Now It Can Be Told: The Story of the Manhattan Project by General Leslie M. Groves

Explosive Revelations of the Twentieth Century

The enemy’s gate is a 2,892-stage diffusion cascade.

So, a colonel walks out of a meeting, when a general pulls him aside to offer him an assignment in Washington.

It would be funnier if he was walking into a bar instead.

No, listen. The general tells him the assignment is so important that the Secretary of War and the President himself had to approve it. In fact, it’s so significant, it has the potential to win the World War Two outright! Now – what does the colonel say?

I still think it should have been a bar. But fine – I don’t know. What?

He says – “I don’t want to stay in Washington.”

I find American jokes are mostly not very funny, and I’m afraid yours are no exception.

But it’s not a joke! It’s the start of the Manhattan Project!

Wait, what?

According to General Leslie M. Groves’s account in his memoir, Now It Can Be Told: The Story of the Manhattan Project, that’s exactly how it went down when then-Colonel Groves was offered the position by General Somerville.

I admit I’m unfamiliar with the details of the US side of World War Two history, but even I know Groves headed the Manhattan Project. So if your story is true, he must have taken the assignment after all. What changed his mind?

Well, what he really wanted was an assignment abroad where the actual combat was happening. But orders were orders, and from what he says, he didn’t have much of a choice. Somerville tried to give him a bit of a pep talk when introducing the job, but it didn’t seem to buoy his enthusiasm any:

My spirits fell as I realized what he had in mind. “Oh, that thing,” I said.

But the Manhattan Project was the poster child of successful wartime military technological development! You’re telling me it succeeded in spite of being headed by someone who didn’t even want to run it?

Hey, don’t you dare suggest Groves would have given anything less than complete dedication to any assignment he did for this country! You have no idea the amount of risk and toil and sheer grit he put into the project to get it to succeed.

Fine, chill out. I suppose this General Somerville must have been pretty persuasive, to convince Groves to put in so much effort on an assignment he didn’t even want?

Groves would have put in effort anyways – but Somerville’s portrayal of the situation to Groves as he dumped the project in his lap might perhaps have been just a tiny bit biased by his need for Groves to agree to take the job:

He outlined my mission, painting a very rosy picture for me: “The basic research and development are done. You just have to take the rough designs, put them into final shape, build some plants and organize an operating force and your job will be finished and the war will be over.” Naturally I was skeptical, but it took me several weeks to realize just how overoptimistic an outlook he had presented.

So how far along was everything in reality?

In truth, at the time Groves took charge of the project, not even the basic scientific research demonstrating the feasibility of nuclear weapons was done, much less any work on actual bomb design.

Wow, so Somerville was practically just lying? What did Groves do next, then? Try to get reassigned to his original post? Complain to General Marshall?

Wrong! Groves was a greater kind of man, not like you or I. The more impossible the task, the more determined he became to see it through, like the protagonist of an Edgar Albert Guest poem.

Yeah, right – I’m not buying it. Since I know Groves didn’t actually leave the project, just give up and tell me already what else happened to convince him that the prospects of his new assignment were brighter than the dearth of work done up to that point suggested.

But no road-to-Damascus moment ever happened! Groves just had faith from the start that he would manage it somehow, and like Guest’s optimist, “if he worried, he hid it”:

One of my first acts after learning that I was to have charge of the uranium project was to tackle what my recent construction experience led me to believe would be our greatest single obstacle. I did not see how we could possibly get the job done with nothing better than an AA-3 priority, and I did not feel inclined to fail by default. It seemed quite simple to me – if ours was really the most urgent project, it would have the top priority.

On September 19, I called upon Donald Nelson, the head of the War Production Board, and stated my views very simply but most definitely. His reaction was completely negative; however, he quickly reversed himself when I said that I would have to recommend to the President that the project should be abandoned because the War Production Board was unwilling to co-operate with his wishes.

When I left his office, I had in my pocket a letter signed by Nelson, saying:

“I am in full accord with the prompt delegation of power by the Army and Navy Munitions Board, through you, to the District Engineer, Manhattan District, to assign an AAA rating, or whatever lesser rating will be sufficient, to those items the delivery of which, in his opinion, cannot otherwise be secured in time for the successful prosecution of the work under his charge.”

Just why Nelson gave in so easily, I will never know. I would have been most unwilling to have had this difficulty brought up to the President; the problem was mine. To have admitted frustration so early would have been most distasteful. And while I still had little liking for my new assignment, it was mine to carry.

In any event, as a result of my visit to Mr. Nelson, we had no major priority difficulties for nearly a year.

Well, I’ll grant you that the man can pull a bluff. But if the Manhattan Project had top priority and they could get all the resources they wanted, then why does everyone act like their success is so impressive? Every rando on twitter takes the Manhattan Project as a byword for any difficult tech-related project they want done quickly. But if you throw enough money and resources at a problem, it will get solved no matter how unexceptional the management might be, right? And the Manhattan Project wasn’t even that fast – the Allies had already finished defeating the Nazis in Europe with only conventional weapons, before Groves’s nukes were even ready.

Your implication that the Manhattan Project took the whole war is completely unfair. From Groves’s account, he only took charge in September 1942, and the project can’t really be considered to have started in earnest until then. And recall, the bombs were dropped on Japan in August, 1945. Do the math – that’s just under three years. The entire Manhattan Project took less time than it took the Germans to build an airport, or Boston to build a subway tunnel.

Fine, but at least some of the research had already been done before 1942, or else there wouldn’t have been international interest in nuclear weapons to begin with. So don’t try to convince me they were starting from scratch.

Sure, some research had been done on nuclear physics, but nothing substantive in the way of bombs specifically, which is what really mattered. Groves himself says:

All that had been done by the middle of 1942 was to demonstrate theoretically the possible feasibility and effectiveness of an atomic bomb. Its probable design and size were unknown.

Consider all the steps of the development process: finishing the basic research – designing, constructing, and operating the massive and complex plants and reactors producing fissile material – designing and building the bombs themselves – testing the bombs – choosing, equipping and training the team to deploy the bombs – selecting the targets – and deploying the bombs in action. Consider that all of this, everything, was started and finished in an interval of less than three years! And you still dare tell me you’re not impressed?

Rather than impressed, now I’m just confused. Neither separating uranium isotopes for a uranium bomb, nor producing plutonium in a reactor for a plutonium bomb, are quick or easy processes. Both require massive amounts of construction just to build the production facilities. Even today, nuclear power plants take around five years to construct. Unless Groves’s team somehow magically erected their plants overnight, it’s just not possible for them to have designed, built, and operated all this within three years.

There’s where you’re wrong. You’re assuming they did everything in serial – research, then design, then testing, then construction, then operation.

The Engineering Design Process

Well, how else would they have done it? The process exists for a reason.

Since serial wasn’t fast enough for them, they did things in parallel.

Do you mean they worked on both their reactors and their isotope separation facilities at the same time? Because I don’t see how they could have gone much more parallel than that.

No, I mean they did the actual steps of the design process in parallel:

We then had to design, build and operate an extremely large plant with equipment of incredible complexity, without the benefit of any pilot plant or intermediate development… Always we were driven by the need to make haste. Consequently, research, development, construction and operation all had to be started and carried on simultaneously and without appreciable prior knowledge.

Groves’s Engineering Design Process

They literally started choosing sites, buying land and materials, and building the plants before the actual designs were even complete. Sometimes they started building even before doing the basic research to know if the process they were building was technologically possible, or even necessary.

Wait, are you implying they actually built entire unnecessary plants, just because they couldn’t afford to wait while they went through the prior steps of the design process?

I don’t think it was that many, though there was at least one. According to Groves, at one point they had a process that was going to be water cooled, but they weren’t sure just how pure the water would need to be. Rather than wait until they knew more, which would have been too late, they simply went ahead and built a whole de-ionization plant just to be on the safe side. It was only later they confirmed that they would not actually need water that pure.

Well, was it at least a small plant?

Only $6 million, so not so bad in the scheme of things…

Only $6 million! Far from the hyper-efficient, streamlined technology design operation the Manhattan Project is portrayed as by popular culture, it sounds to me as if the actual project was downright wasteful.

If their process seems wasteful to you, it’s only because you’re taking the wrong perspective. If the resource they were most concerned about had been money or materials, then sure, it would have been wasteful. But their scarcest resource was neither of those – it was time. If they had waited until they knew exactly what they needed to build and whether it could be proven to work or not, those delays would have held the whole project up months, or even years. In that case, they might not even have finished before the war in the Pacific was over, not to speak of the war in Europe.

Whatever perspective you take, I can’t believe they managed to keep their funding with this kind of thing going on.

Groves mentions the funding problem. Part of how they managed to proceed with so little oversight was that most of their funding was done secretly. Only a few people in the government knew the project existed at all. But also, anyone who understood the mission of the Manhattan Project surely realized that the fundamental risk involved in starting the project in the first place dwarfed the mere cost of a few useless deionization plants. It may have been a risk to build those plants without full knowledge about whether they would serve any useful purpose – however, the Manhattan Project itself was already a risk of this sort on a much greater scale. After all, they weren’t truly certain, right up to the first actual test explosion in the New Mexico desert, that some scientific technicality wouldn’t prove nuclear bombs to be an impossibility after all.

Wait, didn’t Einstein famously send a letter to President Roosevelt warning of the destructive potential of nuclear weapons, and the likelihood that the Germans would pursue their development? Why would that warning have been taken so seriously – even causing the US to start its own nuclear weapons development and eventually leading to the Manhattan Project – unless everyone was confident nuclear weapons were scientifically possible?

According to Groves, the top scientists strongly suspected nuclear weapons to be feasible. But until enough research and experimentation were done to confirm it, no one could know for sure.

But even if their funding was secret, they still must have had to tell someone how much money they needed, if only to make sure the right funds got diverted for them. If they didn’t even know basic things like “is the objective of our project scientifically possible,” how did they manage to make any kind of cost estimates?

I assume they just guessed? Their initial cost estimates sure don’t seem accurate enough to have been anything besides wild guesses; Somerville initially told Groves he expected the project would cost no more than $100 million total.

That seems rather low, if even a single useless deionization plant was already $6 million.

Yes, this was a massive underestimate. In the end, their total expenditures through the end of 1946 amounted to almost $2.2 billion…

That’s not actually as bad as I was expecting –

…in 1945 dollars.

Oh. How much is that in current dollars?

About $45 billion today.

That’s not small, but it’s still not as much as I would have predicted. Perhaps by optimizing for time, they inadvertently ended up optimizing for cost as well?

No, I already told you – while Groves certainly never wasted any money, he also spared no expense in order to complete the project as fast as possible.

That’s not quite what I mean. Consider – when people today try to optimize for “efficiency,” they generally mean both time and money, and their optimization is not solely based off of trading one for another. Sure, some tradeoffs are unavoidable, but many things that waste time also waste money and can be eliminated unrepentantly, or vice versa for things that save both. For example, since under Groves’s time constraints he couldn’t afford to rebuild things, he probably had to put some care into getting everything right the first time around – thus avoiding mistakes that would have cost both time and money.

“Getting everything right the first time and avoiding mistakes” hardly matches with Groves’s description of events. He discusses at length all kinds of problems they encountered, some of which necessitated considerable amounts of re-do. Just to take the electromagnetic separation plant, there was a huge issue with their sealed magnets not being clean enough internally, and they had to ship them all back to be redone. Then there was the issue with the magnetic fields causing the equipment to move and strain the piping, although this had the fairly simple fix of bolting everything to the floor. As they were building, equipment kept arriving in the wrong order for installation, so that they had to build additional buildings just to store it all while they waited for the right pieces to come in. At one point a mouse got into the works, resulting in a major shutdown, and the same happened with birds frying themselves on their power lines – and that’s only the problems Groves considered interesting enough to mention in the book!

Well, it sounds like just because they were fast didn’t mean they could dodge their fair share of the accidents and screw-ups that plague any project of sufficient complexity. But if the Manhattan Project didn’t succeed merely because the US threw massive amounts of money at the problem, or because they got lucky enough to avoid any serious mishaps – what was the cause of their success?

After reading his memoir, I feel that the best explanation as to why they succeeded is the fact that Groves himself was in charge. His goal-based mindset, his dedication to the project, his organizational skills, and his practical charisma all came together in the perfect manager to lead the project to its ultimate triumph.

You say that with a straight face – is Groves really that arrogant in his book?

Not at all – he’s quite humble, giving others a great deal of credit for their roles in the project’s success. But I know how to read between the lines to discern latent awesomeness.

If you insist on crediting one individual for the work of thousands, why not choose a scientist instead? I’d always heard that it was Oppenheimer, not Groves, who was the brains behind the Manhattan Project.

I guess you could argue Oppenheimer was important on the scientific side. But even then, by Groves’s account, Oppenheimer was less a cornerstone than a compromise:

Although Oppenheimer headed the study group at Berkeley, neither Bush, Conant nor I felt that we were in any way committed to his appointment as director of Project Y [the bomb design project]… Adding to my cause for doubt, no one with whom I talked showed any great enthusiasm about Oppenheimer as a possible director of the project.

Oppenheimer was never Groves’s ideal candidate. There was the problem of his reputation within the scientific community to consider, or rather the lack thereof:

Oppenheimer had two major disadvantages – he had had almost no administrative experience of any kind, and he was not a Nobel Prize winner. Because of the latter lack, he did not then have the prestige among his fellow scientists that I would have liked the project leader to possess. The heads of our three major laboratories – Lawrence at Berkeley, Urey at Columbia, and Compton at Chicago – were all Nobel Prize winners, and Compton had several Nobel Prize winners working under him. There was a strong feeling among most of the scientific people with whom I discussed this matter that the head of Project Y should also be one.

And on top of all that, there were Oppenheimer’s well-known communist connections that caused him so much trouble after the war. The military security organization wouldn’t even clear him until Groves personally wrote to the District Engineer and instructed him to do so.

If Oppenheimer really had been both a Soviet agent and the true “father of the atomic bomb,” then it would have been called the Moscow Project, not the Manhattan Project.

Groves ultimately ended up appointing Oppenheimer as a fallback:

In a few weeks it became apparent that we were not going to find a better man; so Oppenheimer was asked to undertake the task.

Besides, Oppenheimer was only head of the Los Alamos lab, which was in charge of bomb design. While this was certainly important, the research and development of the uranium enrichment and plutonium production processes that were carried on by the other labs were just as vital.

I’ll admit maybe Oppenheimer wasn’t the linchpin in the Manhattan Project I thought he was. But still, what makes you think Groves was all that important either?

Well, don’t take my word for it, when you can take Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson’s:

Mr. Stimson told me that if I went [to London], I could not go by air, because of the hazards involved. When I said, “Well, I don’t see what difference that would make,” he replied, “You can’t be replaced.” I said, “You do it, and General Marshall does it; why shouldn’t I?” He repeated, “As I said before, you can’t be replaced, and we can.” Harvey Bundy, who was also present, said he had heard that I had previously urged flying when air safety dictated otherwise, and then asked, “Who would take your place if you were killed?” I replied, “That would be your problem, not mine, but I agree that you might have a problem.”

Okay, but if air travel was so dangerous, how did anyone get around? For that matter, how did Groves get around?

Plane.

But you just said Stimson told him not to go by air!

The solution to having parts break is not to make them indestructible, but to make them replaceable. Groves was only irreplaceable at the beginning of the Manhattan Project, and that was merely due to an oversight on his part. Military policy was to not let anyone be totally vital to a project, such that their work couldn’t be carried on if they were killed. Thus, Stimson immediately ordered Groves to get a “number two man” who could take over if anything happened to him.

Groves didn’t have someone like that already? Not even a vice-head, or something?

Well, Groves already had a sort-of number two, Lieutenant Colonel Nichols. However, he didn’t think Nichols could manage the whole project on his own if push came to shove, whereas Groves himself would still be capable of running the project without Nichols.

What was wrong with Nichols, that Groves didn’t trust him to manage the Manhattan Project?

It wasn’t anything personal. It was just that the project was so complex, it was almost impossible for any individual to run it alone.

But wasn’t that precisely what Groves trusted he could do himself?

With Groves, all things are possible.

Personally, if I were Nichols, I would have felt slighted.

Give Groves some credit – he went to some effort to make sure Nichols felt included in the selection process for the new position:

Having made up my list, I discussed the matter with Nichols. I asked him to look over the names and to strike from the list anyone whom he would prefer not to have in such a position. He struck several names. I always suspected he struck the first one just to see if I really meant what I had said, because it was the name of a man whom I had known for many years, and who was a very close friend. When he struck that name, I did not bat an eye, but merely said, “Well, he’s out.”

I think maybe Nichols was more offended than Groves realized. Striking Groves’s best friend from the list for no reason seems just a bit passive-aggressive.

No way! Everyone loved Groves!

I guess I’ll have to take your word for it. But why make the project so complicated in the first place, that it couldn’t be run by any single mere mortal? If they were aiming for speed, wouldn’t simpler have been better?

Like skinning a cat, bomb-building is a complicated process with more than one possible path to success – or failure. The most basic type of nuclear bomb design uses uranium-235 as the fissionable material. However, this presents complexities of its own, since uranium-235 has to be separated from the other main isotope of uranium found in nature, uranium-238. And this is pretty tricky, since the isotopes are of course chemically identical, and only 0.7% of natural uranium is isotope-235. While there are numerous theoretical methods to enrich uranium to a higher concentration of the bomb-preferred isotope, the Manhattan Project focused on two methods that their top researchers either thought looked easier, or that fell closest to their particular fields of expertise. These were electromagnetic separation and gaseous diffusion. So already, Groves’s process of bomb development had split into two paths. But there’s another basic type of bomb design, which instead of uranium-235 uses plutonium-239. However, as a radioactive, transuranic element, plutonium is not found in nature. In order to get it, one must first build a reactor, then operate that reactor and wait for the uranium to absorb neutrons and decay into plutonium. Thus, we must add a third distinct path of bomb development to Groves’s collection. Each of these different paths is complex enough on its own, so it only stands to reason that the Manhattan Project, which was working on all of them, would be yet more complex in its entirety.

Okay, I get that there’s a lot of possible methods by which one can build a nuclear bomb – but why didn’t Groves just choose the best method and run with it, so that he’d only need one lab and one plant and one team and so on?

And how, precisely, were they going to know which method was the “best” method, when, as I think I’ve mentioned before, the basic research wasn’t even done yet? They didn’t have time to build a bunch of prototypes to test out the processes before scaling up. Likewise, they couldn’t start with a single process, say the one they thought was the most promising, and then if it failed try something else, since if the first failed at that point it would already be too late. It’s the redux of the parallel-versus-series scenario – Groves’s solution, since he had no time for the study-and-then-implement strategy, or even for the guess-and-check strategy, was to just attempt every process all at once and hope that at least one of them ended up working.

Wait, so that’s why the bombs dropped on Japan were of two different types? Because multiple of these methods ended up succeeding?

Yes, both their uranium enrichment processes, as well as their uranium and plutonium bomb designs, ended up working. While the first bomb dropped on Japan used uranium, the second bomb dropped on Nagasaki as well as the bomb detonated in the first nuclear test in the New Mexico desert were plutonium types.

Did they build all these plants in the middle of the desert, then?

No. While their bomb design lab was in the desert to keep it secret, all the rest was spread out between various labs and production sites.

And who exactly did they get to do all the work running these plants? Enlisted soldiers? University students? Bound demons?

Don’t you know this is America, land of the defense contractors and home of the capitalists? They hired private-sector companies, of course. Although, the research was still done at the universities where the scientific teams were located. So all the plutonium production was done at Hanford, with du Pont running the operations. As for the uranium separation operations, known as the Y-12 project, the research on the electromagnetic process was led by Ernest O. Lawrence at University of California. Meanwhile, work on the electromagnetic plant at Oak Ridge was done by the companies Stone and Webster and Eastman Kodak, which were in charge of construction and operation, respectively. For the gaseous diffusion process, known as the K-25 project, the research was led by Harold C. Urey at Columbia. The gaseous diffusion plant was built at Oak Ridge as well, though seventeen miles from the electromagnetic plant, and run by Kellex, a subsidiary of the M. W. Kellogg Company. Later they also built a thermal diffusion plant at Oak Ridge, which they put next to the gaseous diffusion process to take advantage of its steam-generating plant.

But why have two separate sites, Hanford and Oak Ridge? Could they not get enough continuous land to build on?

This is Groves we’re talking about – he could have appropriated an entire state if he had thought he needed it. No, they used multiple sites because this technology was dangerous and untested. The point of the diversification in methods was so that if one failed, the others would still have a chance of working. So if one of the plants blew up, they definitely didn’t want it anywhere near the others where it might take them out too.

You said that they hired companies to operate the plants, but what about the laborers themselves? They must have had to hire thousands of workers to build and run these facilities.

Tens of thousands of workers, but yes.

Good to see exploitation of labor at its finest.

It’s not exploitation if the laborers are working hard out of a desire to help their country win a war against Nazis! Besides, do you really believe any of them were working harder than Groves himself?

Just because you’re opposing evil doesn’t automatically make you virtuous.

And just because you’re employing people doesn’t mean you’re exploiting them. Groves wasn’t just ordering workers around at his whims – in fact, it took a number of careful negotiations with organized labor to get all the workers he needed.

And all these American labor unions just rolled over and let their constituents be used as pawns by the US military-industrial complex? For shame!

But is it really a shame, if the capitalists they were cooperating with were making nuclear weapons?

Especially if the cooperation was with the nuclear kind of capitalists! Labor cannot let itself be intimidated by the force of the nuclear state.

Well, the laborers couldn’t have been persuaded one way or the other by the nuclear weapons anyways, since Groves didn’t tell anyone what they were actually working on. Still, most of them cooperated with Groves readily and willingly:

There was an almost complete absence of labor trouble, despite the fact that as many as four crafts were often involved in setting up a single piece of apparatus. The total time lost on the job from work stoppages, including jurisdictional disputes, was less than eight thousand man-hours as compared with the almost 67 million man-hours worked on the electromagnetic plant.

Groves mentions in particular one young prospective union leader, Fred Behler, who he was “particularly impressed” by. Behler wanted to organize a powerhouse workers union, telling Groves:

“If we don’t organize now, we’ll never be able to, because there will certainly be a plantwide election after the war, and as a craft union we’ll be snowed under.”

Despite that, after Groves’s explanation of the overwhelming need for secrecy across the plant, which precluded the kind of large-scale worker meetings necessary for union organization, Behler put his country first in an inspiring display of patriotism, telling Groves:

“General, in view of what you have told me about the importance of this work and your feelings that any attempt to unionize would be injurious to the country’s welfare, I want to assure you that we’ll make no effort to organize these men; we’ll discourage any effort that is made, and we will do this with the full realization that this means that ultimately these men will not belong to our union.”

You don’t seriously expect me to believe it went that smoothly with every single union he dealt with?

Well, Groves does make note of one exception:

Our one case of persistent labor trouble occurred at Hanford. There we were unable to get what we considered to be a proper output from our pipe fitters. Efforts to correct the situation through appeals to the local union officials were ineffective…

Though he quickly – always quickly! – found a solution to the situation:

Later, when our needs grew even more pressing, we were unable to find enough pipe fitters to maintain our schedule. Investigation showed that there simply were not enough in the United States to fill the demands. The solution we adopted was to locate a considerable number of pipe fitters, all union members, who had been inducted into the Army. These men were given the opportunity to be furloughed to the inactive reserve on condition that they would accept employment at Hanford as civilians at the going rates of pay.

When they arrived they were kept together as a group so that their output would not be held down by the pressure of any union officials or of the men already working there. In a direct comparison on identical work, they produced about 20 per cent more than the other men. Pressure was brought on them to slow down, but they refused. A typical comment was: “I’m not working as hard as I did in the Army, nobody’s shooting at me, I’m being paid a lot more and, what’s more important, I’ve a lot of friends in my old outfit that I hope to see come back alive.” As time went on, the other men were apparently shamed into greater effort, with the result that their output went up about 10 per cent.

Just as I would expect of capitalists – the laborers are asked to work themselves to the bone, while the companies profit from their sweat and blood.

That’s not true! The companies that did work for the Manhattan Project made some of the largest sacrifices and took on some of the greatest risks of any group involved, proving that in a true democracy, even the heads of industry value liberty and democratic principle over any amount of monetary gain.

What exactly, then, were these oh-so-terrible downsides for companies working on the Manhattan Project?

You can get an idea from Groves’s description of his meeting with the president of du Pont, Walter S. Carpenter, Jr. In this meeting, Groves’s aim was to convince Carpenter that his company should take on the operations involved in the Manhattan Project’s plutonium production. But despite his critical need for du Pont’s help, Groves was entirely honest about the disadvantages. Carpenter was fully aware of the difficulties his company would face in attempting the work: the project was a “hazardous, difficult and perhaps impossible undertaking” – du Pont had no experience in the nuclear field – no technical design data was available – and on top of all that, the company was already laden with heavy amounts of war-related work. Besides which, du Pont had to consider their responsibility to their workers in light of the dangers of plutonium production, including the possibility that toxic or radioactive fumes might get released accidentally.

I’m starting to see a pattern here, and I think I know what you’re going to say: “Despite all that, in a true display of patriotism, they agreed to take on the work anyways, etc., etc.”

Stop preempting my punchlines!

What I want to know is, how on earth did Groves convince all these people that his project was so outrageously important that they needed to set aside their own primary interests for the sake of its completion? He must have had some kind of inverse-flame argument. But you already said the Manhattan Project was too secret for him to actually tell any but a few what its true purpose was, so what was he telling everyone instead?

For the most part Groves doesn’t go into explicit detail in that regard. However, his general argument was probably substantially similar to what he told a group of construction supervisors and foremen at Oak Ridge, in a speech he made at the request of the plant manager in order to improve productivity:

As simply as possible, I told the group that, as the officer in charge, I could state positively, both officially and personally, that their work was of extreme importance to the war effort, and that my views were a true reflection of those of the Chief of Staff, General Marshall, of Secretary of War Stimson and of President Roosevelt. I added that they could see for themselves how important it was from the terrific effort we were making, our obviously enormous expenditures in money and labor, and our evident ability to obtain materials that were in critically short supply. I said nothing about what we were working on or our hope that its success would quite possibly end the war. There was no flowery oratory; I would have been incapable of it, and it certainly would not have appealed to the audience.

And just as the plant manager, Creedon, had predicted, Groves’s words worked wonders for workforce motivation:

Creedon estimated that after this meeting the efficiency of his construction operations improved by as much as 15 to 20 per cent. I never quite believed this, but the progress reports did indicate an increase of well over 10 per cent. This was far beyond anything I had anticipated; indeed, I would have been pleased with any improvement at all. In my opinion, whatever success the talk had was a result of Creedon’s understanding, as an experienced construction leader, of the mood of his men and how to improve it.

What Groves told to the du Pont executives probably hit these same points, pointing out the importance and urgency of the project’s goal – though likely with more details for the du Pont people, since they were to be more deeply involved in the project.

And that was all it took to convince du Pont to join?

Alongside the usual appeal to patriotism, apparently it was enough. Since, after Groves convinced Carpenter, who conferred with a few other top du Pont people and agreed to recommend the project to the rest of the Board, this happened:

As the directors entered the room at their next Board meeting, they were asked not to look at the faced-down papers on the table in front of them. Carpenter explained that the Executive Committee was recommending that du Pont accept a contract from the government for a project in a previously unexplored field so large and so difficult that it would strain the capacity of the company to the utmost. He added that there were elements of hazard in it that under certain conditions could very well seriously damage if not well-nigh destroy du Pont. He said that the highest officials in the government, as well as those who knew the most about it, considered it to be of the highest military importance. Even its purpose was held in extreme secrecy, although if any Board member wished to he was free to read the faced-down papers before voting. Not a single man, and they were all heavy stockholders, turned them over before voting approval – or afterwards – a true display of patriotism.

Well, if Groves was able to convince both labor and capital to work with him so easily, I suppose recruiting the scientists must have been a piece of yellow-cake for him?

Actually, working with all the scientists proved to be its own can of radioactive byproduct. Recall, the labs he was employing, or occasionally creating, were conducting their research under strict secrecy – a policy diametrically opposed to the natural inclinations of academics.

Hey, academics can keep secrets!

The only way an academic can keep a secret is if it’s so complex, technical, and boring to those outside their specialty that no one will listen to them long enough to understand it. Academics have collaboration in their blood. Just think for a moment about the fact that they hold conferences where they display their work on big open posters, where the goal is to get as many people as possible from semi-related or unrelated fields to look at it. Or that the primary goal of most research is to publish.

Well, how else are scientists supposed to increase their status if no one knows about their research?

That was precisely the crux of Groves’s main problem with recruiting academics to a secret project – although it wasn’t his only problem. Besides needing to keep the research they were doing in the labs secret, they also needed to keep the very existence of some of these facilities secret. Los Alamos, for example, was located out in the middle of nowhere, and everyone working there had heavy restrictions on traveling in and out. Surprisingly enough, it turns out most scientists do not want to live out in the middle of nowhere with little contact outside their immediate community for years on end. The fact Groves convinced so many to do so is another testament to his persuasiveness.

Okay, cough it up – what was Groves really doing to persuade all these people? And don’t say it was due to patriotism, anyone can make an appeal to patriotism. There must have been some other factor at play.

I don’t know for sure, since Groves never really analyzes it in those terms. But personally, I think his recruitment-charisma came at least in part from the fact that his project clearly had a definite goal which he whole-heartedly believed in, even if he couldn’t tell most people what that goal was. Just knowing there was a goal was enough to inspire on its own. After all, it’s human nature to work harder when you feel your work is having an impact, and contributing to some important purpose. Sometimes I think part of modern cost disease is just inefficiency due to people losing the motivation to even try, as they don’t feel their job makes any real difference in the world.

I guess I understand why Groves would want to talk to these groups he was recruiting to motivate them, but why did he go to so much trouble to negotiate with them as well? Couldn’t he just order everyone to do as he said?

Of course not! We’re talking about the US here, which is a democracy, not Nazi Germany!

Does that rule even apply during wartime? And I thought the Nazis were elected?

It applies in any real democracy.

No true Scotsman…but now I’m curious about something you said earlier. You claimed Groves got efficiency improvements from having a single goal to his project, but this was just an accidental side effect, since he didn’t choose the project’s goal to gain efficiency – rather, it was given to him by his superiors based on their strategic needs. But are there other factors Groves finds himself forced to accommodate out of necessity, that nevertheless wind up “accidentally” resulting in increased efficiency?

Actually, yes. Something else that stood out to me was the sheer informality of a lot of Groves’s agreements with companies or other organizations. In Groves’s account, it was a common occurrence for people to make and accept binding agreements based on an hour-long discussion and a handshake. In a typical meeting, Groves told people what he needed them to do and how important it was, promised them that either the government or he personally would take responsibility for the risks if things went wrong – and then they shook hands on it and agreed to settle all the details after the war was over, while work proceeded immediately. And these weren’t small agreements either, but the sorts of agreements over which companies nowadays spend months or years drafting up detailed contracts with armies of lawyers.

How did they keep track of anything if it was being done so informally?

I assume Groves just knew everything that was going on? If you think about it, he was overseeing basically all the groups involved in the project, in all its phases. That is, everything from the research, design, and construction, even up through selecting the targets and training the bombing team.

Wait, doesn’t the military have a whole department that does that last? How did Groves end up in charge of that?

Just as informally as everything else:

At about this time, the spring of 1945, another job was dropped into our laps at the MED. The first inkling I had of this added responsibility came in the course of a conversation with General Marshall. We had been discussing the progress of the work and, having mentioned our anticipated readiness date, I suggested that the time was fast approaching when we should begin to make plans for the bombing operation itself, even though we still had no assurance that the bomb would be effective. I asked him to designate some officer in the Operations Planning Division (OPD) of the General Staff with whom I could get in touch so that planning could be started. After a moment’s hesitation, General Marshall replied: “I don’t like to bring too many people into this matter. Is there any reason why you can’t take this over and do it yourself?” My “No, sir, I will” concluded the conversation, which constituted the only directive that I ever received or needed.

I admit my knowledge of US military organization is limited, but isn’t that rather out of Groves’s lane?

Yes – Groves appears to have been just as taken aback as you by the decision:

General Marshall’s position on this matter came as a complete surprise to me. I could easily understand, in fact I favored, restricting the knowledge of our work to the smallest possible number of people. I realized too that he might be questioning whether it was wise to bring into the operational planning officers who might not be able to understand the technical problems involved. But I had never imagined that he would want to keep the execution phases of our project entirely apart from the OPD.

So why did Marshall want to cut the OPD out of the loop? Was it really just because of security concerns?

My own guess is that General Marshall had a level of faith in Groves personally that he wouldn’t have dared place in a more distributed organization or department, where responsibility could be shifted or other parts of the bureaucracy blamed for potential failures. Or maybe, Marshal realized the extent to which Groves seemed to lend the magic touch of success to everything he worked on?

You need to take your head out of Groves’s backside. General Marshall probably just couldn’t be bothered with settling the inevitable conflicts that would have arisen between the OPD and the Manhattan Project.

Groves handled his own conflicts perfectly well without needing to get superiors needlessly involved, thank you very much! And he had no shortage of conflicts either, between reluctant companies, intractable labor unions, overly-collaborative scientists, uncooperative military intelligence groups, stubborn Governors hanging onto land he needed to appropriate, meddling Congressmen objecting to his budget –

Wait, I thought you said the Manhattan Project was top secret? How did Congress know about it?

For the most part, Congress didn’t know. But periodically, some Congressional committee noticed the hundreds of millions of dollars being subtly funneled to his project and demanded to know what was being done with it all. Groves mostly managed to deflect the inquiries though on the grounds of secrecy, and by promising that his project would be investigated after the war and he would answer for everything then.

That sounds ominous.

It certainly would have been if they had failed. But going back to Groves’s problems, besides Congress, he had the Secretary of War looking over his shoulder, not to mention the project’s relations with the Treasury Department –

Wait a minute, what did they need the Treasury Department for?

As the war continued and resources became ever scarcer, while the project ramped up and their need for resources only grew, even a triple-A rating from the War Production Board was no longer enough to get them all the materials they needed.

What materials couldn’t they get?

For one thing, they needed a lot of conductive material for the magnetic coils used in the electromagnetic separation process.

Conductive material – so copper, right?

Yes, and during wartime, copper was under high demand and extremely scarce. They needed to find a substitute.

Frankly, if they needed a conductive material in 1945, I don’t see what else besides copper they could have used. It’s not like they had a bunch of superconductors lying around –superconductors had only been discovered in 1911!

That shows how much you know, because they did manage to find an even better conductor than copper. Recall, the elements in the periodic table share common properties according to column:

Okay, but that’s hardly helpful – anything beneath copper is just going to be even harder to get! Silver? Gold? Really?

That’s where the Treasury comes in.

Wait, you can’t be serious…

Completely serious.

They used silver?

Fourteen thousand tons of it, worth more than $300 million – and that’s in 1945 dollars:

The value of one of the materials we used in quantity necessitated what was virtually a separate operation in itself. Preliminary design calculations on the Y-12 electromagnetic plant in the summer of 1942 had indicated that enormous quantities of conductor material would be required. Because the demands for copper to be used in defense projects far exceeded the national supply, the Administration had decided that the need for copper should be reduced by substituting for it silver borrowed from the Treasury Department.

Colonel Marshall thereupon called on the Under Secretary of the Treasury, Daniel Bell. Mr. Bell said that he might be able to make available some 47,000 tons of free silver, together with 39,000 tons more which could be released from the backup of silver certificates, if Congress authorized its use through appropriate legislation. At one point early in the negotiations, Nichols, acting for Marshall, said that they would need between five and ten thousand tons of silver. This led to the icy reply: “Colonel, in the Treasury we do not speak of tons of silver; our unit is the Troy ounce.”

Fort Knox: Supplier of fine wire since 1942

Don’t tell me Oak Ridge still has a whole bunch of silver magnetic coils lying around?

No, they had to keep careful track of all the silver and return it after the war. Groves was quite proud of the fact that they ended up using around fourteen thousand tons of it, but lost less than 0.035 percent.

I guess that’s impressive? I’m unfamiliar with the details of reducing material loss while building industrial equipment out of coinage metals.

As am I. Not that I would mind gaining the experience – I wish the Treasury would issue me some silver.

What for? If you’re trying to build a cyclotron in your basement, the war is long over and you can just use copper again.

Actually, I wish they would issue me some gold. Don’t tell anyone, but it’s my secret fantasy to make myself a gold-plated nuclear submarine, and sail the underground ocean beneath Europe.

There’s a flaw in your plan – the Treasury would never issue you the gold unless it would somehow contribute to the war effort. What would you do, ship war materials to the Pacific?

Well, it wasn’t like they couldn’t have used the help! Just look at the shipping difficulties Groves had getting materials for his bomb deployment group, which was training on the island of Tinian:

Because of the shipping jam, each vessel was required to wait its turn for unloading. This could mean a delay of as much as three months in the unloading of some of our vital equipment.

What did Groves do about it?

The same thing he always did, of course. He wielded his priority due to his project’s status as a super-secret, war-endingly-important black project that held precedence over all other work, name-dropping Admirals all the way:

It was a simple matter, through Purnell, to have Admiral King cable [Admiral] Nimitz that all of our material must be unloaded immediately upon its arrival at Tinian. This was quite upsetting to the normal operations on the island, but it was typical of the support that we unfailingly received from Admiral King, Admiral Purnell and the entire Navy at all times.

You sound like you admire him for this?

Of course.

But he’s wielding his authority like a baseball bat, practically bullying the poor Tinian-based officers who have to accede to his every demand!

Well, he made the ships run on time, didn’t he?

Again, it’s starting to sound to me like the only reason the Manhattan Project managed to succeed is that they could inveigle or coerce everyone they worked with into giving them every person, resource, or piece information they asked for. And “unlimited resources equals unlimited results” is hardly an impressive equation.

There’s no such thing as unlimited resources. And even recognizing the advantages of their priority, you still have to consider how exceptional it was that they managed to obtain so much authority in the first place. If it was that easy, why didn’t the Germans or Russians just give a bunch of funding and blank-checks signed by the Führer or General Secretary to their own nuclear programs, and succeed in building their own bombs?

Actually, while my knowledge of the Manhattan Project may be limited, I have some more insight into that. As for why the Russians never bothered to develop their own nukes from scratch, they clearly intended from the start to just steal the US’s nuclear plans once they were finished. Spies, after all, are the poor country’s budget version of technology researchers.

But how is that possible, when Groves put so much effort into security?

I don’t know what Groves was doing, but the Manhattan Project was as infiltrated by Soviet agents as their gaseous diffusion barriers were by uranium hexafluoride.

Hey, don’t insult Groves’s security procedures!

Chill out – this isn’t any kind of attack against Groves personally. But the Soviet spy network in the 30’s and 40’s was really nothing to scoff at. The NKVD – precursor to the KGB – was recruiting agents all over the US, from the State Department to within Los Alamos itself. And it wasn’t just the US, either – Soviet penetration of the UK was even more extensive. The infiltration was to the extent Stalin was seeing top diplomatic communications sent between western nations before even the intended recipients.

Fine, we can ignore why the Soviets never started their own Manhattan Project, if they were really so confident that their spy network could steal any bomb designs the US managed to develop. But what about the Germans? Don’t try to tell me there was a whole German spy network Groves utterly failed to detect operating in Los Alamos as well?

No, as far as I know, the Germans never had any appreciable spy network on the US mainland.

Then why didn’t they put more effort into building their own nuclear bombs?

The reasons the Germans failed to create any sizable nuclear weapons development program are more complicated, but one possibility is that while the Allies considered nuclear weapons development to be a race, the Germans never really felt the same.

Whyever not?

Partly arrogance – Germany had been top tier in science for so long, they assumed that any problem that looked prohibitively difficult to them would appear impossible to anyone else.

I see, so it was about the psychology. And since the Americans started off behind in the scientific race, when they looked at the difficulties they thought in contrast: “If it can be done, then surely the Germans will do it. So if it even looks remotely feasible to us, we better get to work if we want to have a chance of catching up!”

Yes, and then the Germans never managed to gather enough intelligence on the Americans and British to realize they were putting serious effort into nuclear development. Whereas the Allies noticed the German efforts immediately, which can only have increased their sense of urgency and paranoia.

I thought you said you didn’t know about what the Allies were doing in terms of nuclear research during the war?

No, but I know of the Allied operations to blow up heavy water production facilities in German-occupied territory, and from there the rest is easily enough inferred. After all, there’s no reason for the Allies to have targeted those facilities, unless they knew the Germans were using the heavy water for nuclear research. It’s only lucky for the Allies that the Germans never took them seriously enough to attempt their own intelligence and sabotage operations.

But wasn’t the disparity in their intelligence operations more likely due simply to the fact that the US had all kinds of troops on the continent of Europe, right next to where Germany was doing all their research and operations, available to spy on them? Whereas, all the Allied research was happening a whole ocean away from any German forces? Tell me – how, precisely, were the Germans going to get their spy planes across the Atlantic to get a look at what the Americans were doing?

Who needs spy planes, when you have submarines?

To spy on Los Alamos? In Arizona?

Okay, maybe I didn’t think that one all the way through…

But still, you’re right that Groves seemed very paranoid about the Germans getting nuclear weapons, right up to the end of the war. Even once his nuclear intelligence unit, Alsos, penetrated deep enough into Germany to know that they couldn’t have possibly developed a nuclear bomb, Groves was still concerned that they could have some other type of nuclear-related weapon.

Some other type of weapon? Oh, you mean like a dirty bomb?

Precisely. In fact, the possibility of the Germans deploying this type of weapon was a major concern going into D-Day.

Really? That wasn’t in Band of Brothers. Why have I never heard of this before?

Because it was kept incredibly secret. But Groves was very worried about this possibility, and informed both General Marshal and General Eisenhower about his concerns. Ultimately, Groves recommended they go forward with the operation despite the risks. As a precaution, though, they put out several memos warning about fictional issues that were really signs of radiation exposure in disguise, in order to unobtrusively gather information in case the Germans were more ruthless or creative than they were hoping.

What do you mean, memos about fictional issues?

For example, they released a memo requesting medical personnel to report instances of a supposed problem of “fogging or blackening of photographs or x-ray film,” the implication being the issue was a manufacturing defect. Of course, the effect can also be caused by radiation exposure. And they sent out another memo requesting reports of cases of a “mild disease of unknown etiology,” that just happened to have all the symptoms of radiation poisoning.

Clever! Though unnecessary – the Germans never even considered making a dirty bomb.

Really? How can you be sure?

Well, nothing is a hundred percent certain when so many records were burned or lost at the end of the war, but at least there’s no discussion of any such plans in the Farm Hall transcripts.

Oh, Groves mentions those. After the war, Alsos interned ten German scientists they had identified as being involved in German nuclear weapons development at Farm Hall in England, right? But they bugged all the rooms to eavesdrop on what they were saying. Groves quotes from the reports a few times.

Indeed – as far as I know no full original transcripts exist, but the translated selections reported to Groves by Major Rittner are available and published.

Wouldn’t the Germans have expected the Americans to be spying on them and avoided saying anything compromising, though?

While the scientists would surely have been fools to think their words were private today, recall this was only 1945. It may have been already too late for the Spanish Inquisition to take anyone by surprise, but surveillance technology was still new and unexpected. And from the transcripts, the German scientists sure don’t seem to be hedging what they say. Rittner even includes an excerpt where they discuss whether or not they’re being bugged, and they just laugh the possibility off.

Well, while the Russians were apparently beating us hands-down at intelligence and counterintelligence, it’s satisfying to know that there was still someone less adept than us. Though it does make me wonder – if the government was already bugging people even back in 1945, how much more should we be concerned about being spied on today, now they’ve had three-quarters of a century to perfect their technique?

If I were you, I wouldn’t be too concerned. The US may have managed to build nukes in three years back then, but now they’re lucky if they can finish upgrading a stealth plane within two decades. I used to wonder why the KGB’s operations tended towards information gathering rather than more direct subversion – but with that kind of improvement, who needs sabotage?

You mock us Americans, but at least we can look back on our good old days! If their nuclear project is anything to judge by, modern airport-building skills aside, the Germans couldn’t even run a halfway-decent tech-development project back in the mid-twentieth century.

Then how do you explain their development of the V1 and V2 rockets during World War Two? Ballistic missiles aren’t the kind of thing you stumble onto the designs for by accident.

Okay, that’s a fair point. But if they succeeded at building rockets, then why did their nuclear project fail so badly?

Actually, this is a topic I think the Farm Hall transcripts shed some light on. I’ve never bought the idea, which the German scientists discussed at length later in the transcripts, that that they never worked seriously on building a bomb for moral reasons. But their earlier, initial reactions to hearing the reports of the American bombs dropped on Japan told a different story. As they speculated about how the Americans managed to succeed where they had failed, their estimates for the amount of enriched uranium the Allies must have needed ranged from tens to thousands of kilograms. If many of the leading German nuclear scientists had seriously believed a bomb would need upwards of a thousand kilograms of enriched uranium, then it’s no surprise they considered making a bomb wholly unfeasible – after all, even the Allies didn’t have that much uranium at bomb-levels of enrichment by the end of World War Two.

But if the Germans were coming up with such high estimates for the amount of fissile material needed, why wouldn’t the Americans have started off with the same estimates as well, and likewise given up on building nuclear bombs?

You have to remember, that back in the late 30’s and at the start of the 40’s, no one had any enriched uranium to make measurements on. All anyone had was back-of-the-envelope style calculations. To say the variance in these was immense would be an understatement – they ranged from the less-than-a-kilogram guessed by Frisch and Peierls in England, to tens, hundreds, or even thousands of kilograms, depending on the estimation methods and particular experimental results being used.

But the feasibility of enriching uranium for a bomb has little to do with the feasibility of constructing a working reactor, right? And did the Germans ever manage that, at least?

Well, no.

Ha! I knew it. Their failure was probably less because of what they thought about the details of nuclear physics, and more because of who was doing the thinking:

Mein Führer, I do Nazi the reason our nuclear research is failing.

First of all, while some of the German nuclear scientists were members of the Nazi Party, most were not. But that aside, I would suggest that a look at the details of why the German project failed might be more enlightening than simply assuming American superiority out of some sense of historical patriotism. After all, how many Manhattan Projects has the US managed since back then?

Well then, what other theory have you got to explain why the Germans never built a reactor?

We again come back to the fact that the entire nuclear field was still only just developing, so there were not well-established experimental results that were universally known and accepted. On top of this, when the war started, the exchange of scientific knowledge between Germany and the Allied nations was cut off. This meant that the experimental results everyone was taking for granted in Germany could be very different from those in the Allied nations, due to small mistakes made by individual researchers. For example, Bothe in Germany experimentally found graphite unsuitable to use as a moderator in a reactor – however, the graphite he was using contained significant boron impurities, which were absorbing the neutrons needed for the reaction. Meanwhile, Fermi at Columbia, doing similar experiments, used much higher-purity graphite and found graphite very suitable for use as a moderator. As a result of this fluke, the Germans had to rely on heavy water, or possibly dry ice, for their moderator material, and these were in low supply. Meanwhile the allies could do the sensible thing and use graphite.

Excuses, excuses. It sounds to me like the German nuclear scientists failed because they were all second-tier. It seems almost unfair to the poor Germans, when I consider that the labs working on the Manhattan Project had multiple Nobel Prize-winners apiece.

You forget, the German nuclear scientists had Nobel Prize winners among them as well – Werner Heisenberg and Otto Hahn, to name just two. More likely than all of the German nuclear scientists being second-tier, the problem was rather that they had too many first-tier scientists but no clear overall leader to unite them all to work together. Thus, instead of collaborating, everyone took their research in their own direction in their own lab. Without someone to coordinate their efforts and disseminate the results to the right people, they ended up duplicating each other’s research and stealing each other’s materials.

Wait, were they actually sneaking into each other’s labs and making off with their supplies?

Not quite that bad, but conflicting requests from all the different groups trying to build their own separate reactors still lead to no one group ever gathering together enough resources to succeed. For example, Abraham Esau with the Reich Research Council wanted to test a cube design for a reactor, while at the same time Heisenberg at Leipzig wanted to test a layer design. But there was only enough heavy water in Germany to build one or the other, and neither scientist would back down until it was too late and the war was already ending.

But why didn’t the German military just appoint someone above them to force them all to collaborate, like Groves with the Manhattan Project? Or did they, and it still failed?

While there were certainly military officers involved with the German nuclear research, none had the power or skill at social diplomacy to get the top scientists to stop fighting. As for why not, perhaps it was because the military never took the idea of nuclear weapons seriously enough to care. Or perhaps structural factors prevented them from creating such a clear chain of authority – after all, Hitler was famous for his two-in-a-box management strategy.

But wouldn’t all these factors have also affected the German research into V1 and V2 rockets? How did they manage that, when they couldn’t even build a single reactor?

Unity is the key. Whereas there were several distinct teams in Germany working on nuclear research, in rockets there was only the one team and one effort, led by Wernher von Braun. You see the same thing with the later Soviet space program, where more or less the entire thing was being run by Sergei Korolev.

Well, maybe that sort of one-lab, one-team strategy worked for rockets or satellites, but it would never have worked for nuclear weapons. Groves described the enormous number of technical difficulties they encountered, and it’s clear there’s no way a single team could have ever succeeded alone, much less within three years. Even if one of the German nuclear teams had managed to take full command of the research, I can’t imagine it would have helped them much. Maybe they could have built a reactor, but never a bomb.

Then what are you claiming made the difference that let the Manhattan Project succeed in 1942-US, but not 1942-Germany, or 1950-USSR? Or 2022-US, for that matter? Was it that 1942-US was just willing to throw more people and resources at the problem, like I’ve been arguing all along?

Hardly. Just having more people and resources wouldn’t have worked – it had to be the right people. After all, if rockets and satellites were each developed mainly through the efforts of a single individual – doesn’t it only stand to reason that having multiple such individuals working together would make possible superhuman achievements of technological development? Like, for example, developing nuclear bombs within three years?

But what makes you so certain the Manhattan Project was really recruiting such superior personnel?

Apart from the number of Nobel Prize-winning scientists working in Manhattan Project labs, just look at the reaction to Groves’s recruitment process on the military side:

My request for highly qualified officers was not greeted with too much enthusiasm by the General Staff, whose position was very well put by General Handy, when he said there was no reason why I should have a solid group of the best officers in the Army; that there were other important things besides the Manhattan Project. Many officers I wanted were in rather important spots overseas. All of them were officers that no commander wanted to lose … Handy then told me that he could not go along with my request, that I was asking for too many good men, and that by my system of hand-picking I was getting more than my share. I replied that there was no place for anyone in the atomic field who was not a super-superior officer, that we simply could not use anyone else …

Why else would they have been complaining so bitterly, if Groves hadn’t actually been taking all their best people?

So Groves just got lucky to be part of a military that rolled over and let him recruit all their top officers?

On the contrary, the military got lucky recruiting Groves! Really, without his skill at management, his organizational ability, his capability at convincing people to join him and inspiring them to work towards a common goal, his talent at balancing the political, scientific, military, and civilian sides of the project all at once, and his unwavering determination even when the task seemed impossible – without all that in one man, how could the Manhattan Project ever have succeeded?

While I’m sure his memoir makes it appear as if Groves had all sorts of superhuman management skills and personally directed the solution to every problem, just recognize that you’re getting this account from the man himself. It stands to reason his perspective might be a bit biased.

Groves would never lie! Every word is gospel! You’re the liar!

Chill out, I’m not saying he’s lying. But it’s obvious that Groves’s own contributions and decisions are going to appear more important from his own perspective. After all, from dancing to bring rain to playing slot machines, it’s human nature to believe your own actions are causing whatever happens in the world around you. Groves would have been an extraordinary person indeed not to find the cause of his success in the parts he had the most control over. So for example, if he spent a lot of time and had a lot of say in personnel recruitment, then it’s hardly a surprise if his account attributed greater importance to the quality of the people who were selected.

Possibly. I still maintain that whatever Groves’s biases were, my explanation makes intuitive sense. After all, don’t top technology companies succeed the same way, by hiring the “best” people – not necessarily at a specific task, but in a general “smart, and gets things done” sense?

Sure, sure. But didn’t a bunch of finance companies try the same hiring strategy – and wind up filing for bankruptcy after causing a global recession?

Their problem was an incentive misalignment – they took no responsibility for the results of their decisions. Rather than borrowing silver from the treasury for their magnetic coils, they were stealing gold for their parachutes. Groves, on the other hand, explicitly took responsibility for the results of the Manhattan Project all the way through, to everyone from politicians to companies to laborers.

You seem to believe that by taking responsibility for everything about the project, Groves thereby gained an omnipotent power to control its success or failure. Please try to remember he was just a man, not a divinity.

Perhaps not – but his Buddha-like calm in the face of agitated scientists and politicians certainly didn’t do the project any harm.

I assume you have an example of this mystical calm?

Well, take the Alamogordo test – the very first test of a nuclear bomb on Earth. Everyone involved was extremely anxious to see whether the bomb would work as intended – or whether it would ignite the atmosphere and kill everyone, or just fail to work at all, making all their efforts through the past three years amount to nothing.

So everyone was a bit tense, then?

To put it lightly! Besides that, uncertainty about the weather was causing additional delays and stress, since they didn’t want the wind to carry any radioactive fallout over populated areas. As an example of how infectious the tension was, their Chief Medical Officer, Colonel Stafford Warren, who was in charge of safety, didn’t sleep for forty-eight hours. Groves had to get him a temporary replacement because, “his mind was not working so quickly as it normally did, by any means.” And coming from Groves, about his own people, that’s quite harsh. Groves even had to personally take Oppenheimer aside to “discuss matters quietly and calmly” before making the decision on whether or how much to postpone the test, because all the other scientists were so busy giving unsolicited opinions to the point that “no sound decision could ever be reached amidst such confusion.”

To be fair, the scientists clearly had a lot on the line.

Well, so did Groves! But even the political representatives at the test, Bush and Conant, felt that Groves was abnormally serene about it all:

Oppenheimer and I agreed to meet again at 1 A.M., and to review the situation then, with the understanding that we should be ready to set the bomb off on schedule if the weather had improved by that time. I urged Oppenheimer to go to bed and to get some sleep, or at least to take a rest, and I set the example by doing so myself. Oppenheimer did not accept my advice and remained awake, I imagine constantly worrying. Bush, Conant and I were quartered in a tent that had not been set up very well and the canvas slapped constantly in the high wind. Bush and Conant told me afterward that they could not sleep at all, and did not understand how I could under such conditions.

Couldn’t his calm-under-any-circumstances attitude just have been a military thing?

That assumption isn’t really fair to Fermi – the civilian scientist – who kept his composure as well. Though Groves was initially annoyed with Fermi for taking bets on the outcome of the test, and for saying that even if the bomb didn’t go off the test was worthwhile as a scientific experiment since it would prove such a bomb was impossible, later Groves reconsiders:

Afterward, I realized that this talk had served to smooth down the frayed nerves and ease the tension of the people at the base camp, and I have always thought that this was his [Fermi’s] conscious purpose. Certainly, he himself showed no signs of tension that I could see.

And what was Fermi’s job at the Alamogordo test?

Groves doesn’t say. He does, however, relate a clever estimation Fermi does:

Unknown to me and I think to everyone, Fermi was prepared to measure the blast by a very simple device. He had a handful of torn paper scraps and, as it came time for the shock wave to approach, I saw him dribbling them from his hand toward the ground. There was no ground wind, so that when the shock wave hit it knocked some of the scraps several feet away. Since he dropped them from a fixed elevation from near his body which he had previously measured, the only measurement he now needed was the horizontal distance that they had traveled. He had already calculated in advance the force of the blast for various distances. So, after measuring the distance on the ground, he promptly announced the strength of the explosion. He was remarkably close to the calculations that were made later from the data accumulated by our complicated instruments.

That doesn’t surprise me. That sort of numerical estimation was just the sort of thing Fermi was famous for, and what made him such an excellent experimental physicist. So, how big was the test explosion, then?

Groves doesn’t see fit to mention the numbers, but if you must know – a hundred terajoules, or twenty-five kilotons of TNT.

I assume Alamogordo is out in the middle of the desert somewhere, but did no one notice the equivalent of twenty-five kilotons of TNT going off on US soil?

Oh, people noticed all right. Of course, Groves’s people had a story prepared to cover it up. They claimed to the press that, “a remotely located ammunition magazine containing a considerable amount of high explosives and pyrotechnics exploded” in an accident.

And people bought that?

This was pre-Roswell; people still trusted the government. Still, you can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but:

Our release did not fool everybody. Several days after I got back to Washington, Dr. R. M. Evans, of the du Pont Company, came to see me about some of the operating problems at Hanford. After we had finished and he was leaving, he turned, his hand on the doorknob, and said, “Oh, by the way, General, everybody in du Pont sends you their congratulations.” I quickly replied, “What are you talking about?” He answered, “It’s the first time we ever heard of the Army’s storing high explosives, pyrotechnics and chemicals in one magazine.” He went on to add that the radio announcement on the Pacific Coast had been teletyped in to Wilmington from Hanford. My only response was: “That was a strange thing for the Army to do, wasn’t it?”

Nuclear testing in the desert seems like the sort of thing that would start strange rumors. Wasn’t Groves concerned about people learning about the Manhattan Project’s existence?

Rumors didn’t bother him that much. There were already quite a few rumors about Los Alamos, actually. Some were about the base’s purpose, such as one saying that they were building submarines.

Now you’re the one suggesting submarines, hundreds of miles away from any water!

The subs were transported to the Pacific via the underground ocean.

Hey, I didn’t say I believed the rumors. Other rumors were about the base’s security, such as those accidentally confided to a Los Alamos Colonel by an unsuspecting civilian he met on a train:

“You’d never believe the strange things that are happening on a certain mountain about fifty miles from Santa Fe. They’re doing some work that is very secret and the place is surrounded by belts of tall wire fencing. In order to keep intruders out, between these belts of fences they keep ferocious packs of wild African dogs. Besides, there are thousands of heavily armed soldier guards, and I can tell you that a number of people have been killed by the guards, or torn to pieces by the animals. It’s a frightful thing! However, I suppose that in wartime these things have to be.”

The accuracy of this account of Groves’s security is instantly suspect, since while Groves is clearly willing to make sacrifices during wartime, nowhere else in the book does he mention sacrificing civilians to packs of wild dogs.

The full extent of the rumors must have been wild indeed, if these are just the ones getting all the way back to Groves.

Well, it was part of his job to know what sorts of rumors were going around. He was quite concerned with maintaining information security, and keeping knowledge of the project from seeping out through the press or civilians into the hands of spies.

What, was everything Groves’s job? Hadn’t he ever heard of delegating?

Even if he delegated some things, he was still responsible for everything, from coordinating the labs and building the facilities all the way up through training the bombing team. He was even involved in choosing the targets.

By targets, you mean the actual cities that were bombed? He chose Hiroshima and Nagasaki?

Not on his own – although he had some input and helped compile a list of possible targets, he never had final say on the matter. It’s obvious he wasn’t making the final decisions actually, since as far as specific target choices went, he had his heart set on Kyoto.

Kyoto? Was he quite mad? Did he have no consideration for the sheer historical value that would have been destroyed? Or even if he cared nothing for Japanese culture and history, did he not take into account that such an act would have left the US’s international reputation in tatters? Not, of course, that the US hasn’t found other ways to tank its international reputation since then.

The perfect test-building to study nuclear detonation-induced structural damage.

Your response is more or less what Secretary Stimson said when Groves brought the suggestion to him.

At least someone had some sense, then.

Groves wasn’t particularly reconciled to Stimson’s refusal to consider Kyoto, either. He kept bringing it back up again and again, until at last Stimson brought the matter up with President Truman, who gave it the final veto.

What did Groves have against poor Kyoto?

Rather than having anything against it, the problem was more that Groves cared too little about the city, so that his opinion was formed solely on the basis of frigid practicality.

But how was nuking Kyoto practical in any way?

Well, Groves was quick to point out in his recommendation that Kyoto contained many legitimate military targets. However, foremost on his mind seemed to be the consideration that the amount of testing they had thus far had the opportunity to do with their brand new nuclear weapons was quite limited. As for Kyoto:

…it was large enough to ensure that the damage from the bomb would run out within the city, which would give us a firm understanding of its destructive power…

I’m not even sure what to say to that, besides to point out that there is a difference between doing testing on model cities in the middle of the desert and doing testing on real cities full of people. Anyways, I suppose Groves must have been disappointed when Hiroshima and Nagasaki were chosen instead?

He doesn’t go into detail. But considering how he concluded his discussion on the target selection, I assume that by the time he wrote the book, he had recognized that Kyoto might have been a bad choice:

Events have certainly borne out the wisdom of Mr. Stimson’s decision.

The real test though, is – did Groves ever consider that perhaps the US should never have used nuclear weapons at all?

By the fact you’re even asking that, I doubt you and he would have seen eye to eye. He was quite certain that they were in the right as far as dropping the bombs went:

In my opinion, [President Truman’s] resolve to continue with the original plan will always stand as an act of unsurpassed courage and wisdom – courage because, for the first time in the history of the United States, the President personally determined the course of a major military strategical and tactical operation for which he could be considered directly responsible; and wisdom because history, if any thought is given to the value of American lives, has conclusively proven that his decision was correct.

Well, considering his position, I guess I would have been more surprised if he had thought otherwise.

I don’t think the book mentions his political position, though?

No, I mean his military position as head of the project.

What does that have to do with it?

Consider – Groves had just spent three years of his life doing everything within his power to make those bombs work. That kind of effort and dedication had consequences to his thinking – namely, that he became invested in the outcome, actively desiring the bombs to be used successfully. That was the only way to justify the sacrifices he had made up to that point.

But how can you blame Groves for that, when his dedication was such an important piece in the project’s success? Are you suggesting he should have let the Manhattan Project fail on principle?

No, this isn’t a criticism of Groves – I think remaining unbiased in his role would have been impossible. Through the very process of developing a technology or creating an attack plan, those involved bias themselves towards the idea that the technology or the attack is not only possible but desirable. They get into the mindset of “how do we use these weapons” or “how do we attack this country,” rather than asking whether the weapons should be used or the country attacked at all. However, rational people and a rational state will not make their decisions based on this sort of sunk cost fallacy, but rather on what they expect to benefit them most in the future while still upholding their values. At least for Groves in the US, the conflict of interest inherent here wouldn’t have been that much of a problem, since the US has a civilian-controlled government separate from its military hierarchy. Thus, the civilian government can make and guide the state’s strategic decisions while leaving tactics and details to the military.

Don’t all countries do that?

On the contrary, this was the very mistake Japan, a very militarized state at that point, made in attacking Pearl Harbor – they asked how the US ought to be attacked, and not whether it was a good idea to open hostilities in the first place against an additional country when they were already fighting China. Japan and Germany both had very militarized governments at the time, and this is probably part of the reason these countries entered some conflicts they would almost certainly have been better off avoiding.

I’ll have to take your word for it when it comes to the mindsets that were prevalent in Germany and Japan, but I agree Groves appears to have had a very military type of perspective on a lot of things. While I think that mindset contributed to his success, it also set him apart from many of the others he worked with.

How do you mean?

For one thing, Groves was always focused first on security, whereas the politicians and scientists involved were instead primarily focused on collaboration. Where the State Department saw a treaty, Groves saw a security leak. Or where the scientists at Los Alamos saw an opportunity to hold a colloquium and share knowledge, Groves saw a distraction with the potential to reveal everything to any undetected spies and spell disaster for the project’s information security.

But you were just telling me how much of Groves’s success was due to working with all these different groups – companies, labor, scientists, politicians, the military – and now you’re trying to tell me he didn’t value collaboration?

Groves believed in collaboration for a goal, not collaboration for the sake of itself.

So you’re claiming treaties and colloquiums are useless?

Not at all – and I don’t think Groves believed that either. Basic science research probably benefits greatly from scientists gaining cross-disciplinary knowledge, and sharing their results openly through colloquiums and international collaboration. But for something like the Manhattan Project with a specific goal and a tight deadline, more focus and efficiency were necessary. If the scientists working on the project had gotten sidetracked researching every new discovery anyone else made, they would never have reached their original objective.

It sounds like you think the security-and-efficiency mindset is superior, but I have my doubts.

I’m not sure either way. There’s certainly a balance between these two mindsets in the long run. Without enough open collaboration, not enough new discoveries are made, and technological progress stagnates. Without enough efficient focus, no new developments are made to utilize already existing discoveries, and technological progress also stagnates. The Manhattan Project probably needed some of both mindsets – while it did produce a lot of research that advanced basic science, much of which was published after the war, it did so in service of a central goal, and it would never have achieved what it did so quickly and efficiently without that goal.

I guess I can understand the focus on efficiency, when they had a looming Nazis-with-nukes deadline hanging over their heads. But did security considerations really make that much of a difference in how the project was run?

Oh, definitely. Security considerations even helped dictate the name “Manhattan Project” itself.

Really? I always wondered where the name came from.

The full name was actually the Manhattan Engineering District. Originally, it was called “DSM” but Groves objected on the grounds that this “would arouse the curiosity of all who heard it.” He thought “Manhattan Engineering District” would sound very anodyne and boring, and unsuspicious considering their main offices were located in Manhattan.

How disappointingly mundane.

Your tears of disappointment are Groves’s measure of success. He valued the practical, even when everyone around him wanted to succumb to the temptation to add dramatic flair. Although, sometimes he didn’t quite manage to stop others from deviating from pure practicality in security considerations, such as when his people decided to name the nuclear intelligence operation in Italy, France and Germany, “Alsos.”

I don’t get it – Alsos sounds like a pretty inconspicuous name to me. Why did he object to it?

Because it came too close to the truth:

The Manhattan Project always carefully avoided drawing undue attention to its work and to its people. Code names for our projects were deliberately innocuous. Imagine my horror, then, when I learned that G-2 had given the scientific intelligence mission to Italy the name of “Alsos,” which one of my more scholarly colleagues promptly informed me was the Greek word for “groves.” My first inclination was to have the mission renamed, but I decided that to change it now would only draw attention to it.

Groves’s paranoia about this seems a bit silly.

Well, he had cause to be paranoid! For one thing, it was wartime. And for another, there really were spies trying to infiltrate the project, even if they were Russian and not German like Groves was expecting. Though I have to admit, sometimes his suspicions seem to have gone a little bit overboard even by my standards. For example, take Groves’s response to one of the accidents that occurred when he was trying to use security prohibitions, aka. wartime press censorship, to keep any details about the Manhattan Project out of the press:

There was one unfortunate happening not too long before the bombing, when a Congressman, in discussing an appropriations bill, commented on the importance of the Hanford Project. This item was picked out of the Congressional Record and was republished in a newspaper without any comment. I could never disabuse myself of the feeling that this newspaper did it with the deliberate intent of letting me know that our security prohibitions were not so effective as we thought.

Really – “deliberate intent”? Did he think the newspapers were out to get him or something? Though I suppose when you’re on the lookout for spies for so long, you start to imagine malicious intent even where there is none.

True! Just look at the Army sentries at Los Alamos, who spent so long watching for German spies but finding none, that they started to detect false positives:

[Commander Willian S.] Parsons was the first Navy officer to be assigned to the station [at Los Alamos], and appeared at the gate wearing a Navy summer uniform. His arrival was announced by a frantic guard, who telephoned his sergeant: “Sergeant, we’ve really caught a spy! A guy is down here trying to get in, and his uniform is as phony as a three dollar bill. He’s wearing the eagles of a colonel, and claims that he’s a captain.”

All the effort they wasted keeping an eye out for non-existent German spies would have been better spent trying to track down some of the very-much-existent Soviet spies that were even then percolating into the heart of Groves’s supposedly extremely secret project. Why did no one notice Hall, or Cohen, or Fuchs –

Stop right there – Fuchs wasn’t Groves’s fault! That one was on the British.

So, Groves is all-responsible and all-powerful as long as the project is going well, but as soon as Soviet spies show up and start successfully stealing information, suddenly everything is the British’s fault?

But it’s true! Fuchs was sent over by the British as part of a cooperation agreement between the two countries, the Quebec Agreement, that Groves and his political allies were barely consulted about. This was a pattern throughout the war – the politicians made agreements to share information with other countries – Britain, France, Russia – but they didn’t bother consulting Groves, and ignored his warnings that maintaining information security was in the country’s best interests.

Oh sure, blame the politicians. Of course the military chafed under civilian strategic leadership – but that’s the point! The military can’t always have its way.

Well, in this case the military not getting its way meant that the Soviets got theirs. The British made their own decisions about who to send over as part of the Quebec Agreement, and Groves couldn’t object too strongly without causing a diplomatic issue:

Our acceptance of Fuchs into the project was a mistake. But I am at a loss when I try to determine just how we could have avoided that mistake without insulting our principal war ally, Great Britain, by insisting on controlling their security measures.

Still, Groves tried, repeatedly, to convince the English to do proper background checks on their people, but they either wouldn’t cooperate, or claimed to have done the checks when they really hadn’t – or else they were just so disorganized they couldn’t manage to find the information they really needed when it came down to it:

When I received the names of the first group of British scientists coming over to work in the Manhattan Project, under the terms of the Quebec Agreement, I observed that there was no mention of their reliability. I told the British official with whom I was dealing that I would have to have a statement that they had been properly cleared. The statement furnished in reply was inconclusive, in my opinion, and I asked for a more definite one. This was given me; it said that each member had been investigated as thoroughly as an employee of ours engaged on the same type of work.

Since the disclosure of Fuchs’ record, I have never believed that the British made any investigation at all. Certainly, if they had, and had given me the slightest inkling of his background, which they did not, Fuchs would not have been permitted any access to the project. Furthermore, I am sure the responsible British authorities would have withdrawn his name of their own volition, before giving me his history…

Fuchs was born in Germany and had fled to England, where he completed his education. The British authorities had been informed by the Germans prior to the war that he was a Communist. For some reason they ignored this and did not even record the information where they would find it.

Groves seems to be implying that the British purposely skipped doing background checks – but why? Does he think they were all Soviet agents? Or were they just too lazy?

Groves doesn’t think so little of the British. His theory is rather that they simply couldn’t accept the idea that any of their people might be spies, and so never took the possibility of infiltration seriously. Of course, this is not to say that their motives made them any less to blame:

It was a British responsibility. As partners in the atomic field each nation had to be responsible for its own personnel. The United Kingdom not only failed us, but herself as well.

I have always felt that the basic reason for this was the attitude then prevalent in all British officialdom that for an Englishman treason was impossible, and that when a foreigner was granted citizenship he automatically became fully endowed with the qualities of a native-born Englishman. With the uncloaking in recent years of Fuchs, May, Maclean and Burgess, as well as others, I doubt if this feeling still prevails.

No one but Fuchs and the Russians know what he told them –

Wait, stop! That’s not true.

What’s not true?

That no one knows what Fuchs told the Russians – we do know.

What makes you think you would know any more about it than Groves himself?

Tell me this – when was Groves’s memoir published?

1962.

Oh, that makes more sense. Back then, Groves wouldn’t have had any way to know what any Russian agents were telling their handlers. But it’s not the 60’s anymore, and knowledge seeks the light.

What happened, were the KGB files released after the collapse of the Soviet Union or something?

No, something much more exciting: Vasili Mitrokhin defected to the UK in 1992.

So some guy defected – so what?

Not just any guy – a guy who spent thirty years as a KGB archivist. Over those years, Mitrokhin copied out pages and pages of classified KGB files, and brought his notes with him to the UK.

Thirty years of handwritten notes?

Yep.

I hesitate to ask this in case you actually expect me to go back and read them, but are they openly published like the Farm Hall transcripts?

Not the originals, no – they’re still classified, not to mention in Russian. But the MI5 historian Christopher Andrew wrote a book, The Sword and the Shield, summarizing the major KGB operations the notes cover.

And that book mentioned Fuchs?

Yes. According to Andrew, Fuchs gave the Soviets a complete or near-to-it copy of the bomb designs developed at Los Alamos.

That’s even worse than Groves speculated. The British have much to answer for!

Actually, even without Fuchs, the Manhattan Project’s information security was still doomed. According to Andrew, Stalin received not just one, but two copies of the bomb designs from two separate spies, Klaus Fuchs and Theodore Hall. Just face it: the Manhattan Project was infiltrated. Despite all Groves’s security measures, the Soviets even knew about the Alamogordo test even as it was occurring.

I was starting to think that Groves might have been a bit overly paranoid looking for German spies that weren’t there. But clearly, he wasn’t being careful enough! What was he doing, letting so many spies get past him?

Don’t feel too bad on his behalf – in comparison to the British situation, the US was practically a fortress. In England, the Soviets had, at one point, five top agents in various positions in the UK government – Burgess and Maclean, who you just quoted Groves mentioning, as well as Blunt, Cairncross, and Philby. On top that, they had numerous other lower-level agents as well. Ironically, if it can be called ironic when it was clearly so maliciously deliberate, Kim Philby became head of Section Five of MI6 – Section Five being the section in charge of British anti-communist counterintelligence. According to Andrew, western counterintelligence efforts were so lacking that Soviet spies started to make up fake ones for them claim to have foiled in their reports back to Moscow, just to keep the paranoid Stalin from getting on their cases about failing to infiltrate the non-existent American and English counterintelligence networks. Groves was ahead of his time by western standards just by making any attempt at counterintelligence at all.

Well, you know what they say – nobody expects the Soviet infiltration! Except maybe Secretary Stimson, in some prescient remarks to Groves:

[Stimson] pointed out that while our atomic bombs would offset Russian strength on the continent of Europe, the Soviets would surely spare no effort to develop their own atomic arsenal. Unless the United States and the United Kingdom were to bring the Soviets into our position of control voluntarily, the Russians would only be stimulated in their efforts to catch up with us. Mr. Stimson estimated that it would take from four to twenty years for them to do so. He mentioned that their espionage activities during the war indicated that they had already started.

Well, Stimson was certainly right about that last – Soviet espionage efforts were well underway by the time World War Two ended. And while the true interval it took the Soviets to make their own nukes came in at the low end of his range, it was still within his window: the first Soviet nuclear test, RDS-1, took place on August 19, 1949, just four years after the end of the war.

You sound like you’re impressed with the Soviets’ speed, but they were just copying us! And it still took them longer to make their copy than it took for us to make nukes from scratch.

I respect science-by-spy as its own art.

I’m not sure if this makes it better or worse, but the Soviets’ success at getting information from us wasn’t entirely due to their spy network. The government occasionally lent them a hand as well, to Groves’s perpetual consternation. For example, take the State Department’s involvement in publishing a secret report that was key to negotiations on an agreement over how much scientific information to share with the Soviets:

Unfortunately, the report was published by the State Department on the grounds that certain portions of it had been leaked to the press and that it was therefore wise to make the entire text public. As in the case of many other leaks in Washington, everyone blamed someone else. The State Department blamed a Senate committee and the Senators blamed the State Department. While the newspapermen, in accordance with their code, refused to disclose their source, many of them did say privately that the Senate was not responsible.

Well, Groves should rest in peace knowing the whole business didn’t matter in the end – the State Department was so infiltrated by Soviet intelligence that Moscow would have known the contents of the report anyways, published or not.

Somehow, I think Groves would have found that cold comfort. It seems more and more to me that any attempt at security was a lost cause, between leaks from above by the State Department and international allies, and leaks from below by Soviet agents. Groves was stuck.

I guess you can keep some secrets all of the time, and all secrets some of the time – but good luck keeping complete information security when the Soviets are involved! And after all, Groves’s primary mission was to develop nuclear weapons – keeping them secret was only a secondary objective. He may have failed at the latter, but at least at the former he certainly succeeded.

Actually, I find it ironic that the US was the only country that succeeded at developing nuclear weapons, when they were probably the country that least needed them. Of course, people can debate all day about whether dropping the bombs on Japan to end the war early and save American lives was morally right – but the question is always about ending the war early, not victoriously. No one seriously doubts that we would have won anyways even without nuclear weapons. Germany and Japan were the countries that actually needed them, and could have used them to reverse their circumstances.

I suppose that’s one way of looking at it. But turn it around – couldn’t it have been, the reason the US was the one country to develop nuclear weapons before the end of the war was because they were winning?

What? That doesn’t make sense. Wouldn’t you expect the country that was losing through conventional methods be the one that would feel pressured to turn to nuclear weapons development?

Not unless someone invented time travel when I wasn’t looking.

Huh?

Think about it this way. You say the Manhattan Project was almost preternaturally fast, to the point it’s implausible anyone else could have managed it faster – and yet, it still took them three years. In what war does a country realize it’s losing three years before invading enemy forces make large-scale industrial and technological development impossible? No, the US started the Manhattan Project long before any conclusions could have been reached about the final outcome of the war. And Germany was the same – their choices about what technologies to pursue and which projects to fund were made back even earlier in the war.

But since a country’s endgame using conventional weapons can’t have determined their choice of how many points they put into nuclear research in their opening, doesn’t that invalidate your argument as much as mine? No one can add nuclear research points to their past game, no matter whether they’re losing or winning.

But the two outcomes could still be correlated – for example, if one of the countries is a better player than the other. Couldn’t whatever factor caused the US to be winning the war by conventional methods, be the same factor that caused the US to be winning at nuclear weapons development as well?

Wait, are you agreeing with me that the US is the best country on Earth? Have I converted you?

Not even a little. I don’t mean that the US was “the best” in some intangible sense, only that it possessed some unique advantage from which all or most of its success followed.

What advantage?

Don’t you think I would be rubbing it in your face if I had figured it out myself? We’ve been going in circles trying to determine the true cause of the Manhattan Project’s success, but we’re three-quarters of a century in the future – what do we know? We need something closer to the source. Now that I think about it – why does Groves think the Manhattan Project succeeded? He was there, he must have dropped at least a few ideas somewhere in his 400-pages of memoir?

Better than a few random ideas, he actually gave a full summary, but he doesn’t think their success was due to any single factor:

Looking back, I think I can see five main factors that made the Manhattan Project a successful operation:

First, we had a clearly defined, unmistakable, specific objective. Although at first there was considerable doubt whether we could attain this objective, there was never any doubt about what it was. Consequently the people in responsible positions were able to tailor their every action to its accomplishment.

Second, each part of the project had a specific task. These tasks were carefully allocated and supervised so that the sum of their parts would result in the accomplishment of our over-all mission. This system of compartmentalization had two principal advantages. The most obvious of these was that it simplified the maintenance of security. But over and above that, it required every member of the project to attend strictly to his own business. The result was an operation whose efficiency was without precedent.

Third, there was positive, clear-cut, unquestioned direction of the project at all levels. Authority was invariably delegated with responsibility, and this delegation was absolute and without reservation. Only in this way could the many apparently autonomous organizations working on the many apparently independent tasks be pulled together to achieve our final objective.

Fourth, the project made a maximum use of already existing agencies, facilities and services – governmental, industrial, and academic. Since our objective was finite, we did not design our organization to operate in perpetuity. Consequently, our people were able to devote themselves exclusively to the task at hand, and had no reason to engage in independent empire-building.

Fifth, and finally, we had the full backing of our government, combined with the nearly infinite potential of American science, engineering and industry, and an almost unlimited supply of people endowed with ingenuity and determination.

So Groves thinks they succeeded due to good management, got it.

What? Where are you getting that from?

Look at Groves’s list – most or all of those are management principles. Very good management principles, true, but they’re all the sorts of things Groves could and did have control over as he oversaw the project. While I’m sure Groves’s skill at management raised their chances of success a great deal, I don’t believe the project could have succeeded merely because Groves happened to be especially talented.

Fine then, if you refuse to accept my theory of Groves-superiority, I’ll take another shot: I think the hidden factor is democracy. Democracy always wins!

As I think I already pointed out, Nazi Germany started out as –

And as I already pointed out, Nazis are not real democrats.

It’s all well and good to say the US was a democracy in 1942 and Germany was a fascist dictatorship, and this caused Germany to fail where the US succeeded. However – the US is still a democracy, right? So why can the US government of today no longer run a project anywhere near as fast and successful as the Manhattan Project?

Simple – they don’t have Groves anymore!

Groves was not the only skilled project manager to ever live. The conclusion is inevitable – either the US today is not a true democracy anymore, or else the real key factor behind the Manhattan Project’s success is something else.

Stop raining on my Fourth of July parade! Okay, here’s another theory: what if there was something unique about the culture in the US in the first half of the twentieth century, that caused all those groups Groves brought together – whether labs, companies, laborers, politicians, or military – to cooperate? Other countries were limited to what could be done by small teams since that was the most collaboration they could manage to wring out of people, and the Nazis not even that much. But in the US, everyone in a spirit of patriotism laid aside their grudges and contributed for the good of the country!

While you may be on the right track, I think you overestimate the amount of cooperation that was actually going on.

Impossible! Groves praises the willingness to cooperate of everyone he meets. Of course, there are a couple of exceptions like the pipe fitters union and the French, but those only highlight how far out of their way everyone else was willing to go to help Groves’s project succeed.

Doesn’t that strike you as a bit odd, though? Groves praised everyone – but this only means that maybe we shouldn’t take him at face value. Groves clearly had a very political side to him, and in the interests of appearances probably put forward the best picture of everyone he worked with who gave him any assistance at all, no matter how grudgingly or how much persuading it took before they agreed to help. Now, this isn’t a bad quality in a leader – after all, it was his job to take people with all their faults and get their best work out of them, as Groves certainly understood well. But to get a true picture of the situation, keep in mind that he was writing this book to the public, and while he might have included funny anecdotes about times he disagreed with people, he wasn’t about to put any of the truly nasty arguments in there, especially if those fights were with people he was close to or who were his superiors. I’m afraid I’m not inclined to believe the Manhattan Project was such a rose bed of collaboration and cooperation as Groves seems to have made it out to be.

But even if there were all kinds of behind-the-scenes fights Groves didn’t see fit to mention in his memoir, the fact still remains that in front of the curtain, they all really did manage to work together successfully! Maybe, despite their disagreements, the people Groves recruited were just more dedicated to the project and willing to give it their all, because of their shared understanding of the threat to democracy.

So now you’re combining both your disproven theories together? You want to be extra wrong, is that it? In my experience, people living in democracies are just as likely as people anywhere else to hate and mistrust their country and government – perhaps more so. Last time I checked, Putin’s approval rating was four times that of the US Congress.

Unfair! Comparing Putin to Congress is like comparing nukes to TNT explosives.

By that are you implying that Putin is better or worse, because while nukes are better in the sense of being bigger, they’re worse in terms of being weapons of mass destruction…

Do you even have to ask?

Fine, I’ll change my comparison: Putin’s approval rating was only twice as high as that of the US President.

That’s not fair, everyone knows Putin cheats!

Keep telling yourself that. But I don’t believe for a moment that the Germans and Soviets weren’t just as dedicated to their work and their country as the Americans. Actually, if the success of the KGB spy networks is anything to judge by, many Americans were just as dedicated as the Soviets were – to the Soviet government!

If you’re going to keep being the boron in my reactor and smothering all my theories, why don’t you try coming up with one of your own for a change?

Fine. Partly because of its culture as a liberal democracy – but only partly – the US did value one quality more highly than Germany or the USSR: that is, the courage to take risks. In the Farm Hall transcripts, when Heisenberg explains why Germany could never have launched a massive nuclear research effort like the Manhattan Project, he claims:

HEISENBERG: We wouldn’t have had the moral courage to recommend to the government in the spring of 1942, that they should employ 120,000 just for building the thing up.

Meanwhile, that’s precisely what it took for the US to succeed. And before you say anything, I don’t think the problem was just that the German scientists were all cowards. I think the Nazi regime did not create good incentives for their people to take risks, even when those risks potentially had very high payoffs. Taking risks was just not a good way to get ahead there, but it was a good way to get shot when things went wrong. Since the Manhattan Project was just this sort of risk, no one in Germany was incentivized to start such a thing. Whereas in the US, Groves goes to a lot of people – companies, labor organizers, scientists, military officers – and convinces them to help with his project, knowing it is a risk but one with a high payoff, in that if it succeeds could end the war. They all agree to help him partly because of patriotism, true, but also partly to share in his success – but this latter becomes a consideration only because they’re not afraid of getting shot in the head if the risk doesn’t pay out and the project fails.

But Groves’s team didn’t have complete impunity for their mistakes, you know – and his associates certainly still feared the consequences of failure:

I knew, as did Bush and Conant, as well as the President, Secretary Stimson, General Marshall and General Somervell, that if we were not successful, there would be an investigation that would be as explosive as the anticipated atomic bomb. Once, in 1944, Somervell told me with a perfectly straight face, at least for the moment: “I am thinking of buying a house about a block from the Capitol. The one next door is for sale and you had better buy it. It will be convenient because you and I are going to live out our lives before Congressional committees.”

Sure, but being shot in the head and answering to a Congressional committee are in two different classes of outcome. The personal outcomes for risk-takers in the US were better, and that translated into the organizational outcomes where those people worked being likewise better. This theory also explains the lack of achievement by US government projects today, since while people are still not shot in the head for failure, they no longer reap much glory from their successes, as all the credit goes to the politicians and the bureaucracy as a whole.

I’m still not sure I buy it.

Eh, I suppose we could guess about it all day – if people are still debating the question three quarters of a century on, amateur armchair historians like us can hardly expect to solve it in an afternoon. But it’s sobering to consider that none of these factors would have mattered a whit if nuclear bombs had turned out to be impossible due to some quirk of nuclear physics. All the management skills in the world can’t save you from mother nature’s harsh audit, after all.

Well, even if the physics involved had made nuclear weapons impossible, I think Groves would still have succeeded – with his management skills, he would simply have turned the whole research apparatus to some other technologically-advanced, war-ending project:

The sheer size of Groves’s genetically-engineered combat-dinosaurs gave  the strategy of island-hopping a new meaning.