In this the year 2023, such information would be communicated by email. Even as I write, there are those in high places of our government and the military debating the pros and cons of artificial intelligence.
But that was not the case in the fall of 1939.
A matter of days after Nazi Panzer divisions had invaded Poland, starting World War II, three physicists, Leo Szilard, Eugene Wigner and Edward Teller, had encouraged Albert Einstein to write a letter to the president of the United States, Franklin Roosevelt, informing the president that recent scientific breakthroughs by Italian physicist Enrico Fermi, who created the first self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction, and Leo Szilard made a strong case that a weapon of usual destructive force could be built with government support.
Einstein’s letter read: “This new phenomenon would also lead to the construction of bombs, and it is conceivable — though much less certain —that extremely powerful bombs of this type may thus be constructed. A single bomb of this type, carried by boat and exploded in a port, might very well destroy the whole port together with some of the surrounding territory. However, such bombs might very well prove too heavy for transportation by air.”
Delivering the letter and reading it to Roosevelt was economist Alexander Sachs. Both men belonged to the patrician class; they spoke the same language.
Over a couple of bourbons on the rocks, Sachs read the Einstein letter to the curious Roosevelt, who needed very little convincing with Europe now at war.
Szilard deserves special recognition. He had an epiphany after reading the Times of London the thoughts of a politician who referred to atomic energy as balderdash. Forty years later, the Jewish physicist reflected upon the moment in his memoirs: “I didn’t see at the moment just how one would go about finding such an element, or what experiments would be needed, but the idea never left me. In certain circumstances it might be possible to set up a nuclear chain reaction, liberate energy on an industrial scale, and construct atomic bombs.”
The combination of urging from the preeminent scientific mind of the day, Einstein, and the scientific genius of Szilard convinced Franklin Delano Roosevelt to draw up Executive Order 8807, the Manhattan Project.
Heading up the scientific aspects of the program was the Harvard-Cambridge educated chemist-physicist Julius Robert Oppenheimer.
Reading about the man is like looking into the sun on a cloudless day, his brilliance radiates so. The University of California, Berkeley, professor met Maj. Gen. Leslie Groves — who oversaw security and represented the military’s interests — in October 1942 and realized the urgency of developing a nuclear weapon before the Nazis did. Neither man fully realized the world-changing significance of what they were about.
Both men agreed that the absolute secrecy was imperative. The remote place they selected was Los Alamos, New Mexico, north of Albuquerque on the Pajarito Plateau. This is the site where atomic theory would be applied and the bomb constructed.
July 16, 1945
In the early morning darkness, elation and jubilation after the first successful test of a nuclear bomb at Alamogordo, New Mexico, had changed to anxiety and fear. There amongst the cottonwood trees and Yucca plants on terra cotta colored ground, New York Time’s reporter William Laurence stood along side Harvard physical chemist George B. Kistiakowsky in a slit trench 3 feet deep and witnessed the first test of the atomic bomb. It was Kistiakowsky who prophetically best described what he had witnessed to Laurence. In the chemist’s words, “‘I am sure that at the end of the world — in the last millisecond of the earth’s existence — the last man will see what we saw!’”
The Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki would be obliterated. In Hiroshima alone, 75,000 human beings incinerated like the head of a sulfur match igniting. And the great irony of those fateful events, the crew who assembled the weapon at Los Alamos came to oppose the proliferation of nuclear weapons to the man.
This July, film director Christopher Nolan brings to life those fateful, history-changing events on the high plains of New Mexico in a film titled simply “Oppenheimer.” It is a must see. You won’t be disappointed.
Jean Griffith lives in Carthage and has taught at both Pittsburg State University and Missouri Southern State University.