Organized science and history. Announcer on august 6, 1945, the United States detonated the first atomic bomb in history japan. Roshima, later, ondays nagasaki. Six days later, japan surrendered, bringing an end to the second world war. I have a message from the japanese government. From the secretary of state on august 11. Declaration potsdam that specifies the unconditional surrender. Announcer through the work of cspans cities tour, we will share stories of people who contributed to this worldaltering events. We begin in new orleans, at the National World war ii museum. We are here on the road to tokyo exhibit. That will take up the war on the pacific and asia, 1941 to 1945. What are the most interesting aspects . One of the interesting aspects is how quickly the turning point came in. In are just about six months later, after the japanese ran wild through the pacific, the battle of midway was fought. That was a major portion of japans strength. Whatever chance japan had of winning the pacific war probably disappeared in 1942. Pain andty of war, the humiliation the big victory at , midway. It is a big ocean. But that is a relatively brief time. The war would go on for over three years after midway, from june of 1942 through august of 1945. Naval officers, in particular, but officers across the world realized that the war was over. They took this opportunity to declare war on the United States, a country whose economy was 10 times larger than their own. For some kinding of miracle, and i think that is why japanese officers in particular were doing. It was often couched in terms of loyalty to the emperor. We cannot let the emperor down. I think it was more about that corporate culture. To recognize was a big ocean, maybe something would happen, maybe the americans would tire of the struggle, maybe we japanese could take such a toll on u. S. Casualties that an american president would be forced to end the war. Favorable terms to japan. But, of course, that was never to be. Clearly, the Japanese Military power was broken. On individual islands, they could defend. Studies were done. They were in the ballpark of hundreds of thousands. Unbeknownst to most, with these casualties, a topsecret military program had been going some time in the United States, something never seen before, and, of course, it was the development of atomic weaponry, the Manhattan Project. During the Manhattan Project, oppenheimer, under his leadership, he directed nobel prizewinning scientists, engineers, military personnel , and the civilians who worked on the atomic bomb project in los alamos. In 1938, two german physicist s working in berlin, straw some ssman andahn, strau hahn, bombarded this lump of material called uranium. They got a curious result. It released a lot of heat and it equated a different element. An element that was farther down on the table of elements. The word about this spread through the Nuclear Physics world like a forest fire that scientists had split the atom. And that it was scientists working in nazi, germany, that had split the atom, so there was a lot of knowledge that the germans had split the atom, that england was working on their own splitting of the adam and harnessing that into a military weapon, but it was not until pearl harbor that the Manhattan Project was created, and then a lot of resources under the control of the army corps of engineer was devoted to create this new weapon. So a man was appointed to the head of the Manhattan Project and had just finished building the pentagon. Groves talked to different Physics Department and asked who would be a good leader. Oppenheimer was probably not high on the list. Actually, oppenheimer had not even been in charge of the Physics Department in berkeley before he was chosen to be the head of the central laboratory, but there was something about oppi that people like. I think a couple things grew. There were nobel Prize Winners that were being considered. They already accomplished the nobel prize. Groves wanted somebody who was hungry and maybe would have worked a little harder, and also on a train trip across the was able toppi describe what needed to be done in terms that a layman could understand. So groves picked oppi. To puter thing is where the laboratory. You could not have it in chicago. What happens if an accident happens . Toxic security. What happens if youre walking down a street involved in it . Involvedue who was not in it, walked up, and said, joe, what are you doing . So they looked around. They went out west. Had gone to mexico to recover from an illness when he was 18 years old and fell in love with new mexico. At one point he said he wished he could marry the two loves of his life, physics and new mexico. Of course, that was before he got married. I want to be clear about that. This was an opportunity for him to do that. So he showed groves places around new mexico, and they settled on this boys school in los alamos. After that was chosen in november of 1942, oppi started recruiting people. He could not tell them what he was doing. He would say, i would love for you to join me on this project. But you cannot. People who knew oppi knew the work that was being done in germany. They knew this would be something 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 in santa fe. There, they were told, well, youre not quite there yet. Here is your temporary security pass to get into los alamos. So they got in there. Scientists assembled in 1943. They decided that they needed to do multiple ways of trying to make this weapon. And part of the problem was the nuclear material, the uranium, plutonium. It was minuscule. Plutonium is totally manmade. Reactor in hanford, washington, was created to manufacture this plutonium. Naturally made, but the part that is used for bombs is only at about 1 of what is in nature, so how do you refine that out . How do you extract that 1 out . That is why the 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 can be used for a bomb. Oak Ridge National laboratory is a Major Research institution. And oak Ridge National lab has right aftersince the second world war. This was set up originally in 1943 as clinton laboratories. It did not 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 vast amounts of energy, just as some forms of uranium can, but they did not know much about plutonium. It was an artificial element. It had to be created by man, and they knew nothing about the characteristics of plutonium. Although we started in february of 1943, this facility, the graphite reactor as we know it today, was started in the spring of 1943, completed by november of 1943. It came online as the worlds first operating nuclear reactor. And in this case, used tiny,ically to produce tiny amounts of plutonium, which were recovered and then shifted 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 created here were shipped out to the Los Alamos Laboratory in new mexico where , the bombs were actually designed and built by Robert Oppenheimer and other famous testedsts and otherwise out there. So the purpose of the oak Ridge National laboratory who 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. They realize i say they the government realized fairly thatly in 1942 and 1943 oak ridge and east tennessee were not the places to produce vast amounts of plutonium for a weapon. Plutonium was a highly toxic element. I mean, it is very, very carcinogenic. Very dangerous if not handled properly. And east tennessee was not the place to be producing large amounts of plutonium. This reactor here was not even called a reactor. It was called a pyle. It was designed simply to learn how to produce plutonium, not to produce large amounts of it. Eventually after a year or two, began to produce some enriched uranium over on y12, and that enriched uranium was carried out of here in a handbag, on the train, it went out to los alamos. They were just carrying it normally, and likewise, small amount of plutonium were shipped to chicago, where they could characterize it, and los alamos, where they could learn how to build a bomb using plutonium. Everything was coming in in train loads and train loads. But nothing as far as anybody could tell was anything going out, so this was a very ultrasecret undertaking. And no one knew what was going on except the managers until the bombs were actually dropped on roshan my and nagasaki in japan in her roshan a and nagasaki nagasaki inima and japan. Recruitment was very challenging at times because they could not say a lot about what the end goal of the project was. One of the women i profiled in my book was recruited right out of the halls of her high school during her senior year. I have other women who were recruited out of college. I talked to a woman who was recruited out of a diner, so they went all over the place looking for smart, capable, young women who followed instruction 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 the construction rate, so they scoured everywhere, getting as many people as they can. From a military standpoint, certain soldiers who had a background in engineering or science might be literally taken right out of line as they were getting ready to, come aboard a ship to go overseas, because they had a certain skill set, or oneirected to oakwood of the other sites. Oak ridge or one of the other sites. But, literally, women right out of high school. If you had a nobel winning scientist, he might live in one of the two or threebedroom houses that had been built, depending on how it was a signed how it was assigned, depending on how many children you had, things of that nature, so they might actually have had a lovely house, a standalone house. A 19 or 20yearold young woman who was recruited out of high school, or, say, a 22yearold woman out of college would , probably live in one of the dorms. There were dormitories and cafeterias, in many ways quite similar to a college. She would pay rent for her dorm. If you are africanamerican, you are living in huts. 16foote 16foot by plywood structures that you would share with three or four other people. In the case of katie, the africanamerican woman i profiled, because oak ridge was completely segregated, and the kinds of jobs she had were limited, she was not allowed to have her husband or bring her children with her, and when i interviewed her, i said, what made you decide to do this . This is an incredibly trying situation. She said, the pay i was getting was more than doubled the best i had ever been offered back in auburn, alabama, so for her and her husband, it was definitely an economic motivation to endure enduring at oak ridge as africanamericans. There was a real need for bodies. So that is underlying all of this. But confidence, just sort of absolute confidence. What went into organizing the Manhattan Project was something that they would refer to as compartmentability. In other words, you dont need to know anything more than what you need to know to perform your job as best as you can. You might be sitting next to somebody who has a different job than you do. They dont know what you know, you dont know what they know , and you two do not know what this other guy knows. You guys all know the minimum you need to know to perform your job. And that is it. So, for example for example, some of these women were operating electromagnetic separation calutrons. They called them. This involved operating lots of knobs and dials to keep a needle range, to get very basic, and when they talked to me, this is exactly how they were trained. The needle goes this way turn , the knob this way. If it goes this way, turn it this way. If sparking happens, call the supervisor. That was it. They did not know what the machines were for. They did not know what the end product of the project was. They just knew everything they needed to know to be able to perform their specific task, and 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 obviously, this would vary from person to person. Most people had a certain level of curiosity, but it was also drilled into them that if you asked toorious and many questions, you could lose your job. You did not get to curious too often. Some people did. Many people 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 i am not supposed to ask any questions, so i am not going to ask any questions. There was also a fair amount of what i might call selfcensorship that has happened. Everybody was told this was a very important project for the war. That is something they were told. They were told it was something very important to the war effort, and it was important that they did not talk about what they did, and pretty much, if you ever talked to anyone who lived in world war ii, everybody knew somebody away fighting. Most people knew someone who died. So the idea that they were toldsed to if they were they were not supposed to talk about things because it was good for the war effort, that was enough for a lot of people, so that is what i mean when i talk about selfcensorship. Nobody wanted to be the person who inadvertently or accidentally caused the problem with the war effort or let out the piece of information even though they did not know what it meant. You know, nobody wanted to be that person who actually, you know, caused a problem for what they were trying to accomplish. In september of 1940, a company was commissioned to build a plant at the field. By june of 1942, the plant was in full production. That production continued with the b 26. The plant construct and built over 1500 of these mediumsized bombers to help contribute to the war effort in 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 the war history, the b29 became the r in theomb or bombe pacific. Than any and farther bomber before. At the heart of japan. Those particular airplanes were manufactured at the martin nebraska bomber plant. Where colonel tibbetts actually personally came and named the bomber after his mother to become the first first b29 aircraft to drop an atomic bomb. We are at the National Museum air forces airpowered gallery. This is at the tail end of the world war ii story. The first thing we will look at is the atomic three weapons. More commonly known as the fat man atomic bomb. The reason this is significant signaluse it is a finer of the beginning of the atomic age, the end of world war ii, and it is a marker of the supremacy of American Military and scientific and industrial endr at mid century and the of world war ii. The reason it is called fat man is obvious. It is a fat round bomb. , its shape was mainly because of its method. It is round because it is an implosion method. There is a sphere of implosives explosives that create a smaller sphere to create a Chain Reaction to release this Tremendous Energy resulting in an atomic explosion. The weapon we have on display is real. It is a mark three atomic weapon. It has been restored to look like the fat man bomb that was dropped on august 9, 1945. This was one of many marked threes dropped up until 1949. There were many of these. They were withdrawn from service in 1950. This was an iteration of that first design used against the war. And, of course, Nuclear Weapons design progressed very quickly after the war, so this was obsolete within only a couple of years after it was designed and built. Thereafter, the shape was just storage. It was displayed for the first time in a museum in 1965. So we restored it in 2005, it looks like the fat man that was used at the end of world war ii. The lettering on the front was a curiosity. We think it stands for joint army navy combined foul up. These guys who put these things together were young men doing a ,ough job, and a lot of times you will see words and pictures and so on that, you know, our kind of nonstandard, and i guess you could say this is one of them, but, of course, the other , inside isil, fm fat man. 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 andened at hiroshima nagasaki, so on august 6, when the atomic bomb was detonated over hiroshima, three days later, a different type was over nagasaki. We have the flight record, the pilot of the enola gay, dropped the bomb on hiroshima. We have heard the logbook from the enola gay. Captain lewis, the copilot, sort of the primitive computer of the day, which is a way of computing the aircrafts true flight speed, which, of course, is essential to bombing. As we walk over here, we have examples of glass bottles taken from the wreckage of nagasaki. The intense heat literally melting glass not so far from ground zero. Intentional not the target for bomb number two. The mission was changed to nagasaki. I often think i have been saying this to students for 30 years at the university, the earth, withity on nothing but a bit of chance, nagasaki received the second atomic bombing. Narrator battleship missouri, and the third fleet becomes the scene of an unforgettable ceremony, logging the complete and formal surrender of japan. Thehe bay of tokyo itself, United States comes along side, bringing representatives of the allied powers to witness the final capitulation. The general of the army, Douglas Macarthur, supreme commander, boards the missouri. Admiralnimitz and halsey welcome General Macarthur and others aboard. They are escorted to the veranda deck, where a 20 have a minute ceremony is supposed to take place. This was 1945. Right now, we are on the o1 level of the missouri, also known as the veranda deck, and we now call it the surrender deck. This is where the japanese signed the unconditional surrender, ending world war ii. In fact, behind me is where it was signed. The ship looked different. The canopy overhead was not item behindnd the me was rotated in order to make more room. If you had looked around and above us that day, you have seen thousands of members of them of the crew and other ships hanging onto 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. They made their way behind me, macarthur andal admiral nimitz were there. And then signing on behalf of the japanese delegation. The next person signing was on behalf of the Japanese Military. The third person to sign was general Douglas Macarthur himself. As supreme allied commander, he actually did not represent the United States. That would be the fourth person to sign, admiral nimitz. Following them, the rest of the allies signed. Great britain, the ussr, the netherlands, each in turn. There are two copies of the surrender documents. One was to bese kept by the United States and one by japan. We do not display the original for obvious reasons. We have replicas on board. He used six pens to sign the document. That sounds a bit strange. He chose to use six pins for Douglas Macarthur and Douglas Macarthur on the second document. He did this for a simple reason and one that we actually still do today if you look at lawmakers when they sign an important document. What do you want them to do . They give these pens away as souvenirs. He gave a signal and aircraft flew in formation. Above the missouri, they flew in formation. 25, 23 minutes. It is all it took to end the bloodiest conflict in human history. Announcer at the end of 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 protracted 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 AtomicTesting Museum shares how the atomic august 6, began on 1945, would capture the United States of the americans. The museum focuses on atomic testing over a period from the 1950s, and to me, the interesting story occurs right after world war ii. In between that time of the development of the cold war, there was 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, and he early on. What truman did, he assured the department of defense that they were not in charge of Nuclear Weapons. He had the nuclear commission, and they were always the ones in charge of Nuclear Weapons. This is a big surprise to people. The military base could not get their hands on the Nuclear Weapons. When they would test the Nuclear Weapons, that was overseen by the Atomic Energy commission, not the military. The test site was established in 1951. There was no statewide testing after world war ii. Trinitye, there was the site in new mexico, but all of the tests after the war were done in the pacific, which was a big logistical nightmare. Thousands to millions of dollars to move scientists and equipment to the pacific. They really needed something closer and stateside. It was rather controversial, actually to establish a test , site in the United States. It was not until the cold war started heating up and the war with korea started that the president conceded to establishing a test site within the United States. They looked at different areas around the country, and this was a very attractive area. This was actually the old las vegas gunnery range from world war ii. They actually tested. Bomber crews would drop bombs into all sorts of tests. It was pretty inactive after and it became an ideal place as far as consideration for a remote location to produce Nuclear Weapons. 928 the years, there were nuclear tests, and 100 of those were above ground, and the others were done underground. The socalled atomic age had a great effect in pop culture, not only in the 1950s but after that. It was actually earlier than that. Many people will tell you that the term atomic bomb, atomic was very prevalent in the 1920s and 1930s in the buck rogers radio series. There was actually a concept in Science Fiction of the use of atomic bombs. Of had no concept of what an atomic bomb was until they developed it in world war ii, but in the 1950s, especially when they started testing these, they really came into popular, american culture. You can see examples of the atomic cereal box and all sorts of icons with 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 an atomic bomb beauty contest at one point in the 1950s. Every casino and lounge and bar had their own Atomic Energy recipe book, so it was quite the rage, and, of course, in the early days, in the 1950s, when they were doing aboveground testing, and you could go outside a casino at any time and actually see a Mushroom Cloud out in the distance. It actually got to the point by the mid 50s that there were so many aboveground tests that the Atomic Energy commission actually started to advertise in it hands so local people and tourists planning itineraries could come to las vegas and plan on witnessing or observing a nuclear blast, because las vegas, only about 60 some miles from the test site. There were many believers that Nuclear Testing led to peace in the cold war. Announcer the cspan cities tour travels around the country. With the support of local cable providers, we bring you the history and life of a different city on tv and American History tv. To watch videos of any of the places we have been, 02 cspan. Org citiestour, and follow us on. Marks the anniversaries of the bombing of hiroshima and nagasaki. Watch washington journal at adm used her this morning for discussions about the bombings with the author of twilight of the gods, and also the grandson of harry truman. Then, watch American History tv and washington journal, as we look at how the bombings ended world war ii and their legacy with the author of downfall the end of the Imperial Japanese empire, and a professor at the American University institute. Join with your calls, texts, facebook questions, and tweets. Watch the 75th anniversary of the bombing of hiroshima and nagasaki today and sunday on washington journal on cspan and American History tv on cspan3. Announcer here is a look at our live coverage for thursday. Cspan, a. M. Eastern on the acting Homeland Security chad wolf is on capitol hill to testify on the use of federal Law Enforcement in response to recent protests in portland and elsewhere. That is followed at 2 00 p. M. Eastern by a house subcommittee hearing on the coronavirus potentialamining the impact of reopening schools during the pandemic. Is backn2, the senate at 9 30 a. M. Eastern to debate and vote on the nomination of john cronin to be a judge for the Southern District of new york. And on cspan3, the Senate Armed Services committee holds a confirmation hearing for several Defense Department nominees, including inspector general. That gets underway at 9 00 a. M. Eastern. The Senate Judiciary committee continued its review of the fbi russia investigation by hearing testimony from sally yates, who served as acting attorney general at the start of the trump administration. She was asked about the actions of former National Security advisor michael flynn. Her role in the fisa application process, and allegations of political bias within the Justice Department and the fbi. This is just over three hours