United states detonated the First Nuclear weapon in history followed by a second detonation august 9th over the city of nagasaki. Six days later, japan surrendered, bringing an end to the second world war. I have received this afternoon a message from the japanese government on august 11th. I deem this reply a full acceptance of the declaration where it specifies the surrender of japan. Well share stories of the people who contributed to this worldaltering event. We begin in new orleans at the National World war ii museum. Were here today in the road to tokyo exhibit. Its going to take us the war in the pacific and asia from 1941 to 1995. Its how quickly the turning point came in it. The bombing of pearl harbor was december of 1941. And six months later, the battle of midway was fought. And the u. S. Dive bombers destroyed no fewer than four japanese aircraft carriers. That was a major portion of japans naval strength. Whatever chance japan had at winning the war disappeared in june of 1942. That early into the war, from what we might say the humiliation and pain of pearl harbor to the victory at midway, six months. Its a big ocean, but thats a brief time. The war would go on for another three years until august of 1945. I think most Japanese Naval officers in particular realized that the war was probably lost after midway. But they had taken this gamble to launch a war on the United States, a country whose economy was ten times the size of their own. And really what was there to do now this early on into the war but simply to hang tough and hope for some kind of miracle. And i think thats what japanese officers were doing. It was often couched in terms of loyalty to the emperor. But i think it was more about the culture of the japanese officer corps. They saw no way out other than to hang tough. Maybe the americans would tire of the struggle, maybe we, japanese, could take such a toll of u. S. Casualties that an american president would be forced to end the war. But of course that was never to be. Clearly the Japanese Military power was broken but on individual islands they could defend. Studies were done, causality estimates. They were out of the ballpark in the hundreds of thousands. Unbeknownst to most of those who were predicting the casualties, a Top Secret Military program had been going on for some time in the United States, a research and Development Program of a sort that had never been seen before. And it was the inif he thinvent atomic weaponry, the Manhattan Project. The father of the atomic bomb, under his leadership, he directed noble prize winning scientists, engineers, military personnel, and the civilians who worked on the atomic bomb project. In 1932, german physicists working in berlin bombarded this lump of material called uranium and they got a curious result. It released a lot of heat and then it created a different element, an element that was farther down on the element table. The word about this spread through the Nuclear Physics world like a forest fire that scientists had split the atom and it was scientists working in nazi german, england was working on their own splitting of the atom and harnessing that into a military weapon. But it wasnt until after pearl harbor that the Manhattan Project was created and a lot of resources under the control of the army corps of engineer was devoted to create this weapon. He had just finished building the pentagon. Groves talked to different Physics Departments and asked people who would be a good leader and oppenheimer probably was not high on the list. Actually, oppenheimer had not even been in charge of his Physics Department at berkeley before he was chosen to be the head of the central laboratory. There was something about opi that grooves liked. Groves saw that he was hungry. Groves wanted somebody who was hungrier and would maybe work a little bit harder. And also on a train trip across the country, oppi was able to describe to groves what was needed to be done in terms that groves and a layman could understand. Groves picked oppi. You couldnt have the laboratory in chicago. What happens if an accident happened . Or also it would be easy to breach the security. Youre walking down a street involved in it, a colleague who wasnt involved came up and said, hey, what you doing . There would be an easy way to break top secrecy on that. So they look around. They picked some places in the west. Oppi had come to new mexico to recover from an illness when he was 18 years old and had fallen in love with new mexico. At one point he said that he wished he could marry the two loves of his life, physics and new mexico. Of course thats before he got married. I just want to be clear about that. And this was an opportunity for him to do that. So he showed groves some places around new mexico and they settled on this boys school and so after that was chosen in november of 1942, oppi started recruiting people. He couldnt tell them what he was doing. He said, you know, i would like you to join me on this project but i cant really tell you what youre going to be doing. Youre going to be in a beautiful place and its going to be essential for the war effort. People who knew oppi, they knew the work that was being done in germany and something that was going to be important. A lot of people did sign on. They were given an address in santa fe to report to. They went to that palace address right near the plaza and told, youre not quite there. Heres your temporary security pass to get into loss al moes. They got in there. Scientists assembled in march of 1943. They decided that there were they needed to do multiple ways of trying to make this weapon. And part of the problem was the nuclear material, the uranium or plutonium, it was minimum kuscu. Plutonium is totally man made. A reactor was created to manufacture this plutonium. Uranium is naturally made, but the part thats used for bombs, its only about 1 of what occurs in nature. So how do you refine that out . How do you extract that 1 out. Thats why the Big Industrial complex at oak ridge was made, to kind of separate this isotope of uranium from the rest of it and assemble it in a big enough quantity that it could be used for a bomb. Oak Ridge National laboratory is a Major Research institution and oak Ridge National lab has been around since right after the second world war. This was set up originally in 1943 as clinton laboratories. Didnt have the name oak ridge at the time. And the purpose of clinton laboratories was to learn how to produce plutonium which was a radioactive element that could split and release fast amounts of energy just like some forms of uranium can. But they didnt know much about plutonium. It was an artificial element. Had to be created by man. And they knew nothing about the characteristics of plutonium. Building started in february of 1943. This facility, the graphite reactor as we know it today, was started in the bring of 1943, completed by november of 1943, and came on line as the worlds first operating nuclear reactor. In this case, used specifically to produce tiny, tiny amounts of plutonium which were recovered and then shipped up to the Metallurgical Laboratory which was part of the Manhattan Project in chicago so they could be characterized up there and other bits of plutonium that were produced here were shipped out to Los Alamos Laboratory where the bombs were designed and built by Robert Oppenheimer and other famous citizphysicist tested in new mexico. The purpose of oak Ridge National laboratory was originally to serve as a test reactor which is where we are right now to produce trace amounts of plutonium for a nuclear weapon. And they realized i say they. The government realized fairly quickly that oak ridge and east tennessee were not the places to produce vast amounts of plutonium for a weapon. Plutonium is a highly toxic element. Its very, very dangerous if not handled properly, and east tennessee was not the place to produce large amounts of plutonium. This reactor here was designed simply to learn how to produce plutonium, not to produce large amounts of it. Eventually after a year or two, they actually began to produce some enriched uranium over at y12 and that enriched uranium was carried out of here in a handbag on the train. It went out to los alamos. Something carrying it likewise and small amounts of plutonium were shipped up to chicago where they could characterize it. Everything was coming in, train loads and train loads, but nothing as far as anybody could tell ever going out. But it was a very ultra secret undertaking. And no one knew what was knew wt was going on except the manages until the bombs were dropped on hiroshima and nagasaki in japan in august of 1945. Recruitment was very challenging at times because they couldnt say a lot about what the end goal of the project was. You had some one of the woman i profiled in my book was recruited literally out of the halls of her high school during her senior year. I interviewed other women who were recruited out of college. I talked to a woman who was recruit out of a diner where she was working. They went all over the place looking for smart, capable young women who followed instructions very well, who were very capable of following instructions. They also had to recruit a lot of men and construction wise, turnover was a very big challenge. They did not want to have a lot of turnover because that slowed production, that slowed the construction rate, so i mean, they just scoured everywhere getting as many people as they can. From a military standpoint certain soldiers who had a background in, say, engineering or science, might be literally taken right out of line as they were getting ready to board a ship to go overseas because they had a certain skill set and redirected to oak ridge or one of the other sites. They were drilling down as much as they could. A couple of my women literally right out of high school. If you had a Nobel Prize Winning scientist, he might live in one of the in one of the two or three bedroom houses that had been built depending on housing was assigned depending on how many children you had, things of that nature. They might actually have a lovely house, standalone house. A 19, 20yearold young woman who was recruited out of high school or say a 22yearold woman recruited out of college would probably live in one of the dorms. There were dormitories and cafeterias and dances and many ways quite similar to college and she would have a roommate and pay rent for her dorm. If you were africanamerican you were living in the huntman area. These were 16 foot by 16 foot mostly plywood structures that you might share with three to four other people. In the case of katy, the africanamerican woman i pro filed, because oak ridge was completely segregated and facilities segregated the kinds of jobs she was allowed to have were limited. She was not aloud to live with her husband or bring her children with her. I said what made you decide to do this. This is an incredibly trying situation youre going through. The pay i was getting was more than double the best i had ever been offered back in auburn, alabama. For her and her husband, it was definitely an economic motivation to endure what they were enduring at oak ridge as africanamericans. There was a real need for bodies to was fueling this. Thats underlying all of this. Confidence, just sort of absolute competence. What went into organizing the Manhattan Project was something they referred to often as a xarts meantibility. In other words, you dont need to know anything more than what you need to know to perform your job as well as you possibly can. Okay. You might be sitting next to somebody who has a different job than you do. You dont know what they know. They dont know what you know. You two dont know what this other guy knows. You all know the minimum you need to perform your job and thats it. So, for example, some of these women were operating electromagnetic separation calu trons. This involved operating knobs and dials to keep a specific needle within a certain range to get very basic. When they would talk to me this is exactly how they were trained. The needle goes this way, turn the knob this way. If this sparking happens, you know, call the supervisor. That was it. They didnt know what the machines were for. They didnt know what the end project the end product of the project was. They just knew everything they needed to know to be able to perform their specific task. That was something that was throughout the Manhattan Project. You were only given enough information to do what you needed to do to the best of your ability. There was a level of most of the people i mean this obviously varied from person to person. Most people had a certain level of curiosity, but it was also drilled into them if you got too curious and asked too many questions you could lose your job. People didnt get too curious that often. Some people did. Many people i interviewed saw people get physically taken out of work in the middle of the day with zero explanation and never saw them again. So, you know, there was this idea that im not supposed to ask any questions so im not going to ask any questions. There was also a fair amount of what i might call selfcensorship that happened. Everybody was told this was a very important project for the war. That is something they were told. They werent told what the project was, but they said it was very important to the war effort and it was important that they didnt talk about what they did. Pretty much, i mean if youve ever talked to people who lived through world war ii, everybody knew somebody who was away fighting. Most people knew someone who had died. The idea that they were supposed to if they were told they were not supposed to talk about things because that was good for the war effort that was enough for a lot of people. So there was thats what i mean when i talk about the selfcensorship. Nobody wanted to be the person who inadvertently or accidentally caused a problem with the war effort or let out a piece of effort even though they didnt know what it meant. Nobody wanted to be that person who actually, you know, caused a problem for what they were trying to accomplish. September 1940, glen Martin Company was commissioned to build a plant specifically. By june of 1942, the plant was in full production. That production continued with the b26 martin rodder. The Plant Construction built over 1500 of these medium sized bombers to help contribute to the war effort and all theaters of the war. It was then after that that Production Assembly for the b29 was then put into place. How this fits into ill say the war history the b29 became the iconic bomber of war in the pacific. Designed to carry more destruction and carry it higher, faster and farther than any bomber before, the b29s have artillery pointed at the heart of japan. Those particular airplanes were manufactured at the martin, nebraska, bomber plant where colonel tibbetts came and chose his bomber that would be named after his mother to become the first b26 first aircraft to drop an atomic bomb. Were at the National Museum of the u. S. Air forces air power gallery at the tail end of the world war ii story. The first thing were going to look at is mark 3 atomic weapon widely known as a fat man atomic bomb. The reason this is significant is because it is a sign or signal of the beginning of the atomic age, the end of world war ii and its a marker of the supremacy of American Military and scientific and Industrial Power at midcentury and the end of world war ii. The reason its called fat man is obvious. Its a big, round bomb. Its shape is mainly because of its method. Its round because its a socalled implosion weapon. Theres a sphere of explosives that compress a smaller sphere of fissile material to create the Chain Reaction that releases Tremendous Energy resulting in an atomic explosion. The weapon that we have on display is real. It is a mark 3 atomic weapon. It has been restored to look like the fat man bomb that was dropped on august 9th, 1945. This was one of many mark 3s that were manufactured after the war and up until about 1949. They were withdrawn from service in 1950. This was an iteration of that first design used during the war and, of course, Nuclear Weapons design progressed very quickly after the war and so this was obsolete within only a couple of years after it was designed and built. Thereafter, the shape just was stored. It was displayed for the first time in a museum in 1965 and we restored it in 2005 so that it looked like the fat man that was used at the end of world war ii. The lettering on the front is a curiosity. We think it stands for joint army navy combined foul up. These guys that put these things together were young men doing a tough job and a lot of times youll see nose art with words and pictures and so on that, you know, are kind of nonstandard and i guess you could say this is one of them. Of course the other little stencil, fm, inside the bomb shape, is obviously fat man. So the stuff above it is about army, navy, cooperation to get a tough job done and done well. Here at the museum we want people to think about what happened at hiroshima, nagasaki, and why. After all, 80,000 lives were snuffed out in a millisecond. On august 6th an atomic bomb was detonated over hiroshima. Three days later a second atomic bomb of a different mechanical type detonated over nagasaki. We have the flight record and the watch of colonel Paul Tibbetts jr. , the pilot, dropped the bomb on hiroshima. We have here the logbook. Captain robert lewis, the copilot, so the primitive computer of the day, which is a way of computing an aircraft true air speed, which is essential, of course, to flight and to bombing. As we walk over here, we have examples of glass bottles that were taken from the wreckage of nagasaki. You can see the intense heat literally melting glass not so far from ground zero. Nagasaki was not the original target of bomb number two. Another city had been chosen but the cloud cover was too difficult to drop the bomb on it and the mission was changed to nagasaki and i often think of ive been saying this to students for 30 years as a universal professor the unluckiest city on earth by nothing more than an accident of weather and a bit of chance nagasaki received the second atomic bombing. Battle ship missouri, 53,000 ton of the third fleet becomes the scene of an unforgettable ceremony marking the complete and formal surrender of japan. In the bay of tokyo itself the United States destroyer buchanan comes aside bringing representatives of the applied powers to witness the capitulation. General mcarthur, supreme allied commander. Commander and Admiral Halsey welcome mccarthy and his chief of staff aboard. The admiral escorts to the deck where the 20 minute ceremony to take place. It is sunday, september 2nd, 1945. Right now we are on the o 1 level of the battle ship missouri, but thanks to the events of september 2nd, 1945 we call this the surrender deck. This is where the japanese signed the surrender ending world war ii. This behind me here is where the table sat that day. The ship looked different. Big difference the shady canopy overhead was not installed and the tourette behind me was rotated 30 degrees to starboard to make more room for all the officials that would be on board. If you looked around above us that day you would have seen thousands of the members of the missouri crew hanging on to anything they could trying to get a glimpse of what was about to occur on this deck. At 9 00 in the morning when the ceremony was supposed to start members of the japanese delegation were making their way on board. There were 11 and made their way up the ladder behind me and at 9 02 in the morning general mcarthur, nimitz and halsey descended from above to start the ceremony. After a few opening words the first person to sign the surrender documents would have been mr. Shigmitsu. The next person general mays signing on behalf of the Japanese Military. The third person to sign those documents was general Douglas Mcarthur and signed a supreme allied commander. He did not represent the United States. That would be the fourth person to sign, admiral nimitz. Following, the rest of the allies signed in order, china, great britain, netherlands, new zealand in turn. There are two copies of the documents and two copies because one was to be kept by the United States and one was to be kept by japan. We do not display the originals for obvious reasons. We have replicas on board. The originals are in the National Archives in washington, d. C. , and a war museum in tokyo. We have a replica of one of mcarthurs pens. He used six to sign the documents, which sounds strange. Only had to sign twice but he chose to use six pegs for douglas, mac, arthur on the second document for a very simple reason and one that we actually still do today if you look at lawmakers when they sign important laws. What he wanted to do afterwards was to give the pens away as souvenirs following the last signature he stepped up to the microphone and said these proceedings are closed. He gave a signal and above the missouri over 1,000 al lied aircraft flew in formation. From the beginning to the end at 9 25, 23 minutes, thats all it took to end the bloodiest conflict in human history. At the end the war, the United States would emerge as the worlds First Nuclear power. Soon afterward, the soviet union would join the arms race which led to a protracteded cold war with each country adding to their nuclear arsenals. In the United States testing of these weapons would take place at a site just outside of las vegas. The National Atomic Testing Museum shares how the atomic age, which began on august 6th, 1945, would capture the imagination of americans. The museum focuses on atomic testing over a period from the earl 1950s through 1992 and to me the interesting story occurs after world war ii in between that time of the development of the cold war and there was quite a question of what to do with Nuclear Weapons. President truman worked hard to develop some sort of International Control or consensus over Nuclear Weapons, but he was dismayed at that pretty early on. What truman did, he assured that the department of defense was not in charge of Nuclear Weapons. He established the Atomic Energy commission, which is actually a civilian organization and they were always the ones in charge of Nuclear Weapons. This is a big surprise to people. The military in those early days actually couldnt get their hands on the Nuclear Weapons and when there were tests of Nuclear Weapons that was overseen by the Atomic Energy commission, not the military. The test site was established in 1951. There was no stateside testing after world war ii. The first atomic bomb was exploded in the trinity site in new mexico, but all the tests after the war were done in the pacific which was a big logistical nightmare. It cost thousands to millions of dollars to move scientists and equipment out to the pacific. They needed something closer and stateside. It was controversial actually to establish a test site in the United States and it wasnt until the cold war started heating up and the war with korea started the president conceded to establishing a test site in the United States. They looked at different areas around the country and this was a very attractive area. It was actually the old las vegas gunnery and bombing range from world war ii days. It was a huge area where bomber crews would train and drop bombs and do gunnery tests. It laid pretty inactive after world war ii and it became an ideal place as far as consideration for a very remote location to explode Nuclear Weapons. Over a period of years there were 928 Nuclear Tests at the test site. 100 were above ground and the 828 were actually done underground in tunnels. The socalled atomic age had a great effect in pop culture, not only in the 50s but after that it was actually went back earlier than that. Many people will tell you that the term atomic bombs, atomic was actually very prevalent in the 1920s and 30s. There was actually a concept in Science Fiction of uses of atomic bombs, but, of course, they had no concept of what an atomic bomb was until after developed and used in world war ii. In the 1950s when they started testing atomic weapons here at the Nevada Test Site they really came into Popular American culture. You can see examples of, you know, the atomic cereal box and all sorts of icons of the atomic image and kids toys and chemistry sets and this sort of thing. In las vegas, it was just overwhelming because they actually had a miss atomic beauty contest at one point in the 1950s. Every casino and lounge and bar had their own atomic cocktail recipe book. It was quite the rain. Of course in those early days of the 1950s when doing above ground testing here at the test site you could go outside of a local casino at a given time and see a Mushroom Cloud out in the distance. It actually got to the point by the mid to late 50s there were so many above ground tests that the Atomic Energy commission actually started to advertise in advance so that local people and tourists planning their itinerary could come to las vegas and plan on witnessing or observing a Nuclear Blast because las vegas was history tv programs as a preview of whats available every weekend on cspan 3. Tonight at 8 00 eastern, a look at the end of world war ii. August 6th marks the 75th anniversary of the u. S. Bombing of hiroshima, japan. That was followed by a second atomic bomb dropped on nagasaki three days later. Watch a special edition of American History tv and washington journals coproduction of the hiroshima anniversary. Well look at the strategic situation in the Pacific Theater leading up to the bombings. President Harry Trumans decision to use the new weapon and the legacy of these atomic attacks. Enjoy American History tv this week and every weekend on cspan 3. Recently Maryland Governor larry hiroshi larry hogan passed off to new York Governor Andrew Cuomo during the Virtual Summer meeting. Up next hear their remarks on investing in the nations infrastructure and help the u. S. Recover from the coronavirus eeg pandemic. Welcome,e,we everyone, to tho ngas first summer meeting. We look forward to the day whene we canr gather in person again. Its my honor to introduce a person i have been privileged to work with over the past year, governor larry hogan. Governor hogan is the chief executive of maryland and that beautiful and diverse state is enough to keep any governor sing busy, especially with the challenges this year has brough us. Nonetheless, he has beengy to o generous with his time choosingn to lead the nga and devote timer and energy to our cause leading the State Government in
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