From presentation at AHF symposium, October 2006
BY GEORGE A. COWAN
A major legacy of the “Manhattan Project” is that its name and its formula for success have become synonymous with achieving seemingly impossible national objectives. What were the essential elements of the Manhattan Project? I’ve thought about this question often over the years. One thing was clear. A prerequisite for any such model is an enormously compelling challenge. In the case of the Manhattan Project there were two parts to the challenge: 1. The war and the very real prospect of a Fascist world and, 2. The promise of a new weapon so powerful that it would quickly guarantee victory.
Despite differences in the kinds of people that were involved, the Apollo project to send men to the moon in the 1960’s has often been referred to as a second Manhattan Project. It involved a compelling challenge. This challenge attracted a diverse group of truly talented people. Under their leadership NASA was created and went on to develop its huge centers at Cape Canaveral, Houston, Pasadena. It enlisted the organizational and engineering skills of our most imaginative space technology corporations. And, like the first Manhattan Project, it worked.
Both of these projects were very large. They were examples of what Harris Mayer has called meta-engineering. They could not have been accomplished without the synthesis of many different interests and capabilities. But they wouldn’t have come into existence at all without initial concepts that were spelled out by a small number of extraordinary people. I want to focus on this prerequisite for success, the truly unique feature of the Manhattan Project model.…
I was greatly influenced in subsequent years by my work on the wartime Manhattan Project at Princeton, Chicago, St. Louis, M.I.T., Oak Ridge, Columbia, and Los Alamos. I was thinking in terms of a mini-Manhattan Project when, in the 1980’s I helped put together and manage a small cluster of great people at the Santa Fe Institute. Here the huge challenge was to explore the universality of open, non-linear complex adaptive systems in nearly all of the processes we see in our daily lives. It was and remains a compelling and tremendously important concept, one that is transforming the agenda of the academic, business, and investment worlds. To the extent that it required meta-engineering, a huge base was already being assembled by government and industry in the form of the scientific and industrial explosion of computer technology and the advent of the age of information. The Santa Fe Institute seized on this technology to attack complexity. Its timing happened to be fortunate.
So the Manhattan Project model starts with small, diverse groups of great minds. Formation of such groups requires a compelling challenge that captures these very best minds and requires their collaborative efforts. We can make long lists of problems existing today that suggest a need to adopt the Manhattan Project model. But which of them can inspire groups of extraordinary people to join together and produce truly imaginative conceptual approaches?
I suggest that such a problem is now posed by religious extremists, particularly relatively small groups of fanatics who are rewarded by the use of deadly violence to achieve their ends or by guaranteed entry to Paradise. Bill Press says that the underlying problem must be addressed in a far larger context. Most members of societies that spawn fanatics live in deprived environments. They surely must be open to thoughtful programs that would improve their material well-being. Can we better understand how, at this moment, some of the world’s historically poor societies are successfully moving toward more openness and prosperity? Are we imaginative enough to apply this knowledge to improve the unstable and deprived societies we see all over the world?
Let me repeat. We are facing a threat that is real and even imminent. It is probably bigger than Hitler’s threat in the 1930’s and 1940’s. Relatively small numbers of fanatics and thugs are increasingly capable of inflicting intolerable levels of damage on vulnerable targets. They pose a problem that is truly challenging and compelling.
Our civilization has its share of great minds that have not been fully enlisted in addressing this problem. My own biases turn me toward outstanding physical and social scientists, probably mostly in academia. We regard them and provide support for them as great national assets but many are also part of a unique international community that speaks a common language and shares common objectives. Shouldn’t we turn to this community and enlist its help?
There are, of course, troublesome questions in framing a proposal. The central theme of the Manhattan Project was the achievement of a new, overwhelming form of coercive power. Many people were troubled by this objective but, in the end, the theme was widely accepted. A new Manhattan Project would have to explore other forms of power and paths to peace. It wouldn’t start today with a well-defined program. It is unlikely to have immediate support from those who think that the only possible options are economic sanctions on governments followed, if necessary, by military power. The Project would have a considerably bigger challenge than the one that we faced sixty and seventy years ago. The problems involved in dealing with a combination of deprived societies, rogue governments, dispersed militias, and rampant thuggery have no precedent. It would probably be necessary to begin with a distinguished, high level study group, one that would command wide attention and respect. It would discuss in some detail what paths a new Manhattan Project might begin to explore. The group would be asked to draft a charter for the Project. It would be open to additional ideas. A consensus might then form. Is there sufficient enlightened leadership in Washington or elsewhere to commission such a first step? I hope that the answer is yes and that something like this might happen soon.
Section Ten
Seventy-Five Years Later
Seventy-Five Years Later
To commemorate the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Manhattan Project, this section provides multiple perspectives on the atomic bomb, from reflections of Manhattan Project veterans to memories of Japanese survivors from Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Addressing the legacy of nuclear weapons today, former world leaders warn that the United States and Russia are on a dangerous precipice. In the words of Nobel Peace Prize winners, our mutual destruction is only one impulsive tantrum away.
The section begins with reflections from Manhattan Project participants selected from over 600 oral histories online at “Voices of the Manhattan Project.” Readers can see the transcripts and listen to or watch the full oral histories at www.manhattanprojectvoices.org.
Among these reflections, Benjamin Bederson argues that President Truman made the right decision in using the atomic bombs to end World War II. The most famous woman physicist in the Manhattan Project, Leona Woods Marshall, does not mince her words: “I have no regrets. I think we did right, and we couldn’t have done it differently.”
In contrast, Murray Peshkin concludes that the decision to use the bomb squandered the United States’ moral leadership in the world. In his view, “a well-meaning President made the worst decision.” Others, such as Lilli Hornig, had mixed feelings. Ralph Lapp explains how atomic weapons have bisected human history, changing the nature of war. Dieter Gruen reflects on the need for a global Manhattan Project.
For decades, most American interpretations of the Manhattan Project ended with the atomic bomb’s successful detonation over Japan. The Mayors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and several atomic bomb survivors or hibakusha provide perspectives of what happened “under the mushroom cloud.” Readers can read the full transcripts and watch these and other interviews taken in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in February 2019 at www.rangerinyourpocket.org.
Keiko Ogura was only eight years old when the Hiroshima bomb fell. For the next fifty years, she did not talk about her experience. Only when she began to share her stories did the nightmares stop. Masao Tomonaga was two when the Nagasaki bomb fell 2.5 kilometers from his house. He became a medical doctor and expert on the health effects of radiation from the atomic bombs.
Mayor Kazumi Matsui of Hiroshima explains, “We have been requesting that the heads of state of the U.S., Russi
a, and other nations visit the A-bombed cities. I believe that if they see the reality of the atomic bombing here, they will understand such a tragedy should never happen again.”
President Barack Obama was the first U.S. President to visit Hiroshima on May 27, 2016. In his moving speech, Obama calls for a future where “Hiroshima and Nagasaki are known not as the dawn of atomic warfare but as the start of our own moral awakening.”
The final entries include two letters, one signed by former U.S. government officials George P. Shultz, William J. Perry, and Sam Nunn, and the other by former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev. Both letters were published by The Wall Street Journal in April 2019. Compared to their letters published by the Journal in 2007 (see Section Nine), the recent letters are decidedly more urgent. As Shultz writes, “The U.S., its allies and Russia are caught in a dangerous policy paralysis that could lead—most likely by mistake or miscalculation—to a military confrontation and potentially the use of nuclear weapons for the first time in nearly 74 years.”
This message is further reinforced by the winners of the Nobel Peace Prize in 2017, leaving us all with much to consider about the fragility of peace in the world with nuclear weapons.
Truman Made the Right Decision
Son of Russian Jewish immigrants in New York City, Benjamin Bederson was studying physics when he was drafted by the Army and assigned to Los Alamos. He later had a distinguished career as professor and dean at New York University and as editor in chief of Physical Review. He talks about whether the atomic bomb should have been used on Japan and the threat of nuclear weapons today.
From AHF Oral Histories
INTERVIEW WITH BENJAMIN BEDERSON
For many years at New York University, I taught a course called Physics in Society. The students always raised the question, “Did Truman make a mistake in dropping the atomic bomb?” Many people then and now think it was a mistake to drop the bomb.
I did not think it was a mistake. I looked at the young people and said, “You know, many of your parents would have been killed if there had been an invasion of Japan. And there would have been an invasion of Japan if the Japanese had not surrendered. And you would not be here.”
Of course, there is no way of knowing that, but you have to realize that dropping the bomb saved American lives. It killed a lot of people. You can never understand the horror of that, but war is horrible. Americans were getting killed, and the first thought was to save American lives. It may have saved Japanese lives, too. Who can tell how many Japanese lives would have been lost had there been an invasion of Japan? Probably a lot. It was a tough decision, but Truman made the right decision.
Not many years after the atomic bomb was dropped, the Russians succeeded in developing an atomic bomb. Then the hydrogen bomb was successfully developed with a destructive power many, many times larger than the atomic bomb. Now the world is filled with hydrogen bombs in the Russian arsenal, the American arsenal, and who knows what other arsenals.
If dropped in Manhattan, the hydrogen bomb would destroy the entire city. Two or three million people would be killed, and the entire culture of America would be destroyed. It is unthinkable, and yet it could happen.
The only way to solve this problem is to have an international control of atomic weapons and end their destruction. At some point in the distant future, if we still exist, the world will come to its senses. We will form a truly well-policed, international organization, part of the United Nations hopefully, and atomic weapons will be destroyed. I doubt I’ll live to see it, but it’s worth looking forward to.
No Regrets
Leona Marshall Libby was the most well-known woman scientist working on the Manhattan Project. At 19, she received a BS in chemistry at the University of Chicago. During the war, she worked closely with Enrico Fermi on the Chicago Pile-1 and Hanford’s B Reactor. In this interview, she forcefully states that in World War II, there was no choice but to proceed with the development and use of the atomic bomb.
From AHF Oral Histories
INTERVIEW WITH LEONA MARSHALL LIBBY
I think everyone was terrified that we were wrong (in our way of developing the bomb) and that the Germans were ahead of us. That was a persistent and ever-present fear, fed, of course, by the fact that our leaders knew those people in Germany. They went to school with them. Our leaders were terrified, and that terror was fed to us.
If the Germans had got it before we did, I don’t know what would have happened to the world. Something different. Germany led in the field of physics, in every respect, at the time war set in, when Hitler lowered the boom. It was a very frightening time.
I certainly do recall how I felt when the atomic bombs were used. My brother-in-law was captain of the first minesweeper scheduled into Sasebo Harbor. My brother was a Marine, with a flame thrower, on Okinawa. I’m sure these people would not have lasted in an invasion.
It was pretty clear the war would continue, with half a million of our fighting men dead, not to say how many Japanese. You know and I know that General (Curtis) LeMay firebombed Tokyo and nobody even mentions the slaughter that happened then. They think Nagasaki and Hiroshima were something compared to the firebombing. THEY’RE WRONG!
I have no regrets. I think we did right, and we couldn’t have done it differently. Yeah, I know it has been suggested the second bomb, Nagasaki, was not necessary. The guys who cry on shoulders. When you are in a war, to the death, I don’t think you stand around and ask, “Is it right?”
One Atomic Bomb Was Sufficient
Born in Munich in 1916, Gerhart Friedlander fled Nazi persecution in 1936. He studied at the University of California with Glenn Seaborg, earning his Ph.D. in nuclear chemistry in 1942. During the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos, he was a group leader in the Chemistry Division. After World War II, Friedlander worked at Brookhaven National Laboratory and chaired the Chemistry Department. He questions the necessity of dropping the second atomic bomb on Japan.
AHF Oral Histories
INTERVIEW WITH GERHART FRIEDLANDER
What drove most of those who came from Europe as refugees was to make sure that Hitler did not get an atomic bomb first. What we did not know until after the war is that the Germans, in fact, did not get very far and did not have a serious bomb project. They were working on nuclear reactor development.
That was indeed the motivation certainly for us of European origin, but I think also for the American scientists. It would have been disastrous if the Nazis had developed the bomb before us.
When Germany surrendered, we went on to develop the bomb for use on Japan. I really only know of one person who at that point left the project because the Germans were out of it and that there was now no justification to continue. That was Joseph Rotblat, who in recent years got the Nobel Peace Prize, as a matter of fact, because he continued to work on measures to stop the use of atomic weapons.
Most of us quite gladly continued to work on it until the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. But many of us couldn’t understand why we dropped the second bomb on Nagasaki. It seemed that one atomic bomb was sufficient really to persuade the Japanese to give up. I’ve never heard a really convincing explanation of why we dropped the second bomb.
A Well-Meaning President Made the Worst Decision
Murray Peshkin was an American physicist who worked on the Manhattan Project in Los Alamos. Later he was a professor at Northwestern University and worked for many years at Argonne National Laboratory. Peshkin separates the issue of developing the atomic bombs from the much more complicated issues of their use.
From AHF Oral Histories
INTERVIEW WITH MURRAY PESHKIN
Should we have built that bomb? In retrospect, I think that the answer is yes. Norman Ramsey, who was on the plane that accompanied the Hiroshima bombing, the Enola Gay, said, “If we had not used that bomb to end that war, it is highly probable that it would have been used to start the next war, more than likely by us.”
That’s a very interesting stat
ement. We would not have done the experiment that showed us quite how horrible the consequences were. We would have had a lot more of them. Others would have used them on us. Once fission had been discovered in 1939, it was obvious to every physicist in the world that the possibility of making a fission bomb existed.
We and the Soviets could not have trusted each other. They would have had to go for it, and we would have had to go for it. We had the advantage of great industrial superiority. They had a ruined economy. But they had the advantage that Stalin could force all the best people to work on it… It’s certainly a reasonable speculation that they would have gotten there first. Then what would have happened?
The issue of using the bomb is much more complicated. People have debated that for a long time. The most obvious reason is that we were about to invade Japan. We anticipated a million casualties, of whom one-fourth would have been dead. We anticipated that in the process, we would have killed many millions, maybe tens of millions of Japanese, innocent Japanese civilians. We could end the war right then and there. That was certainly a powerful reason…
What surely would have influenced the decision makers is that Russia [the Soviet Union] had [entered the war with Japan] a few days before the bomb was dropped. If we had let them help us with the invasion of Japan, they would have shared in the occupation. That leads to a kind of desperately awful calculus that the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were the first victims of the Cold War.
In a sense, everybody else in Japan was a beneficiary of our having used the bomb. I have many Japanese friends. I have gingerly felt them out. I have yet to speak with one who didn’t say in some way that they were somehow relieved.
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