Today much is known about the atomic bombs that devastated Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan, and brought an end to World War II. But in the 1940s, the work being done on the Manhattan Project – including the production of plutonium at the Hanford Engineer Works in Eastern Washington – was top secret. Only President Franklin Roosevelt and a small circle of advisors, scientists, and military operatives were fully aware of the undertaking. All would be revealed, however, after August 9, 1945, when plutonium from Hanford was used in the warhead of the atomic bomb released over Nagasaki.
A Fateful Meeting
The potential for splitting the atom to create unknown amounts of energy had been discovered by European scientists in the years leading up to World War II. Before the start of the war in September 1939, a number of these scientists, many of them Jewish, fled to England and the United States to escape antisemitism in Europe. They carried with them an overriding fear that Nazi Germany would develop an atomic bomb. Among those who came, were the already renowned German physicist Albert Einstein and three Hungarian counterparts, Leo Szilard, Eugene Wigner, and Edward Teller. Acting on their fears, they drafted a letter to President Franklin Roosevelt warning of the potential of atomic bombs and urging the U.S. – not yet a combatant in the war – to develop the technology before the Nazis did. They asked Alexander Sachs, financier, former New Deal administrator, and one of Roosevelt’s seemingly endless numbers of unofficial advisors, to deliver it for them.
Sachs met with Roosevelt in the afternoon of October 11, 1939. Rather than reading Einstein’s letter, he delivered a long verbal summary. The president, weary after a long day, told Sachs that he found the information interesting, but premature at that point. Sachs decided to call upon his long friendship with the president to invite himself to breakfast the next morning. This time, he recounted the story of how the American inventor Robert Fulton had been rebuffed by Napoleon after offering to build a fleet of steamships that would enable the emperor to invade England. Napoleon had simply been unable to envision ships without sails. After hearing the story and Sach’s concluding argument, Roosevelt remained silent for a few minutes and then summed up the meeting. "Alex, what you are after is to see that the Nazi’s don’t blow us up?" "Precisely," Sachs replied (Rhodes, 314).
Roosevelt called for his military aide, General Edwin "Pa" Watson and, handing him Einstein’s letter, said, "Pa, this demands action" (Rhodes, 314). The president’s decision set in motion a secret $2 billion program to develop the atomic bomb and another $3 billion program to develop the B-29 bomber to deliver it. It was a decision that would change the world.
Watson immediately created a small advisory committee to study the current state of atomic research that included the émigré physicists who had been involved in drafting the Einstein letter. It would become known as the Uranium Committee and met for the first time on October 21, 1939, only 10 days after Sachs's White House visit. They authorized $6,000 to purchase uranium and graphite for various experiments but did not pursue the development of a bomb.
Increasing Sense of Urgency
That all changed in May 1940, when Germany invaded France, Belgium, and the Netherlands. With a new sense of urgency, Roosevelt replaced the Uranium Committee with the National Defense Research Committee (NDRC), which explored all types of military research, including radar, synthetic materials, and various methods of separating the atom.
In June 1941, Germany attacked Russia, providing even more impetus for increasing and better organizing the American nuclear effort. On June 28, Roosevelt issued an executive order that folded the NDRC into the newly created Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD), providing it with almost unlimited funding and other resources. The former Uranium Committee became the Uranium Section of the OSRD and was soon renamed the S-1 Section for security purposes.
At the same time, atomic research was being conducted in England, and by July 1941, it was discovered that it would take much less Uraniam-235 to set off a powerful chain reaction than had previously been believed. In August, British physicist Mark Oliphant was in the U.S. as part of a mission to share his country’s military research with its American allies. Oliphant was surprised to learn that the Americans were generally unaware of the latest British findings and took it upon himself to brief members of the S-1 Section. On October 9, Vice President Henry Wallace was informed of the British findings and of S-1’s own estimates of the cost and time it would take to develop an American bomb. He obtained President Roosevelt’s permission to explore the cost of building the necessary facilities, but not to begin construction without the president’s authorization.
Roosevelt Signs Off
On December 6, 1941, the S-1 Section met to plan the development and design of an atomic bomb. The next day, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, and Germany declared war on the U.S. four days later. America was now at war. An even greater sense of urgency now drove the government’s efforts. On January 19, 1942, Roosevelt authorized the development of the atomic bomb in a cryptic handwritten note to Vannevar Bush, the chairman of OSRD, that said, "O.K. – Returned – I think you had best keep this in your own safe" ("President Franklin Roosevelt’s note ...").
Cost was no object. To avoid congressional scrutiny, it was determined to bury the enormous cost of the program in the Corps of Engineers budget and in another budget line item intended to speed the flow of munitions to Europe. That was obviously on Roosevelt’s mind when, four days later, he sent another memo to Bush asking, "Do you have the money yet?" ("Secret Wrapped ...").
On August 13, 1942, the Manhattan District of the Army Corps of Engineers was created to oversee the effort to develop and build an atomic bomb. On September 17, a portly, hard-driving, no-nonsense engineer, Brigadier General Leslie R. Groves, was named to lead what became known as the Manhattan Project. Groves had just completed oversight of the construction of the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., the largest building in the world at the time, plus scores of internment camps in the West to house Japanese Americans. Groves believed in leading from the front. He insisted on a lean organization that allowed him to make fast, positive decisions. "Large staffs lead to inaction and delay," he said (Groves, 28). His deputy, Col. Kenneth Nichols, remembered him as, "the biggest sonovabitch I’ve ever met in my life, but also one of the most capable individuals. He had an ego second to none, he had tireless energy ... He had absolute confidence in his decision, and he was absolutely ruthless in how he approached a problem to get it done. But that was the beauty of working for him” (Rhodes, 426).
Total Secrecy
Groves set about his job with relentless and all-consuming drive to accomplish the mission in total secrecy. The day after he took charge of the Manhattan Project, he inspected a 56,000-acre site near Oak Ridge in the semi-wilderness of East Tennessee. It would become the site for the electromagnetic separation plant, an immense gaseous diffusion plant, the pilot plutonium-production reactor, and other related facilities. On November 25, 1942, he approved the purchase of 54,000 acres in the foothills of the remote Sangre de Cristo Mountains near Los Alamos, New Mexico, as the site of a new top-secret laboratory that would consolidate, as much as possible, all atomic research in one location. To manage the laboratory, Groves selected 38-year-old J. Robert Oppenheimer, a controversial theoretical physicist with former family ties to the Communist Party, based on his ability to bridge the interpersonal divide between the overbearing Groves and the touchy scientists who were working at Los Alamos.
Groves had initially wanted to build the plutonium production reactors at Oak Ridge, but the dangers of an accidental release of radiation demanded that they be built in an isolated location. Overcoming its strenuous objections, Groves convinced the chemical giant DuPont to be the lead contractor for the plutonium facilities. Groves then selected Colonel Franklin T. "Fritz" Matthias, 34, his former deputy manager of construction at the Army Corps of Engineers, to look for a site in the West. By mid-December 1942, Matthias had met with the atomic scientists and DuPont’s engineers to establish the site criteria. Matthias and two DuPont engineers looked at 11 sites in four states and found what they were looking for on December 22, when they flew, drove, and walked over parts of a 670-square-mile swath of mostly flat semi-desert shrub steppe located at the great horn of the Columbia River in southeastern Washington. Matthias was already familiar with the area after approving the location of a massive military supply depot in nearby Pasco. Groves confirmed their decision when he visited the site on January 16, 1943.
The site was huge – almost half the size of the state of Rhode Island – and sparsely populated, with about 1,500 people living on scattered farms and ranches or in three tiny towns, Hanford, White Bluffs, and Richland. Several hundred of the residents were Native Americans, and multiple tribes camped on the site during the winter to hunt, fish, and obtain natural foods and medicines. Under Secretary of War Robert P. Patterson authorized the purchase of more than 400,000 acres on February 9, 1943, and the army’s land-acquisition specialists arrived immediately thereafter. By the end of 1943, the government had acquired nearly 430,000 of the almost 500,000 acres for approximately $5.1 million.
Eviction Notices
On March 6, 1943, all the residents of White Bluffs and Hanford received eviction notices telling them that they had 30 days to leave behind their land and crops, the only source of livelihood for most. This was particularly hard on those who had limited resources or were too old to start over. Richland residents were given a little longer because of their location at the southern end of the site. For a time, the Indians were allowed access to their fishing sites, but even that was soon terminated. Some owners were eager to sell; others were not. In July, the government evicted seven holdout owners on the grounds that they threatened project security and obstructed land needed immediately by DuPont for construction. Many asked to be able to return to their orchards and fields by day to harvest their crops. Groves and Matthias saw these requests as both a logistical and a security impossibility, and the landowner’s requests were denied. Some owners who held out for higher prices went to federal court to block the acquisition. There was no way for the property owners to appeal to the court of public opinion since the whole process was top secret and local newspaper editors had been told by stern-faced army officers not to report anything having to do with Hanford, and that included reporting on litigation between the landowners and the government.
Congress – and then only seven top leaders of the House and Senate – would not be told about the Manhattan Project until they were briefed by Secretary Stimson on May 17, 1945. The project remained secret, but it was a close call.
Intrigue in the Capital
The Truman Committee, formally known as the Senate Special Committee to Investigate the National Defense Program, had been formed in March 1941. It was a bipartisan special committee created by the Senate to investigate problems of waste, inefficiency, and war profiteering during the rapid buildup of war production before World War II. In 1940, Missouri Democrat Harry S. Truman (1884-1972) had been reelected to the Senate. However, he had not been endorsed by, nor did he endorse Franklin Roosevelt.
A former county judge, Truman soon heard stories of needless waste and profiteering from the recent construction of Fort Leonard Wood in his home state. He was determined to find out for himself what was going on. He travelled approximately 10,000 miles, from Florida through the Midwest, visiting military installations and uncovering a litany of fraud, waste, and inefficiency in the acquisition and construction of military bases. When he returned to Washington, D.C., Truman met with Roosevelt, who seemed sympathetic, but did not want Truman to reveal the wasteful nature of his administration’s programs.
In early 1941, members of the House of Representatives suggested the creation of another committee that would expose federal waste in military spending. Seeing the move as a likely source of political embarrassment, Roosevelt worked with friendly members of the Senate to create a committee with the same stated purpose ― with Truman as its chairman. Beginning with a shoestring budget, the Truman Committee would become one of the most successful congressional committees in history, ultimately saving an estimated $10-15 billion in military spending and the lives of countless U.S. servicemen.
Investigating Hanford
Not surprisingly, news of the huge project at Hanford could not be kept secret for long. Aggrieved and angry landowners contacted their congressional delegation in Washington. Their congressman, Republican Hal Holmes from Ellensburg, was in his first term. He tried to obtain information about the project from the War Department, but Groves directed Matthias to provide him with a bare minimum of information. After meeting with Matthias, Holmes agreed to cooperate with the land-acquisition program while publicly maintaining that he did not support the project (Jones, 336).
Washington’s junior senator, Everett Democrat Monrad "Mon" Wallgren (1891-1961), was a bigger problem. Wallgren also was new to his job, having been elected in 1940 to replace Lewis B. Schwellenbach, whom Roosevelt had appointed to the federal bench. Once in the Senate, Wallgren became a close friend and poker-playing buddy of the little-known senator from Missouri, Harry Truman. Now a member of the Truman Committee, Wallgren approached Truman and the committee staff about starting an investigation of the Hanford site.
Rudolf Halley, one of the committee’s investigators, sent inquiries to DuPont and the War Department, asking them to supply the committee with information regarding the factors that led to the choice of the Hanford location. The committee’s inquiry set off alarm bells at the highest levels of the War Department. On June 14, Army Chief of Staff George Marshall wrote to Major General George V. Strong, Deputy Chief of Staff for Intelligence, vowing to reach out to Truman and "have him instruct his counsel to drop any investigation of the Pasco Plant" (Drummond, 383). They were so concerned that they decided to bump the matter up to the Secretary of War, Henry Stimson. At 76 years of age, Stimson had enormous prestige. A Republican, he had served in each of the last four administrations and had been President William Howard Taft’s Secretary of War. Three days later, on June 17, Stimson phoned Truman: "I think I’ve had a letter from Mr. Halley, I think who is an assistant to [Chief Counsel Hugh] Fulton of your office,"
"That’s right," Truman replied.
"In connection with the plant at Pasco, Washington."
"That’s right."
"Now that’s a matter which I know all about personally, and I am one of the two or three men in the whole world who know about it."
"I see."
"It’s part of a very important secret development."
Truman got the message and responded, "I herewith see the situation, Mr. Secretary, and you won’t have to say another word to me. Whenever you say that to me, that’s all I want to hear."
"All right," Stimson responded (Drummond, 383).
Coincidentally, Stimson’s warning to Truman had occurred on the same day that Roosevelt held a cabinet meeting in the White House during which they discussed potential severe food shortages around the nation. The president had quietly asked Stimson if it might be possible to move the Hanford project to another location because of the amount of land being taken out of production (Jones, 336). Stimson decided to contact General Groves in search of an answer. Groves explained that he and DuPont had carefully weighed the factors leading to the selection of the Hanford site and had concluded that it was the only place in the United States, "where the work could be done so well." Reassured, Stimson called Roosevelt later the same day and "satisfied his anxiety" (Norris, 218).
Stimson’s phone call may have piqued Truman’s interest in learning more about the secret site at Hanford. An artillery officer in World War I, Truman was interested in all things military, particularly the army. Two former artillerymen from World War I, Brigadier General Frank Lowe and Lieutenant Colonel Harry Vaughn, were assigned to serve on the Truman Committee’s staff. Truman was close to both. Lowe would go on to command the Army Reserve, while Vaughn would serve as Truman’s military aide when Truman was vice-president and president. The men had extensive contacts within the military. In any event, Truman seems to have learned more about the project than was generally known. On July 15, he responded to a letter from Judge Schellenbach, his former senate colleague and the federal judge now handling the Hanford land-acquisition cases, who had written to Truman encouraging him to investigate the federal land acquisition at Hanford. Truman said in his response: "I know something about that tremendous real estate deal, and have been informed that it is for the construction of a plant to make a terrific explosive for a secret weapon that will be a wonder. I hope it works." Then he added, "I sure hope ... that I will have an opportunity to make an investigation of this real estate deal sometime in the near future" (Findlay and Hevly, 146).
Groves and Stimson would have been more than a little surprised to learn that Truman had shared this information in a letter dictated to his secretary and sent openly via the U.S. Mail.
Massive Project
By this time, DuPont was fully engaged in a massive construction program at Hanford. In addition to the plutonium-production reactors and chemical-separation plants, DuPont built a construction camp at the old Hanford town site that housed 51,000 construction workers and some of their families. The camp included 131 barracks segregated by sex and race, eight large mess halls, a giant auditorium/recreation hall that could accommodate 4,000 dancers at one time, 880 smaller hut-like structures, and 3,639 trailer lots (said to be the largest trailer park in the world). DuPont built a water treatment plant capable of supplying enough domestic water for 1.3 million people, 386 miles of new roads, 158 miles of railroad track, more than 50 miles of electrical transmission lines, four substations, plus railroad, automobile, and electrical maintenance facilities. Estimated cost: $230 million.
Truman kept his promise to Stimson not to investigate Hanford – at least for a while. But Schellenbach’s letter and the constant flow of complaints from members of Congress, including Washington’s newly elected junior senator Warren Magnuson (1905-1989), finally drove Truman to action. His committee investigators felt sure that there had to be widespread waste and inefficiency involved in a project of that size. Moreover, some members of the staff felt handicapped by Truman’s hands-off agreement with the War Department. On December 3, 1943, Harold Robinson, a former FBI agent and Truman’s first staff investigator, sent Truman a memo complaining of chronic complaints about the project, "... in my humble opinion, this is another 'Canol" [a controversial artic oil and gas pipeline] wherein the guise of secrecy is being resorted to by the War Department to cover what well may be another example when the lid is taken off" (McNaughton and Hehmeyer, 113).
Truman decided to quietly send his longtime confidant and personal assistant, Fred Canfil, out to Washington to find out what was going on. Nominally a member of the committee staff, Canfil arrived at the Hanford gate unannounced on the anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor, Tuesday, December 7, 1943. Security officers at the gate reviewed his official senate credentials and immediately called Matthias’ office. He ordered them to detain Canfil and not to let him on the premises until he got back to them. Matthias then called Groves who – equally surprised and agitated about this congressional interference, which he thought Stimson had nipped in the bud – called Matthias and told him to deny him entry. His mission thwarted, Canfil drove to Walla Walla, where he wired Truman "THAT NO SENATOR, OR ANYONE CONNECTED WITH THE SENATE WAS TO BE GIVEN ANY INFORMATION ABOUT THE PROJECT" (Riddell, 103). It was Canfil who would later give Truman the sign that sat on his presidential desk: "The Buck Stops Here." ("The Buck Stops Here ...").
Several months later in early 1944, a member of Congress from Idaho – Compton I. White, who wasn't affiliated with the Truman Committee – decided to show up unannounced at the project’s Yakima gate on a Sunday morning, demanding to be admitted. A Democrat, White had represented northern Idaho in Congress since 1933. A former railroad conductor and telegraph operator, White had become a successful miner, lumberman, and rancher and was accustomed to getting his way. He wanted to see the land that had been condemned. Not surprisingly, White was also detained and questioned for four hours "under bright lights in a windowless room," where he became increasingly agitated. Finally, he was driven to Matthias’s home on the Columbia River in Richland, where Matthias tried to talk with him for some time. "He left," Matthias later wrote, "feeling somewhat satisfied, I thought, but not entirely pacified." Groves directed Matthias to send the congressman a letter of explanation, but not an apology (Williams, 84-85).
Secret Briefing
Perhaps because of the increasing congressional interest in the Manhattan Project, Secretary Stimson, Army Chief of Staff Marshall, and Vannevar Bush, director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD), grudgingly provided a secret background briefing to key leaders of the House of Representatives on February 18, 1944, in the hope that it would help safeguard secrecy and improve the chances for financial support in Congress. Truman learned of the briefing and saw it as an opportunity to open a formal investigation. He crafted a carefully worded proposal for the War Department’s consideration that would allow for a limited investigation of the Hanford site. It was quickly rejected, citing a directive to the Army from President Roosevelt, mandating "extreme secrecy" be exercised, "particularly with respect to its purpose, the raw material used to develop the final product, and the manufacturing processes used." Only those "for which knowledge was a vital necessity should be informed," and then, "in minimum detail only" (Giangreco, 26).
On March 10, Truman tried again, this time directing his inquiry directly to Stimson. He outlined the history of his prior requests and said that the committee had received many complaints, including from five members of the Senate who were not members of the committee. Truman made it clear that he was not trying to obtain information about the Manhattan Project, but only about the living conditions of the workers, which were generating many of the complaints. He offered to send only those army officers who had been assigned to the committee, rather than the committee’s civilian investigators. Truman felt that his request, while unlikely to sway Groves or Stimson, would at least be well-received by his fellow senators. Stimson responded on March 14 as expected: "I am declining to take into my confidence any further persons, whether Army officers or civilians. I am merely carrying out the express directions of the President of the United States" (Giangreco, 29).
Stimson’s answer seemed to satisfy Truman, if not his Senate colleagues. Secretary Stimson had a different view of Truman’s request. In a diary entry dated that same night, he wrote: "He [Truman] threatened me with some dire consequences. I told him I had to do just what I did. Truman is a nuisance and petty, untrustworthy man. He talks smoothly but he acts meanly" (Giangreco, 30).
Ground was broken for the first Hanford reactor (designated 100-B) on August 27, 1943. The B Reactor was completed on September 13, 1944, barely a year later. The first plutonium-separation plant was finished in December 1944, and the first batch of plutonium was shipped to Los Alamos, New Mexico, on February 2, 1945. Plutonium from Hanford was used in the Trinity test of a plutonium bomb on July 16, 1945, and in the warhead of the atomic bomb released over Nagasaki, Japan, on August 9, 1945.
