A COLD WAR

* President Roosevelt authorized the Manhattan Project to go full steam 26 days after Fermi’s success, on 28 December 1942

* The U.S. would end up spending $2 billion on it. (about $22 billion in 2018 dollars)

* Do you know why it cost so much?

* 130,000 people

* When I thought of the Manhattan Project, I used to imagine it was a handful of guys sitting around a blackboard scribbling equations in chalk.

* Over 90% of the cost was for building factories to produce fissile material, with less than 10% for development and production of the weapons.

* Remember that you couldn’t just go to Amazon and buy pure uranium-235 or plutonium.

* It had to be made. A LOT of it had to be made.

* And they still didn’t even know how to make it.

* So they ran up parallel factories trying various methods.

* Out of that 130,000 people, do you know how many knew they were working on developing an atomic bomb?

* Probably not many.

* It was one of the best kept secrets in military history.

* Imagine - 130,000 people working on a project that didn’t know what it was for!

* And I’m not just talking about the worker bees - the management didn’t know either.

* And of course in December 1942, nobody knew how long the war would last or how long it would take to build a bomb.

* So it was highly likely they the war would be over before they figure it out.

* But they did it anyway.

* While Bush was seeking approval from the president, Oppenheimer had suggested that a bomb laboratory be set up in an isolated area.

* It would operate secretly but allow a free exchange of ideas between theoreticians and experimentalists who would work side by side.

* The site chosen was the Los Alamos Boys Ranch School in New Mexico.

* Which, BTW, used to be called just Mexico.

* The owners of the boys’ school occupying the site was eager to sell, and Groves was equally eager to buy.

* it was easy enough to get to Santa Fe by train, Los Alamos itself was virtually inaccessible, located on a mesa, or flat-topped hill, about 30 miles northwest.

* a private ranch school for boys, modeled after the Boy Scouts

* Famous graduates of the school include William S. Burroughs and Gore Vidal

* The official name for the site during the war was Project Y.

* It was only after the war, when it’s existence became public, that it was referred to as Los Alamos.

* Oppenheimer was put in charge, despite him being a leftie and the fact he didn’t have a Noble Prize when many of the people working in the team did.

* But he was apparently a great leader.

* According to some of the other scientists who worked there, nobody else in that laboratory even came close to him in his knowledge.

* There was human warmth as well.

* Everybody certainly had the impression that Oppenheimer cared what each particular person was doing.

* In talking to someone he made it clear that that person’s work was important for the success of the whole project.

* He seems to have the ability to walk into a room where a major scientific debate was going on, listen, sum up everyone’s points, and then when he left, everyone knew what the right answer was.

* He insisted that everyone at Los Alamos could know everything about the project - they weren’t relegated to their particular piece of the puzzle.

* He created a spirit where everyone felt important and involved.

* Meanwhile, on the production side of things, they still had challenges.

* Huge amounts of material had to be obtained.

* But that’s just the start of their problems.

* More than three million board cubic feet of timber were required, for instance, and the magnets needed so much copper for windings that the Army had to substitute silver, borrowing almost 15,000 tons of silver bullion from the US Treasury.

* They couldn’t get

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Benn Steil is an American economist, author of a great new book on "The Marshall Plan", and senior fellow and director of international economics at the Council on Foreign Relations.

HOW TO LISTEN

If you're already a subscriber, you can listen to the full show in the player below or subscribe through iTunes or any podcast player.

If you haven't heard any of the series and want to know if you'll like it before you sign up, you can listen to the first six episodes totally free. You might want to start with Episode 1, unless of course you're an old school George Lucas fan, in which case feel free to start at Episode IV. We don't recommend it though.

B

If you haven't already, join our Facebook page and you'll be in the running to win prizes in our regular "Share The Love" and other competitions.

If you'd like a chance to win a prize, write a funny or insightful review on iTunes.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

* Fission involved breaking apart the nuclei of heavy elements like uranium or plutonium.

* Fusion involves forcing the nuclei of lighter elements, like hydrogen or deuterium, together.

* And deuterium, which is basically heavy hydrogen, is far easier to get your hands on than uranium.

* But there’s still not a ton of it.

* There is one D atom in 6420 of H.

* D accounts for approximately 0.0156% of all the naturally occurring hydrogen in the oceans, while protium, the other isotope of hydrogen, accounts for more than 99.98%.

* But a fusion bomb is also a lot more powerful than a fission bomb.

* That’s why all of the nuclear weapons today operate by fusion instead of fission.

* BTW, a fusion bomb is also known as a hydrogen bomb or thermonuclear bomb, becaue a fusion bomb actually contains a fission bomb which creates the heat, thermo, required to initiate the fusion reaction, the nuclear part.

* In late November, there was a scare.

* Neither Groves nor the S-1 Executive had been told that Compton was building the experimental pile at Stagg Field.

* They were faced with the vision of a chain reaction possibly running wild in heavily populated Chicago.

* However, Fermi’s calculations provided reasonable assurance that this was not going to happen.

* But for a few days there, everyone was panicking.

* So let’s talk about k.

* And I’m not talking about Tommy Lee Jones from Men In Black.

* Here’s the situation.

* Remember that to get a fission reaction to happen, you had to get just the right number of neutrons to hit the right number of uranium nuclei, causing them to fission, which would give off more neutrons, which would hit more nuclei, etc.

* Some of the neutrons would be lost, they might bounce in a direction where there wasn’t a uranium nuclei.

* So you have to put up a kind of shielding that would make the neutrons bounce back into the chamber.

* To quantify this, the physicists came up with a number - k.

* If the number of neutrons in the chamber was less than k, there was no chain reaction, the process would just fizzle out.

* If it was exactly k, when k = 1, you had a sustainable reaction.

* But if it was larger than k, it could go supercritical, and you might have a bomb go off in the middle of Chicago.

* But of course at this stage nobody knew if achieving k was even possible.

* To try and achieve k, they put the uranium in the middle of the pile and surrounded it with cubes of graphite, which would act as a moderator, slowing down the neutrons.

* The first pile that Fermi built on the campus at Columbia in September 1941 comprised cans of uranium oxide surrounded by graphite bricks.

* Its k was 0.87.

* Which he said sucked but at least it was a starting point.

* By July 1942, at Stagg Field, they had edged k up to 0.918, then 0.94.

* To get closer to k they realised they were going to need purer graphite and uranium metal, instead of uranium oxide, which had too many impurities.

* The problem was - uranium metal of that purity didn’t exist.

* It wasn’t until November that they could get enough manufactured, from a range of companies who were all working without knowing exactly why, to their specifications.

* So in November, Fermi started to build the main pile in Chicago.

* interestingly, some of the physicists working on the project were pacifists.

* They believed that the existence of atom bombs would prevent future wars.

* But Fermi still didn’t know if the pile would go critical.

* So they had the idea to cover the entire thing in a huge rubber balloon so they could pump all of the air out of it.

* Gases absorb neutrons and they wanted to negate that factor.

* The balloon was made by Goodyear, who of course weren’t allow to know WHY they were building this huge rubber balloon.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

* President Roosevelt responded to Einstein’s letter by setting up the Advisory Committee on Uranium under Lyman J. Briggs, director of the National Bureau of Standards.

* Side note: his daughter Isabel would eventually marry Clarence Myers and go on to generate the Myers–Briggs Type Indicator with her mother.

* Which is complete bullshit BTW.

* The committee met for the first time on 21 October 1939.

* It’s function was to look into the current state of research on uranium to recommend an appropriate role for the federal government.

* On 1 November 1939, the Uranium Committee recommended that the government should immediately obtain 4 tons of graphite, which was used to slow down the neutrons coming from the fission reaction, and 50 tons of uranium oxide.

* But there was still no proof that the whole thing would work.

* Even if you could create a chain reaction, how would you fit everything you needed into something of a size that could be used as a bomb?

* Fermi himself thought that there was ‘little likelihood of an atomic bomb, little proof that we were not pursuing a chimera’.

* Keep in mind that this was before Pearl Harbour, before the U.S. was officially even at war.

* One guy who believed that America was going to end up at war was Vannevar Bush, president of the Carnegie Foundation.

* Bush was a legendary engineer and inventor.

* Among other things, he founded the company now known as Raytheon, which developed better vacuum tubes, he developed the work that lead to the digital circuits, came up with the idea of hypertext, and was vice president of MIT and dean of the MIT School of Engineering.

* in June 1940 Roosevelt established the National Defense Research Committee with Bush at its head.

* Its priorities were the development of radar, proximity fuses and anti-submarine devices.

* The Uranium Committee fell under its remit.

* It was reconstituted as a scientific body and purged of its military membership.

* In the interest of security, foreign-born scientists were barred from the committee and further publication of articles on uranium research was banned.

*

* In 1941, Plutonium was discovered.

* They found that plutonium-239 was 1.7 times as likely as U-235 to fission.

* And they could produce large amounts of fissionable plutonium from the plentiful U-238.

* So now there were two options - U-235 and plutonium.

* Meanwhile, Bush had been appointed director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development.

* This had been established by an executive order on 28 June 1941 – six days after German troops invaded the Soviet Union – giving Bush direct access to the White House.

* The National Defense Research Committee, now headed by James Conant, president of Harvard University, was downgraded to an advisory body while the Uranium Committee became a section of the OSRD, codenamed S-1 – Section One of the Office of Scientific Research and Development.

* It was S-1 that Truman discovered was sucking up a ton of money in 1943 and they told him he wasn’t allowed to know anything about it.

* Meanwhile, over in England, the Military Application of Uranium Detonation Committee, or MAUD, which was set up in 1940 to research atomic weapons, issued a report that said fission of U-235 could happen even with fast neutrons.

* They estimated that a critical mass of 22 pounds would be large enough to produce an enormous explosion.

* A bomb that size could be loaded on existing aircraft and be ready in around two years.

* The Americans read the report.

* It reminded them that fission had been discovered in Nazi Germany nearly three years earlier, and since spring 1940 a large part of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin had been set aside for uranium research.

* Meanwhile

* In September 1941, Werner Heisenberg, one of the key pion

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

* In 1913, H. G. Wells wrote a book called The World Set Free

* The novel begins: "The history of mankind is the history of the attainment of external power. Man is the tool-using, fire-making animal. . . . Always down a lengthening record, save for a set-back ever and again, he is doing more."

* In the book, the human race develops an atomic bomb.

* This was written in 1913.

* A few years earlier, Frederick Soddy had published a book about the properties of radium which Wells had read.

* Soddy and others, including Rutherford, had the slow natural radioactive decay of elements like radium continues for thousands of years, and that while the rate of energy release is negligible, the total amount released is huge.

* Wells wondered what would happen if you could get all of that energy to release at once?

* He got a lot of the details wrong - but plutonium, the fissile material used in the first atomic explosions, wasn’t actually discovered until 1941.

* Wells's "atomic bombs" have no more force than ordinary high explosive and are rather primitive devices detonated by a "bomb-thrower" biting off "a little celluloid stud."

* He also said that ‘A man could carry about in a handbag an amount of latent energy sufficient to wreck half a city’.

* I don’t know about a handbag, but suitcase bombs certainly are a thing.

* In the 1960s the U.S. built a mini nuclear device-- the Special Atomic Demolition Munition (SADM).

* It weighed 80-100 pounds, was small enough to fit in a duffel bag or large case and was designed for sabotage missions-- airfields, bridges, dams.

* It had an explosive charge of roughly one thousand tons of TNT (one kiloton).

* The Russians also developed a suitcase bomb.

* The highest ranking GRU defector, Stanislav Lunev, has said that suitcase nukes might be already deployed by the GRU operatives on US soil to assassinate US leaders in the event of war.

* He claimed that arms caches were hidden by the KGB in many countries.

* They were booby-trapped with "Lightning" explosive devices or Molniya as its known in Russian.

* Just like Mad Max’s Interceptor, a sequence of specific actions had to be taken in the correct order to render the device safe prior to moving or opening the container, or the device would automatically detonate.

* This detonation was designed to be lethal to anyone in its immediate proximity, as well as being sufficient to destroy all materials in the cache.

* In 1992, KGB archivist Vasili Mitrokhin defected to the UK, and brought with him 30 years of handwritten archives.

* He indentified the location of one hidden suitcase radio transmitter, not a bomb, which exploded when Swiss authorities sprayed it with a high pressure water cannon in a wooded area near Bern.

* Several others caches were removed successfully.

* The lightest nuclear warhead ever acknowledged to have been manufactured by the U.S. is the W54, which fit into 11 in by 16 in (28 cm by 41 cm, small enough to fit in a footlocker-sized container) cylinder that weighed 51 lbs (23 kg).

* Anyway, back to Wells’ book.

* His bombs ‘made a mighty thunder in the air, and fell like Lucifer’.

* They produced ‘tremendous pillars of fire . . . Hard upon the sound of them came a roaring wind, and the sky was filled with flickering lightnings and rushing clouds.’

* They destroyed buildings like a scythe cutting down grass, while mountainous clouds billowed up into the air.

* The book was published in 1914, just as World War I was starting.

* In 1932, the Hungarian physicist Leo Szilard, a Wells fan, read the book.

* The following year, he realized that you could indeed make an atomic bomb.

*

* In the first memorandum passed to President Roosevelt, outlining the possibility of making a bomb, Szilard’s first citation is to The World Set Free.

*

* F

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

* The Potsdam declaration on Japan was tricky.

* It was drafted while Churchill was still PM.

* In fact it was probably one of the last things he did as PM.

* But it was signed by Attlee.

* Stalin had to be involved, but he couldn’t sign it because the U.S.S.R. was still technically under a non-agression treaty with Japan.

* Truman also wanted Chiang KaiShek to sign it.

* Which meant it needed they needed to get it translated and sent to him at his remote headquarters nears ChongKing in central China.

* The final text gave Japan “an opportunity to end this war” before the “prodigious land, sea and air forces of the United States, the British Empire and of China, many times reinforced by their armies and air fleets from the west, are poised to strike the final blows upon Japan . . . until she ceases to resist.”

* It also advised the Japanese of what befell the Germans when they fought to the end.

* It warned that “the might that now converges on Japan is immeasurably greater than that which, when applied to the resisting Nazis, necessarily laid waste to the lands, the industry and the method of life of the whole German people.”

* But of course it’s worth keeping in mind that many in the Japanese military prided themselves on their particular militaristic interpretation of the Bushido code.

* The classic book, Bushido, the Soul of Japan by Inazo Nitobe, written in 1899, portrays Bushido - which he says translates as Military-Knight-Ways - as being very similar to the code of chivalry supposedly adopted by the European knights in the Middle Ages.

* He portrays it as relatively pacifistic.

* It’s about courage and honour, sincerity, frugality, loyalty, mastery of martial arts, and honour to the death, but stresses morality as well.

* It was the code of the samurai.

* Here’s some crazy numbers.

* By the end of the 19th century, somewhere between 5% and 10% of the Japanese population were samurai.

* The census at the end of the 19th century counted 1,282,000 members of the "high samurai", allowed to ride a horse, and 492,000 members of the "low samurai", allowed to wear two swords but not to ride a horse, in a country of about 25 million.

* Under the bushidō ideal, if a samurai failed to uphold his honor he could only regain it by performing seppuku (ritual suicide).

* In an excerpt from his book Samurai: The World of the Warrior, historian Stephen Turnbull describes the role of seppuku in feudal Japan:

* In the world of the warrior, seppuku was a deed of bravery that was admirable in a samurai who knew he was defeated, disgraced, or mortally wounded.

* It meant that he could end his days with his transgressions wiped away and with his reputation not merely intact but actually enhanced.

* The cutting of the abdomen released the samurai’s spirit in the most dramatic fashion, but it was an extremely painful and unpleasant way to die, and sometimes the samurai who was performing the act asked a loyal comrade to cut off his head at the moment of agony.

* Unfortunately bushido was hijacked and adapted by militarists and the government from the early 1900s onward as nationalism increased around the time of the Russo-Japanese War.

* And by WWII, it had reached epic proportions.

* I don’t know how much western strategists understood bushido in 1945, but they were certainly aware of kamikaze pilots.

* Kamikaze translates as "divine wind" or "spirit wind”

* The Kamikaze were a part of the Japanese Special Attack Units of military aviators who initiated suicide attacks for the Empire of Japan against Allied naval vessels in the closing stages of the Pacific campaign of World War II, designed to destroy warships more effectively than was possible with conventional air attacks.

* About 3,862 kamikaze pilots died during the war, and somewhere between 5,000 and 7,000 naval person

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

* Episode 69.

* Ray’s favourite number.

* Have you actually had one yet, Ray?

* Sister in law?

* Truman had given his final approval to the plan to invade Kyushu, the southern most island of Japan, just two weeks before leaving for Potsdam.

* A Russian invasion of Manchuria and Korea figured prominently in the grand strategy that underlay that plan.

* Second, even an invasion of the home islands did little to solve the problem of the estimated 1.8 million Japanese soldiers in mainland China.

* But the Soviets could handle that problem as well.

* In return, of course, for the new territories they wanted as a result.

* Which were mostly old Russian territories lost during the Russo-Japanese war as we discussed in earlier episodes.

* Getting Stalin into the Pacific War was Truman’s number one goal in Potsdam.

* The Japanese knew of course that this was coming and had been trying to negotiate a way to keep their Neutrality pact in place with the Soviets.

* They had offered the Soviets pretty much everything they wanted - southern Sakhalin Island, Port Arthur, and half of Manchuria in exchange for help in keeping the rest of Japan’s conquests in Asia.

* The Russians had informed the Allies about these offers and their rebuttals of them.

* But still the Americans didn’t trust the Soviets and thought they might cut a deal.

* Of course, Truman need not have worried about Russian desires to join the war against Japan.

* Stalin wanted Russia involved in the war as much as Truman did.

* On June 28, 1945, even before he set out for Potsdam, Stalin told his commanders to begin preparations for a war with Japan “in the greatest secrecy.”

* As later reported, “army commanders [were] to be given their orders in person and orally and without any written directives.”

* Almost without debate, Stalin told Truman early on at Potsdam that Russian forces would invade Manchuria no later than mid-August.

* Truman was as happy as a capitalist pig in shit.

* How to end the war with Japan remained a question of intense debate.

* The Allies had insisted on unconditional surrender for Germany, but several strategists argued that the same insistence for Japan might well prove counterproductive.

* The geography of Japan complicated any attempts at invasion and military dominance.

* Culturally, the Japanese people had an attachment to the emperor that argued against an insistence on his removal.

* If the Americans, whose forces would have to bear the brunt of an invasion of the home islands, insisted on dethroning the quasi-divine emperor, it might force the Japanese to fight on for an abstract goal that had little real strategic or political importance.

* The Americans should, Secretary of War Henry Stimson and others argued, allow Japan to keep its emperor in exchange for ending the war.

* Most senior US military officials agreed, noting that only the emperor could sign or endorse a capitulation that the Japanese people would respect.

* Removing him by force might create anarchy and an untenable situation for occupying forces.

* British Foreign Minister Ernest Bevin drew a direct lesson from World War I, arguing that “it might have been better for all of us not to have destroyed the institution of the Kaiser after the last war; we might not have had this one if we hadn’t done so.”

* Thus, he argued, the Allies should remain flexible about the emperor’s future.

* Other officials recalled with bitterness Pearl Harbor and insisted that Japan must surrender unconditionally.

* The still-influential former secretary of state Cordell Hull publicly blasted any concessions to the Japanese as “appeasement.”

* His word choice mattered deeply, as it carried the historical implication of both American weakness and the beginning of another round of conflict.

* He, Byr

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Stalin arrived in Potsdam a day late. Claimed he had a small heart attack. Might have been a ruse. It gave the others a day to take a tour of Berlin on July 16 and see the destruction first hand. During the first week of the conference, everyone was jubilant, having won the war - but Truman quickly learned the Russians weren't going to give in to his demands, and the Allies and Stalin both had secrets. The Allies had a successful test of Trinity, the first atomic bomb. Stalin had Hitler's body. Of course, the A Bomb wasn't really a secret. Meanwhile Clement Attlee is there but being ignored by everyone.

HOW TO LISTEN

If you're already a subscriber, you can listen to the full show in the player below or subscribe through iTunes or any podcast player.

If you haven't heard any of the series and want to know if you'll like it before you sign up, you can listen to the first six episodes totally free. You might want to start with Episode 1, unless of course you're an old school George Lucas fan, in which case feel free to start at Episode IV. We don't recommend it though.

S

If you haven't already, join our Facebook page and you'll be in the running to win prizes in our regular "Share The Love" and other competitions.

If you'd like a chance to win a prize, write a funny or insightful review on iTunes.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices