Here's Where It Gets Interesting - How Women Won WWII: With a Flash and a Rumble

Episode Date: February 15, 2023

For 3 years, scientists in secret cities around the U.S. had been in a race against time to complete the world’s first atomic weapon. And in July of 1945, the very first plutonium bomb was ready. Constructing “The Gadget” as it was called, had taken 2 billion dollars and the collective work of 400,000 people. It was ready to be tested. And it needed to work. Join us to hear more about the infamous Trinity test, and what followed for our women scientists who finally had a clearer picture about the work they had been doing. Hosted by: Sharon McMahon Executive Producer: Heather Jackson Audio Producer: Jenny Snyder Written and researched by: Heather Jackson, Sharon McMahon, Valerie Hoback, and Amy Watkin Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

July 16, 1945 was a quiet, soggy morning in the New Mexico desert. Only about 200 people in the world knew that life as they knew it was about to change. For three years, scientists in secret cities around the United States had been in a race against time to complete the world's first atomic weapon. And in July of 1945, the very first plutonium bomb was ready. Constructing the gadget, as it was called, had taken $2 billion and the collective work of 400,000 people. It was ready to be tested. And it needed to work. I'm Sharon McMahon, and here's where it gets interesting. J. Robert Oppenheimer, who became known to history as the father of the atomic bomb, had developed a plan for the weapons test. He called the operation Trinity, a codename inspired

by a John Donne poem called Batter My Heart, Three-Personed God. The poem employs the Christian Holy Trinity, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. But later biographers of Oppenheimer have noted that he also studied Hinduism, which has a trinity of Brahma, the creator, Vishnu, the preserver, and Shiva, the destroyer. Oppenheimer chose the site for the trinity test, Alamogordo bombing range, some 240 miles away from the Los Alamos, New Mexico, Manhattan project base. And even though several years of preparation and work had gone into the test, there was still a giant question mark hanging over it. A few of the scientific team gently reassured each other that they would not ignite the atmosphere and completely wipe out

humanity. But the fear was there, just below the surface. Perhaps to add some levity, scientist Enrico Fermi took side bets as to whether or not the test would wipe New Mexico off the map. And more seriously, the Manhattan Project's director, Lieutenant General Groves, made backup plans to evacuate nearby towns and implement martial law if something went wrong. There were just a few spouses who had inside knowledge of the Manhattan Project's Trinity test. Here's Elsie McMillan, wife to the Nobel Prize-winning scientist Edwin McMillan, who was present at Trinity. Before Ed left for the desert, Elsie asked her husband what to expect. Things were moving fast now. There soon would be a test near Alamogordo at White Sands,

the very place we had visited with Carefree Abandon a few years ago. I asked Ed in all innocence what would happen. It seemed an easy question with a simple answer. Knowing that it was an atomic bomb they were testing should have made me more aware of what would be involved. It was difficult for Ed to tell me. He finally answered, there will be about 50 of us present, key workers. We ourselves are not absolutely certain what will happen. In spite of calculations, we are going into the unknown. We know that there are three possibilities. One, that we will all be blown to bits if it is more powerful than we expect. If this happens, you and the world will be immediately told. Two, it may be a complete dud.

If this happens, you will also be told. Third, it may, as we hope, be a success. We pray without loss of any lives. In this case, there will be a broadcast of the world with a plausible explanation for the noise and the tremendous flash of light which will appear in the sky. With our alarm set for 2.30 a.m., Ed would leave at 3.15.

We did not want to allow much time. We did not want to say goodbye. Wives were not the only women who were just holding their breath. The female scientists who had been working on the project were just as anxious, if not more so. Maria Geppert Mayer had been researching uranium gas and energy releases in nuclear explosions, and what happened at Trinity would be a culmination of her study. Frances Dunn was on staff at Los Alamos as an explosives technician and was one of the very few women who had been officially invited to view the Trinity test as part of the assembly crew. Although there were only a handful

of women who were asked to be in attendance for the history-making Trinity Test, there were others who saw it up close and personal without an official invite. Late on that July night when the test was scheduled, Joan Hinton and Bob Carter, two scientists in Enrico Fermi's lab team at Los Alamos, sped along a long, dark highway in New Mexico on a motorcycle. Their 200-mile trip was top secret, but not by anyone's orders. They wanted to see whatever was scheduled to happen on the designated site deep in the southwestern desert. A little after midnight, Joan and Bob arrived in the general area of the test site. They'd gleaned enough information to know where

to look. The scientists found a comfortable spot on a hillside and waited. But nothing happened. a hillside and waited. But nothing happened. Hours and hours went by and still nothing. It was nearing dawn and they were exhausted and likely wet. The Trinity test had been scheduled to occur around 4 a.m. but an early morning thunderstorm blew through the area and caused a delay. For hours in the dead of night, the bomb hung silently from a 100-foot tower attached to miles of wiring, waiting to be detonated. The people who sat through the long night to witness this world-changing test were ready. test, were ready. They'd been told what to do, lie down, feet toward the blast, head away, and cover your eyes. They were only supposed to lift their heads and watch after the bright flash disappeared. And even then, only through special welder's glasses. Many were earplugs as

well. It's interesting to note that several people on the Trinity site were smoking around the bomb, although they were warned not to. Of course, we have to remember that this was the 1940s and smoking was not only accepted, but often encouraged at the time to calm nerves or keep people busy. It's just hard to imagine today, standing around and smoking next to an atomic bomb. No doubt, it was a long night for everyone there. Edward Teller, famed physicist, was so beside himself that he took up the task of passing out suntan lotion in case it would be helpful against ultraviolet rays, saying that doing this aided in keeping him calm. helpful against ultraviolet rays, saying that doing this aided in keeping him calm. Then, at 5.29 a.m., just as Joan and Bob settled into their nearby hillside to get some sleep,

they were flooded by a sea of light. Here's what Joan says that moment felt like. There was a light. It's like as though you're suddenly dropped in the middle of the ocean. The light was all around you. You couldn't tell that you weren't just in a sea of light. It was absolutely silent because we were 25 miles away. So just the sea of light and my first thought was that gee the atmosphere is really gone. As though it was a big magnet was sucking the light. It just sucked it back into where the bomb went off. And there it turned into this glow, a blue glow with a black, like oil burning, going up and up and up.

And you had this bubbling mass of terrible color, purple, very poisonous looking purple. And the black shadows around it. That glow seems to have haunted a number of witnesses to the blast. There was a cloud from the blast that reached 40,000 feet high, but there was also a fireball that burned yellow, then orange, red, and finally took on an eerie purple glow. It was later reported that people 200 miles away had seen the sea of light that Joan describes. Joan and Bob were alarmed by the silence after such a massive display of light, but then the sound came, and with it, a whoosh of heat. Joan described that sound and feeling.

She said, then all of a sudden, bam! The front of that shockwave was so sharp, loud, and heat. But when the sound came to a stop, the whole place was rumbling. Just heat and rumbling. After years of secret work, never quite knowing what the end result would be, Joan and Bob soon figured out what they had just witnessed. They had been part of the team that created a nuclear bomb. Later, Robert Oppenheimer recalled, we knew the world would not be the same. Later, Robert Oppenheimer recalled, We knew the world would not be the same.

A few people laughed. A few people cried. Most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad Gita, Now I become death, the destroyer of worlds. I suppose we all thought that one way or another. I suppose we all thought that one way or another. A little further away from Trinity, back near the Los Alamos site, another woman was outside early that morning, cleaning up from a picnic she'd hosted the night before.

When the bomb went off, she saw the light, and then she felt the rumble. And she knew exactly what it was. Dorothy McKibben was known as the gatekeeper at Los Alamos because she was responsible for the onboarding of all new employees who came to work at the top secret city. She'd been Robert Oppenheimer's first hire when he started the process of moving the operation to New Mexico. Dorothy first worked as a secretary, but her worth in the project became quickly apparent, and she rose through the ranks to the highest levels of responsibility and security clearance. Dorothy worked in a house-turned-office headquarters at 109 East Palace, Santa Fe.

When weary scientists, often accompanied by their family members, arrived in New Mexico after a long journey, and most having no idea where they were even headed, Dorothy was the friendly face that greeted them. Rebecca Bradford Diven, one of the scientists at Los Alamos, remembers her first meeting with Dorothy McKibben. Dorothy McKibben was the lady in charge of 109 East Palace, where everybody went when they arrived. A very warm, generous, smiling woman who immediately put you at ease and said, I'm so glad to meet you, and I hope you love it, and if you need anything, anything at all, let me know. And she also became a lifelong friend of everybody who ever went through her office. Dorothy reveled in her job and enjoyed even the around-the-clock nature of it. Years later, after declassification, she was finally able to share some of what her time was like during the Manhattan Project years. She said, I was on call 24 hours a day. There was never a dull moment.

She said, I was on call 24 hours a day. There was never a dull moment. The office was a madhouse. We worked six days a week, but I couldn't wait to return to work in the morning. And there were always people who needed attention. They might be hungry or exhausted or in a hurry, but I helped them get what they needed. Sometimes they needed childcare or a pet or holiday food or a doctor. And every evening before she left, she burned all of the paper that she'd used during the workday.

She knew better than to put top-secret classified papers in the trash. Laura Fermi and Rico's wife remembered how well Dorothy took care of the women. She said, Dorothy McKibben stayed calm and unruffled. All the women brought their difficulties and their checks to Dorothy. She endorsed the latter so they could be cashed at the bank and smoothed out the first. Yes, she knew of a boys camp. Yes, she could recommend a good eating place. Yes, she could arrange for a ride to the mesa later in the evening. Yes, she would try to get reservations for a good hotel in Albuquerque. Dorothy's place also became the unofficial wedding chapel, hosting around two dozen marriage ceremonies.

She arranged for a local judge to make each union legal with very little information about who exactly he was marrying. It was important to keep as many identities as possible a secret at Los Alamos. Dorothy was the social head of the Los Alamos compound, and she reveled in it. It was Dorothy who had arranged for the off-site overnight picnic for some Los Alamos families at Sandia Peak on July 15, 1945. And Dorothy, who, when the Trinity test went off early the next morning, dismissed it as a violent thunderstorm in the distance when the light and the rumble woke her guests. It was reported that people as far away as Phoenix, Arizona and western Texas saw and felt the effects of the bomb.

A press statement about the test went out the next day to provide the American people with misdirection. It said, received concerning a heavy explosion which occurred on the Alamogordo Air Base Reservation this morning. A remotely located ammunition magazine containing a considerable amount of high explosives exploded. There was no loss of life or injury to anyone, and the property damage outside of the explosives magazine itself was negligible. Weather conditions affecting the contents of gas shells exploded by the blast made it desirable to evacuate some civilians from this area. President Truman, on the other hand, received a coded message about it that read, doctor has just returned most enthusiastic and confident that the little boy is as husky as his big brother.

The light in his eyes discernible from here to high hold, and I could have heard his screams from here to my farm. Trinity had proven to be a success. And it was the birth of a new age. The age of the atomic bomb. I'm Jenna Fisher. And I'm Angela Kinsey. We are best friends. And together we have the podcast Office Ladies, where we rewatched every single episode of The Office.

With insane behind-the-scenes stories, hilarious guests, and lots of laughs. Guess who's sitting next to me? Steve! It is my girl in the studio! Every Wednesday, we'll be sharing even more exclusive stories from The Office and our friendship with brand new guests, and we'll be digging into our mailbag to answer your questions and comments. So join us for brand new Office Lady 6.0 episodes every Wednesday. Plus, on Mondays, we are taking a second drink. You can revisit all the Office Ladies rewatch episodes every Monday with new bonus tidbits before every episode. Well, we can't wait to see you there.

Follow and listen to Office Ladies on the free Odyssey app and wherever you get your podcasts. A little over two weeks after the gadget was successfully detonated in the New Mexico desert, the United States military dropped atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. On August 6, 1945, President Truman addressed the nation. A short time ago, an American airplane dropped one bomb on Hiroshima and destroyed its usefulness to the enemy. That bomb has more power than 20,000 tons of TNT. The Japanese began the war from the air at Pearl Harbor. They have been repaid many fold, and the end is not yet.

With this bomb, we have now added a new and revolutionary increase in destruction to supplement the growing power of our armed forces. In their present form, these bombs are now in production, and even more powerful forms are in development. It is an atomic bomb. It is a harnessing of the basic power of the universe. The force from which the sun draws its power has been loosed against those who brought war to the Far East. Americans were shocked, and newspapers quickly sold out as people searched for more information. papers quickly sold out as people searched for more information. Perhaps no one was more surprised though than the residents of Oak Ridge, Tennessee, where Caleutron Girls worked among the many thousands of people on a project they weren't allowed to know the details of. President Truman's address continued, the Secretary of War, who was kept in personal touch with all phases of the project,

will immediately make a public statement giving further details. His statement will give facts concerning the sites at Oak Ridge near Knoxville, Tennessee, and at Richland near Pasco, Washington, and at an installation near Santa Fe, New Mexico. Although the workers at the sites have been making materials to be used in producing the greatest destructive force in history, they have not themselves been in danger beyond that of many other occupations for the utmost care has been taken of their safety. One Oak Ridge employee described learning about what they'd actually been working on as unnerving, exciting, a bit skin crawling, definitely shocking. But were these workers as safe as President Truman claimed? It wasn't long before Joan Hinton had an up-close-and-personal visualization of how the new atomic technology impacted humans. Her fellow Omega Lab scientist,

Harry Doglian, was working after hours one night when a human error accidentally brought his bare hand into contact with enriched plutonium. Immediately, his hand started glowing blue and began to tingle. He ran outside and found Joan driving up to the lab and yelled at her to please take him to the hospital, exclaiming, I've just killed myself. Doctors were alarmed at the extreme dose of radiation he'd received and knew there was nothing they could do to stop the chain reaction of deterioration that began to happen in Harry's body. Over the next 25 days, Joan, Bob, and the other Omega Lab technicians watched Harry waste away, losing first his hair, then his skin, and finally his consciousness.

Harry died on September 15, 1945, of severe radiation poisoning. Unfortunately, we don't always see other people as worthy of our empathy and compassion, especially when they've been our enemies during a war. So for those who weren't swayed by the shocking and heartbreaking photos of bomb victims in Japan, evidence of destruction and death happening right in the United States was sometimes more compelling. Harry's death changed everything for Joan and a number of the other scientists who'd witnessed not only Harry's downfall, but who began receiving reports from Japan of the death, destruction, and utter human devastation. Joan spoke about her feelings in the time just after her colleague's death.

She said Los Alamos had all the Western physicists from Europe and England and the U.S. all concentrated in one little place and for science that was extremely interesting. The only trouble was what we were doing. She and a group of her fellow scientists decided to stage a protest about the potential now at hand with the nuclear weapons. They drove to the Trinity test site, collected the odd glowing glass from the ground there, and mailed boxes of it to mayors across the country with the note, Do you want this to happen to your city? We now call this greenish-colored glowing glass Trinitite

because it was formed by the extreme heat of the blast at the Trinity site, which vaporized sand and other materials, lifting it into the air before it rained back down to earth. There is similar glass at various sites in the country, but only the glass from Alamogordo, New Mexico can be called trinitite. To this day, it's mildly dangerous to handle it as it's still somewhat radioactive. The government bulldozed trinitite under the ground at the test site in 1952. But insects like ants carry it up, and so pieces can still be found on the surface. If you visit today, it is illegal to take Trinitite off-site.

Joan felt great insecurity about the line of work she was in. She needed a break to reassess her life and figure out her place in the world. So she planned a trip to China to visit her brother. So she planned a trip to China to visit her brother. Her friends and co-workers sent her off with a huge party, the gift of a new camera and well wishes. But Enrico Fermi only sent her off with one thing, his advice to watch what you say. The secretive nature of the atomic work done for the Manhattan Project was changing, but very slowly. Sites didn't shut down the day after the bombs were dropped in Japan, so while the public was starting to learn about what had been taking place, workers at atomic cities still in operation faced constantly changing rules about what they could and could not reveal to others.

In China, Joan became involved in China's efforts to develop a socialist economy. She got married and raised her three children on a dairy farm there. During a 1952 speech she gave at the Asian and Pacific Peace Conference, Joan apologized to Japan for the part she had played in creating the atomic bomb. Of her move from American physics to Chinese socialism, she said, I did not want to spend my life figuring out how to kill people. I wanted to figure out how to let people have a better life, not a worse life. While Joan was a Manhattan Project scientist who fled America for China, there was another woman in the program who had fled China for the United States and who ended up being an integral

part of the most famous new technology of the mid-20th century. Qin Zhongwu immigrated to the United States from China in 1936 when she was 24 years old. She developed a love of physics as a young child and had attained as much education as possible in her home country, but there was no opportunity for her to get a PhD. After receiving a scholarship to the University of Michigan, she set sail for America and arrived on the West Coast. At the University of Northern California, she fell in love twice, first with the Science Lab's cyclotron particle accelerator, and second with a man named Luke Yuan, who was a fellow Chinese physics grad student. By 1942, Qin had been hired for the Manhattan Project with her research responsibilities based at Columbia University. There, she developed a method for separating

fissionable uranium from non-viable uranium, a critical piece to the creation of the atomic bomb. She ended up being quite close with Oppenheimer himself, and they often called each other Oppie and Gigi, a pair of scientists who remained friends for the rest of their lives. and Gigi, a pair of scientists who remained friends for the rest of their lives. Jean was aware of the project she was working towards, but didn't have the inside scoop on how it would be implemented or what the U.S. government would be doing with the technology. Angered by what the Japanese had done in her own Chinese homeland, she was reportedly in favor of using atomic weapon technology to defeat Japan and end the war. But she wanted its weapons use to end there. And she spent the rest of her life speaking

up for atomic technology as an energy source and against its use as a weapon. She continued to make strides and discoveries within physics and chemistry and won a Nobel Prize in 1975. It's quite possible that Sheen was acquainted with a fellow scientist working on atomic technology, Leona Woods. We talked about her in a previous episode. You might remember that Leona was the only woman scientist on Enrico Fermi's team, the team that made the first successful nuclear chain reaction. scientist on Enrico Fermi's team, the team that made the first successful nuclear chain reaction. Leona hadn't known about the Trinity test or the bombs that were dropped on Japan until after it was all said and done. But of her part in it, she said, I think we did right, and we couldn't have done it differently. It was a very frightening time. My brother was a

Marine on Okinawa. It was pretty clear the war would continue with half a million of our fighting men dead, but you're in a war to the death. I don't think you stand around and ask, is it right? In December of 1945, Mademoiselle magazine published their list of the 10 most outstanding women and 26-year-old Leona Woods was featured, sharing in the article that she was excited to begin a resident fellowship back in Chicago at the Institute of Nuclear Studies. While some of these women atomic scientists returned to their previous studies and institutions like Leona did for a time, others stayed in the place they had been hired at for the Manhattan Project. On that July early morning in 1945, scientist Diz Graves witnessed the moment

that her work creating a neutron reflector for the core of the bomb became a booming reality from the little cabin she shared with her husband 40 miles from the Trinity test site. Shortly after the test, Diz gave birth to a baby girl named Marilyn. And Marilyn's lifelong nickname? Trinity. After the bombs were dropped on Japan, Diz and Alvin Graves settled into New Mexico for good, working at the Los Alamos Post, raising their three children, and pioneering new technologies in experimental physics. Both Diz and Alvin died young, Alvin from complications of radiation poisoning and Diz from cancer. At her funeral, Diz's daughter spoke about the life she'd led and her involvement in world-changing events, sharing that her mother, like Leona Woods, always said, I have no regrets.

I'll see you next time as we conclude our series. Thank you for listening to Hearer work it's interesting this show is written and researched by heather jackson sharon mcmahon valerie hoback and amy watkin edited and mixed by our audio producer jenny snyder and is hosted by me sharon mcmahon we'll see you again soon