The Impact of the Manhattan Project on the Cold War

Abstract

Einstein wrote a letter to Roosevelt about the fact that Germany was trying to develop weapons themselves, and Hitler would use them on the United States. The project was led by Robert J. Oppenheimer, and other physicists from all over the world helped the cause. The Manhattan project was a prime component in the cause of the Cold War, as it caused Soviet uncertainty with respect to whether or not they could trust the Americans with security. This lead to the splitting of alliances that included both communist and non-communist powers, and lead to the political rivalry between the communist powers and countries with westernized democracies. The violation of agreements between Stalin and Britain, and the United States lead to the Soviet domination of Poland, Germany, and other countries. These countries were under Soviet communist control, even though they were interested in being democratic. This lead to the Truman Doctrine, which tried to (in the interest of the United States) discourage other countries from becoming communist. The Manhattan project also helped lead to the genesis of the arms race (as Inter-Continental Ballistic Missiles become a more real and ever-present danger), and space race between the United States and the Soviet Union. The Cold war was more about pride than anything else, and the Manhattan Project helped to start the obsession to have the latest, most detrimental weapons available.

Introduction

Of all of the events that transpired to lead to various actions that lead to the outbreaks of the Cold War, the Manhattan Project seems to be the most aggressive action taken by the United States to ensure national security against hostile countries. Therefore, I assert that the Manhattan Project was the main reason why not only the Cold War began, but that it also was an integral part in the genesis of the Arms Race, and Space Race. I would make the pivot, that is, the most important action of this century perhaps of the last few centuries, the Manhattan Project. Los Alamos during the war had a concentration of raw intellectual power the likes of which had never been seen before and probably will never exist again: Oppenheimer, , Fermi, Serge, Bohr, , Feynman, Serber, Teller, Ulam, Morrison, Wigner, Rabi, Seaborg, Bethe, Lawrence, Alvarez, Weisskopf, Peierls. They were assembled from all over the world by a government which, in the middle of the largest war ever, was prepared to devote about 1% of its economy to a project conceived and comprehended by a handful of professors of mathematicians and the most recondite branches of physics. It was the culmination of the three and a half centuries of physical science which began with Galileo. What they did would end the Second World War and bring on the Cold War. It was an incredible achievement, technically extraordinarily sweet indeed, and absolutely horrifying. The investigatory work done in this paper is to determine the effect of this incredible, absolutely horrifying achievement on the Cold War. This will be carried out by analyzing the causes of the events that followed the Manhattan Project, and how important they were in history. This topic is worthy of investigation given that the Cold War showed the importance of technological advantage that the powers of the world had to have to ensure security to the homeland. It is interesting that The Manhattan Project had a much longer, more evident impact than the use of the plutonium and uranium based bombs that helped to destroy Japan. In a way, The Manhattan Project helped to cement our understanding that in order to be the world’s most powerful country everyone must understand that you have the last, most deadly weaponry.

The Manhattan Project was the codename for a project conducted during World War II, but had major emphasis on the Cold War. The Manhattan Project was a secret military project created in 1942 to produce the first US nuclear weapon. Fears that Nazi Germany would build and use a nuclear weapon during World War II triggered the start of the Manhattan Project, which was originally based in Manhattan, New York. The project got its name from the district that it was in, known as the Manhattan Engineer District (MED). There were supposedly at least ten sites where work on the project was first occurring in Manhattan, the perfect location given access to the ports, military presence, and available workforce. The project was directed by Robert J. Oppenheimer, and other American physicists, but British and Canadian physicists helped as well. The project was under the control of the army core of engineers, and was under the administration of General Leslie R. Groves.

This is a preview of the whole essay

The genesis of the Manhattan Project came from fear that Nazi Germany, the adversary of the westernized democracies, was investigating nuclear weapons. The Manhattan Project started out as a small project, but eventually recruited over one-hundred thirty thousand people, and cost almost two billion dollars. The idea of forming a research team was supported by Albert Einstein, in a letter to President Franklin Roosevelt. On October 11, 1939, Alexander Sachs, a longtime friend and unofficial advisor to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, met with the President to discuss a written by . Einstein had written to inform Roosevelt that recent research on chain reactions utilizing uranium made it possible for large amounts of power to be produced by a chain reaction and that, by harnessing this power; the construction of extremely powerful bombs was a possibility. Einstein believed the German government was actively supporting research in this area and urged the United States government to do likewise. At first the President was not willing to take the risk and was concerned about getting the money necessary, but eventually became convinced of the value of exploring atomic energy.

Einstein drafted his letter with the help of the Hungarian physicist , one of a number of European scientists who fled to the United States in the 1930’s to escape Nazi and fascist repression. Szilard was among the most vocal of those advocating a program to develop bombs based on recent findings in nuclear physics and chemistry. Those like Szilard, and fellow Hungarian refugee physicists , and took it as their responsibility to alert Americans about the possibility that German scientists might win the race to build an atomic bomb, and to warn that Hitler would be more than willing to resort to such a weapon.

Roosevelt wrote Einstein back on , informing the physicist that he had setup a committee consisting of Sachs and representatives from the Army and Navy to study uranium. Roosevelt's approval of uranium research in October 1939 was solely based on his belief that the United States could not take the risk of allowing Hitler to achieve unilateral possession of "extremely powerful bombs". It was merely the first decision among many that ultimately led to the establishment of the only atomic bomb effort that succeeded in World War II.

The British, who made significant theoretical contributions early in the war to the project, did not have the resources to be able to help with a full-fledged atomic bomb research program while fighting for their survival against Nazi Germany. Consequently, the British acceded, reluctantly, to American leadership and sent scientists to every Manhattan Project facility. The Germans, despite Allied fears, were little nearer to producing atomic weapons at the end of the war than they had been at the beginning of the war. German scientists pursued research on fission, but the government's attempts to forge a coherent strategy met with little success. Also, the fact that Albert Einstein had prospects to become an Americanized citizen didn’t help with their research either.

The Russians built a program that grew increasingly active as the war drew to a conclusion, but the first successful Soviet test was not conducted until 1949. The Japanese managed to build several cyclotrons (particle accelerator) by the war's end, but the atomic bomb research effort could not maintain a high priority in the face of increasing resource scarcities. Only the Americans, late to get into World War II, and protected by the oceans on both sides, managed to take the discovery of fission from the laboratory to the battlefield and gain a short-lived atomic monopoly.

In the early twentieth century, there were many discoveries about the atom, which enabled the Manhattan Project to take place. If it weren’t for the newfound knowledge of the nucleus, they atomic bomb wouldn’t have ever been made.

The radiochemists and were bombarding elements with neutrons in their Berlin laboratory when they made an unexpected discovery. They found that while the nuclei of most elements changed somewhat during neutron bombardment, uranium nuclei changed greatly and broke into two roughly equal pieces. They split and became not the new transuranic elements that some thought Fermi had discovered, but radioactive barium isotopes and fragments of the uranium itself. The substances Fermi had created in his experiments, that is, did more than resemble lighter elements; they were the lighter elements. Importantly, the products of the Hahn-Strassmann experiment weighed less than that of the original uranium nucleus, and herein lay the primary significance of their findings. It followed from Einstein's equation that the loss of mass resulting from the splitting process must have been converted into energy in the form of kinetic energy that could in turn be converted into heat. Calculations made by Hahn's former colleague, , a refugee from Nazism then staying in Sweden, and her nephew, , led to the conclusion that so much energy had been released that a previously undiscovered kind of process was at work. Frisch, borrowing the term for cell division in biology-binary fission-named the process fission.8 For his part, Fermi had produced fission in 1934, but had not recognized it.

It soon became clear that the process of fission discovered by Hahn and Strassmann had another important characteristic besides the immediate release of enormous amounts of energy. This was the emission of neutrons. The energy released when fission occurred in uranium caused several neutrons to "boil off" the two main fragments as they flew apart. Given the right set of circumstances, perhaps these secondary neutrons might collide with other atoms and release more neutrons, in turn smashing into other atoms and, at the same time, continuously emitting energy. Beginning with a single uranium nucleus, fission could not only produce substantial amounts of energy but could also lead to a reaction creating ever-increasing amounts of energy. The possibility of such a "chain reaction" completely altered the prospects for releasing the energy stored in the nucleus. A controlled self-sustaining reaction could make it possible to generate a large amount of energy for heat and power, while an unchecked reaction could create an explosion of huge force.

American scientists became active participants in attempts to confirm and extend Hahn's and Strassmann's results, which dominated nuclear physics in 1939. Bohr and John A. Wheeler advanced the theory of fission in important theoretical work done at Princeton University, while Fermi and Szilard collaborated with Walter H. Zinn and Herbert L. Anderson at Columbia University in investigating the possibility of producing a nuclear chain reaction. Given that uranium emitted neutrons (usually two) when it fissioned, the question became whether or not a chain reaction in uranium was possible, and, if so, in which of the three isotopes of the rare metal it was most likely to occur. By March 1940 John R. Dunning and his colleagues at Columbia University, collaborating with Alfred Nier of the University of Minnesota, had demonstrated conclusively that uranium-235, present in only 1 in 140 parts of natural uranium, was the isotope that fissioned with slow neutrons, not the more abundant uranium-238 as Fermi had guessed. This finding was important, for it meant that a chain reaction using the slightly lighter uranium-235 was possible, but only if the isotope could be separated from the uranium-238 and concentrated into a critical mass, a process that posed serious problems. Fermi continued to try to achieve a chain reaction using large amounts of natural uranium in a pile formation. It was already known that a bomb would require fission by fast neutrons; a chain reaction using slow neutrons might not proceed very far before the metal would blow itself apart, causing little, if any, damage. Uranium-238 fissioned with fast neutrons but could not sustain a chain reaction because it required neutrons with higher energy. The crucial question was whether uranium-235 could fission with fast neutrons in a chain-reacting manner, but without enriched samples of uranium-235, scientists could not perform the necessary experiments. Without all of this exploration and discovery, the Manhattan Project could not be.

The Cold War was basically caused by a clash of communist and non-communist countries on a matter of pride with respect to technological superiority. The Manhattan Project was the spark that started the Cold War because after news spread that Japan was bombed, Russia did not like the fact that America had built a bomb with such devastating power. After World War II, the alliance between the United States, Britain, and USSR ended. A new rivalry began with the end of this alliance: the rivalry between communist and non-communist countries. At the end of World War II, during the Yalta Conference, Germany was divided into four zones, which would be controlled by Britain, France, the Soviet Union, and the United States; Berlin was also supposed to be divided. The lack of mutual agreement between the four nations leads to the conflictions that Russia had when the United States bombed Japan. The secrecy that the United States used in operation of the Manhattan Project lead to the paradigm shifting transition of political rivalries, especially with the USSR, which had to be extra careful due to the fact that they had already been invaded twice in the twentieth century. There was also the issue of the border treaty that Stalin signed with Poland; Winston Churchill, Harry Truman, and Atlee weren’t enthused to hear that there was now an “iron curtain” that separated Europe. Poland was now controlled by Russia, so was East Germany, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, and Czechoslovakia. The non-communist countries were also angered at the fact that the free elections, which were promised by Stalin, were not going to be carried out. Instead, the USSR adopted a new foreign policy of containment to keep communism to the areas where it was already in effect. The Truman Doctrine of 1947, issued by President Harry S. Truman, established that the United States would provide political, military, and economic assistance to all democratic nations under threat from external or internal authoritarian forces. The Truman doctrine effectively reoriented United States foreign policy, away from its usual stance of withdrawal from regional conflicts not directly involving the United States, to one of possible intervention in far away conflicts. Truman argued that the United States could no longer stand by and allow the forcible expansion of Soviet totalitarianism into free independent nations, because American national security now depended upon more than just the physical security of American territory. Against its usually traditional avoidance of extensive foreign commitments beyond the Western Hemisphere during peacetime, the Truman Doctrine committed the United States to actively offering assistance to preserve the political integrity of democratic nations when such an offer was deemed to be in the best interest of the United States. Communist leaders in general weren’t proponents of such a doctrine which gave countries who were currently operating under their governmental beliefs the ability to perform illegal acts. The intransigent attitude of both sides helped to cause the Cold War.

After America had created, and used the atomic bomb to attack Japan, The Soviet Union decided to create one of its own for security, considering they did not want to be invaded again. Both the United States and the Soviet Union began to concentrate their intellectual and economical resources to build up large supplies of nuclear weapons, also known as Inter-Continental Ballistic Missiles (ICBMs). This was the start of the arms race; the United States then designed, and tested the hydrogen bomb, which was ten thousand times more deadly than the atomic bomb. The Soviet Union quickly followed suit. In an attempt to get ahead in the arms race, the Russians launched Sputnik, a satellite launched by a missile and thus the arms race quickly evolved into the space race.

Without the Soviet Union being nervously concerned with the advent of the atomic bomb, the Cold War, and the events that preceded it would not have happened. The (relatively) newfound rivalry between the world’s democracies and communist countries also would not exist.

Conclusion

Under the auspices of the Manhattan Project, three main research and production facilities were established at Oak Ridge, Tennessee; at Hanford, Washington; and at Los Alamos, New Mexico. The Oak Ridge Laboratories provided uranium-235 and Hanford produced weapons-grade plutonium. The Los Alamos Laboratory became the site for assembling nuclear weapons.

Los Alamos produced four weapons, two of which, Little Boy and Fat Man, were used against Japan in August 1945. The Manhattan Project officially ended in 1946 when it became part of the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC).

The decision to drop the atomic bombs on the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki is one of the most controversial issues of the 20th century. Many modern historians have criticized the commonly held perceptions that the bomb shortened the war, saved American lives and prevented USSR’s sharing in the post-war administration of Japan (see, for example, Hiroshima’s Shadow edited by Kai Bird & Lawrence Lifschultz ). In 1995, on the 50th anniversary of the bombing, an exhibit designed to commemorate the event resulted in . The American Legion and other veteran’s organizations successfully lobbied against the inclusion of quotes from a number of notables including Dwight D. Eisenhower that questioned the necessity of the bomb’s use.

The nuclear weapons designed, built, and tested by the Manhattan Project and its lineal descendents were perhaps the single most defining element of the second half of the twentieth century. At the same time that they visited on the world unprecedented fear and a daily awareness of the nearness of global holocaust, nuclear weapons also bought the necessary time to achieve a successful outcome to the Cold War on the basis of ideology, economics, social structure, and the limited application of military might. In the over half-century since the Manhattan Project, the world has seen no wars that have even come close to matching the death and destruction associated with the two world wars of the early part of the century. Perhaps Robert Oppenheimer's wish for a weapon that was so terrible that war itself would become obsolete was not entirely without hope.

Without the advent of the atomic bomb, which came about as the result of the Manhattan Project, there would be no bad blood between the communist and the democratic societies in the mid twentieth century. The Manhattan Project not only helped to start the Cold War, but also the space race, and was the fodder to the anti-communist fire which the United States helped to promote with the Truman Doctrine 1947. Though the threat to both American and Soviet nation security was what started the Cold War, it was the need for technological and intellectual pride which drove the countries into a frenzy to create the deadliest weapons the fastest. The Manhattan Project helped to start this newfound need for technical and intellectual pride.