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By the start of World War II, the Martians had become involved in politics. They helped the United States get ready for modern warfare, including advancements in air power, the atomic bomb, and an ever-enhanced application of the computer in weapons development. They initiated the Manhattan Project and participated in it. However, they became divided as to the desirability of actually using the atomic bomb after Germany’s defeat.

Leaders in the Manhattan Project laid the groundwork for the government’s mass-production of radioisotopes during the war. The U.S. Army constructed the Oak Ridge reactor as a pilot plant for the Hanford plutonium-producing reactors, and its postwar fate was uncertain. Scientists wanted to dedicate it to radioisotope production for external users with the dual aims of to benefiting civilian science and justifying a national laboratory in Tennessee. This chapter covers the establishment of the civilian agency (the AEC), the launching of radioisotope distribution—still under the auspices of the Manhattan Project until Jan. 1, 1947—and the U.S. government’s public relations efforts that were staged around the early shipments. It tracks isotope production at Oak Ridge through early postwar period, which supplied stable and radioactive isotopes, as well as irradiation services, to civilian scientists and physicians. The same reactor was producing radioisotopes for sale and materials for radiological warfare experiments and other classified research projects, showing the overlap between the AEC’s civilian and military activities.

Wartime experiences seeded the new nuclear specialists, and these environments gestated their post-war opportunities. The laboratories and production sites merged industrial and scientific cultures. Hybrids—neither engineers nor scientists of the pre-war pattern—were bred and nurtured there. In each country, the mix of industry and science was different, and led to distinct versions of expertise. The Anglo-Canadian project brought together scientists and engineers from universities and the National Research Council with support from Britain's largest chemical company, ICI. In the USA, Du Pont engineers shared an uneasy responsibility for developing nuclear reactors alongside scientists of the University of Chicago's Met Lab. The working contexts fostered new know-how and introduced disputes about competence and authority. The viability of the new breeds remained disputed through the war and beyond. Disputes between established disciplines—especially physics and chemical engineering—initially ceded no territory to upstart experts.

This chapter discusses atomic fordism—the systematic compartmentalization of work for the Manhattan Project. The system stretched across the country with the nation’s major highways functioning as a conveyor belt of nuclear knowledge, nuclear secrets, and fissionable uranium and plutonium. In this systematic production, each worker according to each site was responsible for a very specific part of the process and was often required to perform a set of repetitive, monotonous tasks. The purpose of separation in atomic fordism was for speed and efficiency just as in Henry Ford’s organization, but with the added understanding that this way of working would aid in the Project’s desire to prevent the flow of information.

This chapter explores the growth of tourism in former nuclear sites, as the former sites of the Manhattan Project, as well as its progeny—nuclear storage facilities and aging apparatuses from Cold War nuclear complexes—became places of interest for tourists. Just as industrial tourism became popular in areas of de-industrialization, nuclear tourism is becoming a more common practice in spaces of de-nuclearization. For instance, the Secret City Festival of Oak Ridge included tours to the enormous former factories of the Manhattan Project. In addition, sites of atomic tourism attempt to halt the erasure of the nation’s nuclear past, but they do so mostly by conjuring the prelapsarian days before many of the dangers of nuclear weapons were known.

This chapter presents a photo of J. Robert Oppenheimer, as well as the author’s mother and grandfather, in examining Ed Westcott’s photography concerning the Manhattan Project. His photographs stare out from history books about the bomb, and inside the neatly labeled binders in the Oak Ridge Room of the city’s public library as well as in the National Archives. His subject matter ranges from aerial shots of the land to depictions of the immaculate workspaces of the atomic factories, from workers loading slugs into the face of a reactor to housewives with ration tickets in line at the butcher shop. In addition, Westcott’s photographs can be considered as idealized and contrived depictions of an atomic utopia of order, efficiency, and the wholesome pleasures of mid-twentieth-century America.

In October 1995, Joseph Rotblat and the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs had received the Nobel Peace Prize. The Nobel committee recognized Pugwash's work in bringing together scientists and decision makers, in spite of political differences, to collaborate for the reduction of the nuclear threat. His wife and family perished in the Holocaust. Rotblat's work with James Chadwick led to his membership on the British bomb team and to the Manhattan Project—Chadwick headed Britain's scientific mission to Los Alamos. This chapter presents his views on the good and evil of atomic energy to mankind; his opposition to the atomic attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki; General Leslie Groves' views on using the bomb to subdue the Russians; and the Oppenheimer trial.

The U.S. government developed atomic energy for peacetime after World War II in the form of radioactive isotopes, produced in a former Manhattan Project reactor and distributed to civilian purchasers. These radioisotopes provided physicians with new tools of diagnosis and therapy and equipped biologists to trace molecular transformations from metabolic pathways to ecosystems. This chapter juxtaposes postwar developments in biochemistry, nuclear medicine, and ecology growing out of this new supply of radioisotopes. In each of these areas, one can see how government policy and infrastructure integral to the Cold War decisively shaped scientific opportunities and knowledge. Routine practices of radiolabeling and radiotracing remained in place long after the positive political valence of radioisotopes dimmed in the 1960s and 1970s, in the wake of the debates over radioactive contamination of the environment from atomic weapons tests and nuclear waste.

This chapter narrates events in Oak Ridge following the Hiroshima Bombing, particularly when the secret war project had been broadcast throughout the world. For Oak Ridgers, the day of bombing was a day of jubilation and celebration—a sign that the end of the war was near. The close of the war was an immense relief for the nation as a whole, and Oak Ridge was no exception. However, after the war, the city’s raison d’être had disappeared, and residents were unsure of how to organize their lives after the fallout. Similar worries reverberated throughout all of the Manhattan Project sites. For Oak Ridge, these fears were partially alleviated when, on September 6, 1945, Colonel Nichols announced that the site would continue to operate, although it was not entirely clear in what capacity and on what scale.

During the time of the interview, David Hawkins was a Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the University of Colorado. This chapter presents how he came to know Robert Oppenheimer and his mentor Niels Bohr; how he acted as a liaison between the Los Alamos lab's military and civilian populations; the success of the Manhattan Project due primarily to Oppenheimer's efforts; and Hawkins' technical, administrative, and policy-making history of the Los Alamos lab. It notes that a complex institutional structure was developed at the laboratory, with divisions dedicated to theory, chemistry and metallurgy, research, ordnance, explosives, and the Trinity test.

This chapter focuses on developments in E. O. Lawrence’s Radiation Laboratory to illustrate the cyclotron-based system of radioisotope production. By 1940, biomedical uses of radioisotopes involved collaboration between physical scientists as providers and life scientists and physicians as users, a “moral economy” of gift exchange and shared credit. In Berkeley, biological research with sodium-24, phosphorus-32, and iodine-131 as tracers was connected to therapeutic experiments using these radioisotopes. The militarization of work in Lawrence’s Berkeley laboratory in the early 1940s constrained the availability of radioisotopes to physicians and scientists outside the Radiation Laboratory. In addition, new military priorities shaped the ongoing human experiments conducted by Lawrence’s colleagues (such as John Lawrence and Joseph Hamilton), as they began investigating the toxicity and metabolism of fission products for the Manhattan Project.

Herbert York was the first director of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and the first chancellor of the University of California at San Diego. During World War II, the University of California managed the Los Alamos laboratory for the federal government. York worked in Manhattan Project Site Y-12 in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, where he was a member of the scientific team producing enriched uranium. For young Manhattan Project scientists such as York and the author's parents, the wartime bomb-building effort was an opportunity to work with many of the scientific giants of the era. York's own career is a significant link in this chain of connections. This chapter presents York's well-reasoned arguments in support of the decision to drop the bomb, and the deep context in which the war and the ultimate use of the bomb developed.

On December 6, 1945, four months after Hiroshima, physicist Philip Morrison testified before Senator Brien McMahon's Special Committee on Atomic Energy, created to investigate problems relating to the development, use, and control of atomic energy. Morrison, like many atomic scientists, was deeply concerned about the postwar meaning of the bomb long before the senators heard the faintest rumblings of the weapon's thunder, and emphasized that the atomic bomb was more than a new weapon; it was a revolution in war making, and therefore in history. The author met him in his office at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. This chapter presents Morrison's views on the race for the development of the atomic bomb; the decision to use the bomb on Japanese cities; his participation in the Manhattan Project; and his chosen role as a witness and a chronicler of these world-changing events.

The first section of this chapter aims to understand what happens to people with kind hearts and humanist feelings when they work on weapons of mass destruction, trying to examine the problem of power. The second section examines the Bohr phenomenon, and concepts of salvation and redemption attached to the atomic bomb. The third section looks at Robert Oppenheimer's belief in the transcendent meaning of science's creation. The fourth section discusses the “Atomic Scientist's Appeal,” released by the Federation of American Scientists in Hiroshima. The fifth section explores what science is and its larger meaning. The sixth section presents the author's reflections on the life of her parents, and on their teaching about the world of science that had nothing to do with the bomb. The last section closes with a few memories about her father.

In an unusually well-documented contribution on Russian secret intelligence, David Holloway posits reasons for Stalin’s unpreparedness in 1940-1941. This, it is fair to say, has long been an obsessive object of interest and study in Russia, because it made all the difference to the course of the war that followed from June 1941. Rather than rushing into moral judgments about the régime, Holloway instead takes a cool look at what information came in to Stalin and allows for the fact that not all the incoming intelligence data were consistent. And in respect of revelations about U.S. construction of the atomic bomb, Holloway shows that Stalin once again consciously distanced himself from the findings of the intelligence services in reaching a final judgment. Whereas in the former case, it nearly led to disaster; in respect of the latter, Stalin was undoubtedly correct.

“Preservation Works” provides examples of real case studies where historic preservation of space heritage has been successful, demonstrating potential routes for preservation. The chapter includes discussions on saving the Space Shuttles (led by Donaldson), designation of Tranquillity Base on state historical registries, establishment of a multi-state park for the Manhattan Project, and other smaller efforts to preserve artifacts and recognize sites.