The Atomic West

General Groves and the Atomic West: The Making and the Meaning of Hanford

General Groves and the Atomic West The Making and the Meaning of Hanford Stanley Goldberg M ost histories of the atomic bomb concentrate on the efforts to solve technical conundrums and escape seemingly blind alleys in the struggle to make the bomb a reality. The basis for tribute is often the technical competence and ingenuity of the scientists and engineers who figured out how to manufacture the nuclear fuels and develop the components that went into the first bombs in time for use during the Second World War. Many historians are awed by the technical accomplishments of Manhattan Project scientists, engineers, and technicians. I view the Manhattan Project as a very large, complex industrial organization in which solving technical problems was but one aspect of completing the first bombs by the end of the war. As I have argued elsewhere, a major motivating force in making sure that the bomb was used during the war was the self-interest of General Leslie R. Groves, the military head of the project; and similar motives impelled some of the civilians in the War Department to whom Groves reported.1 From the moment he was placed in command of the Manhattan Engineer District (MED), commonly referred to as the Manhattan Project,z Groves did everything possible to ensure that the atomic bomb was built and used before the war's end. His allies in this effort were Secretary of War Henry Stimson, Assistant Secretary of War Robert P. Patterson, Head of the Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD) Vannevar Bush, and Bush's second in command, James B. Conant. In effect, Groves was their agent. Consciously or not, they made sure that all the right doors were open to him. Whether or not the Japanese would have surrendered without an Allied invasion if the bomb had not been used is not a subject consid39 srANLEY GOLDBERG ered in this article. What I will show is that Groves and his War Department supetiors took all steps possible to be sure that the atomic bomb played a role in btinging the war to an end. Indeed, they were fearful that the war would end before the bomb was used. Other motivations for using the bomb at the end of the war, it has been argued, were to put the Russians on notice regarding postwar adventutism and to end the war before the Soviet Union could get a firm foothold in the Pacific theater. There is ample evidence to support such views concerning other motivations, and this article will not attempt to analyze their relative weights. My concern here is to examine the means used to complete construction of the project's major industtial and laboratory facilities, document how Groves pressured the management of those installations to produce enough fissionable matetial as quickly as possible to ensure that atomic bombs would be ready for use, and show how he then pressed his representatives on the island of Tinian to make haste to send the atomic bomb-carrying B-29s on their way to Hiroshima and Nagasaki.3 Groves mercilessly drove all Manhattan Project facilities. His hand is particularly evident at the Hanford Engineer Works (HEW) located along the Columbia River in south-central Washington State. This site manufactured and putified plutonium, the fuel for the cores of the implosion bomb tested at the Trinity site at Alamogordo, New MexiCO, inJuly 1945 and dropped on Nagasaki three weeks later. This essay focuses a good deal of attention on the management of Hanford, but that should not be taken to suggest that Groves's approach there differed from the methods he used at other MED facilities. The use of the atomIc bomb againstJapan had at least as much to do with politics internal to the United States, and with politiCS internal to the American military bureaucracy, as it did with the beginnings of our international competition with the Soviet Union or with our war against Japan. LESLIE GROVES Just before being appOinted to head the Manhattan Project, Groves was deputy chief of the Construction Division of the Army Corps of Engineers . His rise to that position had been meteoric. Promoted from captain to major inJuly 1940, by November he was a colonel and effectively 40 General Groves and the Atomic West in charge of all new Army construction within the United States. Groves himself had demanded the rank of colonel, reasoning that otherwise he would...