by Cheryl Rofer
Historical Photos of the Manhattan Project, Timothy Joseph. Turner Publishing Company, Nashville, Tennessee 2009, $39.95.
One Christmas eve – I think I must have been about seven – I woke up early and snuck downstairs. Santa had been there. I was always a sucker for construction sets, and there was one I had wanted: long sticks that threaded through paper squares and triangles, with holes at the end to be joined by pipe cleaners. And a book, titled All About Atomic Energy. I built a flying-saucer-shaped enclosure and took the book inside to read. My parents found me asleep with the book in the morning.
The construction set didn’t last – the paper ripped and the pipe cleaners broke – but my interest in atomic energy and, eventually, the Manhattan Project, continued.
It’s more than a half-century ago now since the first nuclear weapons were built, under the extreme duress of a world-shaking competition. It turned out that the German nuclear weapon project had gone badly, but the competition was felt to be real while it was on.
The clothes and postures look as dated now as photos of Nicholas and Alexandra would have looked to me that Christmas. But I still find them moving, the story full of lessons for today. It’s possible that we aren’t paying attention to the best of those lessons.
Timothy Joseph serves up a full portion of Manhattan Project photos in Historical Photos of the Manhattan Project. He takes note of what I think is the best of the lessons: how quickly a new technology was turned into something usable; regrettably, a weapon. We humans are capable of such ingenuity and competence when pressed. We haven’t yet convinced ourselves to be pressed on today’s technical challenges.
The immense industrial base of the Manhattan Project was built and operating in a couple of years, as Joseph notes, even as the science and engineering of it was being figured out. He shows us K-25, the largest building in the world at that time, the production reactors at Hanford, the foundations of the separations buildings there, and the eventual destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Along with that, we see the people of the Manhattan Project and their children, with hats, bobbysox and saddle shoes, and cigarettes. They lived in places that today would be unacceptable: Quonset huts with coal stoves, trailers smaller than most of those now towed along highways behind pickup trucks, surrounded by mud in the wet seasons.
There is a problem for a book like this: some of the photos have been shown so many times (Einstein and Szilard working out their letter to President Roosevelt; the first nuclear mushroom clouds) that repetitiveness is a danger, but the author can hardly ignore them. Joseph has balanced those iconic photos with many that are less familiar.
For me, most of the photos of Los Alamos were familiar, although I hadn’t seen the overhead of the experiment that went so badly wrong for Louis Slotin. I enjoyed the photos from Oak Ridge and Hanford, which made up more of this book than usual.
For those worrying about proliferation, it’s instructive to consider the production reactors, through which the fuel elements progressed horizontally. I was fascinated the first time I saw one in real life. There are other ways to arrange reactors, of course, and the fuel elements are now usually vertical, requiring overhead cranes to move them. The production reactors separated the highly radioactive side from the workers’ side rather neatly.
One of the privileges of my career was to be able to see so much of this in person. My career came very much after the fact of the Manhattan Project, and so I was able to see, for example, the Oak Ridge calutrons only in aging decay, the building used for storage, parts of the calutrons and the control stations still there.
Joseph’s commentary is not up to the quality of his selection of photos. The caption for the photo of operators at those control stations says that they are for gaseous diffusion, then that they are for the calutrons. A number of small errors like this mar the book.
Joseph also presents his view that the atomic weapons produced by the Manhattan Project unambiguously ended World War II, and that they were a good thing. He shows the now-notorious underground tanks being constructed at Hanford, but says little about the difficulty they present in cleanup.
Every time I see photos like this, the rigid gender roles that they show become more disturbing to me. On the cover of the book, Leona Marshall stands with fifteen men, Harold Agnew among them, the crew that assembled the first nuclear reactor at Stagg Field in Chicago. Yes, we lived that way, with that enormous weight of assumptions. I know how it feels to be the only woman, and I clashed with Harold Agnew over such things when he was director at Los Alamos. To his credit, he phoned me a year or so later to see if things were going well.
K-25 is being demolished now, one of the last photos in the book. If you want to continue beyond the book, Frank Munger provides the news and photos, mostly of Oak Ridge. Like this one.
If you’re a Manhattan Project or old-photo buff, you might want to check out Historical Photos of the Manhattan Project.