Abstract
Effective organization and administration were vital to the success of the Manhattan Project. Between late 1939 and the end of the war, government funding of the Project would grow by a factor of over 300,000 from an initial investment of $6,000 to nearly $2 billion. Without aggressive, competent, and committed leaders of great personal integrity drawn from the ranks of civilian scientists and engineers, industrial executives, military officers, and government officials to oversee such an undertaking, the possibilities for inefficiency, lack of results, mismanagement, and outright waste would have been rife. It is a testament to the quality of these people that the record reveals both spectacular success and not even minor examples of such malfeasance. Without these individuals the Project could never have been mounted and carried out as effectively as it was.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsNotes
- 1.
Hewlett and Anderson attribute the note to January 19, 1942. The note can be found in M1392(1), 0945. However, another date suggests itself. The immediately preceding image on the DVD version of the microfilm records supplied to this author is a copy of a letter from Bush to FDR dated June 17, 1942, wherein Bush enclosed a June 13 report on the subject of “Atomic Fission Bombs”; see Sect. 4.9. The June 17 letter is also marked “V.B. OK FDR”. Might the “January 19” note have been penned on June 19? The month on the note of Fig. 4.8 is indistinct. If it is June 19, a Presidential response within two days may seem speedy, but was by no means unprecedented. For example, as discussed in the text, on March 9, 1942, Bush sent FDR an extensive update on the status of the project; the record contains a note signed by Roosevelt on March 11, acknowledging return of the document to Bush (Fig. 4.11). But if Roosevelt annotated the June 17 letter, why would he have felt compelled to send a separate note two days later? The copy of Compton’s November, 1941, report in the OSRD records bears no Presidential annotation, which could suggest the need for a separate acknowledgement. Mere proximity of FDR’s note to the June 17 letter on the DVD supplied to this author is no guarantee of temporal closeness: my experience is that the documents in these records are often very mixed-up chronologically. If the note does refer to returning the third Academy report, this would represent a lapse of some seven weeks between the meeting and the return. But in the hectic days following the attack on Pearl Harbor this may not have been unreasonable; Roosevelt may have been further delayed because he was hosting Winston Churchill for the First Washington Conference, which ran from December 22, 1941, to January 14, 1942. It appears that convincing arguments can be mounted for either date. For this writer, coming across this minor confusion reminded him of advice he received many decades ago from an eighth-grade teacher: “When you write something, date it.” To which I would add: And do it clearly and completely.
Further Reading
Books, Journal Articles, and Reports
J.-J. Ahern, We had the hose turned on us! Ross Gunn and The Naval Research Laboratory’s Early Research into Nuclear Propulsion, 1939–1946. International Journal of Naval History 2(1) (April 2003); http://www.ijnhonline.org/volume2_number1_Apr03/article_ahern_gunn_apr03.htm
S. Cannon, The Hanford Site Historic District—Manhattan Project 1943–1946, Cold War Era 1947–1990. Pacific Northwest national Laboratory (2002). DOE/RL-97-1047 http://www.osti.gov/bridge/product.biblio.jsp?osti_id=807939
R.P. Carlisle, J.M. Zenzen, Supplying the Nuclear Arsenal: American Production Reactors, 1942–1992 (Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 1996)
D.C. Cassidy, A Short History of Physics in the American Century (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 2011)
J. Cirincione, Bomb Scare: The History and Future of Nuclear Weapons (Columbia University Press, New York, 2007)
R.W. Clark, The Birth of the Bomb: The Untold Story of Britain’s Part in the Weapon that Changed the World (Phoenix House, London, 1961)
R.W. Clark, Tizard (The MIT Press, Cambridge, 1965)
K.P. Cohen, S.K. Runcorn, H.E. Suess, H.G. Thode, Harold Clayton Urey, 29(April), pp. 1893–5, January 1981. Biographical Mem. Fellows Roy. Soc. 29, 622–659 (1983)
A. L. Compere, W. L. Griffith, The U. S. Calutron Program for Uranium Enrichment: History, Technology, Operations, and Production. Oak Ridge National Laboratory report ORNL-5928 (1991)
A.H. Compton, Atomic Quest (Oxford University Press, New York, 1956)
B.T. Feld, G. W. Szilard, K. Winsor, The Collected Works of Leo Szilard. Volume I—Scientific Papers. (MIT Press, London, 1972)
L. Fine, J.A. Remington, United States Army in World War II: The Technical Services—The Corps of Engineers: Construction in the United States. Center of Military History, United States Army, Washington (1989)
S. Goldberg, Inventing a climate of opinion: Vannevar Bush and the decision to build the bomb. Isis 83(3), 429–452 (1992)
M. Gowing, Britain and Atomic Energy 1939–1945 (St. Martin’s Press, London, 1964)
L.R. Groves, Now It Can be Told: The Story of the Manhattan Project (Da Capo Press, New York, 1983)
R.G. Hewlett, O.E. Anderson, Jr., A History of the United States Atomic Energy Commission, Vol. 1: The New World, 1939/1946. (Pennsylvania State University Press, University Park, PA 1962)
L. Hoddeson, P.W. Henriksen, R.A. Meade, C. Westfall, Critical Assembly: A Technical History of Los Alamos during the Oppenheimer Years (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1993)
W. Isaacson, Einstein: His Life and Universe (Simon and Schuster, New York, 2007)
V.C. Jones, United States Army in World War II: Special Studies—Manhattan: The Army and the Atomic Bomb. Center of Military History (United States Army, Washington, 1985)
C.C. Kelly (ed.), Remembering the Manhattan Project: Perspectives on the Making of the Atomic Bomb and its Legacy (World Scientific, Hackensack, 2004)
C.C. Kelly (ed.), The Manhattan Project: The Birth of the Atomic Bomb in the Words of Its Creators, Eyewitnesses, and Historians (Black Dog & Leventhal Press, New York, 2007)
C.C. Kelly, R.S. Norris, A Guide to the Manhattan Project in Manhattan (Atomic Heritage Foundation, Washington, 2012)
D. Kiernan, The Girls of Atomic City: The Untold Story of the Women Who Helped Win World War II (Touchstone/Simon and Schuster, New York, 2013)
W. Lanouette, B. Silard, Genius in the Shadows: A Biography of Leo Szilard. The Man Behind the Bomb (University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1994)
S. Lee, ‘In no sense vital and actually not even important’? Reality and Perception of Britain’s Contribution to the Development of Nuclear Weapons. Contemp. Br. Hist. 20(2), 159–185 (2006)
J.C. Marshall, Chronology of District “X” 17 June 1942–28 October 1942
K.D. Nichols, The Road to Trinity (Morrow, New York, 1987)
R.S. Norris, Racing for the Bomb: General Leslie R. Groves, the Manhattan Project’s Indispensable Man (Steerforth Press, South Royalton, VT, 2002)
B.C. Reed, Arthur Compton’s 1941 Report on explosive fission of U-235: A look at the physics. Am. J. Phys. 75(12), 1065–1072 (2007)
B.C. Reed, A brief primer on tamped fission-bomb cores. Am. J. Phys. 77(8), 730–733 (2009)
B.C. Reed, Liquid thermal diffusion during the manhattan project. Phys. Perspect. 13(2), 161–188 (2011)
R. Rhodes, The Making of the Atomic Bomb (Simon and Schuster, New York, 1986)
A. Sachs, Early History Atomic Project in Relation to President Roosevelt, 1939–1940. Unpublished manuscript, August 8–9, (1945)
E. Segrè, Enrico Fermi, Physicist (University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1970)
R. Serber, The Los Alamos Primer: The First Lectures on How To Build An Atomic Bomb (University of California Press, Berkeley, 1992)
H.D. Smyth, Atomic Energy for Military Purposes: The Official Report on the Development of the Atomic Bomb under the Auspices of the United States Government, 1940-1945 (Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1945)
F.M. Szasz, British Scientists and the Manhattan Project: The Los Alamos Years (Palgrave McMillan, London, 1992)
H. Thayer, Management of the Hanford Engineer Works in World War II (American Society of Civil Engineers, New York, 1996)
S.R. Weart, Scientists with a secret. Phys. Today 29(2), 23–30 (1976)
A.M. Weinberg, Eugene Wigner, Nuclear Engineer. Phys. Today 55(10), 42–46 (2002)
G.P. Zachary, Endless Frontier: Vannevar Bush, Engineer of the American Century (MIT Press, Cambridge, 1999)
Websites and Web-based Documents
Alexander Sachs letter to Roosevelt: A copy of Sachs’ cover letter can be found by searching on “Alexander Sachs” at the site of the FDR library, http://www.fdrlibrary.marist.edu/. There were actually three letters from Einstein to Roosevelt between August, 1939 and April, 1940, plus another in March, 1945. Texts of all four letters can be found at http://hypertextbook.com/eworld/einstein.shtml
OSRD: A copy of the Executive Order establishing the OSRD can be found at http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=16137#axzz1QbKXQHjp
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2014 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Reed, B.C. (2014). Organizing the Manhattan Project, 1939–1943. In: The History and Science of the Manhattan Project. Undergraduate Lecture Notes in Physics. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-40297-5_4
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-40297-5_4
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-642-40296-8
Online ISBN: 978-3-642-40297-5
eBook Packages: Physics and AstronomyPhysics and Astronomy (R0)