(l-r) Moderator David Keim, Alan B. Carr, Ray Smith and Dick Groves share a light moment during a panel discussion of the Manhattan Project. Photo: Carlos Jones
Three panelists provide their personal insights on the Manhattan Project efforts of Gen. Leslie B. Groves and Robert Oppenheimer, two opposites in temperament who excelled as a partnership.
A discussion of the history of the Manhattan Project, focusing largely on the project’s military director, Gen. Leslie B. Groves, and the scientific director, Robert Oppenheimer, keynoted ORNL’s observance of its 80th anniversary on Wednesday (10/4/2023) in the Iran Thomas Auditorium.
Three panelists provided their personal insights on the effort that has become synonymous with massive enterprises done under urgent circumstances. Los Alamos National Laboratory senior historian Alan B. Carr, Oak Ridge city historian Ray Smith and Dick Groves, documentarian and grandson of Gen. Groves, shared details about the relationship between Groves and Robert Oppenheimer, the project’s scientific director, and the motivations behind the race to the bomb. The discussion was moderated by David Keim, the lab’s communications and community engagement director, and included questions from audience members in person and online.
Groves explained his grandfather was given the monumental task of ramping up a construction project of a scale that would consume the nation. Gen. Groves was an accomplished engineer and manager who was put in charge of a wartime mobilization that reached expenditures of $10 billon per month in today’s dollars and created cities out of deserts and farmlands.
“The construction challenges were enormous,” Groves said. His grandfather had experienced an accelerated effort in the construction of the Pentagon under Gen. Brehon Somervell, whose style was to order the massive building’s design on Thursday with a Monday delivery deadline. Groves inherited the Pentagon project, which prepared him for the Manhattan Project task that proceeded in similar, if not greater, haste.
In 1939 physicist Niels Bohr brought news of Germany’s fission discovery overseas, which elicited a meeting of the minds of leading scientists including Eugene Wigner, Enrico Fermi, Leo Szilard, Robert Wheeler and Arthur Compton. The assembly that included scientists who had fled the Nazi regime in Europe led to Albert Einstein’s endorsement of the famous letter to President Franklin D. Roosevelt calling for a U.S. weapons program.
Carr praised Gen. Groves’ ability to “listen and adapt,” particularly in working with his scientific director, Robert Oppenheimer, who convinced Groves to adopt a university approach to recruiting the brainpower he would need for the project. Oppenheimer had a lieutenant colonel’s uniform, rarely worn, believing correctly that scientists would much rather work for a university, with its networking opportunities, than join the military.
Groves described his grandfather’s style as that of a highly trained professional. “He wasn’t a screamer and he never cursed, but he knew what he was doing.”
With E.O. Lawrence heading the electromagnetic separation effort at Y-12 and Compton and Fermi in charge of the project at X-10 (ORNL) to obtain plutonium from irradiated uranium, Smith noted Oppenheimer’s visits to Oak Ridge were infrequent at best. (The famous photo of Oppenheimer at the Guest House in Oak Ridge, by storied photographer Ed Westcott, was made after the war.) Groves and Oppenheimer were opposites in temperament but good partners, Carr said, noting Oppenheimer as LANL director was technically Groves’ subordinate.
Gen. Groves received his momentous assignment on Sept. 17, 1942. In early 1943 tracts of land in Anderson and Roane counties were acquired under Groves for the X-10 and Y-12 projects. Meanwhile, Oppenheimer was recruiting talent, confronted with the task of convincing the flower of the nation’s scientists to join a secretive effort toward an uncertain outcome, and run by the military to boot. He was successful, Carr said, because he was persuasive and charismatic.
Other highlights from the panel:
Secrecy: Most of the thousands who participated in the Manhattan Project, the majority of them laborers due to the massive need for construction, had no idea of their work’s purpose. Carr, Groves and Smith discussed “compartmentalization” — the famous secrecy central to the success of the project. Carr said the scientists “recognized the stakes” and actually drove the early secrecy. Smith recalled a conversation with Gladys Owens, who is in another famous Westcott photo of female calutron operators. “I didn’t have any idea what I was doing,” Smith recalled her saying years later. Smith shared that the term “calutron girls,” referring to the work force of young women, was actually coined in 2004 by the late Steve Stow, an ORNL researcher and historian, after Owens came forward as one of the women in the photo.
Segregation: The Oak Ridge operations were tainted by the South’s Jim Crow-era racial restrictions, which dissuaded a sought-after Black researcher, Ernest Wilkins Jr., from coming to Oak Ridge to work on plutonium production. Many African Americans were employed as laborers, but Black families were not allowed to live together; most were housed in crude “hutments.” (Many Manhattan Project scientists were repelled by the racism and led early desegregation efforts.)
Contracting: Vannevar Bush, who led the federal Office of Scientific Research and Development during the war, catalyzed the Manhattan Project in that role and conceived the “federalization of contract” model for research laboratories to counter Compton’s effort to centralize research operations at the University of Chicago. The contractor model, which Carr described as “genius,” endures to this day.
Annoyances: According to Carr, Gen. Groves was annoyed by two things at the July 1945 Trinity A-bomb test: the weatherman, who failed to predict the morning’s rain, and Fermi, who joked about the test’s possibly “igniting the atmosphere.” Physicist Edward Teller had raised the concern, which was discounted after calculations by Hans Bethe and others. Smith also noted that ORNL’s Alex Zucker did the calculations that absolved fears that a hydrogen bomb — a project led by Teller — could do the same thing. — Bill Cabage
Here are some books on the Manhattan Project suggested by the panelists.
- Critical Assembly, Roger Meade
- Big Science, Michael Hiltzik
- Making of the Atomic Bomb, Richard Rhodes
- The Road to Trinity, Kenneth D. Nichols
- Girls of the Atomic City, Denise Kiernan
- Now It Can Be Told, Leslie Groves
- DOE: The Manhattan Project: Making the Atomic Bomb, F.G. Gosling
- Management of the Hanford Engineer Works in WWII, Harry Thayer
- Racing for the Bomb: General Leslie R Groves, the Manhattan Project’s Indispensable Man, Robert Stan Norris