Hello, Internet.

So, we recently went on a trip to Oregon and Washington. Our purpose there? To learn about the Manhattan Project, and specifically the Hanford Site.

Our final project was to create a video talking about five things about Hanford, based on the format of this video:

We worked in small groups to create our videos, although one of my group members was unfortunately unable to go on the trip.

While we were in Oregon and Washington, we got the chance to have some really edifying firsthand experiences with what we were learning about. Although we weren’t allowed to take pictures, we got to visit the Reed Reactor, a nuclear reactor run by Reed College, and see it almost be powered up– and then not quite work, known as a Scram.

Then we got to a place where could take pictures, not to mention videos and interviews: the actual Hanford Site, now a national park. We got to take a tour about the history of the site pre-Manhattan Project, and we visited the B-Reactor, a full sized nuclear reactor used during the Project.

We got some good footage and some informative interviews with our tour guides, which we were then able to incorporate into our video.

However, not all our preparation for our video happened on our trip. Before we left, we did a couple of minor assignments to acquaint ourselves with what the Manhattan Project actually was.

First of all, we created a newsreel set in the 1940s, talking about the first bomb being dropped on Hiroshima. This newsreel emulated actual newsreels of the day, and was told from a 1940s American perspective.

Second of all, we created a “character card” for a person who was involved with the Manhattan Project. I chose to create mine about Edward Teller, a physicist known as the “father of the Hydrogen Bomb”.

(In case you are unable to read it due to the low image quality, this is what the text on the card says:

 

Edward Teller was a American nuclear physicist, originally from Hungary, best known for his work on the Hydrogen Bomb. In fact, he has been nicknamed the “father of the Hydrogen Bomb”. Teller worked on the Manhattan Project in Los Alamos, starting in 1943. He was present at the Trinity test, where, despite being ordered to lie down with his face away from the bomb site, he and a few other scientists turned to watch the first atomic bomb drop. Years later, Teller got permission from Truman to work on a thermonuclear bomb. He returned to Los Alamos, and he and a mathematician called Stanislaw Ulam developed a Hydrogen Bomb.)

 

Once we had done that, it was time to start doing work for our actual videos. We were sorted into our groups, and we started brainstorming ideas. My group’s original script, giving an overview of the Manhattan Project, looked like this:

 

“August 2nd, 1939:

 

Sir–

 

Some recent work by E. Fermi and L. Sailard, which has been communicated to me in manuscript, leads me to expect that the element uranium may be turned into an important source of energy in the immediate future. Certain aspects of the situation which has arisen seem to call for watchfulness and, if necessary, quick action on the part of the Administration. … This new phenomenon would also lead to the construction of bombs, and it is conceivable– though much less certain –that extremely powerful bombs of a new type may thus be constructed.”

 

– Albert Einstein and Leó Szilárd to President Franklin Roosevelt, 1939.

 

In August of 1939, early on in World War II, a group of scientists, most famously Leó Szilárd, approached Albert Einstein and asked him to sign a letter to the then-president of the United States, Franklin Roosevelt. With this letter, they intended to warn Roosevelt of the technological process of Nazi Germany, and to prompt him to attempt to develop the same technology in the US. The technology they were warning him of was nuclear fission– the ability to release energy by splitting a single atom of uranium, discovered by Enrico Fermi –and potentially, although they didn’t exist at the time, nuclear bombs.

 

Despite the US trying to stay out of the war as much as they could, Roosevelt took the advice of Szilárd and Einstein, and started an operation to build a nuclear weapon. This operation, kept almost entirely secret, was known as the “Manhattan Project”. Although it started with one office in– unsurprisingly –Manhattan, New York, the project would grow into a big enough operation to employ hundreds of thousands of people. Literal entire cities of people, in fact; in the interest of keeping the project secret, the US government actually created new cities in remote locations where their employees, and their respective families if needed, would live. These cities– Los Alamos, Oakridge, and Hanford– are known as the “secret cities of the Manhattan Project”.

 

Secret cities is a rather apt name considering that even the people living in the cities to work on the Manhattan Project didn’t really know what they were doing. All they knew was that they were working on a confidential military operation, and doing their part to contribute to scientific progress, as well as the war effort. For a lot of people, helping the war effort was motivation enough– especially post-1941, the year in which Japan launched its attacks on Pearl Harbour and the US, now two years into the Manhattan Project, officially joined the war.

 

Aside from wanting to do their part, people were motivated by the offer of a steady job with good pay. The entire budget for the project was about 2.2 billion dollars– or, in today’s US dollar, $33,575,000,000,000 (33 billion, five hundred seventy five thousand million dollars). While some of the jobs on the Manhattan Project required a lot of scientific knowhow and prior education, many jobs did not, and people were sometimes recruited as early as directly out of high school.

 

The people were motivated to join, work and innovate all in the name of scientific advancement. The only problem was they didn’t know what they were doing, they didn’t know the end goal, product or idea. Until it was too late. All that scientists knew was there small piece of the puzzle, they didn’t see the whole picture until the news broke of the dropping of the bombs on Japan. Some scientists felt victorious, others felt proud, but some felt the strongest and most painful emotion. Regret. The most famous case is Robert Oppenheimer, who was famously quoted saying: ‘I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad-Gita. Vishnu is trying to persuade the Prince that he should do his duty and to impress him takes on his multi-armed form and says, ‘Now, I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.’ This is the most famous example of regret, but he wasn’t the only one– this feeling was felt amongst scientists and the public.

 

This script is a far cry, however, from what we actually ended up with. After some brainstorming, rethinking, and reconfiguring, we had a new idea, and a new thesis: Many people worked on or were affected by the Hanford Site, whether directly or in a roundabout way, without understanding what was happening or why.

 

This thesis became the backbone of our video, now centred around the people of Hanford, split into five groups: those who were evicted in order for the Hanford Site to be built, workers who didn’t know the true purpose of the project, workers who did know the true purpose of the project, children and families who ended up living on the Hanford Site, and the general public. Our video talks about each of these groups, both generally and with some specific stories we learned about in our research and our travels.

 

 

This was a project that I feel I could have done a lot better on. The final product we came up with was not up to the standards I would like to uphold, and I personally feel that my time management on this project should have been significantly better than it was, and that had it been so our end product could have been improved. If I could do this project again in the future, I think I would try and be more prepared before leaving for the trip, to have helped contribute to the editing more, and to make sure we had multiple copies of our footage saved (especially things like interviews that are irreplaceable) so that we didn’t lose anything.

However, I learned a lot about the Manhattan Project, and I found it a lot more interesting than I had initially expected, especially when we got to actually see th remnants of the town, and the preserved Hanford Site. I’m glad that I went on this trip and did this project, because it encouraged me to have a more open mindset and take an interest in something I would have otherwise written off, and to hear about the lives and perspectives of people that I didn’t really know about before this. As much as there are things that I would change about the way I did this project, I’m still happy with what I’ve taken away from it.

Toodles.