Speaker 1: Welcome to brain Stuff production of iHeart Radio, Hey brain Stuff.
Speaker 1: Laurin Vogel bomb here. In September of nine two, US
Speaker 1: Army Lieutenant General Leslie Groves, commander of the Manhattan Project,
Speaker 1: the secret US crash effort to develop the atomic bomb,
Speaker 1: faced a critical decision. The project needed to produce uranium
Speaker 1: two thirty five, an isotope of uranium whose unstable nucleus
Speaker 1: could be easily split to trigger a fission chain reaction
Speaker 1: and release an enormous amount of destructive energy. But that
Speaker 1: would require a massive, complex manufacturing process involving tens of
Speaker 1: thousands of workers, which needed to be kept secret to
Speaker 1: thwart interference from spies and sabotaurs. But the question was
Speaker 1: where could those facilities possibly be hidden. The U S
Speaker 1: officials had already identified potential sites in several parts of
Speaker 1: the country, but all of them had drawbacks. Shasta Dam
Speaker 1: in California, for example, was too close to the Pacific coast,
Speaker 1: and this vulnerable to air attack. In several locations in
Speaker 1: Washington State would have required construction of long power lines
Speaker 1: to provide the massive amounts of electricity needed for the work.
Speaker 1: A site in Illinois, near Chicago was also out officials
Speaker 1: didn't want to be close to a big population center,
Speaker 1: since the potential health risks of the work were not clear,
Speaker 1: and it would have been easier for enemy agents to
Speaker 1: blend in around a city. So instead, Groves quickly settled
Speaker 1: upon a fifty two tho acre that's twenty one hector
Speaker 1: site in rural eastern Tennessee, later expanded slightly. Not only
Speaker 1: would it be inconspicuous to anyone outside of the sparsely
Speaker 1: populated area, but it was also close to hydroelectric plans
Speaker 1: operated by the Tennessee Valley Authority, which could supply the
Speaker 1: enormous amounts of electricity that the plants would require. It
Speaker 1: was the perfect place to build both the Clinton Engineer Works,
Speaker 1: which would be the atomic complex, and a secret city
Speaker 1: to house the workers. The government decided to call the
Speaker 1: secret city oak Ridge because it sounded quote sufficiently bucolic
Speaker 1: and general, according to an article in a nineteen sixty
Speaker 1: nine government review of the project. Not long after choosing
Speaker 1: the area, the U. S Government quietly started moving small
Speaker 1: farmers who had land on the site, paying them compensation
Speaker 1: but not telling them why. Then came trainloads full of
Speaker 1: construction equipment and building materials. Construction crews quickly erected the
Speaker 1: buildings that would comprise the nondescriptly named campus, as well
Speaker 1: as thousands of houses for scientists and workers. Many of
Speaker 1: the homes were B one flat tops, a design fashion
Speaker 1: from pre fabricated panels and roofing to save construction time.
Speaker 1: Building the secret industrial facilities and housing for workers cost
Speaker 1: around one point three two billion dollars that's about eighteen
Speaker 1: point five billion in today's money. That amounted to sixty
Speaker 1: percent of the Manhattan Project's total budget. Over the next
Speaker 1: few years, Oakridge grew into a community of seventy five
Speaker 1: thousand people. We spoke with d Ray Smith, a retired
Speaker 1: historian for the Y twelve National Security Complex who also
Speaker 1: is the historian for the city of oak Ridge and
Speaker 1: a calumnist for the oak Ridger, a local newspaper. Smith
Speaker 1: explained people came from all over the world. Many of
Speaker 1: the scientists were Hungarians, a lot came out of Germany
Speaker 1: and Great Britain. He explains that others were recruited for
Speaker 1: the Clinton engineering works by big US companies working on
Speaker 1: the Manhattan Project, who scoured campuses of US colleges and
Speaker 1: universities for bright students with needed scigence and technical skills.
Speaker 1: For example, a young chemist named Bill Wilcox, who was
Speaker 1: approached by an Eastman Kodak recruiter in three later recalled
Speaker 1: that he was only told that the job was some
Speaker 1: sort of secret war work. He said, I asked where
Speaker 1: I'd be working, He wouldn't say it was secret. I
Speaker 1: asked what sort of work I'd be doing. He wouldn't
Speaker 1: say it was secret. Wilcox eventually ended up at the
Speaker 1: Clinton Engineer Works. According to Smith, those who turned down
Speaker 1: jobs might end up being drafted into a special engineering
Speaker 1: detachment of the U. S. Army and sent to Tennessee. Anyway,
Speaker 1: those atomic workers arrived at a place shrouded in secrecy.
Speaker 1: Locals knew something mysterious was going on at the site,
Speaker 1: but only those who were part of the mission were
Speaker 1: allowed inside, passed the guarded gates on the access roads.
Speaker 1: The atomic facilities themselves were surrounded by additional security. The
Speaker 1: work itself was highly compartmentalized, so that most people knew
Speaker 1: only about the small portion of the effort that they
Speaker 1: themselves were working on, and only a select few knew
Speaker 1: that the overarching mission was to help make the atomic bomb.
Speaker 1: Access to buildings other than the one you were working
Speaker 1: in was highly restricted to keep information from getting out,
Speaker 1: oak Ridge became a self contained community with most everything
Speaker 1: that its workers needed. The secret city had stores, movie houses,
Speaker 1: a high school, a bank, a three bed hospital, tennis
Speaker 1: and handball courts, and even in its own symphony orchestra
Speaker 1: led by a Manhattan Project scientist. People who lived their
Speaker 1: tended victory gardens, raised families, and led what was pretty
Speaker 1: much in normal American existence, that is, except for the
Speaker 1: secrecy that surrounded them and their work. A billboard reminded workers,
Speaker 1: let's keep our trap shut. They knew they had to
Speaker 1: be cautious not to say anything about their jobs to anyone,
Speaker 1: even their own spouses. A young scientist told one of
Speaker 1: the first reporters to write about the subject, when Louis
Speaker 1: Felstein would sit around the dinner table, and the strain
Speaker 1: was terrible, but it was all in the difficult effort
Speaker 1: of producing uranium two thirty five. There's only a tiny
Speaker 1: amount of the stuff zero point seven percent in uranium,
Speaker 1: or most of which is uranium two thirty eight, which
Speaker 1: doesn't fission, is easily and a bomb such as Little Boy,
Speaker 1: the one dropped on Hiroshima required one d and forty
Speaker 1: one pounds. That's sixty of uranium two thirty five. You
Speaker 1: have to separate a lot of material to get that
Speaker 1: much two thirty five. To solve that problem, the Clinton
Speaker 1: Engineer Works Y twelve plant used special devices called calutrons,
Speaker 1: which utilized the electromagnetic separation process developed by Nobel winning
Speaker 1: physicist ernest O. Lawrence at the University of California, Berkeley.
Speaker 1: The calutrons used heat and powerful magnets to separate the
Speaker 1: two isotopes and then to collect just the uranium two
Speaker 1: thirty five isotope because it's so much lighter in weight.
Speaker 1: To gather enough uranium two thirty five for the project's purposes,
Speaker 1: the Y twelve facility employed twenty two thousand workers to
Speaker 1: run one thousand, one hundred and fifty two calcutrons literally
Speaker 1: around the clock. Meanwhile, another part of the works, the
Speaker 1: X ten graphite reactor, used neutrons committed from uranium two
Speaker 1: thirty five to convert uranium two thirty eight into an
Speaker 1: isotope of a different element, plutonium two thirty nine, another
Speaker 1: easily fissionable material suitable for making atomic bombs. As Smith explains,
Speaker 1: after X ten demonstrated that the process could work, the
Speaker 1: actual plutonium used to make Fatman the bomb dropped in
Speaker 1: Nangasaki was produced in the B reactor at the Hanford
Speaker 1: Engineer Works near Richmond, Washington. Finally, on August six, the
Speaker 1: world witnessed to the results of the secret City's labors
Speaker 1: when the United States dropped an atomic bomb containing uranium
Speaker 1: two thirty five produced there on the Japanese city of Hiroshima.
Speaker 1: The Knoxville, Tennessee New Sentinels front page headline proudly proclaimed
Speaker 1: atomic super bomb made at oak Ridge strikes Japan. That
Speaker 1: wasn't completely correct. Though the uranium two thirty five came
Speaker 1: from Tennessee, parts of the bomb were made at three
Speaker 1: different plants, so that none of the would have the
Speaker 1: complete design. The destruction at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was horrific,
Speaker 1: and it was a or perhaps the turning point of
Speaker 1: the war. After the war, the various parts of the
Speaker 1: once secret Tennessee atomic complex were split up. Part eventually
Speaker 1: was reborn as the oak Ridge National Laboratory, which helped
Speaker 1: pioneer the field of nuclear medicine, producing ice topes for
Speaker 1: use in treating cancer. And as diagnostic tools, in addition
Speaker 1: to doing cutting edge research in areas ranging from nanotechnology
Speaker 1: to wireless charging of electric vehicles. Another portion became the
Speaker 1: Y twelve National Security Complex, which produced components for tens
Speaker 1: of thousands of thermonuclear weapons in the U s Arsenal
Speaker 1: during the Cold War and later helped disassemble US and
Speaker 1: former Soviet nuclear weapons. A third part is now the
Speaker 1: site of the East Tennessee Technology Park. Though there's no
Speaker 1: evidence that German or Japanese spies ever managed to infiltrate
Speaker 1: the Clinton Engineer Works, a Soviet spy named George Coval
Speaker 1: did manage to get a job there and apparently passed
Speaker 1: along information about the atomic work to the Soviets. In
Speaker 1: two thousand seven, he was honored posthumously with a Hero
Speaker 1: of the Russian Federation Medal, the nation's highest honor, by
Speaker 1: Russian President Vladimir Putin. Today's episode was written by Patrick J.
Speaker 1: Kaiger and produced by Tyler CLAYG. Brain Stuff is a
Speaker 1: production of I Heart Radio's How Stuff Works. For more
Speaker 1: on this and lots of other historical topics, including lots
Speaker 1: of further reading on Oak City and the atomic age,
Speaker 1: visit our home Planet, how Stuff works dot com and
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