From the series Atom and industrialisation of science
“The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honoured and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage labourers” [Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto).
The Manhattan Project scientists
In Brighter Than a Thousand Suns: A Personal History of the Atomic Scientists, Robert Jungk [1913-1994] writes that the Manhattan Project was a labyrinth of winding paths and dead ends.
Commenting on Jungk’s romanticised account of the first phase of the history of the atomic bomb, Edward Teller [1908-2003], often called the “father” of the H-bomb, wrote: “There is no mention of the futile efforts of the scientists in 1939 to awaken the interest of the military authorities in the atomic bomb. The reader does not learn about the dismay of scientists faced with the necessity of planned research. He does not find out about the indignation of engineers asked to believe in the theory and on such an airy basis to construct a plant”. Teller highlights the resistance of the engineers to accepting theories, incomprehensible to them at the time, of quantum and relativistic physics and the unease of the scientists in accepting the military-industrial management of what was a giant process of industrialisation and militarisation of science.
From August 13, 1942, the date of the project’s inception, atomic scientists were defined simply as “scientific personnel”, lost their privileged position, and had to submit to the strict rules of military secrecy. Jungk writes that never before had a host of such brilliant minds been subjected to the yoke of a way of working and living so foreign to their habits. That they could not publish their work until the end of the war was a natural consequence of this regimen. In order to prevent information on nuclear fission and chain reaction being passed on to German scientists, British and American scientists led by Leó Szilárd [1898-1964] — many of whom were of Jewish heritage — were the first to recommend secrecy, even before the outbreak of war. But the military authorities went even further they erected a kind of invisible wall around each area of research, so that no area knew what the others were working on.
Militarisation of the Manhattan Project
The war inevitably militarised the Manhattan Project. “Compartmentalisation” was introduced which isolated the different groups of scientists. Barely a dozen, out of all the hundreds of thousands of people who were employed on the project in one way or another, could have a comprehensive view of the whole complex. Only a tiny fraction of the staff knew that they were working on an atomic bomb; the vast majority of the employees at the Los Alamos computing facility had no inkling of the real purpose of the complex calculations they performed with their computing machines. The secrecy was such that Vice President Harry Truman himself did not learn about the Manhattan Project until April 25, 1945, after the death of President Franklin D. Roosevelt on the 12th of that month. When an exchange of views between people working in different fields was absolutely essential, special permission had to be obtained from the military administration.
This “compartmentalisation” was regulated by decrees, even though the military and the anti-espionage agencies had already, by means of police investigations, interrogations and questionnaires, obtained the broadest possible guarantees on the private and political background of the scientists, as well as on their individual character, and monitored their every step with a surveillance system that was studied down to the smallest detail. Those who lived in Chicago or in one of the three secret cities built from the ground up in 1943 — Oak Ridge, Hanford and Los Alamos — were subject to censorship of all mail they received or sent. Telephone conversations were constantly monitored, and hotel doormen were counter-espionage agents. The most important atomic scientists had their own bodyguards, who accompanied them everywhere. Those who were not trusted one hundred per cent were watched even more intensely. Secret agents followed their every step without their knowledge and microphones were hidden in their offices.
The man who ruled over the Manhattan Project was General Leslie Richard Groves [1896-1970]. He was 46 years old when he was put in charge of the project on September 17th, 1942. Immediately, inevitable conflicts arose between the scientists and the military management, particularly between Groves and Szilárd, the Hungarian Jewish physicist who conceived the nuclear chain reaction in 1933 and patented the idea in 1936. The letter of August 20, 1939 to President Roosevelt initiating American involvement in the construction of the atomic bomb was written by him and was also signed by Albert Einstein. For Groves, “we should never have had an atom bomb if Szilárd had not shown such determination during the first years of the war. But as soon as we got going, so far as I was concerned he might just as well have walked the plank!".
It was particularly difficult for the Danish physicist Niels Bohr [1885-1962] to keep to the rules of secrecy. After fleeing Denmark, he was no longer treated as a human being, but as a valuable secret weapon, which in no way could be allowed to fall into the hands of the enemy. Jungk relates that in the “Mosquito” plane that carried him across the North Sea, Bohr was placed on the edge of the hatch from which bombs were dropped, so that he could be dropped into the sea in the event of a German attack. When he arrived in New York together with his son Aage, two British secret service officials stuck to his heels, and he was also followed by two FBI agents.
The fear of the German atomic bomb
In his 1979 book Scientists in Power, Spencer R. Weart [born 1942], director of the Centre for History of Physics at the American Institute of Physics (AIP) from 1971 until his retirement in 2009, describes the conflict between atomic scientists and the chemical company DuPont. Numerous scientists at the University of Chicago’s Metallurgical Laboratory (or Met Lab), which was founded in February 1942, were outraged when, in June 1942, the military authorities decided to give the large industrial company the responsibility for running the Laboratory as part of the Manhattan Project.
Weart speaks of an attitude of revolt on the part of the scientists in Chicago, who were convinced that the work would not proceed satisfactorily if they were not given control over the project instead of bureaucrats, military or engineers who knew nothing about nuclear physics. This conflict between scientists and engineers represents a phase in the historical process of development of capitalism and affects most sectors: the expropriation of autonomous artisan labour and its subordination to capital in the form of wage labour.
The Chicago scientists’ protest was kept at bay by their fear that Germany would win the race for the atomic bomb. Although the international community of nuclear scientists had splintered according to adherence to the nationalism of their respective country’, all the world’s atomic scientists knew each other personally and had often been on friendly terms, as was the case of Bohr and Werner Heisenberg [1901-1976].
The Chicago physicists knew that what they were doing could certainly be achieved by German physicists. They calculated that Germany could potentially produce heavy water from 1943 and drop a nuclear bomb, or at least a cloud of deadly radioactive material, on London at the end of the same year. The “Battle of Britain”, the historical name for the air war fought in the British skies between the summer and autumn of 1940, had shown that German planes could reach as far as Liverpool, some 550 km north of the coast of continental Europe, and that they could bomb the cities of London, Birmingham, and Manchester. A German atomic bomb could destroy or even just contaminate Britain’s industrial heartland. The fear of a German bomb was real and pushed the British in the direction of building one ahead of the Americans.
The subjugation of scientists
Eventually, the scientists’ relationship with the DuPont company became cooperative in principle, although challenging in practice. As one immigrant physicist pointed out, a large industry needs a rigid organisation and well-defined tasks, whereas the scientist is “an individualist, who chose his profession [...] because he values his academic freedom more than a high salary”.
The industrialisation of science subjected scientists to factory discipline. The engineers at DuPont were under the impression that the scientists did not realise the extent of the work and facilities required for a great undertaking such as the construction of nuclear reactors. The scientists, for their part, were under the impression that they were being unfairly supplanted by people who knew nothing about nuclear physics and, in their opinion, would endanger the project and turn the laboratory into a mere branch of the chemicals group. DuPont was suspected of attempting to monopolise nuclear development in order to obtain profits after the war.
The atomic scientists quickly realised that they were no longer holding the levers of power, particularly since the Met Lab was no longer at the centre of the project and they had no means of imposing their ideas. Scientists who had been at the forefront of the relativistic and quantum physics revolution of the first three decades of the 20th century not only found themselves without a voice but also fell under military control. For many of them it was a psychological trauma.
Szilárd also posed the problem of intellectual property, namely of patents. The military demanded that all rights to chain reaction-based inventions be sold to the US government. When Szilárd refused, Groves ordered that he be excluded from the work until the issue was resolved. Throughout 1943, he was out of work until he sold the patents for a token sum. Other colleagues of his who considered patenting their ideas had a similar experience.
Most of the scientists in question had an idealistic conception of science: for them, the search for scientific truth transcended frontiers, and science would automatically lead mankind towards a more just society and guaranteed prosperity. They judged science as a field above politics. The Manhattan Project, Hiroshima and Nagasaki put an end to their illusions.
When they started working on the nuclear weapon, scientists felt no contradiction because they were motivated by the mobilisation against Nazism. In May 1945, the defeat of Germany made some scientists change their mind: the Manhattan Project which had been born out of fear of the German atomic bomb had now lost its meaning. For them, the conflict between physicists, engineers and the military over control of the project turned into a moral problem. The more far-sighted realised that the use of the atomic bomb against Japan would provoke a nuclear race with other countries when the war was over. They were not listened to. Powerful in dominating the forces of nature with their science, they were powerless against political power.
Lotta Comunista, June 2024