Hiroshima: The Manhattan Project

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Aktung Aktung, welcome to We Have Ways of Making You Talk with me, Al Murray, and James Holland.

And Jim, this torrent of anniversaries of the events at the end of the war is upon us.

We have a special guest to help us with one of those events, haven't we?

Yeah, we've got a very special guest, great friend of the show.

It's Ian McGregor, who last time we had on talking about Stalingrad, he's stuck with the Second World War just, but moved in a slightly different direction.

And I'm really grateful to him because I don't really understand science, I don't really understand about atomic bombs, but he now does.

I mean, we know the basics, don't we?

But we don't know anything more than that.

So he's going to explain to us about the Manhattan Project in a little two-part series we're doing on the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Ian, thank you so much for coming on.

Thank you for helping us out and saving us from having to do science prep.

I knew you were going to say that.

I'm sorry, I'm that predictable.

That's what was really good about Chalk Valley sitting next to Frank, Professor Frank Close.

Well, now you're on your own, I'm afraid.

I know, I know, it'll be fine.

It'll be fine.

So, I mean, Ian, what I think is interesting about the build-up to the atomic bomb, I think that everyone knows this, is that there's sort of a race on, isn't there?

A bit of a one-horse race, isn't it, to be honest?

There's this body of knowledge that's out there, isn't there?

The potential for an atomic weapon.

Sort of idea that's being kicked around by the clever people that understand this stuff.

But the Germans, in a sense, get going on it first.

Otto Hahn and Strassmann discover nuclear fission in 1938.

Really?

I mean, the German effort is just an absolute shower.

Let's just put that absolutely cars on the table here.

It's pathetic.

It's also split into, you know, two factions when they do it.

Goering kind of calls it quits in summer of 1942 and it sort of goes on as a sort of skeleton effort thereafter.

So I think that's all we need to say about German atomic development, really.

I used to have an old joke, which is that the British are the smartest people on the the planet because they it was the british who invented the atom bomb but they got the americans to build and test it in their country

well i was going to say i mean it's it's that quote from the danish physicist at the time you know he's on the second rung down from einstein so he's the world he's a world leader he says that if anyone's going to build an atomic bomb if it's going to be america they'd have to turn america into one enormous factory because that's what it will take to build an atomic bomb and put all the technology together, ramp up industry to work with science and the military.

And that's it.

That's exactly what the Manhattan Project turned out being.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

So where does the process actually

begin then?

Some of these people are world famous, like Albert Einstein, and, you know, to the point where they're in terrible adverts now.

Others are names that have sort of faded from the picture.

Leo Zillard, I mean, who's he?

Yeah.

Well, I mean, Zillard's one of the raft of top-level physicists that have escaped occupied Europe.

Well, as it's turning into occupied Europe.

Is he Jewish?

Yeah, and he's Hungarian.

And that's the key.

A lot of these physicists, scientists that ended up working on the Manhattan Project, first of all, helping the British, then obviously traveling across the Atlantic and working for the Americans, which would morph into the Manhattan Project, they're escaping religious persecution at first, most of them.

And there's quite a few of them that just don't want to work under a fascist dictatorship as well, and they're driven out too.

They're washed upon the shores of Great Britain.

I mean, I know we're talking about the pathetic attempt by the Nazis to build a bomb.

I wrote an article for Kachin Hoyer about that a a couple of weeks ago.

At the time, it's the big red flag you can wave at the beginning of hostilities to think, well, if they get the bomb, is it part scare tactic?

Maybe it was based on some kind of

reality, I suppose.

But Hahn and Strasman are the ones that discover it, 1938.

I suppose where it ramps up is at Birmingham University.

by 1940.

And that's where you've got Rudolf Piles and Otto Frisch.

They're the ones that say to the British, well, you do realize, you know, that the study of what we've done that's enhanced Strasmond Hahn's work is a grapefruit size.

I mean, it's great that they put it into the layman's terms, a grapefruit size amount of enriched uranium-235

has enough to blow up a harbour or potentially it could blow up a city.

And that's what's worrying British military strategists, British politicians, because they're thinking, what if the Nazis get it?

I mean,

it is.

It's obviously a red rag.

And you have the Maud Committee, don't you?

Yeah, yeah.

Well, I was going to say, it's what Paul's and frische say that drives the british to set up the maud committee which is an acronym isn't it military application of uranium detonation there you go which then is telling them that it's the potential for a super bomb the committee morphs into what will be the government's top secret program called whimsically i suppose tube alloys yeah and it's their report the tube alloys report the maud report that really drives the Americans because I know we talk about this letter famously Einstein gives to FDR, and Zillard is the one who drafts it.

So Zillard's the brains.

And as we know later on, I mean, Einstein became almost a pacifist and regretted that he'd ever got involved in giving the letter.

But FDR thinks we definitely need to do something about this.

But his hands are tied to a degree because they're not at war.

Not only are they not at war, they're neutral.

Exactly.

And the original version of the Manhattan Project is basically given about, I think it's a budget of $600,000.

It's a committee of 12, a couple of military.

Obviously, they're on board straight away, but they haven't got a big say, an industrialist and scientist.

But they're meeting once every couple of weeks.

From when on?

From literally within about a month of FDR meeting Einstein and getting the letter and then saying we need to activate this.

But it's done in a very low-level way.

They're attacked at Pearl Harbor.

Everything's getting ramped up, as we all know.

We don't really need to go there.

But it's really only when they get

the Maud report, I suppose, that that's when it really absolutely takes off.

So, just explain in what the Maud report is.

Presumably, this is by the Maud Committee in Britain.

Yes, exactly.

It's the team that's they bring in Rudolph Parls and Otto Frisch into it.

Rutherford is the chief physicist for the British delegation.

He's going to be involved throughout the war in terms of working on the British project that then goes across the Atlantic and goes into the Manhattan Project.

He's always going to to be the main voice at the table for us.

They do the science and they realize that, yes, this could potentially work.

It's whether the British have the facilities and the capability, the money, everything else to do it.

But it's in that we're at war with Nazi Germany.

We then, what do we give to the Americans in terms of technology and everything else?

And, you know, nuclear technology is just one thing that came out of the famous case that we took over to the Americans at the beginning of the war.

The Moore Committee is driving it from a British perspective, but it's not until after the Americans are actually in the war, the budgets are set up, that it really becomes a driving force in terms of the Maud reports telling them this is exactly blow by blow how we can put together with enriched uranium a bomb.

And do you have people at this stage saying, I have moral qualms about this?

Or are we still in the, because obviously that grows.

And then certainly after the event, a lot of people develop moral qualms, as you pointed out.

Is there this sort of feeling within the scientific community that they're going to do something that's going to change the world or are they, you know, just on the on the tram lines of we need to come up with a weapon to get this war finished more quickly?

You could say it's the genesis of mad mutually assured destruction.

It's we've got to get ours before the Nazis get theirs.

Yeah.

Like we said, the Nazis program didn't get off the ground, but they didn't know that.

I mean, Groves, when he actually, you know, when he's running the Manhattan Project eventually from...

you know, late 1942 onwards, the fear is amongst the whole team is the Nazis are 18 months ahead of them.

And it is always better to overestimate the strength of your enemy rather than underestimate it.

Okay, so now the Americans are in, they've turned on the taps money-wise.

By late 42, you've got the Manhattan Engineer District, Brigadier General Leslie Groves, who's in charge.

And I mean, he's a technocratic soldier, really, isn't he?

Yeah, frustrated.

I mean, I interviewed a couple of his family and his grandson, Richard Groves, was fantastic on his character.

He wanted to be a combat leader.

I mean, that was the thing.

He wanted to be in, he loved explosives, so he wanted to be in the artillery, which is kind of ironic considering they'd report to President Truman, who was, who had actually done that in the Great War.

He graduated from West Point in 1918.

So he's then a career soldier in the Army Corps of Engineers throughout his career, right up until

the beginning of hostilities after Pearl Harbor.

But he did some amazing things when you think about it.

I mean, when we're talking about the Americans would create the Manhattan Project eventually, government realizes we have to make this a top-secret project.

And if you're going to achieve that, then it has to come under the auspices of the Army.

So it's the U.S.

Corps of Army Engineers that take it on.

And they've got the budget too.

I mean, they're going to be spending billions.

So he's appointed in the fall, as I say, in America of 1942.

Presumably,

he could have been sent to Northwest Europe, couldn't he?

He could have been sent to the Pacific or whatever.

His resume is incredible.

I genuinely mean this.

They should have statues to this guy around the States.

Just, you know, you park what he did on the Manhattan Project for a minute when you think that he was one of the key men who led the rejuvenation of the military infrastructure in the United States over about a four or five-year period.

You know, they're rebuilding everything, rebuilding everything, construction new things, whether it's hospitals, training barracks, airports, loading depots, everything.

And he's in charge of that.

And then, crucially, he's then given the job to build the Pentagon, which at the time was the biggest building in the world.

He had a team of 10,000 people and he brings it in on on time and under budget.

Amazing.

He actually had applied for a combat commission and he was 41.

And if you see the photographs of him at the time, he's not looking like he'd pass

an assault course.

All right.

So he's not Matt Damon Buff.

No, no.

And yeah, that's one of the things the film really doesn't address.

I mean, Matt Damon, what does he have?

About six minutes of dialogue throughout the whole movie?

I mean, he just drifts in, drifts out.

You don't really get to grips with great.

Yeah, I mean, I'm looking at pictures of him now.

I mean, he's quite a chunkster, isn't he?

He just loved his suites to the point where his staff hid his collection of suites in the safe.

That's just fantastic.

I like him more and more, I've got to say.

I do.

I think he's amazing.

He's wise enough to say when he's offered the job and he's showing this disappointment that he's not going to be a combat commander.

He says, well,

I want to be brigadier general or two.

He'd end up a two-star general.

I can't be mixing with Nobel.

prize winners of science when I've just got my high school diploma in physics.

I need something that gets me into into the room and gets me respect.

Obviously, his character and the way he was such a driven, obsessed guy, totally on top of his brief, would help.

But, you know, it's his way of wangling a good promotion, a juicy promotion.

And then on the science side is Oppenheimer, who, of course, is a name that I don't think of the two of them.

Groves is a name that people who know about this might know about, but Oppenheimer is the, you know, there was a

film made about him, you know.

Yeah.

Yeah, but he was quite, he was pretty famous before the film, to be fair.

He was.

as was his deeply odd tendencies i can imagine sheldon cooper's been based on him to a degree but uh you've got to remember with groves the power that he had i i equate him and tibbets quite closely in terms of for such junior men in the military hierarchy the power that they were given in the war because of the manhattan project was you know never been done before there was security fears about oppenheimer in terms of he was left-leaning he'd you know he'd been to communist rallies like the film portrays.

He had some dodgy relationships with women.

Wasn't he trying to poison someone at some point?

Yes, that was.

Yeah, well, that actually did happen, apparently.

He injected poison into an apple from a physics professor that he didn't like when he was studying in Austria.

And that actually did happen, apparently.

That's not normal behavior, let's face it.

A very William Tell moment.

No, but like I said, I mean, it's Groves that brings him in against everyone saying his better judgment.

And it's, again, Groves is in the driving seat.

He's already sat down with the top industrialists across America that this time will be meshed together closely with the military.

What they hadn't done in the Great War, they're going to do in this new war.

We're going to work together very, very closely.

You know, you've already helped me build the infrastructure, the military infrastructure across the United States.

Now we're going to be working on the Manhattan Project, which was very close.

How many people you'd need to do it, the facilities you're going to be be building.

I think in nearly every state across the United States, there was some sort of facility that was in the web of the Manhattan Project.

And you're looking at over 130,000 people.

So Oppenheimer is obviously top of the tree.

But Ian, I mean, why doesn't he get in Zillard and Einstein?

I mean, Oppenheimer presumably picks himself because he's the one person who knows how to do this.

I mean, bottom line is, you can have all the organization in the world.

You can have all the money in the world.

You can have every state in the US involved, you know, in a direct way in developing this.

But if you haven't got the science, you haven't got the bomb.

The buck stops with the science.

So I always assume that Oppenheimer was brought in was because he's the one man who can make this happen.

Is that not the case?

No, no, you're absolutely right.

I mean, in terms of, I'd say two things, even though the military and the politicians might know it and might not know him, in his circle of the cream of physicists and science around the world, people like Niels Bohr, people like Enrico Fermi, who would then work in Chicago, at Chicago University.

And these are all émigrés, even come to America in the Latin American.

Exactly.

Yeah, but they're in that, I suppose, Olympic class level of studying innovations and cutting edge physics.

So they all know each other.

But they're also, they're coming to the United States, A, because they're escaping persecution in Europe.

But B, because they know that the United States is the one place where they're going to get the funding to do this incredible science, right?

I mean, you know, it's the richest nation in the world, even in the 1930s and in the height of depression.

Amazing science doesn't just happen.

It happens with enormous financial backing.

And if you're going to get financial backing, this is, you know, America is the place to go.

But just to go back to Oppenheimer, just be absolutely clear.

I mean, Oppenheimer is chosen to lead this because he is the number one Boffin in terms of atomic physics, right?

Exactly.

And he's working at USC Berkeley,

one of the top places to study physics in the world.

You know, over the last several years, he developed a world-class reputation for his classes, which he started from bad term, but from ground zero.

He had his imperfections.

You know, he was a narcissist to a big degree,

suffered from bouts of depression.

His man management skills, I think he perfected them at Los Alamos.

Because of the time sensitivity, there was no kind of room for people having hissy fits.

He had been renowned for that in the 1930s when he was giving classes, just belittling students, berating students who couldn't understand what he was writing on the board where it was perfectly clear to him.

But he was pushing the boundaries of nuclear physics.

So what was coming over from the Maude report would have been bread and butter to him.

He would have understood exactly what it meant, where it was going.

And then as Jim said, the Amigres that were now coming across from Britain to America, to the promised land of having their scientific research funded properly and given the facilities that they needed, he was going to lead that.

And Groves, I would say, from what his grandson Richard said to me, Groves saw a bit of himself in Oppenheimer in terms of he could cajole, sometimes bully, work all hours, be driven, see a problem very, very quickly.

So there's countless stories of he would be walking through the labs of Los Alamos and there'd be a team of younger scientists.

You've got to remember the average age of the scientific team he was going to lead was 28.

So these are all guys that have just probably either finished their post-grads or were doing their post-grads and they've been pulled into the Manhattan Project.

He would see these guys ruminating over a blackboard, just being stumped by something.

He'd walk past, come back about 30 seconds later, walk in and it's a cliche, but he did it and then he'd rework what they did and then walk out.

And they're just looking at him, wow, he's just got it.

He was able to problem solve on the hoof countless times.

Would you say without him, this would never have come off?

No, I think it would have happened.

It just wouldn't have probably happened as quick.

If you take either Oppenheimer or Groves out of the picture, especially Groves.

Well, that's really interesting that you say that.

Well, that's just my opinion.

I mean, you know, I've done a lot of research on Groves and the two people that I changed my mind on to a big degree, and I super admire them now, are Groves and Truman.

Yeah, I love Truman, big fans of his.

But with Groves, absolutely, when you think about, I'm surprised the man didn't have a heart attack or a stroke from, I mean, he was, you know, know, five hours sleep a day.

Well, he got it, he got his three score and ten, didn't he?

I mean, you know, despite his lack of sleep and love of chocolate,

but but what is remarkable about this, though, is how fast it all happens because it's at Quebec where you get the formal agreement signed by Churchill Roosevelt that there's going to be cooperation on tube alloys and its relocation to Manhattan Project.

And then Canada comes in on Quebec as well with uranium and heavy water.

But that's not, it's this, this is in 1943.

I mean, we two years later, there's a viable bomb.

It's absolutely incredible.

27 months from a standing start, 27 months.

Yeah, that is unbelievable.

And I think that goes some way to underline why, in the first part of 1945, no one knows whether this is going to happen or not, whether it's going to work.

And, you know, we've said, we've talked a lot about one has to look at the war in Northwest Europe through the prism of the war in the Pacific by 1945 and the threat of what is to come and the invasion of the Japanese home islands and all the rest of it.

And how could you think anything else when a project like this is happening so quickly and when the science is so unknown and when you're in such uncharted territories?

But Rain Ian, you know, for us Brits, we're a part of it, right?

How much did the British contribution play?

Again,

you read the research and the letters and the diaries.

To a degree, it's part, I would say, Churchill dropping the ball in terms of not fully appreciating the potential of nuclear technology because he had so many other issues going on, so many major problems going on

in various parts of the world, knowing how much it was going to cost, knowing the kind of geography you would need to set up this kind of web of massive industry to produce everything you needed.

Britain didn't have it.

There was discussions about they could do more in Canada, but America, especially Groves, put the kibosh on that.

Groves was not a big fan of too much British involvement in the program.

He almost, I suppose you could argue, put up with them to a degree.

But you're right.

I mean, as soon as the fundamental structure of the Manhattan Project's set up, going on from mid-1943 onwards, and then you've got the dual process of the B-29 program is taking shape too.

Is the B-29 begun for the atomic bomb or is it

specifically for that?

In terms of key people in key jobs realising that strategically, if they're planning for a potential war against Japan, then the current fleet of bombers that they had at the time, whether it's the B-17 or the B-24, wouldn't be the kind of plane you would need to then go and strategically bomb Japanese home islands.

So from the late 1930s, they were talking about they needed to develop a better plane.

And that's, you know, Henry Hap Arnold, who's driving that, and he drives that throughout the whole war.

But the B-29 program, to me anyway, runs very much in parallel with the Manhattan Project.

One drives the other.

Yeah.

So the three key project sites, aren't there, to start off with?

Yeah.

So, I mean, if you're going to, you need enriched uranium-235.

I mean, that's what's been driving this.

That's what was in the Maud report.

That's what started the ball rolling in 1938 in that lab in Berlin.

That's gaseous diffusion, which is basically how you get these particles of U235, is you have to put it through a tube where you've got a filter, a microscopic filter on one end, you've got the piston on the other, and you're pressing this gas through that's picking up these microscopic particles of U235.

Very long, very laborious process where you have to go from one stage of enrichment to the next, to the next, to the next, to the next.

Plutonium was far easier, but the uranium production was going to be done in a site called Oak Ridge in Tennessee.

And that's again, that's just the incredible drive and capacity of the Manhattan Project that they're building from scratch these enormous facilities costing millions, if not billions of dollars in today's money.

It's employing tens of thousands of people, most of whom don't know they're working on a nuclear bomb.

That's Groves' genius of compartmentalization.

Yeah.

And again, that's Groves, is it?

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

I mean, that's his policy.

I mean, that's his plan of keeping everything secret.

Obviously, not realizing that Britain's going to send over Klaus Fuchs one day and blab to the Soviets, but that's for another story.

But yes, compartmentalization, you know, if you're dealing with hundreds of factories, labs, engineering sites spread right across the states, employing over 130,000 people, it's a top secret project.

How do you keep it top secret?

They don't know exactly what fundamentally everything they're working towards is going on.

Well, that begs the question.

What do they think they're working on?

There are some stories where foremen would come home and tell their kids, oh, we're working on this new toilet paper.

And they'd bring toilet paper home to show their kids.

There was a myriad of stories about what they thought they were working on.

It's funny how there seems to be an understanding that it was only Oppenheimer's top team that knew they're working on.

atomic bombs.

But there's several instances when you go on the Atomic Heritage Foundation's website and you're reading some of the testimonies that were given in the 1950s and 60s afterwards there are a lot more dozens of the younger scientists that were working on various smaller elements across the whole site of Los Alamos which you know is a city in the deserts 10,000 people live there they knew they figured it out yeah they figured it out so a lot of people knew but Groves is keeping it very watertight and and we'll talk about it later but when Paul Tibbetts is setting up the five or ninth composite group to actually, you know, they're training to drop the bomb.

It's the same thing.

The security and what you're allowed to say and not to say is, again, watertight.

And that's driven by growths.

At Oak Ridge, they're producing uranium-235.

At Hanford in Washington state, they're producing plutonium reactors.

That's got British and Canadian support with raw materials and stuff.

And then Los Alamos is, I think, the famous site.

The one that, again, if people have heard of it.

heard of any of this, they've heard of that.

And that's the, as you say, it's a city.

They build a city and you've got 10,000 people there.

They're there with their families, aren't they?

Yeah, I mean,

it's a city, it's keep the scientists happy because they're under lock and key, they're not, they're not really allowed to get out much for RR.

You're stuck in the north New Mexican desert, uh, you're surrounded by barbed wire, searchlights, MPs, etc., etc.

Uh, but it had everything that you would find.

Probably a really nice place to live in terms of if you're a world-leading scientist or you're an undergrad that's been drawn into the organization, you're working with key people, world leaders, the best equipment, anything you need for your tests you get very quickly usually within 24 hours and it's still essentially to this day isn't it yeah yeah yeah yeah it's an incredible place to go i'd highly recommend anyone uh thinking of going out on a holiday there definitely check it out the trinity test site is it's a great place to visit too but it's only open twice a year because it's still a military test site So they only allow you once at Easter and once in October.

They open it for 24 hours.

But Los Alamos, yeah, I mean, that site Y, top secret where everyone goes.

Tibbets himself would go there many times to talk to Oppenheimer.

We should just explain to everyone who doesn't know who Tibbets is that Tibbets is the pilot of Enola Gay.

Who will come to drop the first two?

Who will come to drop it?

But that's where, that's the weapons laboratory.

So that's the heart.

That's the beating heart of the whole of the Manhattan Project.

Everything across the United States is working towards giving as much knowledge, information, and material to Site Y so they can build the bomb.

Well, I'll tell you what, we'll take a break right now while people book their holidays in Los Alamos.

We'll see you in a tick.

Welcome back to We have Ways of Making You Talk, where Jim and I are talking to Ian McGregor about the atomic bomb.

And I think we've managed to get through this without having to do any physics.

It may yet come for us.

But we touched on it a moment ago that the B29 is a crucial part of this project as much as anything else because you can have a weapon all you like, but you need to deliver it.

As as you said before the the b17 and the b24 aren't up to it in terms of range and ceiling because this is the thing the americans are really really keen on is bombing from the stratosphere out of the way of air defenses so how does this come about because the b-29 comes before the manhattan project doesn't it oh yeah yeah quite a few years i mean they they they'd had it on the drawing board from about 1936 uh that's where they decided that they needed like i said a bigger bomber than the b-17 uh in in terms of taking the fight to Japan, if it ever came to be.

And it's not just that they're thinking of what plane will we develop and build to do that, but what kind of ordnance will we use?

What kind of studies we're going to do on Japanese infrastructure?

I mean, it was all a second web in terms of this is what we need to do to figure out how best to subdue the Japanese before we ever needed to invade them.

Yeah.

And that's where the B-29 comes in.

And I'd argue personally that I don't just mean militarily.

if you look at the social, economic, political benefits as well as the military, then I would say it's probably arguably the most significant military weapon of World War II.

That's amazing.

I mean, it's an interesting project as well, isn't it?

Because they sort of put the cart before the horse, don't they?

They've decided there's going to be an aeroplane and it's going to look like this.

And they're going to build it.

And then once they built it, they're going to figure out if it'll work.

Well, yeah, I mean,

it's going to be the highest altitude bomber there can be.

It's going to be given the world's first air-pressurized cabin, which is completely groundbreaking at the time.

It's taken for granted now, but it's completely new then.

There's a reason why George Lucas used the cockpit of the B-29 for the Millennium Falcon.

I mean, it's that futuristic.

It's like something out of Dandare.

Yeah.

The shape of it, everything.

There's remote-controlled gun turrets as well, aren't there?

Radar, the works.

But the birth of the B-29 is fraught in multiple crashes, lots of deaths.

It loses its first key test pilot and the team that were on board monitoring how the plane was flying.

I suppose it's innovative in every single aspect in terms of the engines it's going to have.

It's going to have fuel-injected engines with reverse propeller thrust.

It's going to have the biggest bomb bays.

To cut a long story short, it's got twice the range of a B-17 and it can fly there twice as fast and it can carry twice the bomb capacity.

Wow.

That doesn't come cheap.

So the B-29 program will exceed the cost of the manhattan project by about half a billion dollars by the end of the war and they only i think that by the end of the war they'd built maybe 4 200 of them this is being driven by the bomber men isn't it yeah the bomber mafia is they're famously called yeah so who after all have a point to prove don't they so this project it has to become sort of too big to fail they need this bomber to hs2 yeah

i was going to say though jim that it's but you're right because hs2 b29 they're both political decisions yeah that's the key thing it's hap arnold is

you know he's i suppose he is the father of the modern-day american air force yeah well he absolutely is because it becomes a u.s air force after the war doesn't it he is the the general groves of the b-29 it's the same kind of character and he doesn't suffer falls he's got a clear vision as has been said about the bomber mafia in terms of it's going to be high altitude bombing that wins wars uh before our troops ever need to get on the ground in to fight it that's the kind of plane i need and it will establish the B-29 is going to establish, help him to set up the United States Air Force.

It won't be just the, you know, the U.S.

Army Air Corps.

And in those terms, shape the Cold War as much as the atomic bomb because it's that kind of plane.

It's the proof of concept of that kind of plane that takes us straight to the B-52.

You know, still with us now with airframes that are 70 years old being recycled.

I mean, it's extraordinary that legacy, isn't it?

The Americans are still the number one bomber force in the world.

Yeah.

They still can bomb anywhere, anything, better than anybody else.

I wrote an article a couple of weeks ago about the connection between Paul Tibbets Jr., who flies the Enola Gay, and his grandson Paul Tibbets IV, who flew the first combat mission of the B-2 stealth bomber.

And they both commanded the same units as well.

Wow.

Well, not 80 years apart, 70 years apart.

So it's like a family business.

Family business, but it shows you that America's at the sharp end of strategic bombing.

I mean, it's just as simple as that.

But the B-29.

It had its military side of things in terms of that's going to be the bomb that's going to just destroy Japan, ultimately.

But equally, it's going to be the plane that we can rejuvenate the American economy, specifically in areas like the Midwest that's completely been shattered by the Great Depression.

And so, like, you know, one of the biggest factories they build is Wichita in Kansas.

That's where the predominantly most of the B-29s are going to be built.

Can I just say, Ian, we did suggest this to the Prime Minister that he might want to look at defense as a means of boosting the economy.

But in terms of innovation, training the next generation in terms of avionics, electrics, everything else, the B-29 delivered that too.

What I found, I didn't know this until I was doing the research, that the Japanese had at least a year's grace in knowing that the Americans were producing some big long-range bomber that was going to attack them.

Say that again.

There's evidence that the Japanese had some intelligence that the Americans were on the case of developing a new bomber.

Because Because obviously it saw its first operations in China.

That's where it was based before they managed to get onto the Marianas Islands to set up the air bases there on Guam, Saipan and Tinian.

By then that's when they're in reach of the Japanese home islands.

But primarily they were first in China.

Tibbets is interesting in this story in that he is the precision bombing expert, leads the first raid in France, doesn't he?

The stratosphere over Japan isn't what anyone's expected at all.

The winds mean it's just impossible to do this kind of pinpoint bombing.

And so come March, Operation Meeting House on the 10th of March, 1945, they abandon all that, don't they?

And bomb low-level with incendiaries from, you know, 1,000, 2,000 feet.

The whole raison d'etre of this pressurized bomber is simply thrown out of the patch, isn't it?

Well, I would argue that that's more of a, that's a bigger moral question to answer than the atomic bomb.

in terms of what that kind of raid would do for the rest of the war across Japan and how many people it would kill.

Try call it's crossing the Rubicon.

It's basically Hap Arnold's got a a commander, Hansel, who believes in high-precision bombing.

You just said it's not working because of the Japanese jet streams playing havoc with navigation and bomb sites.

And he puts in Curtis LeMay, which, if listeners go and Google him and look at his pictures, with his chomping a cigar, looks like a bulldog chewing a wasp.

Much more pragmatic, you could argue, more brutal.

He just wants to get the job done because he knows Hap Arnold will fire him and get the next guy in.

He'll do the job.

And he thinks, right, we're just going to go in low level.

This new incendiary has just come online, napalm.

I'm going to strip the planes back from their armaments, load them up with incendiaries, send them in low level at night, and we're going to tackle Tokyo.

And like you said, Operation Meeting House, the great Tokyo fire rate.

And that's just a prelude of things to come.

And it works.

Kills over 100,000 people, probably kills a lot more than that, but they just don't have the records to show how many people actually were there at the time that died.

But predominantly elderly men, women, and children.

And it works.

So he then sends in a second raid a couple of weeks later that kills 83,000 people.

Yeah, I mean, it is amazing.

You know, 40% of Japan's urban areas destroyed by the end of August 1945.

8.5 million Japanese civilians de-housed, 900,000, best part of a million killed.

And this is before you're dropping an atomic bomb.

Yeah, and I've had, when I've interviewed Japanese professors of history over there, they said the number is probably far higher, but it's because...

a lot of the administration buildings are destroyed.

The only way to tell how many people are living in the city is their rice ration cards.

They're all destroyed.

So they actually don't know to this day how many people actually have been killed.

Could be double that.

They just don't know.

But officially,

they just listed it as about at least 900,000 people are killed.

But it works.

That's the key thing.

And I think that's the bigger moral conundrum because you're doing it again and again and again and again.

And it's not just two atomic bombs.

Well, we should get on to Colonel Paul Tibbetts, shouldn't we?

And the creation of the 509th Composite Group.

You kind of have to admire his combat resume.

You know, enlisted 37, qualified as a pilot 38, specialising in four-engine bombers, went over in that first wave of B-17s that would make up the 8th Air Force in the UK, was on the first raid,

first 100-bomber raid.

Yep.

Was trusted enough in his skills that Major General Clarke handpicked him to fly Eisenhower to Gibraltar.

for a top secret meeting.

For the start of Torch, flying from Bournemouth airport.

I would say that having talked, interviewed his grandson, Paul, the family do think could be even the level of PTSD, you might say.

Because when you read about some of the arguments he was having with senior staff in North Africa by the time he was there at the beginning of 43, it's only Doolittle that saves him and says, you know, I've heard they need a test pilot for the B-29.

You've always been one of the best four-engine pilots I've ever met.

I'm going to...

assign you there before someone court-martials you.

And that's where he went.

So he ended up test flying the B-29 from, I think, late February 1943.

And that's how he gets the gig.

If you're building the world's most futuristic, innovative four-engine long-range bomber, you need the best pilot.

And that's it.

Like Gros got the Manhattan Project, makes logical sense why Tibbets is chosen to run the 509th.

I mean, he's got all the attributes.

But what is it about it that requires such very special skills?

I mean, isn't it just a question of kind of hoisting a bomb beneath you and off you go?

In terms of the actual mission which we'll talk about later yes but in terms of he's got to start from scratch training what he hopes will be an elite set of crews i think it was 15 crews in that were going to be in the squadron it's like trying to get picked for the british and irish lions they're going to be the cream of the cream and then those 15 crews that actually make up

the 509th will then get whittled down to who's going to be the strike crew that's actually going to launch the you know drop the bomb and so they go through for about september october 1944 is when they're formed he takes them to the training base in wendover in utah they are going to be on a mission singularly different to anything they've ever done they're going to be dropping a four and a half thousand kilo bomb on a specific target from about 32 33 000 feet so he's just training them to the nth degree and again i talk about that in detail having looked at a lot of the testimonies of guys that were in that formation.

It's relentless.

And it's not just relentless from the training and being judged after every mission.

It's relentless in terms of, as we talked about site Y for Los Alamos, the security around them.

So they're constantly aware that they've got the FBI, U.S.

military intelligence agents.

in the base, around the base.

If they go on R ⁇ R to the nearest town for some much needed, you know, shut eye, have a drink with their pals, maybe do a bit of gambling.

There's several instances where all they say is, you know, trying to chat up a local girl, maybe over a drink, say, oh, yeah, I'm with the 509th.

That's probably all they say.

They get back to base, they're on a truck going to northwest Canada within about 24 hours because that's the safest place Tibbets knows to put them.

And so there is a turnover.

So you've got the stress of getting ready for combat, the stress of thinking, am I good enough?

And the existential stress of, I just better keep my mouth shut.

And Tibbetts knows it's an atomic weapon, though, because, as you said, he's been going to Los Alamos and he's been talking to Groves and Oppenheimer.

He knows what the bomb is, right?

Yeah, yeah, he's given that information from the get-go.

He's vetted by US intelligence first, and you know, the clichéd line, the mission that you'll go on, you'll be in charge of, could end the war.

And then it's in the next few weeks and months that he's given the information.

And he has, uh, I would say there's a triangle, Groves, Tibbets, and Oppenheimer, There is a very close relationship with all three for various different reasons.

But again, you don't see that in the movie.

You don't see Tibbets anywhere, really.

And that's a shame because, again, Oppenheimer almost had a,

I would say, a big brother relationship with Tibbets because Tibbets understood physics to a degree.

And he obviously understands engineering to a greater degree.

So he wasn't just sitting there blank-eyed.

No.

So Tibbets was able to take on advice the refinements they would have to do to the B-29s he was going to fly in terms of what it would have on board and how they'd modify the bomb bay, how they'd put in a new position in the cockpit for the weaponier that would arm the bomb.

These are all different things that a normal B-29 wouldn't have.

He was in those conversations.

And then when it came to the actual, as we talk about the mission, Oppenheimer, again, was giving him a lot of advice on, well, this is what you need to expect.

This is the kind of maneuvers you're going to have to do to make sure you get out of there alive.

So he would have have that.

And then with Groves,

it was definitely a father-recalcitant-son relationship.

He was often getting admonished, you know, not bringing the crews up to speed in how quickly they were being trained.

Groves, being Groves, is just checking the reports on how successful these tests.

Are they ready?

Yeah.

Yeah.

And then I suppose one of the most famous ones was once Tibbets knows the 509th is ready to go and the bases are ready to take them on Tinian.

They just want to get out there.

It's a big machine conveyor belt that will get them all out there because, you know, his whole formation is over 1,500 men and there's everything to do with, you know, supply,

security, everything.

It takes a long time, not just in flying them out there, but getting most of the others out by ship.

I mean, he only turns 30 in February 1945.

It's absolutely incredible.

He's unbelievably young still.

God.

But he's got, this is what I admire about him.

He's got, you know, excuse my language, he's got the balls to think, right, I am fed up being given excuses by the Boffins at Los Alamos who are constantly on a daily basis modifying the bomb.

And he just knows he's got the code name.

He rings up Washington and just basically gives the code name to say 509 is activated, ready to go.

And that's it.

Once he's done that, it's set in motion.

hasn't told Groves, and this is what I was getting back to about the relationship.

Groves rings him, get here right now.

He has to fly to Washington where Groves absolutely chews him out famously for about half an hour.

Then he sits down almost exhausted and laughs and said, Well, it's got us going.

He wanted the same thing.

He just wanted to be in the circle of trust.

He wanted to be the guy to give that order.

He didn't expect Tibbets to.

But that shows you a 30-year-old with that kind of authority and

character.

Say, right, I just want to get on with it.

He's got the chutzpah that's needed, hasn't he?

Yeah.

But there's a fourth player in this, and that's the new president.

And, you know, Alan and I have talked a lot about Harry Truman this year

and what an enormously impressive individual he is.

And I think one of the things that's so remarkable is when he takes over as president on 12th of April 1945, in the evening of that fateful day, you know, he's only seen Roosevelt in the Flesh twice since inauguration, and he has no idea about the Manhattan Project at all, despite being in charge of the Truman Committee, which is looking into kind of dodgy spending on defense in the Second World War.

So he gets briefed by Henry Stimson and Leslie Groves a few days later.

And, I mean, just imagine how you'd just be thinking, oh my God, you know, I thought this job was going to be bad enough

when I took it on.

I never realized I was going to have this thrown

into my lap as well.

And it's just incredible

how he responds to it.

Ultimately, the decision to drop the bomb is his.

He is the president.

He's a man of deep Christian faith, deep moral righteousness.

and this is one of the biggest moral dilemmas that any man could ever face, whether to use it or not.

He strikes me as at that period in his life when this job's just been dropped in his lap suddenly.

He's quite a lonely figure as well, because

his wife won't move up to the White House.

She wants to stay in Missouri and his daughter's not there either.

So there's quite a few testimonies of him, you know, just wandering around the West Wing at night, just mulling over, you know, God Almighty,

what I've got on my plate.

But I mean, Stimson actually tells him about the bomb the day he starts office.

The first day he starts office, Stimson walks in with, I've got something to tell you, Mr.

President.

This is just my opinion.

I would argue he's an ex-artillery officer that's seen combat in the First World War.

So he knows the power of explosives.

And if he's told by Stimson, one bomb has the equivalent of 15, 20,000 tons of TNT, he must be thinking, you know, biggest explosion in history.

That's incredible.

That could be.

Does he think that's my ace in the hole?

He must know that the war in Europe's almost over.

It's pretty much a done deal.

But he's still looking at immense casualties in the Pacific.

But also, this is changing warfare forever.

You know, once you cross that, I mean, you call it crossing the Rubicon in your book, but it is crossing the Rubicon, from which, you know, the world changes forever the moment that bomb gets dropped.

You know, that's it.

His experience from France, fighting in France, he's seen, he's seen what slaughter on the battlefield's like for a soldier.

So he's thinking, as you're saying, he might be thinking, great, we don't have to go through that again.

It must have not scared him, but intimidated him.

But I don't think he was looking forward to it.

And he's got to go and now sit down with Stalin.

He'll get to meet his hero, Churchill, fantastic.

But he's got to sit down with Stalin.

The Red Army's parked in Central Europe and...

he's got he has to sort the pacific war out and he's got this new ordinance that you know the world has not you know know has never seen before no one else has got it he didn't know at the time you know hindsight's a great thing but at the time he didn't know about radiation gamma radiation poisoning and everything else that comes with it all he's thinking is i've got a bomb that could literally wipe out an army in one fell swoop yeah that's big and i remember listening to a podcast you gave a couple of years ago where you're talking about the fighting in the philippines you look you're looking at the carnage there Yeah, I agree with all of that, but I think he feels the moral responsibility of this very, very, very deeply indeed.

Yeah.

His say-so is going to change the world forever, whichever way you look at it.

A bomb that is so destructive, a single bomb that's that destructive, that comes with a huge moral burden.

And it's a moral burden that he clearly feels very, very keenly.

And I think it requires a huge amount of moral courage as well to go with it.

I think that's a massive, massive, I mean, that's a sort of scale of responsibility that no other man has ever faced.

And the point is, he faces it, you know, and I think that's very much to his credit.

there's a nice anecdote after the war where he gets tibbets in the oval office and he's he's got two of the three key leaders of the manhattan project in there as well it's not it's not that meeting he has with oppenheimer where he says i've got blood on my hands it's a completely different meeting different vibe where he's i suppose he he's he's saying exactly that to these guys he's definitely saying it to tibbets he's saying you know how do you feel about this and tibbets as he has he would say for the rest of his life i followed orders and truman slams his hand down on the table.

He said, damn right, you did.

I'm the one who takes responsibility for this.

I gave you an order and you carried it out.

Anyone that has a problem with you, tell them to come to me.

Yeah, but also the I followed orders line has all sorts of other connotations which emerged from the Second World War.

And, you know, sometimes that's just not good enough.

Again, it's one of the things that it came up in a question the other week is, do I consider Curtis LeMay a war criminal?

And I said, well, you can actually take it from the man's own lips.

He's watching the planes take off from Guam

to go and do Operation Meeting House, bomb Tokyo.

And he says to his chief of staff, if we lost the war, I'll get executed as a war criminal.

You know, he's not stupid, but he's on the winning side.

Yes, and the huge difference of all of this is if your enemies surrender, the bombing stops, which is the crucial kind of difference between that and, you know, what the Nazis are getting up to, et cetera.

The bombs work successfully at the Trinity Test on the 16th of July.

That's the plutonium bomb.

The plutonium bomb, because that's one of the interesting things about this, isn't it?

That's actually a different weapon, isn't it?

Yeah, yeah, completely.

Can you just explain that a little bit, though?

It's destructive, but not as destructive as an atomic bomb.

And that's why you can still have Los Alamos there today.

Yeah, exactly.

So with the Trinity test, they hadn't used plutoniums that, obviously, it's man-made, much messier in terms of the radiation it can give out to.

The kind of bomb that they thought they would need is the implosion bomb, which is what you see to a degree in the movie it's it's how you because again i was saying this in the talk you've got to remember these guys these scientists even though they're the world's best scientists they're still designing atomic bombs with a slide rule and a pencil yeah there's no computers involved to a greater degree the uranium bomb is a is a gun activated device and that's where the british contingent comes in so that's where klaus fuchs is involved in that so where you're firing uh a projectile of u-235 through the tube that will then strike the main section of the u-235 causing fission.

The plutonium bomb was the explosives placed around the plutonium in the center and they're exploding inwards to then cause fission.

Uranium they tested, they knew it worked, they didn't need to do a test, whereas plutonium because it was a new substance that they were dealing with, less safe, that they thought we have to do this on a site where we're a good few miles, I think they're 20 miles away at the end of it, and keeping everyone out of sight.

So that they just didn't know how big this plutonium bomb would explode.

Uranium, they had a good idea because they'd done the maths, but with plutonium, it was an unknown substance.

They thought, right, well, we have to do the test to see how big it was.

And there's a good anecdote from that where Groves admitted that, again, you see it in the movie where all the scientific team are there, they're all excited, they're putting on their welders' goggles, they're lying face down away from the explosion.

They figured out afterwards that where they'd placed themselves was actually four kilometers too close than they should have been.

And even the governor of New Mexico hadn't been informed that they were going to conduct the test.

So Groves had written three different drafts of a letter, depending on what happened, because again, they didn't know.

One was, it's a success, this is fantastic.

Second was to apologize for all the damage that they caused because they had just exploded too much.

Third was obituaries because they'd all been killed.

And he'd actually drafted those and he had them in a say because that's what they just didn't know what they were messing with.

Incredible.

The main focus for the Manhattan Project was the the creation of plutonium from the world's first reactor.

Because after they dropped the first bomb on Hiroshima and then they're going towards Nagasaki, Truman and Groves and the rest of the chiefs of staff, they're having a conversation where Groves at the meeting tells him, well, by October, we'll have 100 plutonium bombs online.

Yeah, well, and which considering using as tactical nuclear weapons if it comes to in the invasion, aren't they?

That they even reached that kind of thinking.

So how are they choosing the targets in?

Because obviously they're bombing the entire Japanese mainland islands, aren't they?

How do they end up choosing the, you know, these cities that are now infamous, I suppose is the right word?

How do they do it?

Well, because again, long-term planning.

You know, they've been planning this for a couple of years.

As much as you're planning and building the atomic bombs, as much as you're planning, developing and building the B-29, you're looking at the bombing campaign that's been happening since 1945 across Japan.

And they're stipulating.

There are certain cities we don't want you really to touch.

You know, one or two bombers might have gone over and dropped a few bombs and there was some damage but predominantly they want to leave intact hiroshima kyoto nagasaki kakura and niigata and that's the and they set up the target committee and so the key players are there henry stimson vannevar bush who's run the scientific program groves there's at least a dozen men on there and tibbetts will be pulled in eventually and they call them really fresh cities and that's because you know they know they're going to win the war They drop these bombs, they can then send in the teams afterwards to the scientific teams, I should say, to do the assessment of well what does one of these bombs do to a completely non-damaged city they're tests as much as anything else well they're guinea pigs are yeah yeah yeah yeah that's what they are they're which is why all the biggies aren't on this because they've already been bombed yeah yeah and that's why on the day of the first attack on hiroshima when they dropped the bomb because they've seen so many single b-29s fly over or at most there's normally two or three the defenders and their local population don't go into mass hysteria because all they're seeing is, you know, they call them the B-SANS, the B-29s.

It's what they normally see.

So on the day of the actual bombing where Tibbets is actually above them in the Enola Gay, no one's panicking.

They just think, well, there's another single B-29.

But across those cities that I've mentioned on the target committees list, that's what they were doing.

They were just assessing, okay, what do they look like?

Let's take as many reconnaissance photos as possible.

Because once we've destroyed it, our science teams can then measure the radiation blast, measure the damage fire does because

the resultant fireballs, how many buildings are destroyed, how many people die in the first half mile radius.

Yeah.

So it's scientific and clinical, isn't it?

And there's a target committee to come up with this, which obviously includes Groves and Oppenheimer, but also includes Major General Lauris Nordstadt, who's a deputy chief of the air staff, Brigadier General Thomas Farrell, who's Groves' Deputy.

Colonel John Lansdell, who's a Manhattan Project Intelligence and Security Man.

You've got Dr.

John von Neumann, who's an implosion expert.

Then you've got a British physicist, Dr.

William Penny, who's big into tube alloys.

And Dr.

Norman Ramsey, who's a, who's another physicist and an advisor on bomb delivery tactics.

That's a pretty broad committee, isn't it?

You'd have to say.

Well, I was going to say, it encompasses politics and the military and the science community.

I mean, they're the three arms that have brought this all together over the last two and a half years.

But primarily, as you said earlier, it's the president's decision, advised by Stimson.

To a degree,

his confidant, Admiral William Leigh, who's never been a big fan of the Manhattan Project, you know, he still gives him advice.

Well, Leigh, yes, he's the one who famously prefers to starve Japan into submission.

Well, Air Force, Navy, into service rivalry.

There's five cities which get shortlisted.

That list is drawn up in May 1945, ahead of the test.

And they're done in order, right?

Order of preference.

Yeah, yeah.

I mean, they discuss them in detail, and that's where you get that debate that apparently happens that Henry Stimson, Secretary of War, says, well, you can't bomb Kyoto because it's the cultural center of the country, which we need intact if we're ever going to rebuild it.

Well, he's honeymooned there, hasn't he?

So he knows it personally.

Yeah, well, again, I researched that a lot.

I couldn't find any link that he's ever said that.

And obviously, they do say it in the movie.

I looked in several archives and there's no mention of it.

Even when I was in the World War II Museum in New Orleans, I couldn't find it.

Sounds nice, but whether he said it or not, I don't know.

Yeah,

they're the ones that are saved, whereas 66 other cities have been reduced to ashes by Curtis LeMay's incendiary campaigns.

66, yeah.

Okay.

And they're the ones that are going to be chosen.

And so when we get to talk about the mission.

Well, and we should say what the five are.

So Hiroshima is the first one.

Kyoto is still on the list, then later removed.

Nagasaki, Kokura, and Niigata.

Yeah.

And even though we, you know, we're obviously going to talk about Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Kokura was actually the top target for the committee.

That was going to be the first one because it was a major, had a major arsenal there and it was a main military depot, more so than Hiroshima.

I mean, Hiroshima was a military hub in the South Island, but Kokura was top of the target list.

It's only cloud cover that saved it.

Incredible.

So 24th of July, 1945, Truman authorizes military use of the bomb as soon as made ready, without further civilian consultation.

Hiroshima is confirmed as the first strike target for special mission number 13.

Why number 13?

Do we know?

Well, I don't know.

I don't know.

Actually, that's a good question.

I don't know that.

I just assume they just plucked 13 out of the air.

Well, we will return for our next episode with Ian.

When special mission number 13 gets underway.

Thanks for listening, everybody.

If you want to listen to these back-to-back, go to our Apple podcast channel and subscribe and then you can get these back to back without any adverts or become a patreon better still where you could do much the same thing plus watch live casts and other bits and pieces of we have ways stuff ian this is this is absolutely fascinating and really really good to hear this properly in detail and not via perhaps the medium of a hollywood movie which i think many many will have done most recently anyway we'll see you again very shortly thanks everyone for listening cheerio cheerio