Mr. Graff is a journalist, a historian and the author, most recently, of โThe Devil Reached Toward the Sky: An Oral History of the Making and Unleashing of the Atomic Bomb.โ
The 80th anniversary last week of the atomic bombings that helped end World War II came at a most peculiar time. That is in part because we canโt mark that anniversary without also noting the astonishing Manhattan Project that built atomic weapons.
The Manhattan Project was a towering achievement, one of the great stories of human effort and accomplishment. Yet the Trump administration has been systematically dismantling the culture of research that the Manhattan Project and World War II bequeathed us, a culture that propelled American prosperity.
At no other time in modern history has a country so thoroughly turned its back on its core national strengths. The very elements that made the Manhattan Project such a success are today under assault. With devastating cuts to science and health research, the administration is turning its back on a history of being powered and renewed by the innovation and vision of immigrants. What America may find is that we have squandered the greatest gift of the Manhattan Project โ which, in the end, wasnโt the bomb but a new way of looking at how science and government can work together.
That the Manhattan Project happened is itself a minor miracle. For nearly two years, the U.S. military seemed to want nothing to do with the effort of inventing an atomic bomb.
From 1939 to 1941, a ragtag group of mostly Jewish refugee scientists from Hitlerโs Europe, including Albert Einstein, approached the government and met with military officials. The scientists educated them on the discovery of nuclear fission, its implications for war and their fears that Hitler would develop an atomic bomb first.
The military brushed them off. โThe colonels kept rather aloof,โ the physicist Eugene Wigner recalled after one such meeting in October 1939, as Hitler took Poland. โThey were friendly, they smiled, but they never expected to see a working atomic bomb in this world.โ
One of those colonels told Wigner and Edward Teller, dismissively, that he would award $10,000 to whoever could develop a death ray and prove it by killing a goat โ the implication being he imagined that project more likely than a bomb that unlocked the power of the fundamental building block of the universe.
