American History Hit - The Atomic Bomb & the Secret City

Episode Date: September 22, 2022

In 1939 Franklin D Roosevelt received a letter from Albert Einstein, warning him that the Nazis might be developing nuclear weapons. America has to act fast.What follows is the creation of a secret city in the rural area of Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Around 75,000 people moved to the secret city during the World War Two, and the first atomic bomb was developed in just 28 months.Don Wildman is joined by historian, Ray Smith, to find out how it was possible, and to hear about the experiences of the people who worked at Oak Ridge, most of whom didn't know what they were creating.You can find out more here.The senior producer was Charlotte Long. The producer was Benjie Guy. Mixed by Thomas Ntinas. Special thanks to Fendall Fulton.For more History Hit content, subscribe to our newsletters here.If you'd like to learn even more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad-free podcasts, and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Want to explore even more history? Sign up to History Hit, where you will discover history from around the world. From the American Revolution to prehistoric Scotland, there is plenty to discover. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries, with a brand new release every week, exploring everything from the ancient world to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com slash subscribe to bring the past alive. It is 1939, and Franklin Roosevelt has just received a letter. It includes a warning that the Nazis might be developing a new powerful bomb,

which, if carried by boat and exploded in a port, might very well destroy the whole port, together with the surrounding territory. The letter is from Albert Einstein. America has to act fast. What follows is the creation of a secret city, built on quiet rural land in eastern Tennessee. This is the story of Oak Ridge, the secret city which helped build the first atomic bomb. We lived in the house right next to the store. The dates as I remember it in 1942 around August, government representatives came in and told,

dead, all the people in the area, you will be out of here by Thanksgiving. Okay, I'm June Adamson, and I came to Oak Ridge in 1943s. We didn't like it one bit, but on the other hand, I was glad to get out of Salt Lake City. I grew up in Salt Lake, and I always wanted to leave there. So he said that in Manhattan Project in World War II, that the atomic bomb was conceived, designed, built, and tested in 28 months, and I'd been here in Oak Ridge for over 30 years. You could have knocked people with a feather. Hi there, I'm Don Wildman, and welcome to you.

to the very first episode of American History Hit. I'll have new episodes for you every Monday and Thursday, and thank you for joining me on our first show. It's great to have you. In August 1945, on two separate days, United States forces dropped atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, leading to levels of man-made death and destruction in the world

had never known. These bombs, so terrifying, so catastrophic, were the fruits of breakthrough scientific experimentation and production within the U.S. three-year period that would open the world up to the nuclear age. Central to this massive effort was the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. And here to take us through this story is the historian of Oak Ridge, Ray Smith. How are you, Ray?

Welcome to American History Hit. Well, thank you. I'm very glad to be here. Full disclosure, Ray and I met a few years ago. I was doing a television show down there, and I got the full tour. But today we get a chance to get into more detail than we could do on. television, so as only podcasts can do. Ray, the story of Oak Ridge begins with the Manhattan Project. Can you tell me about how the Manhattan Project started? Yes, I can. Of course,

we go back to Germany when they realize that they could release a huge amount of energy with uranium when they split the atom. That was in the late 30s. By 1942, American, not just the industry in the military, but the president, Roosevelt, was sent a letter by Albert Einstein, actually written by Leo's Alar. But that letter said Germany is likely building a bomb. And that, I think, caused the president to put the energy needed to make the Manhattan Project come into existence. And there's an interesting, very quick story about that that I think you'll enjoy. When he got that letter, he went to Senator McKellar and said, Senator, I need to put a large amount of money against the war effort. And I can't let the press or anyone know how much

it is. Can you help me with that? Senator McKeller said, yes, Mr. President, I can do that for you. Just where in Tennessee are you going to put that thing? So that may have had influence on how East Tennessee got to be part of one of three major locations during the Manhattan Project, Oak Ridge, Los Alamos, New Mexico, and Hanford, Washington. Now, back to Oak Ridge for just a second. The Oak Ridge first thing started was the administration building in November of 1942, but by February of 1943, they were building the Y-12 plant, which is where the uranium was separated for Little Boy. They were also building the graphite reactor, which has proved that you could produce plutonium from a uranium reactor, and now that is the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. The Y-12 plant is still the National Security Complex. and then a third process came into being, the K-25 gaseous diffusion process.

Now imagine this, General Groves had been put in charge of the Manhattan Project, and he had these scientists, Robert Oppenheimer and others, telling him, here's how you get the material for a bomb. And they were telling him different things. They were telling him plutonium. They were telling him uranium 235. They were saying, oh, there's a quicker way to get it than the way they're you're doing it there at Y-12 with the electromagnetic separation, you can get it using

gaseous diffusion. So all of these scientists are telling them these different things. Well, you know what Groves did. He tried all of them, except centrifuges. They didn't try that one, but in fact, it has today turned out to be the most used process for getting uranium. Let me back you up to the idea of three sites. So the Manhattan Project, it's called the Manhattan project because it was first located in Manhattan. It's quite literally that, right? Yes, that's correct. The Corps of Engineers, Army Corps of Engineers, named their districts for the main city in that district. And the Manhattan District was given the responsibility for creating a bomb. So they just changed the district to a project and kept that same name, Manhattan.

Now, they did the same thing in Oak Ridge. It was called the Clinton Engineer Works because Clinton was the major city there. Oh, by the way, a cute little story. It was first known as the Kingston Demolition Range. And then they thought, oh, that sounds a little too ominous. Let's change it to the Clinton engineer world. There you go. So there were three outpost, a lightweight word for it, but from the headquarters is in Manhattan, and then there's the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. There's Los Alamos out in New Mexico, and then Hanford up in Washington. The similarity between Oak Ridge and Hanford is that they're very close to very large amounts of electricity, right? Electrical power can be had. That was true in Oak Ridge. TVA had just built their first dam,

the Norris Dam, about 20 miles north on the Clinch River. And they told them that if you build it within a five-mile radius or diameter down south of us, we can supply electricity. So electricity did have a part of making the decision. Senator McKeller likely had more. But at any rate, they did, consider that. It used a huge amount of electricity for sure, probably about as much as the city of New York City. It was a huge draw, but the electromagnetic process used a lot of electricity, but then the gaseous diffusion process with some 3,000 pumps and motors. That used a huge amount of electricity as well. But remember now, at the time in the Manhattan Project, it was the Clinton Engineer Works, the city of Oak Ridge, the Y-12 electromagnetic separation.

plant, the graphite reactor, and the K-25 plus S-50 was the thermal diffusion. So there were four facilities here, all working toward the idea of getting some material for the bomb. Now, the reason they went out to Hanford, Washington is because they decided they didn't want to put all of their eggs in one basket. And oh, by the way, that's a huge area up there. They needed that water off the Columbia River, but there's what, 560 square miles of that location, a huge location. But Oak Ridge would not have had enough room for all of those reactors that were built up there. But they did focus on the uranium in Oak Ridge. It is the sheer dimensions of this effort that astonish you.

I mean, that goes for so much in World War II. So much had to happen on such a big scale, so quickly. Right. let me give you an example that'll help it put it in perspective for people. The electromagnetic separation process is a process that uses large magnets with the uranium going between the magnets and getting bent, and then you separate by their mass, you can separate the 235. But it was a batch process.

They had 1152. They called them Caliatrons, California University Cyclotrons, and they were in nine large buildings, 22,482 people working on those 1,152 chalotrons for nearly a year to get enough uranium for little boy and a little left over. About 60 kilograms, 140 pounds, less than a gallon in volume. Now think about that. That's why Great Britain came to us and said, look, we know you can make a bomb out of uranium, but it's a huge effort to separate that U-235 from the U-235 from the U-230.

We'll send our scientist over to you and you build the bomb. That's literally how the project got started, even before they put General Groves in charge of it. They were looking at how to do it. And of course, when he got a hold of it, come on, I mean, I don't believe we could have done it without a General Groves. Yeah. Even Colonel Nichols, who was second in command and actually ran the Manhattan Project

from Oak Ridge, except for Los Alamos, Oppenheimer around that. But he said of General Groves, if I had to do the atomic bomb project over again and could pick my boss, I would pick General Grohl. Let's get to the personalities in a moment. I really want to understand the stakes here. That letter from Einstein to FDR happens in what year is that? 39, August of 39, Leo Zillard went to him and wrote it. He signed it. And then they used Alexander Sachs, who was a close friend to the president. They actually used him to funnel the letter to the president. So he gets this letter that basically is a warning that the Germans are very close to developing the unthinkable,

a bomb that could just destroy the world or at least, you know, win them the war. And over that period of time from 1939 to basically 1942, they have to make a decision to not only build an enormous, and I mean enormous, I walked around the place, plant in Tennessee, in Washington, and then get the best of the best to collect themselves in Los Alamos. And all of this has to be figured out with a war going on, which is insane to consider the pressure involved. It is. And think about this. While this is happening, and of course, you know Pearl Harbor had a whole lot to do with moving things forward. But while this is happening, there's a man who had uranium mines in the Belgian Congo named Sergei.

he saw Germany buying his uranium ore and he stopped selling it to him. And for two years, he packaged all that ore up, put it in ships and sent it to New York City and put it in a warehouse on Stanton Island. No kidding. In 1942, when they started the Manhattan Project, Colonel Nichols went to him and said,

we need some uranium ore and you've got a mine. He said, I knew you were going to need it. I've already brought it to you. you. It's in a warehouse on Stanton Island. Now, one man decided Germany wouldn't get his ore and the United States would. Wow. Now, the interesting thing about that ore, too, is they're still mining uranium today, but when they do that in Colorado and up in Canada, the most, generally, you get about 1% uranium out of that ore. Some of the uranium ore coming out of the Belgian Congo was as high as 60% uranium. So when you think about it, that just,

by one man enabled Oak Ridge to get huge amount of uranium ore and to be able to use that to separate that U-235. So General Leslie Groves is put in charge of this. The right man for the job because he'd built the Pentagon right before this, right? Yeah, that's correct. He did. So he knew how to get a private industry involved, a large construction project. He could manage that.

And he also knew how to spend money. There's a good story. He went to the man that could give him the credit rated. He needed a triple A credit rating. So he wrote a letter, took it to the man that could approve it, laid it on his desk, and said, I need you to sign that. He said, I'm not sure I can sign that. So General Groves just picked it up off his desk, started walking to the door over his shoulder, said, well, I'll just tell the president you wouldn't sign it. He said, oh, maybe I can.

Yeah, exactly. So he got a AAA credit rating. And that meant that he had a blank check. He could do whatever he needed to. Let's go to grade school on this level of science we're going to talk about. Okay. What is the basics of making an atomic bomb? Well, you have two choices.

Uranium 235 is the isotope that is fissionable, that will easily split by the neutrons hitting the atoms and splitting that atom with a huge release of energy. The other material that is useful is plutonium. Now, plutonium doesn't exist in nature to any large degree at all, so it can be produced in a uranium reactor. Interestingly enough, the U-238 converts to plutonium 239 while it's in that reactor. Now, it takes a while to do that, but you can actually create plutonium in a uranium reactor.

As far as the uranium goes, you have to separate that 235. Now, the difference in Fat Man and Little Boy, the only two bombs ever used in warfare, is that the little boy was a uranium bomb. And to think of it as a gun barrel, and you put uranium on both the ends of the barrel, and then put a little explosive behind one end to cause them to go together. And once they come close together, you get enough of them close enough together, the neutrons start splitting the atoms, and you have a huge release of energy. So making a bomb is not hard, but getting the material for the bomb is really hard.

Now, the plutonium bomb was different. A fat man is different. The plutonium is a sphere in the center of 32 implosions to compress that plutonium. Now, that's why, remember, if only one of those didn't go off at the same time, you'd have a blowout. It wouldn't work. So that's why they did the test at Trinity near Alamagordo, New Mexico. It was a duplicate of the Fat Man bomb, but they wanted to be sure that they could make all of those implosions go off at the same time. So they did do the test on Fat Man, but they didn't do one on Little Bowl.

In fact, they didn't have enough material to make two bombs. So the process at Oak Ridge is about producing U-235, which is the fissionable material, the fissionable uranium. Yes. As big a plant as that is. Why was Oak Ridge so big? Well, again, because of the batch process of separating that uranium required the large buildings. And then, of course, the K-25 gaseous diffusion building was a mile long. In a U-shape, it covered 44 acres.

Now, there were 3,000 stages. Now, it's a continuous operation. You're pumping gas through a membrane that will let the 235 go through a little faster, a little easier than the 238. And so if you do that over and over and over, you're going to begin to accumulate more 235, a higher percentage. And that's called enriching uranium. So that process took a huge amount of land there on the Clinch River. And of course, Y12, those nine large buildings, it's about a half a mile wide, two and a half miles long down in Bear Creek Valley. And then the graphite reactor was over in Bethel Valley.

That is now the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and you, like many others, only think of Oak Ridge as the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, because it is the largest laboratory in the Department of Energy System. It has the world's fastest, most powerful supercomputer, the frontier computer, and it has the largest, most powerful pulse neutron source. And that supercomputer is doing major work, even on COVID virus, on climate change, just an enormous. amount of things coming out of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory today. So Oak Ridge is still producing scientific discoveries on a regular basis. The work at Oak Ridge, never mind at Los Alamos and Hanford, everything had to be done in secret. This is a top secret situation. How did they keep a secret with so many people there? That's a good question. General Groves had this philosophy of compartmentalization. If you didn't need to know what you were doing, in order to

to do your job, if you didn't need to know what was happening in the next building, you didn't have access to that building. You only had access to the areas where you worked. Now, they couldn't do that in Los Alamos. The scientists needed to talk. But in Oak Ridge, they were able to keep people isolated. Interesting, they started a 43 club a few years after the Manhattan Project for people who were here in Oak Ridge during 43. At their second meeting, at the end of the meeting, this man held up his hand, said, I have a question. I used to have to keep a three by five, blank three by five cards

in my pocket. And if I heard anybody talking about the project, I had to write down what I heard, put it in an envelope, and send it to the Acme Finance Company. Now, if I didn't hear anything, at the end of the week on Friday, I had to send a blank card in. I wonder if

anybody else had to do that. About half the people in the room held their hand up. So, Don, they were spying on one another. That's one of the ways they kept that secret. But it was a compartmentalization kind of process where nobody really ever knew exactly what they were involved in. Did any average worker at Oak Ridge have any idea that they were actually building an atomic bomb? Oh, no, absolutely not.

Of the 22,482 people working at Y12, maybe 100 of them, the chemist, would have known they were working with uranium. They wouldn't have had a clue what they were doing with. Remember, this is the first time this has ever been done. An interesting insight into that is one of the calatron girls. They used high school graduates, young girls, to operate these calutrons. They had to have so many of them. They couldn't hire enough scientists and engineers. So they trained these young girls to keep a meter on a certain spot,

let it drift to a control point and come back. Now, one of those calatron girls came back in 2004, and she came to me. I took her out to Y12 and made her picture out there by those calutrons, set her on a stool just like she did in 1945. And she said, Ray, I never did know what I was doing. Can you show me? I said, yeah, Gladys, I can show you.

So I opened up one of the cabinets, and I said, Gladys, when you were changing those knobs, you were changing the value of this rheostat down here. She reached over and tapped me on their arm. She said, Ray, I still don't know what I was doing. But I know if I had any bobby pins in my hair, they'd just go and go stick to the wall somewhere. Largest magnets in the world at the time will pull the bobby pins.

out of the young girls' actors. Explain to me what Calutron means again. Okay, Calutron stands for California University Cyclotron. And they just called it Calutron. And it's an electromagnetic separation unit. Let me quickly tell you how it operates. Imagine with me if I had my hand held up and I had two rubber bands hanging down from it. I put a golf ball on one and a ping pong ball on the other.

Then I held it down to my side and spun it real quick for. a half a turn. That golf ball would stretch that rubber band further than the ping pong ball. So I'd get two arcs. Same thing happens with uranium 235 and 238. There's three neutrons difference in the mass. So when they go between

those magnets and they get turned because of that, and when they do that, centrifugal force will make the 238 make a slightly larger arc than the 235. So you can catch the 235 up at the top. But the only problem is in a thousand pounds of uranium ore,

there's only seven pounds of uranium 235. So it's a simple process, knows it works, basic physics, but it takes a long time to get it done. When they built Oak Ridge, was there anything there to start? It was a rural community, half a dozen small communities there. Robertsville, the actual school for Robertsville is still being used by the Robertsville Middle School. In fact, some of those communities still have annual reunions every year. So it was a rural area, about 3,000 people on 1,000 farms,

and they had to leave just in a matter of days in order to make room for the Manhattan Project. They were just told the war is coming. See you later. You have to realize that that was something back then that everybody wanted to help. The whole mentality was, let's do something to stop all this killing and end this war. So they want to do anything they could to help. Even Bill Wilcox, who was the historian before me and was a chemist during the Manhattan Project, when he graduated from college and went to look for work, he would only accept work that was war work. And that was the mentality back then. Everybody wanted to help. I mean, thousands of people dying.

You know, 60 million people died during that war. It's the largest one we've ever had. I'll be back with Ray after this short break. Tell me about the reaction to the bombs being dropped. war comes to an end. How aware are the workers and the people of Oak Ridge that they had everything to do with creating these bombs? Well, what happened is they got the notification the same day. In fact, they sent out press releases on the same day that little boy was dropped. So the world knew it as soon as possible. And the people at Oak Ridge first learned what was happening by the press releases and by that information. A good way.

to understand that is there's another Caryotron girl, Ruth Huddleston, who was working that day and when her supervisor told her, told all of them, what had happened, and that Oak Ridge had made the uranium for that bomb. She was happy because she said her

boyfriend was in Germany, and had already told her he was going to Japan. So she thought, well, I've saved his life because he was going over there. And then she got home that night, and she saw in the paper and heard on the radio, how many people had been killed? And she just said, oh, no, she got so depressed,

she couldn't sleep for a week because she'd been part of actually killing that large number of people. Now, it had that effect on everyone, pride to end the war, but not pride about having killed so many people. Tell me about the impact and legacy of Oak Ridge. It continues on as a scientific institution, right? Yes, absolutely. Oak Ridge was 75,000 people during the Manhattan Project living in Oak Ridge. Fifth largest city in the state wasn't on any map. Actually, wasn't on a map until, wouldn't open to the public until 1949. But since then, Oak Ridge has continued to provide service to the nation in the way of the nuclear weapons. All of the secondaries for all of the nation's nuclear weapons come from Y-12. And all of the highly enriched uranium in the nation

that's not in a nuclear weapon or in the Navy's ships and submarine reactors or research reactors, all of that is stored at the Y-12 National Security Complex. It continues to be a large economic driver for the area. I've already told you about the Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the great things that are happening out there. Matter of fact, there are discoveries. such as nuclear medicine. That came from Oak Ridge, starting in 1946 right after the war. Nuclear energy for electrical power.

That had its origin in Oak Ridge. And over the years, there have continued to be things invented in Oak Ridge that has worldwide impact and significance. Even things as simple as the touchscreen on your iPhone, that technology was invented in Oak Ridge. No kidding. It's an amazing story. Yes, it is. Oak Ridge continues to be an amazing place. We do have a lot of history there now, and of course, tourism is coming back after COVID.

We now have five museums. There's a new museum at the K-25 location. That's an excellent museum. We have the Manhattan Project National Historical Park that's there in Oak Ridge, and of course it's in Los Alamos in Hanford, too. but having a national park is a major thing for us, and we're very happy with that. The American Museum of Science and Energy continues to be a large attraction for tourism, and we have a new museum, the Oak Ridge History Museum, that tells the story of the people in Oak Ridge and the city. There are just some great history there in Oak Ridge, and we're happy to share it with people. You have a busy day ahead of you every single day.

I'm so glad you don't have to operate in top secrecy anymore. That would be so awkward. That's true. That's true. There's a lot we can tell, and we do, and we enjoy telling our story. It's a proud story. It's amazing. It keeps on going, too.

Thank you, Ray, for joining us on American History yet. Nice to see you again. Yeah, you bet. Good to see you. That's it for our very first episode. Thanks for listening. And thanks so much to Ray for sharing his decades of knowledge. If you liked what you heard, please review and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.

We've got episodes on the Hollywood Blacklist, Pontiac's Rebellion, and the Battle of Midway, all coming up. Do make sure you don't miss those. And please get in touch with History Hit on social media if there are any stories you'd like to hear us explore. See you next time. This podcast includes music from Epidemic Sound.