"The Secret City"

This weekend I went to a museum in Oak Ridge, TN. To give some background...
Oak Ridge is a city that was created by the military during WWII. It was one of the sites of the Manhattan Project. Everyone has heard about the site in New Mexico and Nevada where they tested the atomic bomb for the first time, but few know about the site where all the research and development was performed.
A letter from Albert Einstein written in 1939 warned FDR that, "it may become possible to set up a nuclear chain reaction in a large mass of uranium, by which vast amounts of power and large quantities of new radium-like elements would be generated. Now it appears almost certain that this could be achieved in the immediate future." He also warned that other countries were beginning to develop these capabilities, that Germany had taken over one site where uranium was prevalent, and that in America we did not have a good supply of uranium. He encouraged the president to start research on this project and to start building up our stores of uranium.
Some research was started, but nothing massive. Then, two years later, the government got a swift kick in the rear and all-of-a-sudden began a massive research and development project. The event that triggered it... the attack on Pearl Harbor. The government decided that they needed to really start moving on this  and develop the capability to produce an atomic bomb before Germany or Japan.
They selected the TN area because of its seclusion and its accessibility by train to Washington DC and other major cities. This area was not called Oak Ridge at the time, in fact, it was not shown on any maps and there were gates around the whole city.

It quickly grew from a population of 3,000 to 75,000, making it the 5th largest city in TN at the time, with over 100,000 people working inside the gates. This was literally the city that never slept. Workers would come in shifts and work would go on 24 hours a day 7 days a week. Inside this secret city everyone wore ID badges and everyone was working toward a common goal, but no one knew exactly what that goal was. Only the top commanders in the military and the top scientists knew what they were working on. I found it very interesting that, when FDR died and Vice-President Truman took over as President, he had to be briefed on the secret X-10, Y-12, and K-25 sites (the code names for each of the major laboratories in TN). It was so secret even the VP did not know about it.

Even though most of the people did not know anything about an atomic bomb, secrecy was still of the utmost importance. It was on billboards, it was in pamphlets, and signs were hanging in every office.

One of my patients said that her uncle worked in Oak Ridge and that secrecy was so ingrained into their minds that to his dieing day he never spoke about what he would do when working there.
In order to accommodate the influx of people coming to work in this city, the government put up, "flat tops", which were prefab houses that were labeled A through F. If you told someone you were living in a "B" house they all knew the exact layout and size of your place. One of these houses still in original condition was donated to the museum and I was able to walk through it (all 576 sq feet of it). It literally looked like a box and inside I could lift my hand up and touch the ceiling. It was really small!

B1 model Flat top

One of the women who worked and lived at Oak Ridge remembers one of her supervisiors saying, "We cannot tell you what you are going to do, but we can tell you how to do it and we can only tell you that if our enemies achieve what we are attempting before we do, God help us!"
 When it comes right down to it, the best part of the story is that even with two years head start, a large supply of uranium and some amazing scientific minds the "enemies" did not achieve it before we did. We still beat them even with all the disadvantages and that just goes to speak to the nature of  the America I love. Whoever said that the attack on Pearl Harbor "awoke the sleeping giant" was spot on. When we set our minds to something we accomplish it with flying colors.
Unfortunately for Japan, the "flying colors" this time happened to be two of their cities...Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
When the scientists were performing tests on the uranium to see if, in its purest form, it was able to cause the chain reaction needed to produce a bomb the mood was intense. As they pulled out the safety barriers that had prohibited the reaction from occurring and the instruments started reading energy levels that began to set off all the safety alarms, the scientists knew they had done something great and terrible all at the same time. I read that they all had a celebratory drink in complete silence. From that test it was a quick process to make and test the first bomb. Then, when "Little Boy" and "Fat Man" landed in Japan and ended the war the people of Oak Ridge finally knew what they were working on and they were shocked, but proud.

 I wonder how I would feel knowing I played a part in the making of such a weapon of destruction?
History is so interesting and it is surprising to me that more history teachers don't go into detail about the events in our past. If they did, I would have paid much closer attention...