Now It Can Be Told: The Story Of The Manhattan Project
Leslie R. Groves
Language: English
Pages: 385
ISBN: 0306801892
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
General Leslie Groves and J. Robert Oppenheimer were the two men chiefly responsible for the building of the first atomic bomb at Los Alamos, code name "The Manhattan Project." As the ranking military officer in charge of marshalling men and material for what was to be the most ambitious, expensive engineering feat in history, it was General Groves who hired Oppenheimer (with knowledge of his left-wing past), planned facilities that would extract the necessary enriched uranium, and saw to it that nothing interfered with the accelerated research and swift assembly of the weapon.This is his story of the political, logistical, and personal problems of this enormous undertaking which involved foreign governments, sensitive issues of press censorship, the construction of huge plants at Hanford and Oak Ridge, and a race to build the bomb before the Nazis got wind of it. The role of groves in the Manhattan Project has always been controversial. In his new introduction the noted physicist Edward Teller, who was there at Los Alamos, candidly assesses the general's contributions—and Oppenheimer's—while reflecting on the awesome legacy of their work.
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force of the blast for various distances. So, after measuring the distance on the ground, he promptly announced the strength of the explosion. He was remarkably close to the calculations that were made later from the data accumulated by our complicated instruments. I had become a bit annoyed with Fermi the evening before, when he suddenly offered to take wagers from his fellow scientists on whether or not the bomb would ignite the atmosphere, and if so, whether it would merely destroy New Mexico
said it or anything resembling it. It was true that we had lost some scientists of great reputation, and that we had lost many of the heads of the various groups, but Los Alamos had been so strongly staffed that even the men whose reputations were not so widespread were nevertheless possessed of great ability and, in my opinion, were fully capable of doing an excellent job and of carrying forward new ideas just as vigorously as would the slightly older men of greater reputation. To tell the
the bomb once the fissionable material was available. The May-Johnson Bill provided for a board of nine commissioners who would oversee the nation’s atomic energy program in a manner similar to that followed by most boards of directors in large corporations. The duties of the commissioners would not have been so arduous as to require them to devote their time exclusively to atomic affairs. The Interim Committee felt, and I am sure they were right, that this would enable the President to obtain
engineers and executives at Wilmington and the highly intelligent and theoretically inclined scientists at Chicago. This meant he had to shuttle back and forth between Chicago and Wilmington and later Hanford, easing tensions and calming tempers and, at the same time, seeing to it that needed scientific decisions were promptly reached at Chicago. He was eminently qualified for this liaison assignment, for he was a well-trained chemical engineer and had had more than twenty years of experience in
good relations with the Commanding Officer, so I had urged him to select as an associate director a physicist with industrial background. With my approval he chose Condon, who at that time was an associate director in the Westinghouse experimental laboratory at Pittsburgh. At Los Alamos, Condon did little to smooth the frictions between the scientists and the military officers who handled the administrative housekeeping details. We employed Army officers for these simply because we did not wish
