The Girls of Atomic City (33 page)

As for HP-12’s broken bones, they were not set until April 15, 20 days after the crash. The doctors felt it would be easier that way, considering the tests that needed to be done. Bone tissue was sampled 96 hours after the initial injections. The bones could be set after the biopsy was performed. So on April 15, surgery was performed to retrieve the samples and HP-12’s bones finally ended up in a cast. The doctors had previously noticed tooth decay and inflammation of the gums in the patient. So the doctor—Clark or Howland, depending on who later was relating the story—decided that in addition to the bone samples, they would remove 15 of HP-12’s teeth. The teeth were removed and shipped off to New Mexico, where they would be thoroughly examined to determine whether or not there were any signs that plutonium had made its way from HP-12’s bloodstream to a smile now missing 15 of its original members.

TUBEALLOY

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

HOPE AND THE HABERDASHER, APRIL-MAY 1945

“Next time I see Franklin,” the ever-so-pleased secretary of war said to the District Engineer, referring to President Roosevelt, “I’ll tell him that the Army has been able to do more for Tennessee while fighting a war than the TVA (Tennessee Valley Authority) accomplished with all its dams.”

Secretary of War Henry Stimson was speaking to the District Engineer after completing this, his first-ever tour of the Clinton Engineer Works. He’d arrived April 11, 1945, along with his aide and the General. The Secretary, still handsome and mustachioed at 77 years of age, was in need of some assistance getting around the roughshod, sidewalk-free outpost. Mud, stairs, boardwalks. The Engineer had made sure that ramps were built at all the key locations the Secretary would be touring, cane in hand and fedora atop his head. The result of the sudden appearance of ramps outside Oak Ridge’s buildings fueled the Reservation’s already active gossip pump:
President Roosevelt is coming to town!

The size of the operation impressed the Secretary, and few, if any, of the workers recognized him as he was led on his tour. Retiring to the Guest House after his first full day in town, he wrote in his diary that he had just seen “the most wonderful and unique operation that probably has ever existed in the world.”

The tour continued the next day. When the Secretary returned to Washington, he continued the rapturous account of his visit, penning in his diary he’d seen the “largest and most extraordinary scientific experiment in history,” that he had been “the first outsider to pierce the secrecy of its barricades” and described Oak Ridge as an “orderly and well-governed city.”

He added that although the Project had proceeded as planned, and that he was 99 percent sure of success, the only real measure of success was yet to come. The value and efficacy of the Gadget would be judged by its first war trial.

★ ★ ★

The General found out from a fellow officer who, in turn, had heard the news on the radio.

On April 12, 1945, President Roosevelt had died in the “Little White House,” Warm Springs, Georgia, of a massive cerebral hemorrhage.

A nation fell into tremendous sadness for the loss of their longtime leader. The people had elected President Roosevelt to not one, not two, but to
four
consecutive terms in the Oval Office. There were young adults who did not remember ever having any other White House occupant.

For the Project, the timing was not ideal. There could be no stopping, no slowing down, no pausing to regroup. The timetable did not allow for it. The majority of members of Congress had no idea the Project existed, and it was often extremely difficult to obtain additional funding without raising some fiscal eyebrows. With each additional financial request, the General and the Secretary encountered at least minimal difficulties. Each time they had to trot out vague explanations for how each fresh infusion was going to be spent—something beyond the standard explanation that the appropriation was destined for “the war effort.” They needed the president on board.

The tricky business of divulging Project information
without
divulging any Project information was usually achieved by focusing on the purchase price of lands, housing costs, construction, and infrastructure. But the Secretary and General were careful not to give too much information about the costs and size of the actual plants themselves. Everything was described in the broadest believable terms. Yet earlier in the year, it was becoming clear that some members of Congress might need to be brought into the loop. If House leadership were on board, several key members could be invited to Clinton Engineer Works where an idea of the size and scope of the Project might be more easily grasped, even if details were withheld.

With Roosevelt’s approval, the General and Secretary had been planning to meet with leading members of the House on April 13. In light of the unfortunate events of April 12, that meeting was now canceled.

Now former Vice President Truman was inheriting not only the helm of a country at war. He was inheriting the Project.

He knew precious little about what was taking place in the mountains of Tennessee, the desert of New Mexico, the flats of Washington State, and elsewhere. Truman would have to be briefed and soon. The Missourian had been vice president just 82 days now. Besides not knowing of the Gadget, there were growing tensions with the Russians, who were now moving on Berlin.

The Secretary had mentioned to President Truman that there were some important items that needed to be discussed. But the responsibilities of a new president were legion. There were schedules and meetings to be juggled. There were administrative transitions to manage and moving his family into the White House and the list of tasks went on and on, compounded by the ongoing war.

So the Secretary made it clear that this particular meeting could not wait:

April 24, 1945

Dear Mr. President:

I think it is very important that I should have a talk with you as soon as possible on a highly secret matter.

I mentioned it to you shortly after you took office but have not urged it since on account of the pressure (sic) you have been under. It, however, has such a bearing on our present foreign relations and has such an important effect upon all much thinking in this field that I think you ought to know about it without much further delay.

Truman immediately sent a reply, handwritten on the very same letter. His appointment secretary, Matthew Connelly, put the secretary of war on his appointment list for the very next day, Wednesday, April 25.

The former haberdasher from Independence, Missouri, could not have fathomed the information about to be dropped into his lap. This man had once served as so notable a head of the Senate Special Committee that the body soon became better known as the Truman Committee, a group determined to make sure that the American public was getting its money’s worth as far as national defense spending was concerned.

Welcome to the Oval Office, Mr. President. You’re about to get an earful.

Truman listened as the largest expenditure in the history of the American military was laid out before him in full detail. As he listened, he worked to understand the enormity of the long-term effects of this Project on not only the conflict at hand but foreign policy in years to come. He worked to wrap his mind around the decision that likely stood before him, a decision that was fast approaching.

The brand-new president felt, as he later wrote, “like the moon, the stars, and all the planets had fallen on me.”

Both the General and the Secretary were on hand to drop the cosmos on the newly burdened head of President Truman. They brought him up to speed, from the earliest days of research through the development of the Manhattan Engineer District and up to their current projections for delivery of the Gadget. The Secretary’s trip to CEW turned out to be well timed—the information was now as fresh in his mind as it was in the General’s.

They explained that a version of the Gadget—the implosion version, using 49 as fuel—would be ready for a test in July, just three months away. A second version of the Gadget—the gun version, using enriched Tubealloy from CEW—would likely be ready for deployment by roughly August 1.

Truman listened. He was on board.

It was suggested that five congressmen—one of whom had already raised questions about this cloaked and horrendously expensive project—be given a tour of the CEW so that they, too, might understand the scale and necessity of this unprecedented military venture.

Truman was hardly green when it came to knowledge of military spending, having investigated a number of items on the defense agenda that he believed to be evidence of overspending. He had on more than one occasion, while heading the committee named for him, pushed the Secretary to fully explain this Project and why it was costing so much and just where on earth all the money requested could ever possibly be going. The Secretary had not said a peep. And now President Truman had his answers. All of them. The moon and stars and planets had landed, and Truman could now see the breaking dawn of a new, untold universe.

★ ★ ★

“THE WAR IN EUROPE IS ENDED! SURRENDER IS UNCONDITIONAL; V-E WILL BE PROCLAIMED TODAY; OUR TROOPS ON OKINAWA GAIN,” announced
The New York Times
in a banner headline covering the front page on May 8, 1945.

Germany had officially remained in the war just over a week after Adolf Hitler’s death on April 30. Not that the writing hadn’t already been on the wall before Hitler and his new bride, Eva Braun, walked into the
Führerbunker
50 feet beneath the city streets of Berlin. Above them, the once-gleaming European capital was succumbing helplessly to hordes of Russian troops. The pair would never see sunlight again.

VE Day came mere weeks after the deaths of Benito Mussolini and President Roosevelt and shortly after President Truman learned the full truth about the Project. Within 24 hours of the official end of the war in Europe, a group of Project representatives, chaired by the Secretary, gathered for the first informal meeting of the Interim Committee, a group tasked with discussing and assessing not just how the Gadget itself would be used, but also the role of the Gadget and the science that had made it possible in the postwar world. How would information be shared among nations that differed in political ideology? How would the science be controlled internationally and what kind of legislation would be put in place to regulate it all?

Wartime information control and publicity were more immediate concerns. At the second informal meeting of the Interim Committee, on May 14, the General attended. A scientific panel was agreed upon that would include Fermi, Compton, Lawrence, and Oppenheimer, and the committee discussed how best to disperse information to the public.

“William L. Laurence, a science editor of
The New York Times
, now under contract with the Manhattan District, should work up drafts of public statements . . .”

The committee knew that all their many years of private toil on the Project would soon be very, very public, and they needed guidelines about how to share information about the Gadget with the world.

★ ★ ★

As post-Hitler Europe began to take shape, Allied forces tracked down ten German scientists—Lise Meitner’s former colleague Otto Hahn among them—and detained them at Farm Hall, a country estate in Godmanchester, England, just outside Cambridge. There they would be kept under wraps and out of sight until the war was over and until the Allies had determined, once and for all, just how close Germany had come to creating a Gadget of its own.

The German scientists sat at Farm Hall, with nothing to do but debate the reason they were being held there and how long their detainment might last. As they did, the Allies listened. This was Operation Epsilon.

“ . . . I wonder whether there are microphones installed here?” Kurt Diebner, physicist and head of Germany’s research into Tubealloy, asked his colleagues.

“Microphones installed?” answered Werner Heisenberg, the man who brought the world the uncertainty principle of quantum theory. He was laughing. “Oh no, they’re not as cute as all that. I don’t think they know the real Gestapo methods; they’re a bit old-fashioned in that respect.”

★ ★ ★

Victory in Europe brought joy and relief to those with family or loved ones stationed overseas and meant, they hoped, soldiers might soon be headed home. Meanwhile, work at the Clinton Engineer Works didn’t skip a beat.

No sooner had news of Germany’s surrender hit the papers than brand-new messages were slapped up on CEW’s billboards, reminders that it was business as usual. There was no slowing down now. If anything, the pace needed to pick up.

One billboard that sprung up seemingly overnight featured a buff Uncle Sam pulling up his shirtsleeves. His gaze was fixed on a map of Japan, while behind him a white flag flew over the land of Germany. It proclaimed: