Prelude to Hiroshima
Ray Monk
RACING FOR THE BOMB: GENERAL LESLIE R. GROVES, THE MANHATTAN PROJECT'S INDISPENSABLE MAN by Robert S. Norris Steerforth Press, £17.99, pp. 722. ISBN 1586420399 0 ur fascination with the building of the world's first atomic bomb is, it seems, as enduring as it is insatiable; for over 50 years there has been an endless stream of histo ries, memoirs, biographies. novels, documentaries and movies exploring its every aspect. And yet, curiously, the man at the very centre of the Manhattan Project has attracted comparatively little attention. That man is not, as many believe, J. Robert Oppenheimer (the so-called 'father of the atomic bomb'), but General Leslie R. Groves. Oppenheimer may have led the Los Alamos laboratory, but that laboratory was not, contrary to widespread impression, the whole of the Manhattan Project. Of the two billion dollars spent on the project, only a small fraction was spent at Los Alamos, and, of the 100,000 or so people employed in building the bomb, only 2-3 per cent worked there. On what was the rest of the money spent? Where did the other people work? To answer these questions, one has to understand the unbelievably vast scale of the enterprise Groves led and the enormity of his achievement in seeing it through to its epochal and cataclysmic climax.
Because of our preoccupation with the scientists at Los Alamos, we tend to see Groves through their eyes, and, therefore, what we see is a corpulent, uneducated oaf, who understood nothing of atomic physics and who tried to impose upon scientists methods of working more suited to fighting a war than to investigating the secrets of nature. The great merit of Robert Norris's sympathetic and meticulously researched biography is that it enables us to put this caricature aside and to see Groves for what he was: an extraordinarily able man of great intelligence, irresistible determination and demonic energy who was, indeed, the indispensable man of the Manhattan Project. And, in the process, we see the project itself for what it was: not primarily a scientific research programme, but an engineering project of unimaginable magnitude that required for its completion not just the combined brains of the most brilliant scientists of the day, but also the industrial and military might of the United States and (perhaps above all) the unshakable will of General Leslie Groves.
Soon after nuclear fission was discovered in 1938, many scientists realised the potential consequences for the manufacture of explosives, but Niels Bohr, the world's most eminent scientist in the field, reassured them that an atomic bomb would never be built, because, he said, to make a bomb that utilised the tremendous energy released by splitting the uranium nucleus would require turning the whole of the United States into one big factory. The reason for this is that you cannot make a bomb with the kind of uranium that is found in nature. To make a bomb, you need either a rare isotope of uranium that is incredibly difficult to separate from natural uranium, or you need plutonium, which doesn't occur in nature at all, and requires enormously expensive nuclear plants to produce. That's where Groves comes in, that's where the two billion dollars was spent and that's what 97-98 per cent of the people employed on the Manhattan Project were doing: producing the 60 kilograms of uranium 235 that destroyed Hiroshima and the six kilograms of plutonium that laid waste Nagasaki. The effort required to produce these modest amounts of fissile material was extraordinary. First Groves had to ensure that the United States owned most, or preferably all, of the uranium ore in the world. This itself required millions of dollars and delicate, secret negotiations with governments and international companies. Then he had to construct two fairly large new industrial towns, Oak Ridge in Tennessee and Hanford in Washington — the first devoted to the extraction of uranium 235 and the second to the production of plutonium — and recruit the tens of thousands of workers needed to run the plants built there. Meanwhile, he had to oversee the huge scientific effort required to invent methods of extracting these precious materials and to use them in the construction of a bomb. And finally he had to ensure that this massive project remained a secret, not only to Germany and Japan, but also to the Soviet Union, the American public, Congress and even the people employed on it (most of the workers at Oak Ridge and Hanford had no idea that the purpose of their work was the production of material for building bombs).
Groves himself gave a good account of all this in his 1962 book, Now It Can Be Told. but Norris adds far more detail and places Groves's work on the Manhattan Project in the context of his whole life, allowing us to see what kind of man he was and why he was peculiarly well suited to the daunting task given to him. For anybody interested in understanding the true nature of the Manhattan Project, Racing for the Bomb is essential reading.
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