Y-12 Plant Turns Sixty

GMontag writes "The Einstein icon seems quite appropriate for this story: The Y-12 Electromagnetic Separation Plant, in Oak Ridge, TN, turns 60 today." The linked Knoxville News Sentinel story begins "On a cold February morning 60 years ago (Feb. 18, 1943), ground was broken in rural East Tennessee for the first production building at the Y-12 Electromagnetic Separation Plant. The plant's job was to make enough enriched uranium for a new kind of bomb, an atomic bomb. In a short time Bear Creek Valley, where the plant is located, was filled with machinery and round-the-clock bustle of people on a mission. At its peak in 1945 more than 22,000 workers were employed at the site in Oak Ridge." I've been meaning to get out to Oak Ridge to see if their museum's gotten better in the past 20 years.

Comments

Museum

[GMontag]

I've been meaning to get out to Oak Ridge to see if their museum's gotten better in the past 20 years.

I took my son there a little over 10 years ago, it seemed to be a bit improved from what it was over 20 yrs ago.

Dr. Johnson(sp?), one of my history instructors at UT wrote a book about OR, "City Behind the Fence" IIRC. Seemed very interesting and he was an excellent teacher. May be worth a browse if you can find it.

Re:Einstein

[kmellis]

I don't see the conflict between what I wrote and the account in your link. I compressed in my memory and thus my post the two meetings: the first Wigner and Szilard, the second Teller and Szilard; and I emphasized the important detail that Einstein didn't completely write even the first version of the letter that Szilard then translated and edited into two versions: long and short.

If you read the page you linked to carefully, you'll see that this is the sequence:

On July 12, 1939, Szilard and Wigner meet with Einstein in Peconic, Einstein dictates to Wigner (in German) a letter to the Belgian ambassador.

Shortly thereafter, Szilard met with Alexander Sachs, an unofficial adviser to the President. He agreed to carry a letter from Einstein to FDR, if Szilard could get one.

Szilard wrote a four-page draft version of this letter, and mailed it to Einstein.

Einstein asked to meet again with Szilard in person to discuss the letter, and so on July 30, 1939--this time with Edward Teller as chauffeur--Szilard travels out to Peconic a second time.

Einstein felt that Szilard's version was too long and technical for the President, and dictated (again, in German) a shorter version to Szilard.

Szilard spent a few days translating Einstein's letter into English, and even produced an even more shortened version. He took both to Einstein; Einstein signed both but preffered the longer of the two.

Szilard gave the longer letter to Sachs to take to FDR.

Sachs was not able to meet with FDR until October 11, 1939.

Here is one summary account of that meeting (an account which corresponds with my memory of its description in Rhodes's book--probably the source for this one):

" When Sachs met with the president, he spent the better part of an hour going through the physics involved in splitting the atom, then handed Roosevelt the Einstein letter with a cover note from Szilard. Unfortunately, after an hour Roosevelt was losing interest and questioned whether further costly research was appropriate for government funding. The audience was clearly at an end, but FDR invited Sachs to return the next morning for breakfast.

Imagine the night Sachs spent at the Carlton Hotel on Oct. 11! He had that afternoon failed to engage Roosevelt's interest in a project that he and Szilard and Einstein felt was essential if Hitler was not to win the war and conquer the world. He knew he had one more shot to convince FDR that the government should fund the research, or all of Szilard's work and the effect of the Einstein letter would go down the drain. Hitler would have an atomic bomb, and there would be no one with the wherewithal to contest the Nazis. And now it all came down to his breakfast meeting with Roosevelt.

The next morning, Sachs took a different tack, as Roosevelt asked him, "What bright idea do you have this morning?"

Sachs reminded Roosevelt of Napoleon's foolish refusal to underwrite Robert Fulton's experimental submarine, an invention that might have won the battle of Trafalgar for the French if Napoleon had had more faith in it. He also quoted the scientist Francis Aston's concern that a device powered by subatomic energy might allow one nation's leader to blow up his neighbor. "Alex," Roosevelt responded, "what you are after is to see that the Nazis don't blow us up."

"Precisely," Sachs responded.

That turned out to be enough. By 1945 the government was to spend $2 billion building the bomb. After 1945 most of the scientists involved (especially Leo Szilard) were to spend the rest of their lives trying to get the genie back into the bottle.

So, none of this was Einstein's initiative. Szilard wrote the first version of the letter that Einstein was to send to FDR. Einstein rewrote it by dictating a new version of Szilard; then Szilard himself translated that into two versions which he took back to Einstein to sign. Sachs met with the President, but didn't present Einstein's letter until the end of the meeting, by then FDR was bored and not paying attention. Sachs met with FDR again the next day, this time convincing FDR to support an atomic program. There's not much evidence that Einstein's letter was particularly influential in this discussion. All evidence indicates that it was Sachs himself was who was persuasive. And, even then, the initial support was still very tepid.

In retrospect, I shouldn't have posted a simple "Why?" in response to the story, since doing so was a little bit coy and sort of an entrapment. But I partly did it because I was trying to be cautious about assuming why people so strongly associate Einstein with the bomb. Some people, for example, argue that he's in some sense the "father" of the bomb because of "e=mc^2".

But I've always thought that his importance to the development of the bomb was greatly overestimated in popular imagination. I imagine that a lot of people, uninformed about physics, just assume that the greatest physicist they're familiar with must be responsible in some way for the bomb. Others that are more knowledgable probably believe that he was intimately familiar with the work on atomic theory and the possibility of the bomb and took it upon himself to write FDR that letter and thus made the whole thing happen with his enormous influence. But that's not the way that it happened.

There are a few people that really were crucial to getting the ball rolling. The first and foremost is Szilard, who, if anyone, is the appropriate person to have his photo associated with this story. The two civilians are probably Vannevar Bush and James Conant (and possibly Sachs for his one crucial meeting with FDR). The former three worked tirelessly for years trying to get the US involved in atomic research, and then were instrumental after it began.