April 4, 2024 Newsletter
The movie “Oppenheimer” won seven Academy Awards, creating a “Big Bang” in the media. On March 10, the BBC’s Dan Snow produced a History Hits podcast on “Oppenheimer vs Einstein,“ interviewing the Atomic Heritage Foundation’s Cindy Kelly.
Japan’s NHK produced a documentary about Edgar Sengier, “Mystery Man of the A-Bomb.“ In March, “A Compassionate Spy” featured Theodore A. Hall, a young Los Alamos physicist who provided critical information to the Soviets.
This issue also reports on ground-breaking developments at Oak Ridge, Los Alamos, and Hanford. It also presents the National Park Service’s colorful new app for visitors to the Manhattan Project National Park sites.
While new books about World War II abound, this issues features a couple related to the Manhattan Project and its legacy. In addition, it includes stories of two women atomic pioneers whose contributions were long overlooked.
Finally, we are sad to note the loss of Dorothy Perkins, the devoted wife of Clay Perkins. Together, Clay and Dorothy gave generously to the preservation of the Manhattan Project. We will always remember Dorothy, her wonderful sense of humor and her love of history.
OPPENHEIMER vs EINSTEIN
What was the relationship between the two most famous scientists of the 20th century? In his History Hits podcast, BBC’s Dan Snow asks Cindy Kelly about Oppenheimer and Einstein, their backgrounds, personalities, and relationship. Which scientist had a greater impact on science and the history of the 20th century?
The relationship between Oppenheimer and Einstein was always tentative. As Oppenheimer wrote, “We were close colleagues and something of friends.” Einstein published his revolutionary theory of special relativity and E=mc2 in 1905 when Oppenheimer was a baby. Twenty-five years older, Einstein was more a patron saint of physics than a colleague to Oppenheimer.
In the 1930’s, Oppenheimer had called Einstein a “complete cuckoo.” Einstein had become obsessed with trying to create a great “unified theory.” In his pursuit, Einstein was at odds with the leading theoretical physicists of the day.
Fleeing Nazi Europe in 1933, Einstein joined the Institute of Advanced Study at Princeton. In 1947, he was asked whether he supported Wolfgang Pauli or Oppenheimer as the new Director of the Institute. Einstein recommended his friend Pauli who had won a Nobel Prize. Einstein had a grudging respect for Oppenheimer as a person but not as a physicist.
As physicists they disagreed, but as humanists, they were allies. Einstein was a pacifist and regretted his association with the atomic bomb. Oppenheimer left Los Alamos in October 1945 and warned against the pursuit of the hydrogen bomb. Unlike Einstein who was content to be an outsider, Oppenheimer contested his security clearance because he wanted to contribute to shaping policies from the inside.
As Director of the Institute, Oppenheimer was always friendly to Einstein. Einstein loved listening to the Carnegie Hall concerts on the radio but could not do that from his home. Without telling Einstein, Oppenheimer had an antenna installed at his house. On Einstein’s birthday, he gave him a new radio and suggested that they listen to the Carnegie Hall concert together. Einstein loved it.
You can listen to the podcast about Oppenheimer vs. Einstein here.
“OPPENHEIMER” OPENS IN JAPAN
On March 29, 2024, “Oppenheimer” opened in Japanese theaters. Some viewers were shocked by the “jubilant faces” celebrating the success of the bomb. Others appreciated that in the second half of the movie, Oppenheimer was seriously troubled about unleashing nuclear weapons. The film is stimulating discussions in Japan about nuclear weapons from an international perspective, not just from the perspective of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. See New York Times article here.
FROM THE MANHATTAN PROJECT SITES
OAK RIDGE, TENNESSEE
In Oak Ridge, TN, a ground-breaking ceremony for the K-25 Viewing Platform was held last May, and work is well underway. The platform will provide visitors a unique perspective on the vast 44-acre footprint of the K-25 plant. The plant produced enriched uranium for the “Little Boy” atomic bomb and throughout the Cold War. The Army Corps of Engineers, which oversaw the Manhattan Project, is constructing the facility (see image above, right). Completion is expected in early 2025.
The Oak Ridge History Museum now has a replica of a hutment. Unskilled and low-paid workers, mostly African American, lived in these sixteen-by-sixteen-foot hutments warmed by a black beauty stove. The hutments were very basic shelters with no running water or plumbing. Starting pay was fifty-eight cents an hour for jobs as laborers, janitors, and domestic workers.
HANFORD, WASHINGTON
At Hanford, WA, tours to the B Reactor will be curtailed when renovation of the B Reactor begins sometime this summer. However, there are many interesting sites to explore at Hanford even if you can’t go into the B Reactor.
Robert Franklin of the Hanford History Project reports that construction is complete for a new 7,500 square foot repository and office building near the Port of Benton in Richland, WA. The White Bluffs Storage and Archive Facility (photo above) was built for the Department of Energy’s collection of archives and artifacts from Hanford and is climate and temperature controlled. Opening date for the public is expected in June or July.
LOS ALAMOS, NEW MEXICO
“Lost Almost”: The Los Alamos Post Office and World War II Exhibit is an award-winning philatelic exhibit dealing with the top-secret “drop box” mail of the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos. The exhibit was developed by Wayne L. Youngblood of Prairie du Sac, Wisconsin (WYstamps.com). At Los Alamos during the Manhattan Project, US civilian mail was censored for the first time. Drop boxes were used to keep the location of the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory secret even though some 5,000 people lived there by 1945.
Three round-trip mail runs went between Los Alamos and Santa Fe daily. In an oral history, Adrienne Lowry, wife of Joseph Kennedy, describes her job as a mail carrier. “Driving down that hill on the narrow dirt road with lots of switchbacks was slightly harrowing. I had a briefcase padlocked to my belt for the confidential mail and a bodyguard, Juan Lujan. He spoke very little English but wore a gun and followed me into the post office.”
The exhibit includes an outgoing letter from Dorothy McKibbin in 1950 to someone interested in employment at the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory. The return address was P.O. Box 1663, Los Alamos (not Santa Fe).
A letter from Professor John Tatlock of University of California-Berkeley, Jean Tatlock’s father, thanks Charles Isaacs for his letter of compassion and support. A former lover of J. Robert Oppenheimer, Jean Tatlock died on January 4, 1944. Here is the link to the exhibit.
NATIONAL PARK SERVICE’S NEW APP
The National Park Service has launched an informative, colorful new app for visitors to learn about the Manhattan Project National Park sites at Oak Ridge, Los Alamos, and Hanford. Complete with interactive maps, the app highlights dozens of points of interest, self-guided tours, and hiking trails. Here is the link to the NPS app.
“Behind the Fence” sections highlight the Manhattan Project properties owned by the Federal government that currently have limited public access. At Los Alamos, the “V Site” is a few humble garage-like buildings where the “Gadget” or plutonium bomb was designed. At Oak Ridge, the Beta 3 building (9204-3) is the last of the original calutron “racetracks” that produced enriched uranium at Y-12 plant.
One theme of the app is the civilian displacement caused by the Manhattan Project. At Los Alamos, the Romero Cabin once belonged to homesteaders who farmed on the Pajarito Plateau during the summer, moving to the Espanola Valley in the winter. At Hanford, Native Americans were displaced from their traditional hunting, fishing, camping, and sacred places in the Columbia River basin that became “off limits” as part of the Hanford site.
Racial discrimination and segregation were common in many areas of the United States in the early1940s and were reflected in part of the Manhattan Project. At Hanford, the Green Bridge divides Kennewick, which prohibited Blacks after sundown, and Pasco, which sought to confine them. At Oak Ridge, most African American workers were segregated in the “colored hutment area” where they lived in dilapidated 16 x 16-foot structures. The US military was not desegregated until 1948.
The app is an excellent resource for visitors to scroll through options or read in-depth descriptions of different aspects of the Manhattan Project.
TWO FILMS ON THE MANHATTAN PROJECT:
MYSTERY MAN OF THE A-BOMB
NHK’s Hideharu Watanabe produced an excellent documentary film about Edgar Sengier, “Mystery Man of the A-Bomb.” What motivated Sengier, President of the Union Minière du Haut Katanga (UMHK), to secretly ship 1,200 tons of high quality uranium to New York City? The decision changed the course of World War II. The two atomic bombs dropped on Japan were created with the uranium that Sengier provided.
Col. Kenneth Nichols, deputy to General Leslie Groves who was in charge of the Manhattan Project, met with Sengier in 1942. Nichols agreed to purchase UMHK’s supply of uranium from the Congo. In September 1944, the United States (US), the United Kingdom (UK), and Belgium signed a secret agreement that gave the US and UK exclusive rights to purchase the Belgian Congo’s uranium after the war. UMHK made an enormous profit as the result of these agreements.
At the end of the war, the Soviets seized supplies of Belgian uranium from the Germans, enabling the USSR to quickly produce atomic bombs after the war. The US in turn generated pressure on Sangier to reopen the uranium mines in the Congo. The miners paid a high price, working long hours in harsh conditions with high levels of radioactivity.
The documentary includes interviews with Manhattan Project veteran Hal Behl; historians David Holloway and Alex Wellerstein; Monique du Ruette, the granddaughter of Julien Leroy (Sengier’s closest aid); and Congolese workers.
A COMPASSIONATE SPY
“A Compassionate Spy” documents the promising young physicist, Theodore A. Hall, who was recruited in 1944 to work on the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos. Believing America should not have a monopoly on the atomic bomb, Hall began providing the Soviets top-secret information on the plutonium bomb design and other issues.
When the FBI finally caught up with Hall in 1951, he stonewalled them and was never charged. In the early 1960s, he and his family moved to England where he worked on biophysics research at Cambridge University.
In July 1995, the National Security Agency published the VENONA papers, a collection of thousands of cables sent by Soviet diplomats to Moscow. Journalist Joseph Albright figured out that MLAD or “Youngster” was the codename for Ted Hall. Albright’s book with Marcia Kunstel, “Bombshell,” revealed Hall’s espionage to the public for the first time in 1997.
In the documentary, “A Compassionate Spy,” Hall expressed no remorse for his espionage and advancing the Soviet nuclear bomb program. He shrugged and said he acted out of “compassion.”
The documentary was shown at The Avalon theater in Washington, DC and 122 other venues as part of the Sloan Foundation’s Science to Screen program. It is also available online.
NOTABLE BOOKS
THE MANIAC
The MANIAC by Benjamin Labatut is a compelling account of one of the twentieth century’s most inventive geniuses, John von Neumann. Born in 1903 in Budapest, von Neumann was a wunderkind who learned to read by age two and speak five languages fluently. At age 10, he was already searching for a mathematical, absolute truth.
Fleeing Nazi oppression, von Neumann joined the newly created Institute for Advanced Study. Perhaps von Neumann’s greatest brainchild was the MANIAC (Mathematical Analyzer Numerical Integrator and Automatic Computer Model I). The one-of-a-kind computer was built under the direction of Nicholas Metropolis at Los Alamos. The MANIAC confirmed the feasibility of the hydrogen bomb design developed by Edward Teller and Stanislaw Ulam.
The final section of the book addresses von Neumann’s legacy, artificial intelligence. A child chess prodigy, Demis Hassabis programmed AlphaGo, a computer that defeated the human world Go champion. Now Vice President of Google DeepMind, Hassabis is in the vanguard of artificial intelligence, continuing the path-breaking work of John von Neumann.
SEABEES AND SUPERFORTS AT WAR
Don A. Farrell just published another impressive history, Seabees and Superforts at War:Tinian’s Critical Role in the Ultimate Defeat of Japan. The book is a fascinating account of how a tiny island came to play an outsized role in World War II. Farrell has been a resident of Tinian since 1987 and is the leading expert on the history of the Mariana Islands.
Seabees and Superforts provides the military and political context along with well-researched details about the challenges of transforming Tinian into an important base of operations in the Pacific. Numerous illustrations, maps, and photographs make the work captivating for World War II buffs and the general public alike.
OVERLOOKED ATOMIC PIONEERS
LISE MEITNER: DISCOVERED “FISSION”
Lise Meitner (1878-1968) was a brilliant physicist, one of seven children born to Austrian Jewish parents who believed in educating their daughters. In 1906, she became one of the first women to receive a doctorate degree from the University of Vienna. In 1913, she went to Germany to work at the Kaiser-Wilhelm Institute in Berlin, and in 1926, Lise became the first woman to hold a full professorship in physics at the University of Berlin.
But in 1933, the anti-Jewish laws of Nazi Germany stripped Lise of her teaching position. In 1938, she barely escaped Nazi authorities, fleeing on a train to the Netherlands, leaving behind all her possessions. When she arrived in Copenhagen, Danish physicist Niels Bohr helped her get to Sweden by boat. She lived in Sweden for many years, ultimately becoming a Swedish citizen.
Upon her arrival in Stockholm, she continued to correspond with her long-time German colleague Otto Hahn. In late 1938, Hahn sought her advice on an experiment that puzzled him. Meitner and her nephew Otto Frisch recognized that Hahn had accidentally split uranium atoms. In an article in the February 1939 issue of Nature, Meitner and Hahn called the process “fission.”
But in 1944, Hahn alone received the Nobel Prize for the discovery of “fission” In his acceptance speech, Hahn did not even acknowledge Lise Meitner, his close collaborator for many years. Perhaps fearful of Nazi reprisals, Hahn did not mention consulting a “non-Aryan” in exile. As a recent New York Times article relates, Hahn obscured Lise Meitner’s role and rightful place in history.
MARY LUCY MILLER: PLUTONIUM PROCEDURES
Mary Lucy Miller, pictured above, was another overlooked atomic pioneer until her great-niece Diana Del Mauro worked with the Los Alamos National Laboratory to discover her significant contributions at Los Alamos.
In 1934, Mary Lucy Miller earned a doctorate in physical chemistry from Columbia University. She then worked six years as a research associate at prestigious institutions in New York and St. Louis.
After Pearl Harbor, her boyfriend enlisted in the US Army, and she responded by enlisting in what became the Women’s Army Corps (WACs). In 1943, she joined the WACs at Los Alamos.
With her PhD in chemistry and research experience, she was assigned to the Chemistry and Metallurgy Division under Joseph Kennedy, co-discoverer of plutonium in 1940. Her innovative work produced procedures for separating and electrodepositing plutonium that are still followed at the Los Alamos Laboratory today.
Roger Meade, Laboratory archivist-historian emeritus, offered this perspective, “The Laboratory operated as one team… Like most who worked at Los Alamos during the war, she remains relatively unknown.” Del Mauro’s article, “Mary Lucy Miller,“ shines a spotlight on her at long last.
IN MEMORIAM: DOROTHY PERKINS
Dorothy Neblett Perkins, the beloved wife of Clay K. Perkins for 65 years, died in San Diego on February 3, 2024. Dorothy and Clay were a wonderful pair. The two traveled to Albuquerque, Los Alamos and Hanford and generously donated to the preservation of the Manhattan Project.
Perhaps their greatest contribution was to purchase and restore the Hans Bethe House in Los Alamos. Now part of the Los Alamos History Museum, the Hans Bethe House contains the Harold Agnew Cold War Gallery. (See below.) They also created a replica of the 100-foot tower erected at the Trinity Site for the test on July 16, 1945. The replica tower now stands with its own “Gadget” at the National Museum of Nuclear Science & History in Albuquerque.
Dorothy was a wonderful partner for Clay, even graciously sharing their home with nuclear weapons, Revolutionary War cannons, and other military memorabilia. She also pursued her own interests, from helping the less fortunate to writing eleven books. One book is about her family’s tea pot from Mexico’s President Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna. Captured by Texan federalists in 1836, Santa Anna allegedly exchanged Texas for his freedom. Dorothy’s forebears got the tea pot.
Dorothy had a wonderful sense of humor and was much loved. We extend our deepest sympathy to Clay and his family.
In 2016, Clay and Dorothy Perkins purchased and restored the “Harold Agnew Cold War Gallery and Hans Bethe House.” Harold Agnew was a Manhattan Project veteran and the third director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory (1970-1979). Hans Bethe was head of the Theoretical Division during the Manhattan Project and later lived in the cottage.
HELP RESTORE THE OPPENHEIMER HOUSE
The Oppenheimer House is almost 95 years old. Built by hand by stonemason Marcos Gomez without even a level, the cottage needs substantial repairs before it is ready for the public.
“The movie introduced a whole new generation of people to not only J. Robert Oppenheimer but the Manhattan Project. And this house represents that period of time,” said Leslie Linke, head of the financial committee with the Los Alamos Historical Society.
Please consider a gift to restore the “jewel in the crown” of the Manhattan Project. Inspired by “Oppenheimer,” people from around the world want to see the house where he lived.
Your check to the Los Alamos Historical Society,1050 Bathtub Row, Los Alamos, NM 87544, will be greatly appreciated and fully tax-deductible.
Check out what’s happening with the Atomic Heritage Foundation’s partners at the National Museum of Nuclear Science & History. The Einstein Gala on March 16, 2024 was a great success, honoring the Palo Verde Generating Station for its contributions to the nuclear industry.
NMNS&H
Coming soon will be the Museum Artifact Center (MAC) designed for the Museum’s unique collection of nuclear defense artifacts. Thanks to Manhattan Project veteran Hal Behl for his most generous donation. The countdown to completion begins!