Manhattan Project

V

The Legacy of the Manhattan Project

The Manhattan Project shaped the future of the world in ways that no one could have imagined. It led to an arms race between the United States and the Soviet Union, helped create a culture of secrecy and fear—especially in the United States and the Soviet Union—and resulted in the spread of nuclear weapons, the development of nuclear energy for peaceful purposes, and the ongoing problem of how to store radioactive nuclear waste. The world will undoubtedly be dealing with these legacies for a long time to come.

A

Nuclear Arms Race

In 1946 an American committee proposed the creation of an international authority to control “all phases of the development and use of atomic energy.” Many scientists who worked on the Manhattan Project helped formulate this plan, which was presented to the newly created United Nations (UN) by American financier and economist Bernard Baruch. Baruch warned of the dangers of nations competing to produce weapons of mass destruction. But the Soviet Union—deeply involved in building its own atomic bomb—refused to cooperate. In 1949 the Soviets detonated their first atomic weapon—virtually identical to the Trinity Site bomb—and the arms race was on. (See the Sidebar “The Baruch Plan.”)

In the early 1950s as relations between the West and the Soviet Union deteriorated into what was called the Cold War, Britain, the Soviet Union, and the United States also developed thermonuclear or hydrogen bombs, whose explosive power was more than 50 times greater than a standard atomic bomb. Neither the Soviet Union nor the United States dared attack one another for fear of instant retaliation, a situation that was known as mutually assured destruction (MAD). This tense atmosphere evaporated with the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. United States-Russian relations became much more friendly, and the Cold War was declared officially at an end. Nevertheless, the arms race produced so many nuclear weapons that many scientists still fear that any use of the stockpiles could end human civilization as we know it. See also Nuclear Weapons.

B

A Culture of Secrecy and Fear

The secrecy that surrounded the Manhattan Project continued with the start of the Cold War. In 1945 the Allies discovered that the Soviet Union had extensively spied on the project. In late 1949 the British arrested physicist Klaus Fuchs, who had spent time in Los Alamos as part of the British mission. Fuchs eventually confessed to handing over secret data to the Soviets on several occasions, including an exact description of the Trinity Site bomb, as well as early research on the hydrogen bomb. Since Fuchs was then a naturalized British citizen, he was tried in Britain for espionage and in 1950 sentenced to 14 years in prison. Fear that he had assisted a Soviet H-bomb program helped push America to make the political decision to develop hydrogen weapons.

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The 1950s also produced two other nuclear-related trials. The first involved Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. Ethel’s brother, David Greenglass, had worked as a machinist at Los Alamos and had passed crude drawings of atomic bombs to Julius, who gave them to a Soviet courier. When the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) helped crack the Fuchs case, they discovered the Rosenberg/Greenglass espionage, and after a controversial trial, the Rosenbergs were executed in 1953. Later disclosures, following the demise of the Soviet Union, revealed that only Julius Rosenberg had met with the Soviet courier. Opinion remains divided today over whether the Rosenbergs received a fair trial in the anti-Communist witch-hunt hysteria of the time and whether the death penalty was merited, considering that it is rarely invoked in espionage cases in Western countries and considering the questionable usefulness of the information passed to the Soviets. Also debated is the question of whether the prosecution had charged Ethel, despite scant evidence against her, merely in an attempt to gain a confession from Julius.

Shortly after the execution of the Rosenbergs, Oppenheimer faced a trial of his own when he was brought before a board of inquiry of the Atomic Energy Commission to explain his early radical political past and to justify his opposition to America’s development of the hydrogen bomb. Oppenheimer’s left-wing political links had been no secret. Groves knew of them in 1943 but appointed Oppenheimer director of Los Alamos anyway. Yet by the 1950s the fear engendered by the anti-Communist hysteria of the time had made it seem that anyone with left-wing views was a security risk. The board of inquiry voted to remove Oppenheimer’s security clearance, in effect barring him from any further work on atomic-related programs. Given his contribution to the Manhattan Project, Oppenheimer felt hurt and betrayed. The nation’s scientific community split down the middle on the justice of this decision, and the hard feelings did not fade for a generation.

In subsequent years more revelations were unearthed about Soviet spying on the Manhattan Project. Theodore Hall, a brilliant 19-year-old American physicist who arrived at Los Alamos in January 1944, began passing information to the Soviets in late 1944. A socialist and an admirer of the Soviet Union, Hall later wrote that he had decided “an American monopoly” on nuclear weapons “was dangerous and should be prevented.” Hall was never prosecuted, although he apparently came under suspicion after World War II ended. In the 1960s he took up residence in the United Kingdom. His role in espionage was first disclosed in 1996.

But perhaps the most dramatic disclosure of Soviet spying came in November 2007 when Russian president Vladimir Putin gave Russia’s highest award to American-born George Koval, a top Soviet spy and member of the Soviet Union’s military intelligence. The award was made posthumously following Koval’s death in 2006 in Moscow. Koval thus became the only known professional spy to have infiltrated the Manhattan Project. Unlike other Soviet spies, Koval had access not only to Los Alamos but also to the Oak Ridge facility and another top-secret plant near Dayton, Ohio. Putin credited Koval, who had been trained in both electrical and chemical engineering, with having “helped speed up considerably the time it took for the Soviet Union to develop an atomic bomb of its own.”

C

Nuclear Proliferation

Once the Manhattan Project demonstrated that an atomic bomb could be built, it was only a matter of time before other nations acquired nuclear weapons. The secrets of the physical world lie open to all trained observers, and any country with the scientific knowledge and a sufficient industrial base can manufacture its own nuclear bombs. The United States and the Soviet Union were the first to develop nuclear weapons, followed by Britain, France, and China. In 1968 the five nuclear powers signed the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, under which they agreed to pursue disarmament and to deny nuclear weapons technology or assistance to any nonnuclear state.

By 1995, 165 nonnuclear states had ratified the treaty. India, Israel, and Pakistan did not adopt the treaty, and today those three countries have nuclear weapons. South Africa began to develop nuclear weapons, but scrapped its program and agreed to the treaty in 1991. Following the Persian Gulf War, UN weapons inspectors discovered that Iraq had a nuclear weapons program but had not yet developed a bomb. In 2003 North Korea withdrew from the treaty and announced that it had secretly developed atomic bombs. As a result, by 2003 nine countries—Britain, China, France, India, Israel, North Korea, Pakistan, Russia, and the United States—were known or were believed to possess nuclear weapons. Today the governments of many nations are also concerned about the possibility that nuclear bombs or the fissile material needed to make a Hiroshima-type nuclear bomb could fall into the hands of terrorists. See also Arms Control; Terrorism.

D

Nuclear Energy for Peaceful Purposes

A fourth legacy of the Manhattan Project may be seen in the emergence of peaceful uses of nuclear energy. In 1953 U.S. president Dwight D. Eisenhower told the UN that America would share its atomic expertise with poorer countries in the Plowshare, or Atoms for Peace, program. This short-lived endeavor helped spread peaceful nuclear technology around the world, but it never achieved the hoped-for goal of providing “electricity too cheap to measure.” Nevertheless, by 2003 the United States had more than 100 nuclear power plants in operation, and there were 438 commercial nuclear generating units worldwide. Widely publicized nuclear power plant accidents, such as the one at Three Mile Island nuclear power plant near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, in 1979 and Chernobyl’ in Ukraine in 1986, have somewhat dampened the hopes of nuclear energy advocates. The realm of nuclear medicine remains the chief area where scientists’ dreams for the peaceful uses of the atom are still alive and well. See also Nuclear Energy.

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