off in 1941 by two remarkable leaders, both engineers, who possess an uncommon talent for getting things done. Bush reorganizes a vast and growing military-related university R&D effort – first mobilized in 1940 under his National Defense Research Committee (NDRC) – into the powerful Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD). At the same time, Somervell (supported by Hopkins and Madigan) resolves a decades-long political fight over control of the Army Construction Division – maneuvering it out of the Quartermaster Corps and into the Corps of Engineers. Absent these two strategic thinkers, the institutions they champion, and the organizational changes they drive, there would be no bomb in 1945.

Photos:  An early 20-microgram sample of plutonium; the 6.2-kilogram Trinity bomb core will require 310 million times the sample. A chart of total Manhattan Project manpower, showing a monthly peak of 125,000 in mid-’44. Vannevar Bush in 1941. Somervell in 1941, testifying before Congress on issues relating to his Quartermaster predecessor.

An “Overripe” Discovery…Already Imagined

Most of us are unaware just how recently (the first four decades of the 1900s – within the lifetimes of the grandparents of Gen Xers and millennials) Thomson, Rutherford, Bohr, and other atomic pioneers built the  physics foundation of much of today’s technology. The first expectation of nuclear power and “atomic bombs” comes little more than a hundred years ago, in 1914, when H.G. Wells draws on Soddy to write The World Set Free (science fiction that, in due course, exerts a strong influence on Szilard, Lindemann, and Churchill). By 1938, the discovery of fission is, in the words of the physicist Philip Morrison, “overripe.” Fermi, disdaining Noddack, misses it in 1934; Curie and Savitch come close in 1937; Abelson feels he would have spotted it in early 1939. That Hahn’s discovery (secured by Meitner and Frisch’s interpretation) occurs in Hitler’s Berlin in December 1938, on the eve of war, is a remarkable coincidence that raises interesting questions. What if Fermi had listened to Noddack and discovered fission in 1934? What if Chamberlain hadn’t appeased Hitler at Munich in October 1938 – and Germany had gone to war before Hahn got his unexpected barium result? For that matter, what if Hitler had, like his archenemy Churchill, been inspired by Wells’ vision of technology just over the horizon?

Photos: The World Set Free.  A portrait of Wells in 1911. Other remarkable sci-fi of the time: Fred Allhoff’s 1940 Lightning in the Night, serialized in Liberty magazine, which imagines the US bringing down Hitler in 1945 by threatening to drop the bomb on Berlin.

Messengers and Memos

How can specialists hope to effectively communicate looming threats and possible options to policy-makers? (Recall that, a month prior to the 9/11 World Trade Center attack, the Presidential Daily Brief titled “Bin Ladin Determined to Attack in the US” failed to   provoke policy-makers to connect the dots.) The early course of the American and British efforts – the latter start six months late but soon jump months ahead – offers an interesting case study in messaging, featuring two of the history’s more unlikely and eccentric characters, Sachs and Lindemann. Act 1 – America: Selected by Szilard and Einstein to warn FDR (after their misguided first choice, Lindbergh – a leading isolationist and staunch opponent of FDR – doesn’t respond to their recruiting letter), Sachs directs the drafting of the message to FDR. Sachs, an economist with a wide-ranging curiosity, is a verbose, often impenetrable writer. (A White House aide covers one of his reports with a note that laments, “I could wish that Dr. Sachs understood the value of clear and simple English! I have difficulty in making out what he is driving at.”) Sachs proceeds to assemble a dossier for FDR – not just the 3-page Einstein letter (which buries the lede) but a 4-page Szilard memo, his own memo, and supporting documents. So equipped, Sachs fails on 11 October 1939 but, using the story of Fulton and Napoleon as a metaphor, succeeds the following morning. Assigned by General Watson to Briggs and his “Uranium Committee” (two mid-level ordnance officers), the American response moves fitfully over the following nine months. Act 1, Britain: Frisch and Peierls’ March 1940 memo packages the hypothesis of a bomb, a concept for its production, and commentary on its strategic implications into a tidy four pages. Oliphant transmits it to Tizard; a month later Thomson, Chadwick, and British science are fully engaged in an effort that will morph into the MAUD Committee, then Tube Alloys. Act 2, Britain: Not content with Thomson’s May 1941 draft, Chadwick spends a month rewriting the MAUD Report – producing a clear and concise assessment of the program’s feasibility. Lindemann – “the Prof”; a master of the executive summary who, sitting outside Churchill’s office, pens some 2,000 one-page memos during the war – devotes two-and-a-half pages to introducing Chadwick’s MAUD Report.  Six days later, on 7 June 1941, Churchill signs off.  Act 2, America: Bush, aiming to get his experts to answer the “simple” question of whether a bomb can be built, commissions a National Academy of Science review in April 1941. By June, he is all but ready to drop the project, when a series of prompts (from Britain via Bainbridge and Oliphant; then, Lawrence, Compton, and Conant) leads him to repeat his question again, and again. A third Academy review, led by Compton, is underway when, on October 3, the MAUD Report reaches Bush, giving him a clear answer to his questions: a bomb is feasible in this war. Six days later, Bush meets with FDR and VP Wallace and, drawing on the credibility he has established in leading the NDRC and OSRD the prior sixteen months, secures the authority to greatly expand and accelerate bomb research, ahead of engaging the Corps of Engineers in an all-out production effort. The Americans and British provide a clear and comprehensible contrast – a case study in how those who can spot a threat and imagine a response go about securing necessary authority and support.

Photos: Sachs, reenacting his October 1939 White House visits, in a postwar newsreel. Frederick Lindemann – “the Prof.”

Context: The War

Early film accounts like 1946’s “Atomic Power” and 1947’s The Beginning or the End made no reference to the fighting in the Pacific and Europe. They didn’t need to; Americans would have easily tied any Manhattan dates to major markers in the war – 1941: Pearl Harbor; 1942: Midway, Guadalcanal, and North Africa; 1943: Stalingrad and Italy; 1944: D-Day, the Philippines, and the Battle of the Bulge; 1945: Iwo Jima, Okinawa, and V-E Day. The same couldn’t be said for audiences decades later – or now. The war overseas needs to be woven into the story to remind the audience of the pressure on, and support for, the Manhattan Project. More generally, the documentary should use graphics and timelines to give the audience different perspectives of the race: the evolving specifications for the mass of uranium and plutonium required; forecast and actual construction completion dates; monthly manpower and spending data for CEW and HEW; target and actual U235 production from Y-12, K-25, S-50 (and the combination thereof); target and actual plutonium production at Hanford – in other words, the data the leaders would have reviewed to understand where they stood in relation to a finish line that, owing to advancing science and engineering, was shifting throughout the Project.

Photos: February 1943 – The Soviets defeat the Germans at Stalingrad, as construction of Y-12 and X-10 begins. December 1944 – The Americans repulse the Germans at the Battle of the Bulge, as the Hanford reactors, after the 3-month xenon poisoning delay, go into operation.