peace, scientists build the ultimate weapon of war. To fight fascism, they
unleash the power of the atom. Theoretical brilliance and
engineering grit gave birth to an ethical nightmare-- the atom bomb. Now, the Manhattan
Project on Modern Marvels. [music playing] At 5:30 AM, July 16, 1945,
scientists and dignitaries awaited the detonation
of the first atomic bomb in a desolate area of the
New Mexico desert known aptly as Jornada del Muerto
or Journey of Death. They had taken bets on how
much power their creation might unleash, but many wondered
whether the weapon would work at all. There was, however,
one certainty. If the atomic bomb
detonated, the world would never be the same. RICHARD RHODES: This story
is the great tragic epic of the 20th century. If I were going to
give it a theme, the theme would be
humankind invents the means of its own destruction. NARRATOR: And in order to do
so, scientists, engineers, and the army teamed up in an
effort dubbed the Manhattan Project. In the short span
of two years, they built an industrial
complex with sites across the country that
would rival the size of the automotive industry. To manufacture
fuel for the bomb, they built the fifth largest
town in the state of Tennessee that consumed 1/10 of the
electrical power generated in the United States. The bomb builders spent
well over $2 billion, almost $30 billion
in today's market to detonate the first
man-made atomic explosion, just 28 months after
scientists set foot in a lab at the Manhattan Project's Los
Alamos, New Mexico facility. Nonetheless, that July morning
in 1945, many of the world's top physicists watched
anxiously at the test site 200 miles south of Los
Alamos, awaiting the results of their labors. MAN: 5, 4. 3, 2, 1. NARRATOR: But this
countdown had really begun 12 years before when
many of these scientists escape the coming of
fascism to Europe. WILLIAM LANOUETTE: Once
Hitler took power in 1933, the Jews of Europe, especially
the Jews of Germany, were under a direct threat. And some of the best
scientists in the country, having to be Jewish, Hans Bethe
was one, Edward Teller was one, Leo Szilard was one,
Einstein was one. NARRATOR: And one by
one, they fled Europe to the United States. Scientists found refuge
at American universities. In 1938, dramatic news
arrived from Germany. German scientists had split
the atom by bombarding uranium with neutrons, which caused
instability in the uranium nucleus. During the split, mass
was lost and was converted into kinetic energy. They had discovered
fission, and with it, opened the Pandora's box. DR. ROBERT CHRISTY: If
each of those neutrons goes into another uranium
nucleus and causes fission, then the first fission has
led to more than two fissions in the next generation. And you can see that each
successive generation has many more neutrons, and this
causes an explosive chain reaction. NARRATOR: If two masses of
highly fissionable uranium in the form of a
sphere and a plug could be brought together with
sufficient speed inside a bomb, an exponentially
increasing chain reaction with explosive
force would result. The implications of the
discovery of the fission of uranium would be obvious
to scientists in Nazi Germany, and this frightened Leo's
Szilard, a 40-year-old emigrate physicist from Hungary. Politically astute,
Szilard wanted to warn President Roosevelt but
knew that he lacked the stature to do so. RICHARD RHODES: Imagine men
with heavy foreign accents say they have figured out a
way to make a bomb no bigger than an ordinary bomb
that could blow up a city. You might well think
they were crackpots and throw them out
of your office. NARRATOR: Szilard wrote
a letter to the president and sought a prominent
ally to sign it-- Albert Einstein. Szilard, who didn't drive a car,
enlisted the help of his friend Edward Teller, an eminent
theoretical physicist, to drive him to Weinstein's
summer house on Long Island. DR. EDWARD TELLER: Einstein
had thought about what Szilard has written, asked a
few questions about it, and then said yes,
yes, let's sign it. NARRATOR: On October 11th
1939, in response to Einstein and Szilard's letter of
warning, President Roosevelt formed the advisory
committee on uranium. But this abstract new
discovery became a low priority for a leadership distracted
by a World War that was now two months old. A recent refugee of that war,
37-year-old physicist Enrico Fermi, narrowly escaped
with his Jewish wife, Laura. RACHEL FERMI: They used the
opportunity of going to Sweden to collect the Nobel
Prize to go from there and then go on to
the United States. So that the fascist authorities
initially at that time didn't know that they
we're actually not going to be returning to Italy. NARRATOR: Together with
Leo Szilard at Columbia, Fermi tackled the first
obstacle to the bomb-- the question of whether or
not a sustained chain reaction could be induced in
a uranium reactor. Without the successively
doubling power of the chain reaction, a bomb would
be an impossibility. WILLIAM LANOUETTE: Fermi was
one of the few scientists who was talented both in
theory and in practice. He loved getting
his hands dirty. Leo Szilard was the
antithesis of Enrico Fermi. Szilard usually slept late. He soaked in the bathtub
to get fresh ideas. NARRATOR: While in the
bathtub, Szilard remained focused on the competition-- the German bomb effort. He convinced
scientists in the US whose community
thrived on openness to censor their own papers
so that they would not inadvertently help the Germans. As the US bomb effort was taking
its first tentative steps, news that the Kaiser
Wilhelm Institute in Berlin had begun actively
pursuing uranium research, rippled through the American
scientific community. It would take nothing
short of a disaster to move the President
to take decisive action, and a disaster was not far off. Prior to 1933, Germany produced
the most Nobel laureate scientists. After that date, scientists
in the United States received the most honors. On December 7th 1941, the
Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, seeking 19 US Naval vessels
and killing more than 2,000 soldiers. FRANKLIN ROOSEVELT: No matter
how long it might take us-- NARRATOR: The next day, the
US declared war on Japan. World War II was no
longer just Europe's war. FRANKLIN ROOSEVELT: Righteous
might will win through to absolute victory. NARRATOR: America's
entry into the war had a galvanizing effect on its
moribund atomic bomb effort. President Roosevelt approved
production of the weapon and turned the nuclear
program over to the army. Brigadier General Leslie R
Groves, an expert engineer and administrator, was placed
at the head of the Manhattan engineer district, named
after the project's initial headquarters
in New York City. RICHARD RHODES: General
Groves, having just finished building the
Pentagon, was absolutely disgusted to be a side project
as it came to be called. He was sure it was a boondoggle. He was sure you could
never do such a thing. NARRATOR: But at the
University of Chicago, Szilard and Fermi were
taking the first steps in proving Groves wrong. They were trying to demonstrate
that the fishing process could be harnessed by launching
a sustained chain reaction in uranium. They built the first primitive
reactor in a squash court beneath the stands of the
university's football stadium. The reactor consisted of a pile
in which a fission reaction could be initiated
and controlled. WILLIAM LANOUETTE: They did it
by piling layers of graphite and then embedding
balls of uranium so that when the neutrons
started flying through, they would be slowed
by the graphite, collide with the uranium,
release more neutrons, and those neutrons would
continue in the chain reaction pattern. NARRATOR: This
momentous achievement only detectable by
a Geiger counter meant that the fission
process could be sustained. Nuclear energy could be
released in a controlled way, as in a reactor or perhaps
cataclysmically, as in a bomb. DR. ALVIN WEINBERG:
It was so crazy that you could put a bunch of
uranium together with graphite and the thing would
spring to life. NARRATOR: The bomb effort
went into high gear. Its first priority was the
lack of weapon's grade fuel. Fission is more readily produced
in a rare uranium isotope-- Uranium 235-- that
occurs naturally at a ratio of 1 to 139 to its
less useful twin, Uranium 238. Chemically identical,
the isotopes were almost impossible
to separate. The only workable method in 1942
was electromagnetic separation. In this process, a
mass spectrometer used for separating
electrically charged particles according to their mass sent
a stream of uranium atoms past a magnet. Atoms of the lighter
isotope U-235 would be deflected more than
those of the heavier U-238, and would be captured
one atom at a time. Scientists at
Columbia University championed a competing
mode of separation. Gaseous to fusion-- this
method passed the isotope through a porous barrier that
separated the lighter isotope from its heavier
counterpart, but it proved to be technically challenging. WILLIAM J. WILCOX:
In a square center here, about the size
of my thumbnail, you've got to have hundreds
of millions of porous, and they have to all
be the same size. If they're too big,
the gas flows through without any separation. If they're too small,
the gas gets in there and condenses on the
surface, it won't go through. So you talk about obstacles. NARRATOR: But if a suitable
barrier could be manufactured, it promised a greater yield than
the electromagnetic process. Both techniques would have
to be done on a massive scale and would prove
extremely costly. And if they worked,
they would provide fuel for a bomb that
would be designed in a remote area of New Mexico. Groves selected a bomb design
site in Los Alamos, an isolated location in the mountains at
an elevation of 7,000 feet and accessible by only one road. ELLEN BRADBURY: General
Groves wanted it to be inland, too far for enemy
planes or submarines, he wanted it to
be beautiful where he said he could keep a bunch
of prima donnas and muse. NARRATOR: In November of 1942,
the army purchased 54,000 acres for $440,000 under the guise
of using them as a demolition range. To head up the installation,
Groves, an expert judge of men, chose a most
unlikely candidate-- J Robert Oppenheimer. A gifted physics
professor, Oppenheimer had a reputation for
being temperamental, perhaps not suited to a
highly stressful assignment. GREGG HERKEN: Groves was
advised that Oppenheimer would be a disaster. People told him that Oppenheimer
couldn't run a hotdog stand. RICHARD RHODES: Oppenheimer was
a fascinating and complicated man. Fundamentally, he
seems to have had some of the qualities of an actor. He was different things
to different people. NARRATOR: Oppenheimer drew
luminaries like Enrico Fermi, Hans Bethe, and Edward Teller
to the facility, as well as technicians fresh
out of college. Laboratory personnel grew from
250 in 1943 to 2,500 in 1945. RICHARD RHODES: There
were lots of babies born. General Groves, at one
point, asked Oppenheimer if he couldn't do
something about that. He said he didn't think so. The one place that they
had to keep expanding was the maternity
ward at the hospital. NARRATOR: During
the fall of 1942, the theoretical
physicists at Los Alamos began the difficult
process of trying to determine how much U-235
it would take to make a bomb. ROBERT NORRIS: And the
scientists tell him, well, it could be X amount but that's
a plus or minus by a factor of 10. And Groves said, he's
absolutely staggered. He uses the illustration that,
well, you're giving a wedding and you say it's for 100 people. But maybe 1,000 will
turn up or maybe 10. So how can you make any sort
of plans with that range? NARRATOR: This kind of
uncertainty only served to fuel fears that the Nazis
might be closer to building a bomb. In early fall of 1942, General
Groves purchased 59,000 acres in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. This would become the main
site for uranium production in the United States. [music playing] On December 28th 1942,
President Roosevelt approved an additional
$500 million investment in the
Manhattan Project. The first priority-- to
build the massive industrial facilities that would produce
the fissionable material to fuel the atom bomb. Robert Oppenheimer's
team of physicists doubled the amount
of Uranium-235 thought necessary to
achieve critical mass and sustain an explosive chain
reaction to 200 kilograms. Their calculation made without
adequate samples of U-235 for tests would prove to be
10 times the required amount. The scientists at Los
Alamos also studied tampers, barrier
materials that would slow the expansion
of the critical mass and reflect neutrons back
to feed the fission process inside the bomb. Determined to have the atom
bomb ready for use in the war, General Groves
notified contractors in Oak Ridge, Tennessee that
they had a scant six months to build the massive
electromagnetic calutrons. Designed by Ernest Lawrence at
the University of California in Berkeley, these
calutrons trans would be used to separate
U-235 from U-238. GREGG HERKEN: Lawrence was,
to some extent, an engineer. He was comfortable
with the soldering iron and with wrenches and
the tools for the trade, with building machines. NARRATOR: In February
1943, construction began on the calutron's site
that was given the deliberately nondescript codename-- Y-12. These gigantic structures
contained multiple calutrons, box-shaped collection units that
were configured in a race track layout. A magnetic field pass throughout
the entire oval of calutrons causing the divergence of
streams of U-235 and U-238 so that the separated
isotopes could be collected. A single calutrons could capture
a mere 10 grams of U-235 daily. A staggering total of 1,152
would be built by war's end. Because of the intense
time constraints, Groves could not afford
to build pilot plants, facilities to test the scaling
up of the laboratory processes. GREGG HERKEN: They're physically
building Oak Ridge and Y-12 electromagnetic separation plant
before the design drawings had even been approved. It's incredible that you would
never do this in civilian life. And you would never do it short
of a wartime emergency that is dire. They turned the
alpha 1 racetrack on to make the first uranium
and everything goes haywire. That the magnets are so
strong that they pull nails out of the wall. NARRATOR: Groves arrived
and shut the plant down. His response was
characteristic of his approach. Since the race tracks were
not operating to capacity, more would have to be
built to supply the bombs. As a result, the
town of Oak Ridge continued to grow to house
an expanding workforce. 75,000 people would ultimately
come to live at the site. Groves used creative
means to recruit them. RICHARD RHODES: It was hard
to get construction workers during the war. His solution was to put out ads
saying we can't tell you what you'll be doing but there'll be
steak every night on the table. NARRATOR: Once hired,
workers were instructed to be evasive about
what they were doing. JOANNE GAILAR: If anybody asks
you what you make in Oak Ridge, you tell them you're making the
lights for the lightning bugs or that you're making
the holes for the donuts. [laughs] NARRATOR: Meanwhile,
at Los Alamos, design work was
underway on the gadget as the test bomb
came to be known. The main obstacle was how to
quickly assemble two smaller sub-critical masses into
one larger explosive one. The bomb design that they
came up with was a gun design. Inside the bomb, a cannon
would fire one piece of radioactive
fuel into another. At 3,000 feet per
second, the pieces would have to come together fast
enough to prevent spontaneously emitted neutrons from
melting the fuel, causing the bomb to fizzle
rather than explode. ROGER MEADE: But the engineering
aspects were daunting. It's one thing to say you
can shoot a piece of uranium at a second piece,
but how do you do it? How fast does it have to go? How do you stop it at the end? How do you keep it together
long enough as a mass so that it does go high order
and give you an atomic bomb? NARRATOR: Oppenheimer
led the effort to overcome these obstacles by
setting an example for his team at Los Alamos. DR. PHILIP MORRISON: In
the middle of the night, something had to be done. Then we walked Robert
just at the right time to see how it went. He was interested in
everything-- in the explosives, in the mechanics,
in the chemistry, in the bomb itself, of course. And this is what makes all the
big laboratory of thousands of people working
together cohere. ELLEN BRADBURY: Oppenheimer was
living on coffee and Martinis and cigarettes. Groves was eating with
him in chocolate samplers and sleeping soundly, whereas
Oppenheimer was anguished. They were just so different, but
they seemed to be able to mesh and they certainly
had a common goal. NARRATOR: And this common goal
was about to reach a new level. As scientists refine the
design of the gadget, a new man-made
element, plutonium, was gaining favor
as a possible fuel. Identified in 1941,
Plutonium was almost twice as likely to undergo
fission as Uranium 235. It could be produced
on a large scale by irradiating Uranium
in nuclear reactors. In order to produce Plutonium,
three production reactors were designed by engineers
at the University of Chicago that would be built in
Hanford, Washington. Groves initiated the
construction at Hanford on August 27th 1943 with a labor
force that had been recruited to the area. DR. WILLIAM MADIA: Numbers as
high as 60,000 construction workers living in tents out
on the Hanford reservation. So the government went
in and bought up a half a million acres out in the
desert of eastern Washington, created this remote
construction site, and literally in a matter
of months, constructed large-scale engineered
structures for Plutonium production. NARRATOR: But Groves was not
content to rely on just two approaches-- Y-12 and Hanford-- to produce
the weapons grade fuel for the bomb. By September 1943, he had
begun construction on a third-- K-25-- a gigantic gaseous
diffusion plant at Oak Ridge. In the diffusion process, a
gaseous compound-- uranium hexafluoride-- passes through
a cascade of barriers, each one giving a slight
enrichment of the lighter isotope U-235. The difficulty lay in finding
a barrier that would not be degraded by the
very corrosive gas. Scientists and
engineers were not able to manufacture a
satisfactory barrier until a year after site
construction began on K-25. A building that would
ultimately cover more area than any structure ever built,
the U-shape measured half a mile long by 1,000 feet wide. With an area of 2
million square feet, it contained a series of
sealed containers and cascades that ran the length
of the building. Oak Ridge continued to grow. And by the end of the war,
it was the fifth largest town in Tennessee. JOE DYKSTRA: The total power
consumption during the K-25 operation during the war
in the Manhattan district was about 10% of the electrical
energy in the United States. JAMES HACKWORTH: If you look at
the size, the scope of the K-25 site in the Manhattan
Project, I don't think there's been any
engineering feat to date comparable to what was
done within the time frame. NARRATOR: It was looking
less and less likely that enough U-235 could be
produced to impact the war. At the same time, the
alternative, Plutonium, was proving to be
equally tricky. Impurities in this new element
were leading to increased neutron activity that would
cause bombs to pre-detonate, to fizzle before the two halves
joined in a critical mass. ROGER MEADE: There are
production problems at Oak Ridge. They're not sure they can even
make any Uranium at that point, Uranium 235. And so if they can't
use Plutonium in a gun, there may in fact not
even be an atomic bomb. GREGG HERKEN: It's
a real crisis. It's at that point that I think
Oppenheimer's talent comes to the fore, where he brings
in the people, new people, in fact, and he
reorganizes Los Alamos. That brings people in to
solve the problem of how to make a Plutonium bomb. NARRATOR: The Plutonium
bomb's new configuration called for an outer shell of
explosives that would direct symmetrical shockwaves
inward, compressing a subcritical central
mass of Plutonium. The resulting increase
in the density would shrink distances
between nuclei, thus, starting the
explosive chain reaction. ROGER MEADE: Nobody would
ever take in high explosives, wrap them around something, and
got a symmetrical explosion. And so making sure they
could do that technically, it was a very, very tough
engineering problem. So from May 1944 until
about August of '44, the laboratory wrestles
with his problem. NARRATOR: By late 1944, K-25,
the gaseous diffusion plant was producing
enriched U-235 that ran through the
magnetic calutrons to affect the
further enrichment. This one-two punch
generated enough fuel for one-gun type bomb. But if as military
strategists thought, it would take more than one
bomb to break the enemy's will, then it was crucial
that the upcoming test of the new Plutonium
implosion bomb work. All this uncertainty only
served to heighten tensions at Los Alamos as scientists
and engineers prepared for the first detonation
of an atomic weapon. If the implosion
design was successful, it might bring an
end to the war. As a substitute for copper,
which was in short supply during World War II, the US
Army borrowed almost 15,000 tons of silver from the
US Treasury to wind into coils for the
calutron's electromagnets. [music playing] Weapon designed for
the Uranium gun bomb was completed by February 1945. Confidence in the
weapon was high. They named it Little Boy for
its relatively small size-- 10 feet long and less
than 10,000 pounds. Designers considered
a test prior to combat use unnecessary
and impossible, since there was only
enough U-235 for one bomb. The design for the
more complicated Plutonium-fueled
implosion device dubbed Fat Man for its rotund
shape was approved in March, and a test was
scheduled for July. In preparation for deployment
of the weapons, Colonel Paul Tibbets, a veteran combat pilot
with extensive B-29 experience was selected and placed
at the head of a new unit, the 509th Composite Group. The unit began training
at Wendover Field, Utah, dropping 5,500-pound
orange dummy bombs. On April 12th 1945,
President Roosevelt died in Warm Springs, Georgia,
bringing Vise President Harry S Truman into the Oval Office. Secrecy on the Manhattan Project
had been so tight that Truman was not privy to the
bomb developments and had to be briefed
extensively in his first weeks in office. Less than one month later,
German armed forces in Europe surrendered. But Japan did not. In June 1945, Tibbets and his
unit moved to Tinian Island in the Pacific, 1,450 miles from
Tokyo, where the Navy Seabees had built the world's largest
airport to accommodate Boeing's new B-29 Superfortresses. GENERAL PAUL TIBBETS: Ireland
was selected because it was within striking range of Japan. Number two, it had
the longest runways. Number three, it had
the facilities there to modify the area where
we're going to load them up. I wanted to have my crews
fly over enemy territory because they were not used to
flying over enemy territory. I wanted to get practice flying,
being shot at, flying alone. NARRATOR: Half a world
away on the morning of July 16th 1945, in the New Mexico
desert 200 miles south of Los Alamos, scientists
and dignitaries awaited the results of the
first test of an atomic weapon. Oppenheimer had given the
test of the implosion device the codename Trinity, a
reference to a devotional poem by 17th century English
poet John Donne. The poem explores the paradox
of a god that destroys in order to renew. But on the morning
of the Trinity test, the implosion device did not
look particularly imposing atop a tower 100 feet high. JOHN ISAACSON: One of the guys
said that, really, the Trinity device owes a tremendous
debt to 3M because most of it was held together
with masking tape. It was a garage bomb, basically. ROGER MEADE: And it literally
takes about three days to assemble one of
these wartime devices. Think of them as crude
laboratory devices, they're not production
designs, you don't roll them off an assembly line. You've got to worry about,
have we done everything right? What's missing? And there are stories
where people as last minute have a nightmare that they
put something together wrong, actually go back in, and
discover that, oh, I inserted this wire backwards or that one. NARRATOR: The scientists waited
anxiously at their posts. Some feared success
because of speculation that the bomb might
ignite the atmosphere and destroy the world. GREGG HERKEN: Teller was 20
miles away at Companion Hill with Lawrence. And Teller mostly scared
everybody to death because he was
putting suntan lotion on his face and
his hands and there is a guard against the
ultraviolet from the bomb. This is 20 miles away. NARRATOR: All the scientists
were 20 miles away, but most feared of
dying, especially since a blank test of the
explosive surrounding the core had failed just days before. Sensors showed that they
had not fired simultaneously and would not have
compressed the core properly. MCALLISTER HULL: It
is really unnerving when the right shot failed. The normal anxiety that one
might have had with a device on which you had worked but
had never been tested before, that was heightened by the
failure of the blank shot. JOHN RHOADES: General
Groves was lying on the ground in
the prone position, facing away from the blast. What he said was
going through his mind was what was he going to do
when the timer got to zero and nothing happened. [music playing] [nuclear explosion] NARRATOR: At 5:30
AM, July 16th 1945, the world entered the atomic
age with an intense flash, a sudden wave of heat, followed
by a tremendous shock wave. The ball of fire
extended 40,000 feet. [nuclear explosion] The bomb packed a
punch equivalent to 20,000 tons of TNT, the high
end of most of the scientists' predictions. Completely vaporizing
the steel tower and heating the
desert sand into glass for a radius of 800 yards. DR. PHILIP MORRISON: What got
me was I hadn't thought the heat of the fireball would heat my
face exactly as at sunrise. DR. EDWARD TELLER: It became
brighter and brighter indoors, and I knew that soon, it
will be used over Japan and then it will not
be just an experiment. NARRATOR: Groves
returned to Washington to report the results to
Secretary of War, Henry Stimson, and to make
preparations for the use of the bomb against Japan. Later that day, Groves
had his photograph taken for the publicity
that would accompany the bombing of Hiroshima. ED WESCOTT: And I said, as
general looked down at Tokyo, he put his hands on
his hips and says, no, I won't look at Tokyo, Ed. But I'll look
somewhere close to it. So he did and I made
the picture, a little-- wherever he was looking
was probably Hiroshima. NARRATOR: Although Trinity
had been a success, questions remained
about Fat Man. MCALLISTER HULL: The gadget,
Trinity, was not long, could have been dropped. It was a gadget sitting
on top of a tower, so could the bomb work? That would certainly have
been the military view. We test them in action. NARRATOR: Moreover, the
untested Little Boy would only get one chance to work. ROGER MEADE: The only way
we could know for sure is if we actually test it, but
we don't have enough uranium. So we're going to
have to look at this and say, our
calculations look good, our engineering looks
good, but we don't know. And so Little Boy goes into
combat as an untested weapon. NARRATOR: The course of the
war, the work of thousands, the expenditure of billions, and
the fate of more than 100,000 Japanese soldiers and
civilians hung in the balance on the morning of
August 6th 1945 as the Enola Gay flew with
31,000 feet over Hiroshima. On its way home from delivering
the Iranian bomb to Tinian Island, the USS Indianapolis
was torpedoed and sunk by a Japanese submarine. Of the 1,196 men aboard,
only 315 were saved. [music playing] In June of 1945, 155
Manhattan Project scientists signed a petition calling
for a demonstration of the atomic bomb over
an uninhabited area prior to its use against Japan. WILLIAM LANOUETTE: General
Groves heard about the petition and ordered that it not be
circulated at Los Alamos. Then to undermine the
petition, he conducted a poll of atomic scientists-- what do you think
of a demonstration? To his chagrin, 83% of the
people answering the poll said some sort of demonstration
was preferable to bombing civilians. So then Groves saw to it that
the petition was bottled up at Oak Ridge until after
the bombs fell on Japan. NARRATOR: There was, however,
a strong support, particularly at the highest levels of
government and the military to use the bomb swiftly
against Japanese cities. WILLIAM LANOUETTE: There
was every incentive to use this weapon to scare
the Japanese into surrender before the Russians got in
on the post-war settlement. What our military leaders feared
was what happened in Korea, where there was a north
Japan and a south Japan, and the north Japan was
communist in the south Japan was capitalist. [bomb explosions] NARRATOR: Moreover, the assault
on the Japanese mainland scheduled for November of
1945 would include a million and a half allied soldiers. Casualties in the
Pacific indicated that losses would be heavy. RICHARD RHODES: By the end
of the Second World War, we were so angry
at the Japanese. They had started the war,
they had fought furiously, and brutally they had
slaughtered civilians. We had, by that time, totally
destroyed their Air Force. We had totally
destroyed their Navy. And yet, they would surrender. [music playing] NARRATOR: In the spring
of 1945, General Groves chose populated Japanese
cities as potential targets to demonstrate the
bomb's destructive power, and end the war as
quickly as possible. Once selected, the
cities on his shortlist were off-limits to
allied bombing raids. They would be saved in
order to be destroyed. The final decision
rested with the president and was made on June 1st after a
conversation with his Secretary of State, James Byrnes. RICHARD RHODES: At
one point, Byrnes said to Truman, Mr.
President, what would you tell the American people
at your impeachment in 1946 when they find out that you had
a weapon that could have ended the war and saved American lives
and you decided not to use it? I think that probably was the
decisive argument for Truman. GENERAL PAUL TIBBETS:
He'd been in World War I and he knew what it
was to fight and die. And I think he was interested
in stopping it as quick as he could. And I certainly admire
the man for what he did. PRESIDENT HARRY TRUMAN:
Let there be no mistake. We shall completely destroy
Japan's power to make war. If they do not now
accept our terms, they may expect a rain of ruin
from the air, the like of which has never been
seen on this earth. NARRATOR: At 2:45
AM on August 6th, Paul Tibbets lifted the
Enola Gay off the runway on Tinian island. GENERAL PAUL TIBBETS: I thought
airplane will probably go down in history, and I wanted
to be sure that in my mind there could be no other B-29
that would have the same name. Well, my mother's
name, Enola Gay, fit the bill because
I knew there could not be two Enola Gays. NARRATOR: On August
6th 1945 at 8:15 AM, the gun model uranium
bomb, Little Boy, dropped from bomb bay
doors of the Enola Gay. 43 seconds later, the
bomb detonated 1,900 feet above Hiroshima with a
force of 12,500 tons of TNT. GENERAL PAUL TIBBETS: I could
see a little bit of Hiroshima down there, but I couldn't-- there was nothing there
but black boil and mist. And steam was coming
up, there were bubbles. And that's the way
that thing looked. [music playing] NARRATOR: 90% of the city was
leveled by the 500-mile an hour winds of the blast, which
charred victims' skin 2 miles away and
incinerated those directly beneath the detonation. DR. PHILIP MORRISON: We
visited the patients. We visited the railroad
platform which they had lined up all people that were dying
of radiation sickness. Maybe 600 or 800,
nothing to be done. They did everything
they could work with. HIROSHI TAKEDA: This small
boy, I thin little boy, he was bloated and it's hard
to recognize the face at all. He was saying,
[speaking japanese] means mommy, mommy,
water, water. It's pitiful, painful cry. Something I will never forget. NARRATOR: The
Japanese death toll rose to 130,000 people killed by
the blast and ensuing radiation sickness. Three days later, a second
more powerful plutonium bomb, Fat Man, fell on Nagasaki
with similar results. Japan surrendered
on August 14th 1945. GENERAL MACARTHUR: Let us
pray that peace in our start to the world, and that God
will preserve it always. NARRATOR: The most catastrophic
war in human history was over. MCALLISTER HULL: I figured out
how many of us at Los Alamos really knew all
that was going on, and dividing that into
the number of casualties, I figured that I'm responsible
for 100 or 200 of them. And that's a hard kind of
thing to be responsible for. But I've been asked in
view of that calculation, would I do it again,
and the answer is yes, because any new weapon
I would want to be given first to the United States. NARRATOR: The American
atomic weapon monopoly was short lived. In 1949, the Soviets
detonated an atomic bomb. [bomb explosions] During the 1950s,
both superpowers added the hydrogen
bomb to their arsenals in an attempt to achieve
military superiority. Ultimately, the two would
have tens of thousands of weapons in their
nuclear arsenals. DR. EDWARD TELLER:
Progress cannot be stopped. And we are told
to stop progress. I am very much afraid
that progress will occur and will occur in a country
that is less dedicated to peace than we are. NARRATOR: But Oppenheimer did
not agree that the arms race represented progress. His opposition to Edward
Teller's hydrogen bomb project and questions about his
communist sympathies led to the revocable of
his security clearance at a government hearing in 1954. Teller testified against
his former chief. DR. ROBERT CHRISTY: He
should not have testified against Oppenheimer. I think that the whole
proceeding against Oppenheimer was a terrible mistake on
the part of the United States government. And I felt very upset by it,
as I think many scientists did. And I felt that any
scientist who supported this was more or less doing
exactly the wrong thing. NARRATOR: Oppenheimer's career
had been brought to an end, but the debate over his
and the Manhattan Project's contribution to history
was just beginning. RICHARD RHODES: If you
graph human deaths from war across the last
200 years, you will see an exponential increase
up to 1945, at which point the line on the graph drops
to about a million a year and stays there for the
rest of the century. Clearly, there was a radical
break in international affairs in 1945. And I think that break has to
be attributed to this discovery that scientists made,
working peacefully in their laboratories, trying to
understand how the world really works, rather than how we
would wish that it worked. NARRATOR: The question of the
Manhattan Project's legacy, whether the atom bomb produced
under the strain of war by some of the greatest
scientific minds of the last century should
be seen paradoxically as a peacemaker or simply as
a savage destructive weapon, remains as polarizing today
as it was 50 years ago. But for some, this
debate is not abstract. The legacy of August 6th
1945 is far too personal. HIROSHI TAKEDA: Every
year on this day, at 8:15, I always offer prayer. And even this
morning, tears flow. I just can't-- everything
comes right back at me. Of course, I can't
forget the people that were killed in the bombing. [nuclear explosion] NARRATOR: But perhaps
the most lasting effect of the Manhattan Project-- WILLIAM MORTEL: I can't
recall an event that had such a decisive
effect on American society or all societies, because
for the first time, they faced instant, total,
absolute annihilation. And one for which the average
citizen, and no material way to intervene to prevent it, that
shattered the sense of security and of confidence
in American society, I think unlike any other
event in our history. [music playing] <font color="#FFFF00"> Captioning sponsored by</font> <font color="#FFFF00"> A&E TELEVISION NETWORKS</font> Captioned by <font color="#00FFFF"> Media Access Group at WGBH</font> access.wgbh.org
