THE MANHATTAN PROJECT WHAT MADE IT POSSIBLE? William J. (Bill) Wilcox, Retired Technical Director for Y- 12 & K-25

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1 Talk for Oak Ridge Rotary Club, June 6, THE MANHATTAN PROJECT WHAT MADE IT POSSIBLE? William J. (Bill) Wilcox, Retired Technical Director for Y- 12 & K-25 During the Manhattan Project (from May 25, 1943), Jr. Chemist, Tenn. Eastman Corp., Y-12 After the advanced showing of the History Channel s tape at the Museum last Saturday night, I heard someone say, Hey, that should have been titled The Role of Los Alamos in the Manhattan Project! Sure enough, the next day, Sunday, my sister in Pennsylvania called to tell me the newspaper there listed the program in that very way: The Manhattan Project Los Alamos scientists and engineers build the ultimate weapon of war in the interest of peace. That made me wonder how it was being billed here in real Atom Country, so I grabbed last Sunday s News-Sentinel. First I tried their listing called This Weeks Best Bets. For our Tuesday June 4 at 10PM time slot, their recommendation was that we all watch a documentary on the city of Boston on Channel 6! Next I tried the Movie Listings. Bingo!

2 Talk for Oak Ridge Rotary Club, June 6, There under the M s was The Manhattan Project. Yes, a 1986 movie with 2 _ stars and this explanation - A teen becomes suspicious of his mother s new boyfriend. On HBO. So Wow, I thought, this is not exactly the hot Video in the Knoxville area this week! Well what about that new Video? The very able producers who came here last October taped interviews with four members of our Rotary Club Alvin Weinberg, Don Trauger, Dick Smyser and myself, and with six more Ridgers. Those producers are of a generation who did not live through the awful War against Germany and Japan, so they view the Manhattan Project through a somewhat different lens than those of us who every morning for six long years read dreadful headlines and every night huddled over our radios listening to Lowell Thomas, Gabriel Heatter, and Edward R. Murrow, the Peter Jennings and Tom Brokaw of those days. The new History Channel tape has some very fine parts. I thought the way they handled the history leading up to the Manhattan Project was the best of any of the treatments I ve seen. As for the Project part itself, it tells the story of the work at Los Alamos, NM and that of its scientists very well in their so tight time frame, limited to less than an hour. Not many viewers would gather from watching that short

3 Talk for Oak Ridge Rotary Club, June 6, story how much greater were the problems in number and size at Oak Ridge in supplying the critical mass of U-235 for the first bomb. To put our efforts in perspective, consider the cost. Out of the 2 billion dollar total cost of the Manhattan Project, 60 cents of every dollar was spent on the efforts at Oak Ridge compared to 4 cents on Los Alamos efforts. Our U-235 challenge, like their challenge on weaponization, required solution of very difficult problems in science and engineering (we had our Nobel Laureates too: Ernest Lawrence, Harold Urey, Bill Libby, and Glenn Seaborg who came here every week to visit the Clinton Labs, now ORNL). The huge Y-12 and K-25 plants alone cost 13 times as much as the cost of Los Alamos 990 millions vs. 74 million. 1 In the summer of 1945 there were 22,000 people at Y-12 alone compared to the 2,500 at Los Alamos. 2 But of course when you re making a video for the public they want action, and our work at Oak Ridge was a prolonged and steady 24hours/7days effort for 2.5 years that never once culminated in a single day s event like the Trinity Test at Alamogordo that was so dramatic and so well filmed for posterity back in It would take a lot more time than I have this noon or that the History Channel had to tell about the equally urgent, 1 By the end of 1945 Data from the official history (vol I) by Hewlett & Robinson, page Op.cit. The Cost of Y-12 and K-25 to end 1945 was $478 + $512 = $990 million vs. $74 million for Los Alamos. The total cost of the MP thru 1945 = $ 1,889,604,000. Thru 1946 = $2,170,647,000. People in 1945 were 22,000 at Y-12, 11,000 at K-25 = 33,000 vs. 2,500 at Los Alamos, latter # from Video.

4 Talk for Oak Ridge Rotary Club, June 6, equally heroic stories of the wartime years of either Y-12 or of K-25, each of which was highly uncertain in outcome from their first designs, demanding brand new science, never before heard classes of materials like K-25 s fluorocarbons and interhalogens, entirely new technologies. K-25 was especially fantastic one enormous vacuum-tight marvel. Instead, what I d like to address is a question I ve often been asked about the Manhattan Project and that is this: How was it ever possible to accomplish so very much brand new science and technology in so short a time? Did it accomplish So much? Decidedly so. The Y-12 and K-25 ventures represented the first-ever productionscale separation of the isotopes of any element anywhere in the world. The Graphite Reactor at Clinton Labs was the first-ever to produce plutonium on a gram scale. All of this here in Oak Ridge. Elsewhere in the Manhattan Project, Hanford was the first-ever production of plutonium in multi pound quantities anywhere. And at Los Alamos their challenge was the first-ever design and development of militarily useful weapons. The prospects for success of any of these ventures at the start of the Project were dim indeed; but fear of German and later of Japanese success and the

5 Talk for Oak Ridge Rotary Club, June 6, urgency of doing anything to shorten the War made making the effort to do even the impossible a must for all of us. Was it really done so fast? Yes. Each of the three main segments uranium isotope separation at Oak Ridge, plutonium production at Hanford, and weaponization at Los Alamos were accomplished in 2 yrs 5 mos. from ground breaking! The first time anything is done is the hardest for any such achievements, because you never know what will and what won t work. It was incredibly fast considering the difficulties. Here s one way to gauge our accomplishment. A British physicist and spy at Los Alamos, Klaus Fuchs, gave the Russians design details of the plutonium implosion device in the summer and fall of 1945, and under orders that they not to try to improve on our design but just to produce an exact duplicate, it took the very able Russians about four years to do what we did in 2.5 years! 3 Yes, the Manhattan Project accomplished its mission in an incredibly short time. So how was it possible? Here are some reasons I ve been reflecting on. 1. One reason for its success was the choice of Gen. Groves, not only because of his intelligence and personal skills, but 3 The orders came from Beria, directly under Stalin, countering Peter Kapitza s urging improvement as a way to get ahead of the U.S. He ended up under house arrest. (Rhoades, Dark Sun, p )

6 Talk for Oak Ridge Rotary Club, June 6, because he was given and then took full responsibility for the entire project. The organizational decision to put the whole U.S program under him with full support from our top government was a major difference between our atomic program and the programs of Germany, Japan, and Russia. James C. White, president of Tennessee Eastman Corp., a subsidiary of Eastman Kodak, told in a memoir how Groves twisted their arm to take on the Y-12 job on Christmas Eve, He wrote: Groves had a reputation all over the country of being ruthless with contractors. His West Point colleagues said that Groves would get ahead even if he had to step on his Grandmother s face. But I think they made a fine choice when they picked him.... He talked to us all day, but got nowhere because he couldn t tell us anything about the project; we not having any clearances. Along toward night, I said it would help if he could at least tell us about the size of the job and the type of people needed. He said it could not possibly get to more than 2500 people, he thought about 1500 on total payroll. Of course, as you know, we had hired over 24,000 before it was over. He didn t at that point have all the facts either.

7 Talk for Oak Ridge Rotary Club, June 6, Later on in his memoir White spoke about Groves relation with the scientists: You know all you had to do was to get about 25 of these top scientists from universities around the country in one room and no decisions are made! But Groves could pin them down and get an answer. It wasn t always right, but at least he got an answer. So that s one reason. Groves deserves a lot of credit for leadership, keeping a dauntingly diverse bunch of strongminded people focused on challenging goals, demanding progress, and making tough decisions. 2. Second. Masterful corporate recruitment and delegation. In his first four months on the job (Sept, Oct, Nov, Dec. 1942) Groves enlisted the help of top corporations with strength in chemistry and chemical engineering to sign on as their patriotic duty, and teamed each of them with the top university scientists that had been doing the R&D in the years just before the Project. For instance, to build and run Y-12 s electromagnetic separation plant he got Tennessee Eastman (a subsidiary of Eastman Kodak) to implement the R&D being done by the E. O. Lawrence team at California,

8 Talk for Oak Ridge Rotary Club, June 6, and Stone & Webster of Boston to do the huge A/E work. For K-25 he enlisted Union Carbide to work with the team of scientists at Columbia with M.W. Kellogg (Kellex Corp.) to do the engineering design. And for the Pu Project at Hanford (incl. their pilot graphite reactor in OR) Groves finally talked E.I. Dupont to work with Arthur Holly Compton s team at the Univ. Chicago. What this approach meant was the immediate injection into the Manhattan project of a huge cadre of senior professionals of all the needed disciplines into the project, people who knew how to get things done in high technology fields. By summer 1943, only six months into the Project, Groves had many thousands of people Q cleared and already hard at work, scientists, engineers, and architects designing exotic equipment, and construction workers already building plants and towns. Marvelous. 3. Third on my list, maybe not in importance, but in timing, was the availability of almost new sites for building the needed facilities at Oak Ridge, Hanford, and Los Alamos. There was not a lot of tearing or rebuilding to do anywhere. One thing the Army Engineers (whose Project this was) were experts at doing was what most needed to be done quickly: building roads, guard fences, putting up towns, living quarters and all the infrastructures required in a big hurry. When Groves came to see the East Tennessee site in

9 Talk for Oak Ridge Rotary Club, June 6, Sept the same month he took command he recognized the possible hazard it would be to locate the plutonium production reactors so close to Knoxville and so scrapped his predecessor in the Manhattan Engineering District, Col. James Marshall s idea of locating the entire Manhattan Project on our 59,000 acres, one reason our area has looked to some folks bigger than it needed to be. 4. A fourth and big reason things were done faster than usual, let s be candid, was because of the Secrecy this wartime Project demanded.. Groves early on decided to compartmentalize each of the main parts of the Project Y- 12, K-25, X-10, Hanford, Los Alamos, and within those areas, each was still further divided into secret compartments. As a Jr. Chemist at Y-12 I knew what my group s job was in 9203, but nothing about all those other buildings, let alone anything about those other places in town. Secrecy worked to a great advantage in decisionmaking and progress. A well-informed small group at the top headed by Groves made decisions on the crucial questions, there was no need to consult with the Administration, get Congressional buy-ins, and gather any stakeholder input. Plant managers reviewed options, made decisions; that was that. It sure saves time when you don t have to sell your plan or decisions to others.

10 Talk for Oak Ridge Rotary Club, June 6, A fifth and maybe even more important factor than secrecy was the availability of money with minimal paperwork. Groves virtually had a blank check. If anything was wanted to keep the program on schedule or that might speed it up; it was bought, not studied. We working level people wrote up our work in Lab Notebooks for patent purposes and review by our bosses, but spent no time on budget presentations, preparing briefings, progress reports, writing proposals or even purchase requisitions. to order something I just made a list on a handy scrap of paper and took it up to Sally in the front hall! A few days or weeks later the boxes would appear. The only forms we ever saw were time cards, and waybills and analysis request forms to account for every milligram of U-235. Yes, the availability of all the money the Manhattan Project needed certainly made a big difference both in the time it took and in what was accomplished. 6. Still another factor of real importance was that when the Project had to compete for scarce materials in the wartime economy, Groves was able to invoke the Government s top priority in getting help from contractors, suppliers, etc. Throughout the war, pressure was on all the companies in all the manufacturing sectors of the country to get their needs met ASAP, and the Government priority system was the tool government officials used to get things done in the right

11 Talk for Oak Ridge Rotary Club, June 6, order. When push came to shove, our Project had a big club But I think the most important reason so much got done so fast was that everyone from Gen. Groves on down to the operators on all three shifts had a common purpose to do whatever they could seven days a week to help end the war. Nobody told us we ought to work extra long hours and extra hard; we had convinced ourselves that we should by reading the papers each day and hearing on the radio every night of the atrocities and the killing of our countrymen and our allies in North Africa, on the beaches in Normandy, on the infamous Bataan Death march in the Philippines, in the jungles of Burma, and on islands in the Pacific whose names we never heard of before, but now can never forget. This is what is difficult to share and get across to the next generation. I ve had a hard time describing it to my own children that patriotism that made you work so hard, keep the secrets, restrain your natural curiosity, put up with all the shortages, and live with rules you often could not understand. It was all wrapped up in that phrase to help win the War. Our country glimpsed a kindred spirit in the weeks following the dastardly attacks of September 11, an 4 I m grateful to Donald B. Trauger who suggested I add this one after hearing my Rotary talk.

12 Talk for Oak Ridge Rotary Club, June 6, outpouring of that patriotic feeling: What can I do to help? But during WWII we had read about awful horrors somewhere week after week for six long years. ( 39-45) A million American boys were killed or wounded in the just the three years and nine months we were at war. I lost my best boyhood friend who was piloting a bomber over Germany; both of my wife s brothers were in the services, almost everyone knew someone who had lost family members. What did those two successful bombings at the end of the Manhattan Project mean to us here in Oak Ridge? Nobody that I knew felt any glory in the killing of the Japanese at Hiroshima any more than we gloried in the killing that huge number in the fire-bombing of Tokyo on the night of March 10 th a few months before that bombing that burned out 16 square miles of Tokyo, 4 times as much as was burned out at Hiroshima. 5 What we did take pride in was that the shock of our Project s success finally caused their reluctant Emperor to stand up to his die-hard militarists and insist on bringing their War to an end at last. A war they started against us at Pearl Harbor, but which had earlier seen their savage attacks on China start that eventually resulted in a now almost forgotten 14 million Chinese dead. The six 5 140,000 were killed or seriously wounded by the firestorm caused by 334 B-29s from Tinian each carrying six tons of incendiaries. 1,000,000 were wounded. 16 sq. miles of the city were burned out. Night 3/9-10/45 Tibbets, Return of the Enola Gay, page 195. Rhodes, Making the Atomic Bomb, page

13 Talk for Oak Ridge Rotary Club, June 6, year World War that we helped stop had caused a nearly incomprehensible total of 54 million people killed by other humans! 6 Rather than drawing the Manhattan Project story in the fine Modern Marvels video to a close showing individual Japanese victims of our bombs, my preference would have been for an ending that simply proclaimed the role of the Manhattan Project in stopping that war s awful killing of so many on all sides and restoring blessed peace once again. That relief is, I think, what caused all of us here in Oak Ridge to rejoice so when we woke up the morning of August 14 th to this very special edition of The Knoxville Journal. (Display item: that issue was printed on red paper with an 8-inch tall banner headline: P E A C E.) And finally, rather than framing the post-war legacy of the Manhattan Project in terms of Los Alamos and Livermore s developing the even more powerful thermonuclear bombs, I wished the Project s legacy could also have been framed in terms of the dawn of the new era of peaceful applications of nuclear science. That was the era into which I m proud to say Oak Ridge (ORNL & Y-12) led the way in producing radioactive and stable isotopes that have brought the world so many benefits in medicine, agriculture, and industrial 6 Gil Eliot, The Twentieth Century Book of the Dead, Scribners, NY, 1972.

14 Talk for Oak Ridge Rotary Club, June 6, uses we still enjoy today, and not many years later Oak Ridge again led the way (ORNL & K-25) in giving to the world nuclear research reactors and power plants whose clean electric power - though not yet acceptable to the public in this country - has been welcomed and beneficial to so many countries of the world including Japan yes once our war-time enemy, but for so long since, such good friends. Those and other peaceful uses to my mind should also be honored as a real legacy of the Manhattan Project. They truly are one of our Modern Marvels. Thank you.

15 Talk for Oak Ridge Rotary Club, June 6, Cost Summary. This R. G. Hewlett & O. E. Robinson summary of MED costs is given in an Appendix to The New World, , Univ. Calif. Press, 1962, paperback reprint 1990, page 723. The H&R numbers are Manhattan Project cost totals at the end of 1945 (the Project ran one more year, but the war ended August 14, 1945.) Y-12 $477,631,000 (42% of OR) (25.3% of MP) K-25 $512,166,000 (45% of OR) (27.1% of MP) (incl. Steam Plant) X-10 $ 26,932,000 ( 2.4% of OR)

16 Talk for Oak Ridge Rotary Club, June 6, S-50 $ 15,672,000 Townsite $ 96,000,000 (H&A give only a total for CEW Hdqs etc., I use GORobinson s $ here) Oak Ridge $ 1,128,401,000 (59.7% of MP) Hanford $390,124,000 (20.6% of MP) Los Alamos $ 74,055,000 ( 3.9% of MP) Sp. Oper. Mtls. $103,369, 000 [U mining, milling, refining, and probably others (?), but not D 2 O ] CEW Hdqs. $ 59,951, 000 (their caption adds & central utilities (?). I subtracted 96M). I wonder if this number might incl. the Steam Plant. This probably includes the Delivery Group at Wendover, Tinian Island, etc. [We need other breakdowns of costs to be sure of what is included where.]

17 Talk for Oak Ridge Rotary Club, June 6, Heavy Water Plts $ 26,768,000 R&D $ 69,681,000 (Universities like Columbia, Chicago, California, Iowa State, etc.?) Govt. Overhead $ 37,255,000 Manhattan Proj. $1,889,604,000 Total Through End of 1945 (The Project ran till end of 1946); The Final Manhattan Project Cost through the end of 1946, was $2,170,647,000.

Oak Ridge and the Manhattan Project. Table of Contents. 1. Content Essay High School Activity Primary Source: Images 9-10

Oak Ridge and the Manhattan Project Table of Contents Pages 1. Content Essay 2-4 2. 5 th Grade Activity 5-6 3. High School Activity 7-8 4. Primary Source: Images 9-10 1 Standards: 5.59, U.S. 68 Oak Ridge