| Chapter 1: | Two Stories |
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appointed J. Robert Oppenheimer as the committee's top theorist. Oppenheimer was a brilliant physicist. He graduated from Harvard University in 1925 and received his doctorate from the University of Göttingen in Germany in 1927. As a theoretical advisor, Oppenheimer provided Compton with estimates of the amount of enriched uranium needed for a viable weapon—the “critical mass.” The army took over the committee's work in the summer of 1942. Oppenheimer became the director of “the Manhattan Project.”
“The Manhattan Project” was the code name for the top-secret military program to develop the world's first nuclear weapon. Even Vice President Harry Truman was unaware of the project's existence. The massive project mobilized the best scientists in the United States and employed about 150,000 people. It offered “cost-plus” contracts, in which the government pledged to absorb all the costs and pay an additional fixed fee to private contractors. The progress in developing atomic bombs proceeded rapidly.
On November 15, 1944, the Allied forces occupied Strasbourg, where several laboratories on atomic research were located. The papers found in Strasbourg (known as the Weizsäcker's papers) revealed that Germany was at least two years behind the United States in the development of atomic weapons. After Germany's surrender, the original justification for initiating the Manhattan Project no longer existed. However, the project did not stop.
The non-existence of a German atomic bomb disturbed American atomic scientists, who had started to develop the atomic bomb on the assumption that Germany might get it first. A conversation between Samuel Goudsmit, the physicist who discovered Weizsäcker's papers, and a liaison officer at the War Department illustrated the discrepancy between a scientist's conscience and a military mindset.