- [Narrator] This
might be the story of history's biggest secret, a hidden world of secret cities and classified nuclear
facilities built inside America. 400,000 people were part of it, though only a handful
really knew the truth. - They told us exactly what
to do and not to tell anybody. - [Narrator] It took up half
a million acres of land. It saw the construction of the largest
building in the world. It cost billions of dollars, and all these resources
were focused on one goal: bringing an end to
World War II by building the world's first atomic bomb. Six decades on, a
team of experts return to the once-classified sites where the course of
history was decided. In green valleys
and dry deserts, they will uncover and
rebuild this lost world. - The army tore down
the entire community called Happy Valley, it's gone. - [Narrator] Using the
latest in computer technology and new evidence,
the team will uncover the most complex feat of
engineering ever undertaken. This is the lost world
of the Manhattan Project. (dramatic music) Oak Ridge, Tennessee. In 1941, this was still
a remote farming area. Within two years, according
to classified plans and maps, it was a secret city. - The government realized
that this project was gonna take
many, many workers, so they began to design a city that ultimately would
hold 75,000 people. - [Narrator] It was
going to be the home to the biggest secret
of World War II. The government pretended
it didn't exist because this was part of Project
X, the Manhattan Project, the race to build the
first atomic bomb. Historian David Bradshaw
explores modern day Oak Ridge. He's hunting for clues to
its secret wartime past. In 1939, a group of scientists,
Albert Einstein among them, had warned President
Roosevelt of the possibility that Hitler's Germany
might be close to producing an atomic bomb. Roosevelt issued an order. Whatever it took, the
US had to be the first to develop an atomic bomb. One man, General Leslie Groves, was given
unprecedented authority and unlimited funds
to make it happen. He would need them. - Well, theoretically of
course, a bomb was possible in terms of the physics of it, but engineering and all
of the other many things that had to go into making
an actual combat weapon were quite unknown, so this was a pretty big
gamble to start off on. - [Narrator] Land was
the first requirement. The engineers knew that the
processes to create the bomb would be very labor-intensive. Groves set up facilities
in New Mexico, in Washington state, and
here, at Oak Ridge, Tennessee. David Bradshaw has been
searching through the archives to find out how the Oak
Ridge facility was set up. He's found documents
showing that Groves commandeered 59,000
acres of farm land, an area roughly twice
the size of Washington DC was about to be transformed. - Leslie Groves
selected this site to become the site for
the Manhattan Project. If you had looked
out here in 1941, you would have simply
seen rolling farm land, homes, barns, out buildings, very rural and very much the
way it had been for 100 years. They picked this site
because of its protection. - [Narrator] A study
of the layout shows how this land perfectly
suited Groves's needs. The ridges that surround
the land would shield what happened here
from prying eyes, and the project wasn't just
secret, it was high risk. If something went
catastrophically wrong, the ridge might protect the
local population from a blast. - In September of '42, the thousand farm
owners here received a very short letter which said "by December of 1942, you
must be off your property." - [Narrator] Farmers
whose families had been working the land for generations were given only a few
weeks' notice to quit. (tender music) The only explanation
given was that this land would be used for
the war effort. (dramatic music) Once the land was clear, the
first priority was security. - Probably one of the first
security buildings built was this one, it's
probably one of the last original ones still standing. - [Narrator] These
high towers were built to keep the site under
constant surveillance. It was as heavily guarded
as a high security prison. - You entered probably
through a spiral staircase. There were machine gun ports, gigantic search lights above us. None of the trees on this
ridge would have been here, so the ability to have
360 degree security would have been tantamount, and I'm sure that's why
they selected this spot. - [Narrator] From
his investigations, David Bradshaw has been
able to uncover the details of the security placed
in and around Oak Ridge. The site was placed under
guard and access restricted. No one entered without
high level clearance. All traffic in and out
was channeled through seven fortified check points. Oak Ridge was cut off
from the outside world. For the next three years,
no site in the United States was more important, more
closely watched, or more secret, and yet Groves had to bring tens of thousands
of workers here. He had to quickly build a
whole new town from scratch. A private company
was given the task. The initial brief, as
shown on these plans, was to create homes
for 13,000 people, scientists, engineers, soldiers, construction workers, laborers. This new community
would need shops, hospitals, schools
for their kids. At the project's peak, 75,000
people would live here. An investigation of what
remains of the secret city at Oak Ridge today offers
clues to the incredible speed with which this
community was built. - Just off the sidewalk
here are some of the very first houses in Oak
Ridge, E Apartment Buildings, probably completed
in August of 1943, built very, very quickly. This house, this house, this house, all the foundations
would have been laid. Then the framers would
have come in the next day and framed maybe a
dozen houses in a day. Then the plumbers, electricians,
finally the finishers, and people would have moved
in maybe one every hour as these came off
the production line. Really built only to
last for 10 years or so, 60 years later,
they're still with us. (tense music) - [Narrator] This
new town would be a model of suburban uniformity. What marked out Oak Ridge
was its secret mission to build the bomb. The army's next challenge
was to entice workers here and so they produced
this document. - It's really interesting,
it's marketing by the army. They knew people didn't
want to be coerced into Oak Ridge, but attracted, and so they developed
this document, talked about what your
house would look like, transportation, stores
and shops, a supermarket, a furniture store, a
moving picture theater. The document is fantastic, and it actually shows the
different types of houses, and it also has the rents. The Type A house
was $38 per month. That includes all
utilities, garbage pick-up, everything you would want. - [Narrator] From this
evidence, David Bradshaw has built a picture of what
this place looked like. In just a few months,
10,000 family homes, 90 dormitory buildings,
and over 5,000 trailers were built to accommodate
a work force of thousands. The first workers moved
in on July 27th, 1943. They came in their thousands
from all over the US, answering job advertisements
to join the war effort. - When I was interviewed,
I said I'm interested in some kind of war work. He said "well, this
is vital war work." I said "where will
I be working?" He says "well, I can't
tell you, it's secret." I said "well, what
will I be doing?" He says "well, I can't tell
you that, it's secret." - I remember coming here
and we had to be stopped at the gate, they
searched the car. It was scary, it really was, and then when we
got into the area, it was scarier still
because you think you're coming to a
town, there was no town. There were just trailers,
rows and rows of trailers and huts and all this temporary
housing, a lot of mud, and you weren't supposed
to ask any questions. (dramatic music) - [Narrator] Although
they didn't know it, these people were on
the front line in a war. Secrecy dominated their lives. - We had many, many posters up. What you see here,
what you hear here, when you leave here,
let it stay here. So we knew if we found
out anything, you know, don't breathe it, don't tell it. - [Narrator] Now, with the
basic structures in place, the security, the man
power, and the resources, the real work could
finally begin. 95% of the people who
worked at Oak Ridge had no idea of what
they were involved in, but we can now understand
exactly what they achieved. Building the bomb would
require vast uranium processing plants with
would lead to the largest construction project that
the world had ever seen. (dramatic music) As part of the
Manhattan Project, the US military
built a secret base at Oak Ridge, Tennessee
during World War II. Hidden from the world was
a city for 75,000 workers and a nuclear processing
plant called Y-12. The race was on to
enrich enough uranium for the world's
first atomic bomb. 100 pounds of
uranium was required. Its production demanded
an extraordinarily complex process that had never
been attempted before. What followed was to
be the most costly and most labor-intensive
engineering program in history. The vast Y-12 complex
is still highly secret, still an active
nuclear facility. Ray Smith, manager
here for many years, is searching what remains of
the World War II buildings for clues to tell their
extraordinary story. In 1943, General Groves, who
ran the Manhattan Project ordered the immediate
construction of nine huge
industrial buildings. - Below us is the Y-12
National Security Complex. It was built as a major part
of the Manhattan Project. If you look, you can see three
of the nine major buildings. The cost to construct these
buildings was $427 million. They're made out of
concrete and steel and the materials were
all brought in here, truck loads and train
loads of materials, to build this huge facility. - [Narrator] Each of the
nine buildings average 300 by 500 feet in size. They all remain standing
today and they contain evidence of how this
massive industrial plant was initially conceived. - At the beginning when
they were planning these industrial buildings,
the nine of them, they didn't really
know what the equipment would look like that
needed to be in there, but they knew that they
needed to be large buildings and that the equipment
would likely be heavy. So it was built
with the huge cranes to lift in any design
that might be needed for the equipment that
would be installed to obtain the enriched
uranium for the first bomb. - [Narrator] Producing
uranium for an atomic bomb was completely
uncharted territory. Speed was of the essence, and there was no time to
experiment or test the process. - You had to compress everything
into one phase basically. You were doing your research
and development pilot phase at the very same time
you were designing a massive building
that was going to be the industrial facility to
make it on a huge scale. - [Narrator] Only one
of the war era buildings still houses its original
uranium processing equipment. It's called Beta
3 and it was used for uranium separation
right up to 1998. Until recently, the exact
details of its processes, its location and construction were matters of
national security. But by exploring the secret
history behind this equipment, Ray Smith can now reveal
what happened here. - This equipment, the calutrons, were actually built
by using magnets on either side of
a vacuum chamber. These units are very heavy. That's why the
structure was built as sturdy as it was, to
hold the large single magnet that went all the way around
this rectangular shape. - [Narrator] They
were to be the largest and most expensive
electromagnets ever built. To work, they needed
miles of copper wire, but this was war time, and
all the available copper was being used to make
bullets and shells. Groves's men hit on a
drastic alternative. - Someone had the bright idea,
said "why not use silver?" Well, that's a very
good conductor, but where were you
going to get it? Well, you could go to the
treasury of the United States and decide to get
what eventually were 14,000 tons of silver that were literally taken
out of the depository and melted down and
turned into the wiring for the magnets at Y-12. - [Narrator] Once Groves had
borrowed the treasury's silver, he machinery, known as
calutrons, could be built. We can now reveal how
this equipment worked. Uranium would be
heated and fed out into the enormously-powerful
magnetic field. This force would be
enough to separate tiny amounts of
weapons-grade uranium-235 from the original raw material. 38 magnets make up
one set of calutrons and there were 36
calutrons in this building. In total, there were 1,152
calutrons on the site. - The magnets were so large that they had to keep
people away from them and they couldn't use any tools that might be attracted
by the magnets. In fact, they put a red line to warn people not
to go any closer. If you did and you
happened to have something in your pocket that was
metal, like a pocket knife, it would suck it
right up against there and it would hold you there. You couldn't get it off,
and in fact to get it off, you have to cut the material
around the object to get away. - [Narrator] Evidence shows
that the power consumed was so vast that for the
duration of its wartime mission, Project X would use one
seventh of all electricity generated in the United States. 1,152 machines ran
24 hours a day, seven days a week
for a whole year. These machines were
operated not by scientists, but by female high
school graduates. They were called
the calutron girls, and they had little idea of
what they were involved in. - We knew we were doing
something toward the war effort, but it was a surprise. And we were glad that we
could contribute to that. You had dials that
you had to get that maybe this dial lower
and this dial higher. - The units that
they were monitoring, they actually sat in front
and would turn these knobs as needed, they were
actually rheostats that would change the
current going to the magnets in the calutrons, but
they didn't know that. All they knew was this
meter needs to stay on a certain number,
and I adjust this one or I adjust this one to make
it move one way or the other. They had no idea what
they were actually doing. - Nothing was ever said. If you talked about anything,
what'd you do last night? Where'd you go? But not about work. All of the girls
were young, pretty, and very sociable, and we enjoyed each other. - [Narrator] Ray has
learned that the scientists still weren't convinced
these young high school girls were capable of doing
this crucial job. - So they set up a contest
where the scientist operated one bay of
controls for the calutrons, and the calutron girls
operated another one. They ran for a week like that, and at the end of the week, the calutron girls beat
the scientist hands down. - [Narrator] 2,000 calutron
girls worked in shifts for six months, but the
process proved so inefficient that only seven pounds of
uranium-235 were produced. Time was running out. No matter how innovative
the engineering, to have any hope of
meeting the target, a second plant would now
have to be brought online at Project X. And this would require
the construction of the biggest
building in the world. (tense music) This crumbling edifice was once the biggest
building in the world. Called K-25, it was a
key building in the Manhattan Project and it was designed
to increase production of the desperately-needed
uranium-235. Today, K-25 is inaccessible. It's highly contaminated, but our experts will discover
what this building looked like and find the clues
to the community that worked to
build it 1943, American forces are
engaged in a vicious battle with the Japanese for
control of the Pacific. The need to develop the atomic
bomb is as great as ever. If they are going to produce
the 100 pounds needed to build the bomb, scientists
need to find new ways to obtain the precious U-235. The solution was a new
type of enrichment plant. If building the town at
Oak Ridge and the vast electromagnetic separation
plant had sapped resources, this new phase was to present
the greatest challenge so far. - They authorized
the construction of a gaseous fusion plant. It was a much more difficult
engineering problem. It really was a bigger gamble as far as General Groves and
his people were concerned. - [Narrator] To get the job
done, they would have to construct the biggest
building in the world. They chose a site 11 miles from the secret
city of Oak Ridge. The first pour of concrete alone would cover 200,000 cubic yards. Entire companies
were requisitioned to provide the thousands of
tons of materials needed. Thousands of construction
workers were required. Historian David Bradshaw
is convinced that they were housed near the site, but nothing today survives
of this enormous settlement. - The army, right
across the highway, built an entire community,
temporary in nature, nicknamed Happy Valley
by its residents, but it wasn't so temporary
that it didn't have things like a school. It had theaters, a
recreation all, stores. Essentially when the war ended, the army tore down
the entire community. Some of the structures
were built on foundations and fitters which we
think may still exist. So we're gonna see
what we can find, and see if we can
find some clues to the community
called Happy Valley. (tender music) - [Narrator] Happy
Valley was built in 1943 and David calculates that
it housed 15,000 people. It consisted of row
upon row of trailers. Despite the fact that the site
is now overgrown by woodland, clues to what this town once
looked like are everywhere. - I think right through here is a fire hydrant in
the middle of the woods. Of course, it wouldn't be
in the middle of the woods 60 years ago, it would
have been in the middle of this bustling city which
is called Happy Valley. Really everywhere you'd look, even though this is
just a woods today, you see bits and
pieces of the thousands of people who lived here. - [Narrator] The ground
is still flattened where the roads used to run there are remains
of sewage channels and water tunnels
across the site. - I think this is
a telephone pole. It looks like it probably
powered a facility, and I think this
foundation was probably it. Looks like a permanent, definitely a
permanent structure. This, this is part of a lavatory,
I'm sure, a toilet, and it probably would have
sat just like that over this. And it looks like
over here there is a what's probably, I imagine was the sink. So this was probably a men's lavatory for
the Hutman area. - [Narrator] Using
evidence from the site as well as original plans, David's been able to
bring back to life the temporary settlement
of Happy Valley. (mysterious music) For 24 months between
1943 and 1944, this was a thriving town. Inhabitants were
housed in trailers and endured difficult
conditions while they were constructing the K-25 facility. This is the building that
they were working to complete. It may be a ruin today,
but exploring the site reveals clues to
K-25's top secret past. At a cost of $512 million,
$10 billion today, it's the size of
35 football fields, built just to produce 100
pounds of processed uranium. - It's an absolutely
fantastic structure. The building itself
is four stories high on this side, the outside, and rather than building
a mile long building, they folded it into a U shape, and what you're
looking at is one leg of this U that's
a half mile long. Each of the legs
is 400 feet wide. - [Narrator] The reason that
K-25 had to be so enormous was that the processes going
on inside were so complex. Gaseous diffusion
works by filtering the uranium-238 in gas form to produce the
weapons-grade uranium-235. It's so inefficient the
process has to be repeated many thousands of times. But such was the desperate
need to enrich uranium to fuel a bomb that no
obstacle was too big. - It was and still is the largest building
that was built in the Manhattan Project. It's the largest
relic that remains, and it is just now, as we speak, in the process of
being taken down. - [Narrator] Today, K-25
is strictly off-limits, but using original plans
and eyewitness testimony, we can reveal what this
building would have looked like when it was completed in 1944. (dramatic music) Documents show that it occupied
two million square feet. It was a half mile long
by 1,000 feet wide. It housed 758 miles
of copper tubing, 3,800 miles of
electrical conductors, and the amount of water
used in its processes would have supplied a
city of five million. When K-25 began operations, it's recorded that it
took a team of 12,000 just to hunt for
leaks in the piping which had to be
completely air-tight. - Well, my job was
to find the leaks in the welds in the pipe, and the pipes would
come in from overhead and stop at my station. We found the leak in the
pipe and we marked it, and then the millwrights
would come and take the pipe off to be welded and sent back. And that was just all
day, we just wondered what the pipes, they were
big pipes, little pipes, pipes with elbows,
all kinds of pipes. - [Narrator] And of course,
security was as tight as ever. - This is my badge that I
used when I worked at K-25. (chuckles) I could
go to the restroom, I could go to the cafeteria, and I could go to my work
station, but no place else. (tense music) - [Narrator] After
a supreme effort, K-25 began producing the desperately-needed
enriched uranium which would enable Project
X to meet its target in the race to build the bomb. In July 1944, an armed
guard took the first sample of uranium on a
2,000-mile journey from Oak Ridge to New Mexico, where some of the
greatest scientists the world has ever known
were waiting to work on it. It would be in the buildings
of another secret city that the bomb would be
armed, tested, and built. That place remains highly
classified even today. It is the laboratory
at Los Alamos. (calm music) Deep in the heart of New Mexico is the most important site
of the Manhattan Project, Los Alamos. (dramatic music) This is still a
top-secret facility for the design of
nuclear weapons, but in the 1940s, it was
known simply as Project Y. This was the site where the
bombs that ended World War II were designed and built. Very little remains
of the original Manhattan Project buildings, but our team of experts will
search historic documents and crumbling ruins
for clues to reveal how this place looked. Archeologist John
Issacson has studied the Los Alamos site
to understand why Groves and his scientific
director, J. Robert Oppenheimer, chose this location. - We're at the site of
the original main gate to the laboratory that
was established in 1943. They were looking for a
place that was remote, and in those days,
this was very remote, and that also did not have
any security vulnerabilities because of the terrain. It provided the best
suite of characteristics that they were looking for
to put a laboratory here. - [Narrator] When Groves
and Oppenheimer came here for the first time,
this site was home to the elite Ranch School, the boys were rushed
through their graduation, the land was requisitioned,
and the engineers moved in. The main school hall, Fuller
Lodge, remains standing today. - And this really became
sort of the social center of the Manhattan Project. A lot of social events
took place here. - [Narrator] As with Oak Ridge, Los Alamos was
built very quickly. Its accommodation consisted of
temporary homes and trailers. Oppenheimer would
later become known as the father of
the atomic bomb. He was tasked with gathering
some of the finest brains in America to work with him
in this isolated location. - You've just come from
a prestigious university on the east coast
of the United States or perhaps from Europe. You're recruited to work
on a secret project, you don't even know where. Then you're told to report to a train station
in Lamy, New Mexico. First thing you ask
is, where's Lamy? You're taken on a
day-long journey over rutted muddy roads into this encampment
that basically looks like it comes out of the
middle of nowhere. You're now told "here's
where you're going to conduct "one of the most
innovative and creative "scientific endeavors in
the history of mankind." You might have thought that
you were absolutely crazy and had gone nuts, but that
was the reality of those days. - [Narrator] It's clear
that the conditions in which this elite group of scientists
worked were very basic. - This was a site that was
built very rapidly by the army. They used whatever
materials were available, they brought in lumber and they
erected shanties and shacks in which they
conduct experiments that were to
revolutionize mankind. - [Narrator] Over the
course of three years, over 600 technical
buildings were constructed. Now only 30 of them remain in amongst the modern buildings
of today's laboratory. John Issacson and Ellen McGehee
are focusing on the site where engineers
created the weapon to detonate the
first atomic bomb. It takes detective
work to piece together the details of what this
building looked like and exactly what happened here. - We're at a building
called the gun site, or also known as the
periscope bunker, and it's the site where
the uranium gun device, the uranium gun
weapon, was designed. - [Narrator] The
theory was simple. Shoot one piece of
uranium down a barrel to collide with another. The two pieces
would fuse together, a nuclear detonation
would result. But in practice, the explosion
had to be perfectly timed. This building was
where scientific theory became an engineering reality. - What was done here was working out the ballistics,
muzzle velocities, of these projectiles
inside the bomb that were shooting
into each other to see if they could
get sufficient speed to have the weapon successfully
assemble before it exploded. - [Narrator] By
studying the plans, our experts have discovered
that this structure supported a tower that
served as a periscope. This device would have
enabled the scientists to observe and record
each shot while they were protected from shrapnel
in the building below. - We're pretty sure that the
inside of this periscope tower was light tight, so
that they would have probably been using
it to take photographs of the actual tests that
were happening right above. - [Narrator] The presence
of these bolts indicates where powerful naval guns
were anchored to the ground, and shells were fired in
full view of the periscope. - This is an area
where we think that the naval guns were situated. You would have been able
to have a clear shot between the guns mounted here
and the periscope structure that is just a little
bit to the north. - [Narrator] Using their
findings, the experts can now bring this lost world to life. The gun site and periscope
were built into the landscape and the bunker was
covered with a protective three-foot layer of earth. The naval cannon on
top of the bunker would have fired the ordinance. High speed movie cameras
mounted in the periscope would have allowed the
scientists to calibrate the speed and power
of the explosion. - They would fire these weapons
and they would understand with great precision and detail, the speed of the projectiles, the time it took from the
ignition of the charge until the projectile
began moving. Those minor details
were very important in ensuring that they could
assemble the critical mass necessary to sustain
the nuclear reaction. - [Narrator] The tests at the
gun site gave the engineers the data they needed
to build a bomb they were confident would work, but then a new scientific
breakthrough indicated that it might now be
possible to build a bomb from a new substance, plutonium, which would prove
even more destructive than the uranium device. And this bomb would
require the building of a totally new test site, and would present the
engineers at Los Alamos with their biggest
challenge yet. (tense music) This is the V site
at Los Alamos, a collection of ramshackle sheds abandoned for years. Our investigators are
here because it was in these buildings that some
of the most dangerous experiments of the Manhattan
Project took place. By studying new evidence,
it's possible to understand what this lost world looked
like and what happened here. By 1944, a uranium-fueled
nuclear bomb was but scientists at
Los Alamos had been presented with
another possibility to make an even more
destructive bomb from a different kind of fuel. - This totally new material
that was discovered, and that is plutonium, and the scientists
had actually been able to do enough calculations
to try to understand that plutonium would probably
be a better bomb than uranium. - [Narrator] So a new
race was underway, a whole complex of buildings
was constructed at Los Alamos. - This area is called V
site, but during the war, this was actually called
Technical Area 25. They came out here and
used this little area as a special sort of
high-security, secret area for working on the
implosion device. - [Narrator] The
engineers were entering uncharted territory, but
they knew that what they were going to attempt
was highly dangerous and would require a new
type of explosives research. - The idea is to start
with a sphere of plutonium and to compress it
using high explosives to a point where now it could
sustain a critical reaction. This was a challenge for
explosive development. Normally with explosives,
we would blow things up, not try to blow them inward, and so the implosion
concept was created. - [Narrator] The military
needed this work done fast so no time was lost in building
the explosives workshops. - A lot of this stuff
was salvaged from other construction projects
because when they decided to build this area, it
was just like, come on, we gotta get a place
to put this together. Grab some stuff from other
places around the laboratory and throw it together and get us a
building as quick as you can. - [Narrator] The designers
knew that the people working at the V site
would be handling powerful, often-unstable high explosives. The experts have
been able to identify a series of safety
precautions which were built. - This is part of
a surface that was around the buildings
in this whole area, and this is a spark suppressant
material that was on the ground because they're
working with high explosives. - [Narrator] There wasn't
just the threat of sparks. (thunder claps) There was also New Mexico's
freak weather to contend with. - This is one of the highest
lightning strike areas in the United States,
so during the summer, during the monsoon period,
we get lots of lightning and so lightning
is a major issue in this whole high
explosives area. - [Narrator] The engineers'
role at the V site was to pack the
explosive tightly around the
plutonium core and to verify that there
wasn't even the smallest gap, as this might disrupt the
critical detonation process, which had to be totally uniform. The big fear was that in
such high-risk operations, an accident might
ignite the many tons of TNT stored in the huts, and so key buildings were
surrounded by protective outer walls called berms. - Now this is the berm back
here behind us, of course, that was built as
a protective device for the high explosives,
and these berms really were designed during the
project to protect people and buildings behind it, so it would limit the damage
if there was an accident. - [Narrator] Using original
plans and new evidence from the site, our
experts now understand how this protective
technique worked. Next to each workshop, a
12-foot berm was erected, held in place by
shock-absorbing metal rods and back-filled with earth. In the event of an explosion, there would be no saving
the people inside. The purpose of the berm was to
protect the surrounding area. The ordinance engineers who
were sent into the workshops to assemble the high
explosive charges were aware of the
dangers they faced. One of them was
George Kistiakowsky. - Kistiakowsky was asked
by someone, you know, weren't you afraid of drilling
into these high explosives and pouring in this
molten high explosive, that they would explode? And he said "well, you know, "if it exploded, I
would never know." So he was pretty blase
about the whole thing, and I think they had an
attitude that a certain level of risk was acceptable
because it was war time. - [Narrator] By May
1945, two implosion bombs had successfully been built. The engineers persuaded
the military to let them test one of these
precious new devices, but there was great concern. Should the test fail, the
plutonium might all be wasted. Ellen McGehee has been
studying this strange concrete bowl which she
reveals was a device to salvage the
precious plutonium. - They were worried that
when they did the test, that basically the conventional
explosives would detonate but they wouldn't have
an atomic reaction, and that the world's, or
close to the world's supply of plutonium would basically
get scattered to the winds. - [Narrator] The engineers'
solution was to build this huge bowl, over
220 yards in diameter. If the plutonium
didn't detonate, the exploding TNT would simply
scatter it into this pool. The water would be filtered
and the plutonium collected. But with time running out,
this approach was abandoned. The engineers decided
to proceed with the test without attempting to recover
the plutonium if it failed. The world's first
test of a nuclear bomb was set for the
16th of July, 1945, to take place in a
huge area of desert 200 miles south of Los
Alamos called Alamogordo. Before this first detonation, the engineers feared
that the bomb might not be powerful enough or
worse, that they had created something that was
entirely uncontrollable. - So one of the great
uncertainties associated with the first test
was how much energy that the test would produce. What would be the
yield of the weapon? Indeed, scientists
took a number of wagers as to whether or not the
ignition of that device might cause a reaction
between the nitrogen and the oxygen in the
atmosphere, and thus ignite the atmosphere and cause
a total conflagration. - [Narrator] 27 months of work, vast human and material
resources mobilized in secret at a cost of over
two billion dollars. It all culminated here, with the detonation of
the first atomic bomb. (tense music) The local population reported
a blinding white flash visible for a
radius of 150 miles and audible for
200 miles around. - A press release was
prepared ahead of time saying that an ammunition
dump had exploded and that was what caused the bright light to occur
on the dawn of July 16th and lo and behold, that
was printed in the paper and people, I suppose, said "well, I guess that
was an ammunition dump" and took the
newspaper at its word. - [Narrator] Few witnesses
realized they had seen something which
would define history, the greatest force
for destruction that the world had ever seen, born from the largest
construction project - The logistics
are mind boggling. I mean, it takes 27
months these days to do an environmental
impact statement, and these gentlemen
were able to put everything together
in that time frame. - [Narrator] Three
weeks after the test, the first uranium bomb
would explode over the Japanese city of Hiroshima, and the plutonium
bomb would destroy Nagasaki three days after that. With war over, these
buildings were allowed to fade and crumble,
they were hidden behind razor wire fences
and a wall of secrecy. Communities like Happy Valley disappeared from sight forever. But their legacy lives on in a new generation of
technological secrets, born out of the lost world
of the Manhattan Project. (tense music)
