The United States of America can take pride in a number of things, among them arguably the two greatest cultural and scientific achievements of human history: The moon landing and atomic power. It is the latter that we will focus on in the article, the unleashing of the power of the atom, for good and for ill.
America was the first nation to split the atom and applied it immediately to the war effort. It was not for a lack of trying on the part of America’s rivals: Germany famously had their own nuclear program. Less well known is that the Empire of Japan was also looking for a way to weaponize the primal forces of nature.
But America got there first. And their ability to do so not only changed the course of the Second World War, it also changed the course of human history. For the first time ever, mankind has the ability to wipe away human life as we know it at the push of a button. On the other hand, we also have a clean, reliable fuel source that could outstrip all existing sources, if the political will were there.
This is the story of how America unleashed and harnessed the power of nuclear fission, for better or for worse.
Pre-History of the Atomic Bomb: Physics and FascismTo understand how the United States acquired the bomb, it is first necessary to briefly explain how man’s physical view of the cosmos was revolutionized by the new physics. In the early 20th Century, Pierre and Marie Curie observed radium for the first time and noticed that certain substances were highly radioactive.
Scientists and laymen alike began to believe that atoms contained massive amounts of energy just waiting to be harnessed. H.G. Wells published his novel, The World Set Free, about atomic warfare, in 1914. In 1924, Winston Churchill speculated about the destructive power of nuclear fission.
A little later, the top physicists of Germany were leaving in droves because of the rise to power of Hitler and the Nazis. By the time the Nazis invaded Poland in 1939, many of the top scientists had left the continent entirely, most for the United States, but some also for Canada. What this meant was that the best nuclear physicists in the world were concentrated in North America by the end of the 1930s, leaving Germany with a serious drought.
Still, it was the Germans who first discovered nuclear fission in 1938, at the Kaiser Wilhelm Society for Chemistry. Otto Hahn was the first person to discover the process, which made a nuclear weapon theoretically possible. Once nuclear fission was discovered and the applications of such a discovery extrapolated by the major powers of the time, the race was on to see who would be the first to unlock the power of the atom for military purposes.
The Also-Rans: Germany and JapanBy all accounts, Germany should have had the first nuclear weapon. They, after all, were the first to discover nuclear fission, though the atom was first split by Englishman Ernest Rutherford at Manchester University in 1911. However, as stated above, most of the top scientists of the country were leaving because of the Nazi regime and its hostility toward Jews.
The Nazis were also tripped up because they disbanded their original team pursuing the secrets of the atom, the Uranverein (Uranium Society). The group was formed in April of 1939, but disbanded in August of the same year. Some of the most brilliant scientists left in Germany were removed from the project and sent off to regular military duty. There were a couple other German projects in 1939, but nothing centralized like later projects, which were much closer to the Manhattan Project.
The second Uranverein was formed on the same day that the Second World War began in 1939. The initial report from the group was so pessimistic that they concealed their results from Hitler for two weeks and even then only casually mentioned it: It would probably take five years to get an atomic bomb and the Americans would likely be able to develop one sooner. With this, the atomic weapons project was not given the attention it would have been given if the Germans believed they could have developed a weapon first.
In 1942, the project was scaled back even further, as it was not believed that the group’s efforts would be decisive in ending the war. The atomic weapons project was effectively ended, with Albert Speer putting the bulk of the work toward the production of nuclear energy rather than nuclear weapons. It was around this time that the atomic bomb project was shelved entirely. Speer believed that it would have taken all of Germany’s resources to produce an atomic bomb by 1947.
Japan actually had a more robust and advanced nuclear weapons program, which was ultimately scuttled for a historically ironic reason: The Japanese didn’t believe anyone else had the imagination to see how atomic power could be used as a weapon. Indeed, they singled out the American government as not being able to grasp how nuclear fission could be used in warfare. The project was scrapped in favor of more work on radar.
Curiously, Japan is sometimes counted as a nuclear power today. A term called “nuclear latency” means that Japan has all the know-how and material to produce an atomic weapon very quickly if they choose to do so. It is widely believed that if Japan had the will, it could produce an atomic weapon inside of a year. Indeed, this is sometimes subject of internal debate in the country, which is constitutionally prohibited from making offensive weapons, but has sought to find ways to define tactical nuclear weapons as defensive – especially as China has become more militarized and aggressive.
The Pre-History of the Manhattan ProjectThe Einstein–Szilárd letter was drafted by Leó Szilárd in 1939. Albert Einstein signed off on it. The gist of the letter was that Germany was attempting to develop an atomic bomb. It urged America to begin stockpiling uranium ore and to expend more resources studying atomic chain reactions.
Roosevelt was extremely interested in the letter. Despite the fact that the United States was not yet a belligerent in the Second World War, he ordered the creation of the Advisory Committee on Uranium. Army Lieutenant Colonel Keith F. Adamson authorized $6,000 (over $100,000 in 2020 dollars) to buy graphite and uranium for Enrico Fermi and Leó Szilárd to use toward their experiments.
They were not able to achieve the chain reaction necessary to create atomic energy of any kind, let alone a weapon.
The program went through a couple of different permutations and even absorbed the information of a previous, more aggressive and more advanced British program of a similar kind. In June 1939, they discovered the critical mass of uranium needed for such a chain reaction – 22 pounds. This could easily be carried by the existing bombers of that time period.
On October 9, 1941, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt ordered the creation of a robust, permanent and dedicated atomic program steered by his Top Policy Group. Roosevelt was a part of this group along with Vice President Henry Wallace, Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson, and the Chief of Staff of the Army, General George C. Marshall. Roosevelt prioritized the Army over the Navy because he had more faith in their ability to run large-scale projects.
The Manhattan Project BeginsOriginally “Manhattan” was only the name of one of the districts where the atomic work was happening. However, over time it became the code name for the entire project, which eventually involved over 130,000 workers and cost about $2 billion ($28 billion in 2020 dollars). Over 90 percent of that was spent on factories and the production of the fissionable materials that were a prerequisite for building a weapon. Less than 10 percent of the budget was spent on the actual weapon itself.
The cost associated with the development of uranium was so significant because of the technologies of the 1940s. Enriching uranium was difficult and costly, with some researchers at the time estimating that it would take 27,000 years to produce a single gram of the correct type of uranium necessary, when kilograms were what the project was calling for. The Manhattan Project eventually got around this by effectively learning how to get much more bang for their thermonuclear buck. They switched to a different bomb design that required significantly less uranium by compounding the explosive power of what they had.
The Manhattan Project is perhaps the most intensive human labor effort in history, undertaken by the ascendant world economic power during the biggest war in human history. The War Production Board gave the project the highest priority rating in 1942, a luxury that the United States was easily able to afford because of its place in the world economy and its relatively late entry into the Second World War.
While the Project is generally associated with Los Alamos (known as Site Y), there were no fewer than 20 different sites where the Manhattan Project was up and running. Indeed, the first nuclear chain reaction that reached critical mass took place not in a New Mexico desert, but in a University of Chicago laboratory.
Originally, the Manhattan Project was working on three different types of nuclear weapons: The Thin Man (a gun-type fission plutonium weapon), the Fat Man (an implosion-type nuclear weapon) and the Little Boy (a gun-type fission uranium weapon). Of these, the first was abandoned in July 1944, when researchers realized that it would probably not work properly, with the Fat Man prioritized while production on the Little Man continued.
There was a 100-ton test explosion on V-E Day, May 7, 1945, at the Trinity Site outside of Bingham, New Mexico – but the real first atomic test took place on July 16, 1945. Codenamed “Trinity” by Robert Oppenheimer, the test was planned because the team wasn’t sure that the weapon would work and, if it did, they weren’t entirely sure what it would do upon detonation. The weapon was nicknamed “The Gadget” and was basically the same design as the Fat Man. In the event of failure, Lieutenant General Leslie Groves would have had to explain the loss of a billion dollars of plutonium to the Senate.
On August 6, 1945, the B-29 bomber Enola Gay dropped Little Boy on the city of Hiroshima. Three days later, the B-29 Bockscar dropped the Fat Man implosion-type plutonium weapon on the city of Nagasaki, the secondary target. Its original primary target, Kokura, was too heavily covered in clouds and smoke.
On August 14, 1945, Japan surrendered to the Allied Powers.
The Manhattan District itself was abolished August 15, 1947.
Invading Japan?Other than copious amounts of nuclear weapons testing, the bomb has only ever been dropped twice, both times by the United States on Japan. There is reason to believe that the United States threatened the Empire of Japan with nuclear destruction before dropping the bomb: The Potsdam Declaration issued an ultimatum to Japan that if it did not surrender unconditionally that it would face "prompt and utter destruction.”
The bombings killed between 129,000 and 226,000 people, most of whom were civilians. This does not include the number of civilians killed due to the radiation from the bomb.
It is appropriate to consider this one of the most inhumane attacks in the history of war. However, it is equally appropriate to weigh the atomic bombing of Japan against the planned invasion of Japan, known as Operation Downfall. It’s easy to Monday-morning quarterback the decision to drop the bomb, but to fully understand the “why” requires stepping into the shoes of the men making the decisions. It does not require giving them a pass.
Few Americans at the time even spent a lot of time thinking about the Okinawa Campaign, despite the fact that it left over 100,000 men dead on both sides. FDR died in the middle of it and the Germans surrendered, so the Okinawa Campaign, despite its carnage, got lost in the shuffle.
The lasting impression on the American public was a taste for extra-conventional means of waging the war to save American lives, not limited to napalm and carpet bombing. This wasn’t just due to the high casualties, but also the Japanese methods of war, including kamikazes and banzai charges, each of which were methods of weaponizing suicide. This resulted in the Western forces becoming far, far more aggressive with picket destroyers and flame-throwing tanks. Air Force General Curtis LeMay, who later ran for Vice President on a platform of using nukes against North Vietnam, was more than willing to oblige these more brutal methods.
There was a plan for invading the Japanese mainland islands, going back before the surrender of Nazi Germany. Known as Operation Downfall, stealth was not an attribute: The geography of Japan made the general outline of the invasion readily known to the Japanese government.
Operation Downfall, scheduled for November 1945, was divided into two parts. Operation Olympic was a series of Army landings designed to capture the southern third of the third-largest of the Japanese mainland islands, Kyūshū. The second, Operation Coronet was aimed at capturing the Kantō Plain on the main Japanese island of Honshū. This Allied invasion would consist of American forces and a combined Commonwealth Corps. The Soviets had not yet declared war on Japan and the Chinese were in no position to help invade the Japanese mainland. Japanese defensive plan Operation Ketsugō aimed at an all-out defense of Kyūshū.
If carried out, this would have been the largest amphibious invasion in history.
The Japanese had 2.3 million Japanese Army troops at their disposal, aided by a 28 million strong national civilian militia. The Vice Chief of the Imperial Japanese Navy General Staff, Vice Admiral Takijirō Ōnishi, predicted the number of Japanese deaths at 20 million, a staggering number. The U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff predicted between 25,000 and 46,000 Americans dead. University of Chicago political science professor Philip Quincy Wright and American physicist William Shockley, using information from Colonels James McCormack and Dean Rusk, as well as cardiac surgeon Michael E. DeBakey, envisioned a far more grim result for the Allies: 400,000 and 800,000 Allied dead, with Japanese fatalities between 5 and 10 million.
The first plan to mitigate the casualties was not atomic weapons, but chemical ones, with phosgene, mustard gas, tear gas and cyanogen chloride moved into the theater. Biological weapons were also considered on the table.
There was also the massive bombing campaign to both weaken the military and soften civilian resolve in the island in advance of the invasion. All told, 67 cities were firebombed by LeMay. This absolutely devastated the six largest cities of Japan, as well as destroyed many of Japan’s so-called “paper cities,” which were still largely constructed with, as the name would imply, paper. And the disturbing fact is that LeMay still might have saved more lives than would have been lost on both sides from a land invasion of the homeland.
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