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Los Alamos Rises: Groves, Oppenheimer & the Secret City
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
Deep in the New Mexico desert, a secret city of 130,000 people was built from nothing — and two men who barely trusted each other were charged with making it work. This is the story of how the Manhattan Project went from a squash court in Chicago to the world's most ambitious weapons laboratory.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
It's the summer of nineteen forty-three, and a United States Army general is standing in a secret laboratory carved into the New Mexico desert. He doesn't trust the man running it.
To understand how they got there, you have to go back to August of nineteen thirty-nine. A Hungarian physicist named Leo Szilard had been awake with a fear he couldn't shake.
Before Los Alamos, before Trinity, before the bomb was even a blueprint, there was a squash court in Chicago. Enrico Fermi, who had fled Mussolini's Italy after winning the Nobel Prize in nineteen thirty-eight, had built something extraordinary beneath the stands of Stagg Field at the University of Chicago.
Groves had been appointed to run the Manhattan Project in September of nineteen forty-two. He'd just finished the Pentagon.
Los Alamos was working on two bomb designs simultaneously, and the distinction matters. The first design, the gun-type weapon, was relatively straightforward in concept.
July sixteenth, nineteen forty-five. The Jornada del Muerto desert in New Mexico.
Three weeks later, the decision that Groves and the scientists had been building toward was executed. President Truman, who had only learned of the Manhattan Project after Roosevelt's death in April, had been briefed at Potsdam.
What many of the senior scientists didn't know during all of this was how compromised the project actually was. Klaus Fuchs was a German-born physicist who had fled Nazi persecution and ended up at Los Alamos as a trusted member of the theoretical division.
After the bombs fell, the men who built them had to live with what they'd done. Oppenheimer became the most prominent voice for nuclear arms control in the years that followed.
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