Modern Marvels Oppenheimer & the Birth of the Atomic Bomb (S8, E25) Full Episode [English] subtitles – 100+ languages (SRT)

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Original subtitles

NARRATOR: To make peace, scientists built

the ultimate weapon of war.

To fight fascism, they unleashed 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"--

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.

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 (OVER INTERCOM): 5, 4, 3, 2--

NARRATOR: But this countdown had really begun 12 years before,

when many of these scientists escaped 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

happened to be Jewish.

[inaudible] 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

a Pandora's box.

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 Szilard,

a 40-year-old emigre 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 Einstein's summer house on Long Island.

Einstein read [non-english],, asked a few questions about it,

and then said, yes, yes, and signed it.

NARRATOR: On October 11, 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 take--

to go from there and then go on to the United States.

So the fascist authorities in Italy at that time

didn't know that they were 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.

The Manhattan Project will return on "Modern Marvels."

On December 7, 1941, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor,

sinking 19 US Naval vessels and killing more than 2,000

soldiers.

--matter how long it may take us--

NARRATOR: The next day the US declared war on Japan.

World War II was no longer just Europe's war.

--righteous might will win through to absolute victory.

[cheers]

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 assigned to the Manhattan 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 fission 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 efficient 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.

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 weapons-grade fuel.

Fission is more readily produced in a rare uranium isotope--

uranium-235-- that occurs naturally

at a ratio of 1 to 1.39 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, U235,

would be deflected more than those of the heavier U238,

and would be captured one atom at a time.

Scientists at Columbia University

championed a competing mode of separation, gaseous diffusion.

This method past 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 centimeter, about the size

of a thumbnail, you've got to have hundreds of millions

of pores, and they have to all be the same size.

If they're too big, the gas flows through it

without any separation.

If they're too small, the gas gets in there

and condenses on the surface--

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 amused.

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 hot dog 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 [inaudible],, 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 U235 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.

Groves is 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.

The Manhattan Project will return on "Modern Marvels."

On December 28, 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 U235

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

in Berkeley.

These calutrons would be used to separate U235 from U238.

GREGG HERKEN: Lawrence was, to some extent, an engineer.

He was comfortable with the soldering iron,

and with wrenches, and with the tools of the trade,

with building machines.

NARRATOR: In February 1943, construction

began on the calutron site.

It was given the deliberately nondescript code name Y-12.

These gigantic structures contained multiple calutrons,

box-shaped collection units that were configured in a racetrack

layout.

A magnetic field passed throughout the entire oval

of calutrons, causing the divergence of streams of U235

and U238 so that the separated isotopes could be collected.

A single calutron could capture a mere 10 grams of U235 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.

ELLEN BRADBURY: They're physically building Oak Ridge

and Y-12--

the 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 turn the alpha one racetrack on

to make the first uranium, and everything goes haywire.

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 racetracks 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.

[forced laughter]

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

subcritical 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.

PHILIP MORRISON: In the middle of the night,

something would be done.

In would walk 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 a big laboratory of thousands

of people working together coherent.

ELLEN BRADBURY: Oppenheimer was living on coffee, and martinis,

and cigarettes.

Groves was eating [inaudible] 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 refined 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,

and 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.

It would be built in Hanford, Washington.

Groves initiated the construction at Hanford

on August 27, 1943 with a labor force that

had been recruited to the area.

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 U235.

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 their Manhattan District

was about 10% of the electrical power, 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, was in the time frame.

NARRATOR: It was looking less and less likely

that enough U235 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.

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 [inaudible]

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 shock waves 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.

Nobody had ever taken high explosives,

wrapped them around something, and got a symmetrical

explosion, and so they weren't even sure they could do that,

technically.

It was a very tough engineering problem.

So from May 1944 until about August of '44,

the laboratory wrestles with this problem.

NARRATOR: By late 1944, K-25, the gaseous diffusion plant,

was producing enriched U235 that ran

through the magnetic calutrons to affect a 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.

The Manhattan Project will return on "Modern Marvels."

Weapon design 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 U235 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 12, 1945, President Roosevelt

died in Warm Springs, Georgia, bringing Vice 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 Super Fortresses.

PAUL TIBBETS: --island 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 the bomb.

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 16, 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, 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.

Teller was 20 miles away at [inaudible] Hill with Lawrence,

and Teller mostly scared everybody to death,

because he was putting suntan lotion on his face and in his

hands and-- as a guard against the ultraviolet from the bomb.

And this is 20 miles away.

NARRATOR: All the scientists were 20 miles away,

but most feared a dud, especially since a blank test

of the explosives 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 was really unnerving

when the blank shot failed.

The normal anxiety that one might have had with a device

on which you had worked, but had never been tested fully

was heightened by the failure of the blank shot.

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?

NARRATOR: At 5:30 AM, July 16, 1945,

the world entered the atomic age with an intense flash,

a sudden wave of heat, followed by a tremendous shockwave.

The ball of fire extended 40,000 feet.

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.

What caught me was I hadn't thought

the heat of the fireball would heat my face

exactly as at sunrise.

EDWARD TELLER: It became brighter and brighter,

and rose, 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 WESTCOTT: And I said, general, look down [inaudible]

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.

Wherever he was looking was probably Hiroshima.

NARRATOR: Although Trinity had been a success,

questions remained about Fat Man.

MCALLISTER HULL: Trinity was [inaudible] dropped.

It was a gadget sitting on top of a tower.

So could the bomb work?

That would certainly have been the military.

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 6, 1945,

as the Enola Gay flew 31,000 feet over Hiroshima.

On its way home from delivering the uranium 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.

The Manhattan Project will return on "Modern Marvels."

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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, 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.

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 wouldn't surrender.

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 short list

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 1 after a conversation with his Secretary

of State, James Byrnes.

RICHARD RHODES: And at one point,

Byrnes said to Truman, Mr. President, what will 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.

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 admired the man for what he did.

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 6,

Paul Tibbets lifted the Enola Gay off the runway

on Tinian Island.

PAUL TIBBETS: I thought the 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 6, 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.

PAUL TIBBETS: I could see a little bit of Hiroshima down

there, but I couldn't--

there was nothing there but black boiling mess.

And steam was coming up.

There were bubbles, and that's the way that thing looked.

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.

PHILIP MORRISON: We visited the patients.

We visited the railroad platform, which--

they had lined up all the people who are dying of radiation

sickness, maybe 600 or 800--

nothing to be done.

They didn't anything to work with.

HIROSHI TAKEDA: The small boy--

I think was a boy--

was bloated [inaudible] couldn't hardly recognize the face

at all.

[inaudible] mommy, mommy, water, water.

The pitiful, painful cries is something I'll 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 14, 1945.

GENERAL: Let us pray that peace be now restored 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 figure that I'm responsible for 100 or 200 of them.

And that's the hard 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.

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.

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 revoking of his security clearance

at a government hearing in 1954.

Teller testified against his former chief.

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.

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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 6, 1945 is far too personal.

HIROSHI TAKEDA: Every year on this day,

on 8/15, I always offer prayer in the--

even this morning, tears flow.

Everything comes right back at me.

And of course, I can't forget all the people

that was killed in the bomb.

NARRATOR: But perhaps the most lasting effect

of the Manhattan Project--

WILLIAM MARTEL: I can't recall an event that

had such a decisive effect on American society,

or all societies, because of 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.

It shattered this sense of security

and of confidence in American society,

I think, unlike any other event in our history.

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