The development of the first atomic bomb was an astonishingly well-kept secret. A dead hush was maintained even as the American project grew to an enormous scale — eventually including more than a hundred thousand people and a cumulative budget of $2 billion. By 1943 the Oak Ridge, Tennessee processing facility — containing what was then the largest building in the world — was fully operational; the Hanford, Washington complex — employing as many people as the nation’s automobile industry — was also running; and the Los Alamos Laboratory in New Mexico was assembling one of the greatest concentrations of scientific genius ever to meet in one physical space. But very few outside these facilities knew what was going on inside, even at the highest levels of government.
It wasn’t until April 12, 1945, the day President Franklin Roosevelt died of a massive stroke, that newly sworn-in Harry Truman learned of the Manhattan Project and the intention to develop an atomic bomb. Less than four months later, he made the final decision to drop Little Boy and Fat Man on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
In an instant, the atomic bomb went from the biggest, best-kept secret in U.S. military history to the subject of intense public fascination, of countless articles, essays, and news reports. The potential for peaceful uses of atomic power — the idea that atoms could power cars, electric plants, and submarines — absorbed the attention of creative writers, filmmakers, and artists as well as engineers and scientists, although no scientific methods for such uses had been developed by the war’s end. In 1946, President Truman established the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), the civilian successor to the Manhattan Project, to pursue their development.
But while the fact of nuclear fission had become common knowledge, the logistics were still fiercely guarded as the country entered the Cold War nuclear arms race. The 1946 law that established the AEC also banned, in a highly unusual restriction on the freedom of speech, the dissemination of any technical information about atomic weapons, even to allies; violation of the ban could be “punished by death or imprisonment for life.”
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