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-: A short time ago an American airplane dropped one bomb on Hiroshima. -: Now, I am become death, the destroyer of worlds. -: So, the discovery of nuclear fission, that you could split atoms, this took place in Berlin. And, a number of scientists who had been previously in Germany, but had fled after Hitler took power, they saw this as a really bad sign that if there was any possibility of using nuclear technology for military purposes, either as a reactor, or as a bomb, that the, sort of, worst hands you could have it in, would be in the hands of the Germans. And so, once they started thinking this way, the ones, there were, not all scientists were immediately worried about this. I mean, this discovery had just happened. It was basic science, but there were some who were willing to say, like, "I don't know, maybe within a couple years, you could actually make a bomb out of this thing." And, the person who did that in the United States, was Leo Szilard. He had gotten very frustrated that there didn't seem to be any official action being taken about the possibility of atomic weapons. Now, nobody knew who Leo Szilard was in 1939, but they did know his very good friend, Albert Einstein. So, Szilard went to Einstein, and said, "Let's write a letter." And, they ended up writing a letter to President Roosevelt that essentially said, "Hey, there's been these new discoveries in science. We ought to have somebody in the government taking a look at these. There is a possibility of a very large weapon being made. Somebody should be looking at this." And, so Roosevelt was sort of given this letter, and he agreed, "sure." And so, he created what was called the Uranium Committee. The Uranium Committee was not very effective. It did some very small scale experiments. It organized a little bit of research, but it was almost too secret. Like, there was not enough people brought in on it. There was not enough work being done. It was not super well-funded. And if that had been the level of the American approach there would have been no atomic bomb. This was not a project that was ever gonna lead on its own to making a bomb. What happened is that the British had a very similar project. They had other refugees from the Nazis who were also worried about this. And, they did their own investigations. And, they came to the conclusion that with some effort, a country with the resources of the United States, or Germany, could make an atomic bomb within a few years. And so, this led to the whole program being taken over by a different group of scientists. It was given a new name, "S1." This was a, sort of, pilot scale, like, "can we actually do this?" And then, when they decided, "yeah, it looks like we can do it," then they created the Manhattan Project, which is to say they gave it, they got permission from Roosevelt, to turn it over to the Army, to actually build nuclear weapons. So, General Groves became the head of the Manhattan Project, in 1942. And, he was this just, gruff, West Point engineer. His previous, sort of, resume item was that he built the Pentagon, which was the largest office building in the entire world at the time. He knew how to get things done. And so, obviously, this is gonna put him head-to-head with university scientists, Nobel Prize winners. Groves referred to them as prima donnas. He thought that they were, sort of, these eggheads, who if left to their own devices, would treat the Manhattan Project as the world's most expensive summer research project, and not be focused on the military needs for this weapon. Groves' approach to this, to dealing with them, was sort of twofold. One was the hiring of Jay Robert Oppenheimer, as the, sort of, head scientist. Groves had this, sort of, talent of picking people. He, at some level, understood that if he's gonna tell the scientist to do things they didn't want to do, it would be better coming from Oppenheimer, than coming from Groves, because they would respect a guy like Oppenheimer. If Oppenheimer says, "we've all gotta be secret, and we've all gotta live in a place with fences, and we've all gotta not have mail being sent out," they're more likely to buy it than if Groves does it, because they're gonna see him as the embodiment of the military. So, Oppenheimer plays this key role, not just for his scientific capabilities, but his, sort of, social capabilities, his ability to be a scientist's scientist. The other approach that Grove used was what he considered the heart of security, compartmentalization. This is sometimes called the need-to-know policy. So, you only tell people exactly as much as they need to know to do the job that is right in front of them. The idea is that the less they know, the less they could possibly compromise. But, also, and Groves is very explicit about this, this is how the scientists are going to keep to their tasks, keep to their knitting. You're gonna only have them work on one tiny thing, because the minute they start to think about the big picture, oh, they're gonna look at a million different sort of possibilities. They might even look at political questions. And, Groves doesn't want any of that. He wants them to be very narrow focused, technical sort of workers. And so, pretty much every scientist on the Manhattan Project chafed under this regime, and pretty much every one of them ended up with stories about how they had to break the rules in order just to get their jobs done. And so, sometimes these stories are framed very humorously. Richard Feynman famously cracked safes at Los Alamos, and broke 'em into office, and, you know, did lock picking. And, he wrote about these stories later, "haha, what a good romp." But, he's like defying security orders, very deliberately, again, to get his job done. This kind of policy was clearly trying to cut them out of discussions of policy, and politics, and the use of the bombs. And, they sought ways to sort of get around this to make it so that they had not just lost all control over this weapon they were creating. And Groves, of course, fought this pretty bitterly. I think a lot of people, when they think about, like, the Manhattan Project, or making the atomic bomb, they think about, like, a laboratory with a bunch of scientists, and they've got equipment, and, you know, somehow a bomb pops out. The better way to think about it is they built an entire industry from scratch, and they did it in like two and a half years. And, this was a giant industry. It was, it cost $2 billion, which was about 1% of the cost of World War II. It used about 1% of all electricity in the United States, during World War II. It ended up employing about 1% of the civilian labor force, during World War II. So, it's about 500,000 people total, worked on this project. It ended up filing about 1% of all patents. I mean, I just wanna give you a sense, this is a big, big project. But, the biggest fear was, "what if this whole thing becomes really public, and then it gets shut down?" Because, even the Germans finding out, that wouldn't stop the Manhattan Project, it would just, maybe, intensify the race they thought they were in. But, if Congress finds out? If Congress finds out they might decide they don't want to do this thing, and they might shut the whole thing down. And, Congress was trying to find out, there were congressmen repeatedly trying to audit, and discover what was going on with all of this money, and these gigantic sites, that employed tens of thousands of people, and they were just getting no answers back. This is why the funding for the project was initially out of a totally black budget, like secret funds that Roosevelt had secured so he wouldn't have to go through Congress. Eventually, they were able to, sort of, pull in a few congressmen, and use them to, sort of, rubber stamp these expenditures. But, almost nobody in Congress was told about this. But, this was a real source of problems. They really feared that if Congress found out about this, they would potentially wanna stop it. They would potentially wanna have a role in deciding how it was gonna be used. They would potentially see it as, just, like, a scientific boondoggle. And, they weren't wrong to fear this. There were many people along the way who did think these things. Newscaster: To the world, August 6th, 1945 began as just another day, but to a single B29 over the Japanese city of Hiroshima, It was the beginning of a new era for civilization. (bomb explodes) -: So, the atomic bomb was kept totally, totally, totally secret as much as possible, until the day of Hiroshima. And then, it was out there. Then the government did a lot of work to try and make everybody in the world know what this thing was, and what they thought its implications were. Both because they wanted the Japanese to give up, but also because they felt that this was a genuinely important, you know, potentially changing the direction of human history. But, all of this enthusiasm was tinged with this undercurrent, and many of the scientists encouraged this, of what does this mean for the next war? They went out and they actually worked with lobbyists, and talked to Congress, and they basically said, "guys, this bomb is awful and we need to work today to make sure that that war doesn't happen. And, what is that gonna look like?" People had different ideas, treaties, for example, that might ban nuclear weapons, and make sure that nobody else would get them, and the United States would eventually get rid of its, and and things of that nature. But, the basic idea was this is not gonna be, this is not some just regular weapon. This is a turning point, and it's not gonna be the monopoly of the United States forever. Other countries are gonna get it. The Soviet Union is gonna get it. Interestingly, one of the big turning points in even further public understanding, doesn't come until about a year later, with the publication of the book "Hiroshima," by John Hershey. And, it was the first account that Americans really had of what had happened in Japan. And, you start to couple that with a lot of criticism about the use of the bombs, coming largely from the military who were afraid that the atomic bombs would be given too much credit in winning World War II, and were gonna be used as an excuse to cut the conventional military. And, this is what leads to a, sort of, concerted effort by former members of the Manhattan Project, to sort of retell the story. And so, this is where we get this whole idea of, that there was a decision to use the atomic bomb, that Truman weighed it very carefully, that the option was to use the bomb or invade. That really doesn't come out until 1947, and it's the result of mounting criticisms. And, that story is remarkably successful. You still hear it today in American classrooms. Historians have known for decades that isn't really what happened. That wasn't really the stakes of it, but as a way of convincing people to accept that the bombs were, sort of, the lesser of two evils, it was very successful. So, after World War II, one of the big questions was, what do we do with this Manhattan Project thing? Like, we spent all this money building this secret industry, this sort of secret empire that spanned hundreds of sites across the United States, and even some sites in other countries. Initially the military tried to push a bill through Congress that basically said "we're gonna create this new organization, called the Atomic Energy Commission, and it'll be civilian and military, and it'll manage these things." And, this met with a very strong backlash. The scientists who had worked on the Manhattan Project in particular, got very organized and, sort of, made it very clear that they did not think this was acceptable. They really didn't think that the military could manage this well. They had a million stories about how the military had, sort of, been a poor manager of even the Manhattan Project. They believed that if you let the military do this, they're gonna just make all bombs, and they are gonna have access to them. They're not gonna develop the peaceful sides of atomic energy. This was gonna be a disaster. The law that came after it, was much more influenced by the scientists, and it also created Atomic Energy Commission, but this time it would be all civilian. And, it was very explicitly framed as, "this is going to be a civilian production." And, even what they called custody, even like physical access to nuclear weapons. The military could only have access to nuclear weapons if the president ordered them to have them, but it would not be by default. And, that this was gonna introduce, sort of, a check on the military. They weren't just going to be able to do whatever they wanted, or make as many bombs as they wanted. There was gonna be this civilian, and presidential check on what they could do. In practice, it worked out not quite as simple as that. The military, the goal of the Atomic Energy Commission, they were supposed to, say, figure out how many bombs the military needed. And, what the military would say was, "well how many bombs can you make?" And, then they would order that many bombs, right? So, in the way the military had a lot more power, after all. One of the interesting things about World War II, is that the secrecy was so all-encompassing, that even the fact that there was a secret, was secret. So, this is what I call absolute secrecy. The fact that there was a top secret project to make the atomic bomb, was the top secret. By the Cold War, people know that there are weapons projects they know that nuclear weapons are being developed. They know that there is an H-bomb being developed. They know all of this sort of stuff. They don't know the details, but they know that these things exist. And so, you can say, "oh, that big plant over there? It's for a secret Atomic Energy Commission project." And, people will say, "oh, all right, well I know that I can't go in there. That sounds legitimate." Whereas, in World War II, you couldn't say that. You just say, "Ah, I can't tell you what's over there at all." Which of course gets people curious, and they start to push and things like this. In the Cold War, the secrecy was also imagined to be essentially permanent. In World War II, most of the scientists and the military believed that the secrets were gonna be, sort of, released in some way after the war. That's how it had happened in previous wars. There were very few permanent secrets in the United States, before World War II. And then, after World War II, it became this issue where the knowledge didn't expire. The stakes are really high. This is a function of the bomb itself, as well. If you're imagining that what you're combating as an enemy that if things go wrongly will start a war that will kill your entire nation, it's very easy to justify just about anything in the face of that threat. It's different than even World War II. Hitler was not gonna conquer the United States, right? He could conquer England, he could do a lot of damage, no doubt. But, like, it wasn't as existential as the Cold War, where they literally have thousands of weapons, and we have thousands of weapons, and we are toe-to-toe in Berlin, and things could go off at any minute. And, if they get the idea that they've got an advantage, the Americans thought the Soviets will take it. That's the mindset they thought they had. And, this led to, just, a, sort of, spreading of secrecy. And, a lot of this literally comes out of the Manhattan Project, in terms of the practices and ideas. There, again, isn't really permanent secrecy in the United States, prior to World War II. And then, the Manhattan Project becomes the, sort of, bulkhead of this permanent existential secrecy, that starts to spread to every federal organization, and every level of American society. And, this becomes so pervasive, that they end up coming up with, sort of, new terms for it. The idea of national security gets created in this early Cold War period, to mean something different than what they would've called, like, National Defense. The national security is deliberately broad. It covers politics, it covers ideology, it covers weapons. And, if you believe that every little aspect of your world is part of this giant battle, where again, at the end of the battle is, if you win it, then you win. And, if you lose, everybody dies. You start to sort of justify almost anything. And, so the amount of secrecy just multiplies, and multiplies, and multiplies. At the same time, people start to realize this is getting pretty big. Certainly by the late Cold War, people start to criticize this, and push back a bit. But, this is sort of seen as like a real shift in the direction of how Americans think about government and what the role of the government is. And, the bomb is at the center of this, both literally, in terms of the Manhattan Project creating some of these practices, but to an even greater extinct, almost rhetorically. It's the sort of ultimate justification at the end of the line. (gentle instrumental music)