My Road Trip to the Manhattan Project

The Atomic Age Turns 79

An atomic bomb test at Bikini Island in the Pacific on July 25, 1946. Code named Operation Crossroads, this underwater detonation created the massive mushroom cloud and destroyed the unmanned ships arranged around the site. Notice the dark ships lifted in the stem of the cloud. Source: US Department of Defense on Wikimedia Commons.

I was raised in a nuclear family. I don’t mean that my family had a mother, father, and three siblings — which we did. Nor do I mean that I was raised in the Atomic Age — which I was. I mean that my father safeguarded nuclear weapons for the US Air Force. Proud of his work, Dad hung photos of atomic explosions on our family room wall like the one above. I thought all families did this until I left home and realized no one did. So I became an atomic historian to understand what my father did (since he never talked about his top-secret work) and, more importantly, to explore the most consequential event in 20th-century history — the creation of nuclear weapons.

The Birth of the Atomic Age

Philosophers as far back as ancient Greece had theorized about an indivisible unit of matter called an atom. Despite an atom’s supposed indivisibility, Einstein predicted that if it was divided, an enormous amount of energy would be released.

In the fall of 1938, German physicists Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann made a fateful discovery at their lab in Berlin. They bombarded a lump of uranium with neutrons, surprisingly generating excess heat. When they sent their puzzling result to Lise Meitner, a Jewish colleague who had fled to Sweden, she and her nephew Otto…