A new documentary on MagellanTV explains how a world living in the shadow cast by nuclear weapons came to be.
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The birth of the atomic bomb came after a long gestation. Pioneers of the theoretical physics underlying the bomb’s creation – figures like Albert Einstein and Enrico Fermi, not to mention lesser-knowns like Lise Meitner – worked in the more obscure halls of science, the ones not commonly walked by practical men such as U.S. presidents Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman. But, when World War II came to America, Roosevelt would go on to approve a project that would change not only science but history, and Truman would ultimately deploy the fruit of that radioactive tree.
Spurred by warnings from Einstein and others that their colleagues in Hitler’s Germany might turn the secrets of the atom into a weapon of unprecedented destructive power, Roosevelt signed off on a top-secret endeavor dubbed the Manhattan Project. The military commander was a hard-driving, two-star U.S. Army general named Leslie Groves. But its true, indispensable leader was Robert Oppenheimer, a man of both science and conscience, who was generally unknown except among the small community of physicists.
The grand project was launched in the summer of 1942 on its New York island namesake, but it required more room to expand without attracting the prying eyes of spies . . . or the public. So, the main effort was moved to a place few outside of New Mexico had ever heard of – Los Alamos, which would remain quite deliberately anonymous to the large majority of Americans until after the war. As would, for most intents and purposes, Robert Oppenheimer.
Oppenheimer himself was one of the more intriguing figures in modern U.S. history, as Christopher Nolan’s recent big-screen docudrama about him reveals in considerable detail, albeit with the usual dramatic license. Nolan’s film is remarkable in many ways, but concision is not one of them. If you want to learn about the basic history behind the development of the atomic bomb, Sarah Findley’s tidier, fact-based documentary, Manufacturing Death: Birth of the Atomic Bomb (to be released on March 20 on MagellanTV), is a good place to start.
Relying on archival film footage (including much that I haven’t seen before) and informative interjections by historians, the film moves at a brisk pace through the rise of Nazi Germany and the early days of World War II right into the creation of the Manhattan Project.
Many telling details emerge. One that caught my attention was that most of the people working in Los Alamos hadn’t a clue as to what was going on there – only that it was secret. Laundry workers were provided with small, handheld machines to scan people’s dirty clothes. Little did they know that those were Geiger counters to measure radiation that might have penetrated the fabric.
On July 16, 1945, in Alamogordo, New Mexico, well to the south of Los Alamos, the word “Trinity” took on new meaning when it was used as the code designation for the first test of an atomic bomb. That is when The Bomb was truly and irreversibly born. Less than a month later, the “Little Boy” atom bomb exploded 2,000 feet above Hiroshima, Japan, destroying the city and killing between 90,000 and 166,000 people within four months of the explosion. Three days later, the “Fat Boy” bomb was dropped on Nagasaki, killing tens of thousands more. Then, on August 15, Emperor Hirohito announced Japan’s unconditional surrender.
After the war, the invisibility cloak that had shielded Oppenheimer from the public effectively disappeared. In newsreel footage, his ambivalence about the success of the Manhattan Project is apparent, as he speaks in apocalyptic terms about the bomb’s potential for global destruction and the need to rein it in.
Since then, the hands on the famous doomsday clock of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists have moved back and forth from midnight, never quite reaching it. As I write, the hands are set at 89 seconds to that fateful hour.
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Arthur M. Marx is the Lead Editor at MagellanTV. He was previously a senior writer/editor at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government.
Title Image: Trinity atomic bomb detonation, July 16, 1945 (Source: U.S. Department of Energy, via Wikimedia Commons)
