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Einstein's Letter: The Moment That Started the Atomic Age
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
In 1939, a letter signed by Albert Einstein set the Manhattan Project in motion — but Einstein himself would never be granted security clearance to see what it unleashed. This episode traces the project's origins, Oppenheimer's audacious recruitment drive, and the secret city where 130,000 people built the most dangerous weapon in history.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
Before the Manhattan Project, J. Robert Oppenheimer was a theoretical physicist.
To understand how Oppenheimer ended up at Los Alamos, you have to go back to the beginning of the project itself. Not the labs.
The Manhattan Project didn't arrive fully formed. It grew.
General Leslie Groves, the Army officer running the Manhattan Project, made a decision that was either brilliant or reckless, depending on how you look at it. He put a theoretical physicist in charge of the most important weapons laboratory the country had ever built.
What they arrived to was something stranger than most of them expected. Los Alamos was a working town.
While Los Alamos was still being built, another critical step happened elsewhere. In Chicago, under the west stands of Stagg Field at the University of Chicago, Enrico Fermi was building something he called Chicago Pile-1.
The answer to "how fast" depended on solving several problems simultaneously, and one of them nearly derailed the entire project. The original design for a plutonium bomb used a simple gun-type mechanism.
By the summer of nineteen forty-five, they had a weapon ready to test. They called it the Gadget.
On August sixth, nineteen forty-five, a uranium bomb called Little Boy was dropped on Hiroshima. Approximately one hundred thousand people died.
Here's something that only emerged in full afterward. The Manhattan Project's secrecy, for all its elaborate architecture, had been penetrated from early on.
The men who built the bomb didn't walk away unchanged. Oppenheimer spent his postwar years advocating for international arms control and opposing the development of the hydrogen bomb.
The Manhattan Project transformed American science, American military power, and the nature of warfare itself. What Oppenheimer built at Los Alamos was not just a weapon.
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