and I can guarantee that MAX,

maybe 15% of Americans under the age of 30 could accurately tell you what in what decade World War II took place

and the same number might know which countries were in the Axis and which the Allies.

It would likely only be 10% of the population would know the correct answer.

look who we have as the TWO major party candidates in a country of 330 million people for 2020 and 2024!!

BoydCrowder13 said:

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Anything I know about Oppenheimer or the Manhattan Project is self taught. And I was a huge history nerd in high school and college.

To be fair to your daughter and her Nazi scientist comment, we did recruit a significant amount of German scientists for the Manhattan project and space race. Though only some were former Nazis.

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You're kind of confusing two different things. After WWII, yes, we rushed to scoop up Nazi scientists in rocketry and every other field, pretty much by force.

The MP scientists weren't nabbed in the same way. Many of the leading scientists in physics in the 30s and 40s were German Jews, and fled when Hitler came to power.

They came to the MP because they thought Hitler was working to get The Bomb, and they desperately wanted to beat him to it. When the war in Europe ended, many of them wanted to stop work, and not use the bomb on Japan

davec81 said:

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fasthorse05 said:

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Leslie Groves was always my favorite.

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THE most important man in the Manhattan Project (imo).

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The guy who built the Pentagon on time and under budget

Agree that Little Boy was not tested because the design was simple and they believed it would work

Disagree about the TVA. It was created in 1933, long before the MP. The Uranium lab was put at Oak Ridge because the TVA was already there with lots of electricity

Dorm 15 said:

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Why Los Alamos?

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That's where Davey Crockett fought Genghis Khan but lost. "Remember Los Alamos!"

Horn_in_Aggieland said:

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I didn't until I recently finished a biography, American Prometheus.

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that book is what Nolan based his screenplay on

going to have to order it on Amazon and see this in IMAX at the Dulles Udvar Hazey Smithsonian Museum!

(for those visiting DC the Smithsonian annex out at Dulles is even better than the downtown Smithsonian Air and Space Museum)

Burdizzo said:

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twk said:

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Heck, even if you only get your history from the movies, this isn't the first film to cover the subject:

Fat Man and Little Boy



Knowledge of history seems to get less every year. Maybe it's that they are focusing on different aspects of history, but, whatever the reason, it's not doing a service to young people.

[Edit: hawg beat me to it. ]

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That is a good story, and I still get bummed out that John Cusack's character died in the movie (real event). Oppenheimer deserves all the credit he gets for developing the bomb. The guy who doesn't get enough credit is Edward Teller for taking those ideas and making way bigger bombs. He didn't have the moral reservations that Oppenheimer did, and he knew we had to develop them in order to stay ahead in the unfortunate arms race that came in the following decades

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People younger than me (52) have no concept of what huge movie stars Paul Newman and Kirk Douglas were

also the importance of Albert Einstein in the development of the Manhattan Project.

Because the Nazis had driven out the German Jews throughout the 1930s, they all ended up working on the American atomic bomb program in the 1940s.

Just asked my son, (Jr. engineering major). He had heard the name Oppenheimer but not specifics. So, that's now corrected.

I tend to relate items from their grandfather as historical nuggets, like him sitting on a plane at Pope during the height of the Cuban Missile crisis.

Desert Ag said:

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Can't help but share one of my favorite pics of my two oldest boys circa 1995.

Bonus points for anyone who can tell me the one and only perfect caption for this.

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Two young boys pose with their Titanic exploration submersible

CanyonAg77 said:

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davec81 said:

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fasthorse05 said:

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Leslie Groves was always my favorite.

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THE most important man in the Manhattan Project (imo).

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The guy who built the Pentagon on time and under budget

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In a course I took at Defense Acquisition University the instructor told the following anecdote about Leslie Groves' leadership of the Manhattan Project.

The construction of the uranium enrichment apparatus at Oak Ridge required massive amounts electricity (almost 10% of the total US electric grid at the time if I recall correctly) and they needed some massive transformers that were built on site. The engineers realized that the copper wire used for the transformers was in very high demand for the war effort for almost every piece of electrically powered technology as well as for things as mundane as brass shell casings and copper jacketed bullets. They went to Groves and told him how much copper they needed to draw it into hundreds of miles of wire. Groves asked them if there were potential substitutes for copper and they said that gold would also work very well.

Groves went to Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau and told him that he needed to borrow some gold from from Fort Knox for the Manhattan Project. Groves had a letter from FDR that he could use with any government official that basically said, "give General Groves whatever he needs." Morgenthau was happy to oblige and asked how much gold he needed. Groves told him, 25,000 pounds. Morgenthau didn't blink but asked if he could convert that into Troy ounces since that was how they counted the gold reserves. It was about 364,000 Troy ounces.

Groves took a locomotive with a box car and a lot of armed security from Oak Ridge to Ft Knox and made the withdrawal of gold ingots and returned to Oak Ridge. The gold was carefully drawn into wire and used to make the windings for the transformers. All shavings and trimmings were carefully collected and saved. After the war, the gold wound transformers were disassembled and the gold was melted down and cast back into ingots and returned to Ft. Knox. The amount of gold returned to Ft Knox was 99.98% of the initial withdrawal.

Quote:

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Quote:

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fasthorse05 said:
Leslie Groves was always my favorite.

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davec81 said:
THE most important man in the Manhattan Project (imo).
The guy who built the Pentagon on time and under budget

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...and that's very notable because it's the last time the US government EVER did anything on time & under budget.

Substitute the word "silver" for "gold" in your story, and it's 100% accurate. Except this article says it was 14,000 TONS

https://www.americanscientist.org/article/from-treasury-vault-to-the-manhattan-project

Quote:

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Burdizzo said:

That is a good story, and I still get bummed out that John Cusack's character died in the movie (real event). Oppenheimer deserves all the credit he gets for developing the bomb. The guy who doesn't get enough credit is Edward Teller for taking those ideas and making way bigger bombs. He didn't have the moral reservations that Oppenheimer did, and he knew we had to develop them in order to stay ahead in the unfortunate arms race that came in the following decades

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Not completely accurate. The Cusack character was an amalgam character, based on a few scientists. The incident depicted in the movie actually occurred after WWII ended. Louis Slotin was killed as a result of the criticality accident. The core in question became known as the "demon core" as it killed two scientists in a similar manner. That core would have been used for the 3rd bomb had it been needed.

After Slotin's death, the core was melted down and re-purposed.

I was so intrigued by the story depicted in the movie, I combed through every bit of source material I could find at the time. This was pre-internet, so it took me looking through numerous texts at Evans to finally learn the actual story of Slotin.

The Demon Core

Both my kids graduated from public schools and then A&M - one with a liberal arts degree. They both know about Oppenheimer.

Couple of interesting tidbits:

• In 1943, Neils Bohr was rescued from Denmark in a secret operation that nearly ended in disaster. The Germans almost got there before the Danish resistance could get him to Sweden, and his oxygen supply failed during the Mosquito flight from Stockholm to England. And on top of that, the bottle of heavy water Bohr brought with him turned out to be a bottle of beer instead.
• Somewhat ironically, the MP scientists had no ethical qualms about asking the Allies to assassinate Werner Heisenberg, who was part of Hitler's nuclear weapons program. The OSS tried several times without success. This apparently was a good thing because Heisenberg wasn't much of a help anyway.

CanyonAg77 said:

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fc2112 said:

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My kids know a lot about the Manhattan Project. But then again, what I do for a living...

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What do you do?

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Weapons system development. We do a lot of testing at Holloman AFB. Been to the Trinity Site once when the range was down and the USAF guys made up an excuse to go up there.

Cool. Been to Trinity on public tours twice. Once with wife once with son

HollywoodBQ said:

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At the request of my Engineering degreed daughter, I just bought tickets to see Oppenheimer in 70mm tomorrow night (the day before it opens nationally - one of the few perks of paying to live in LA).

You would think this is going to be a hooray hashtag Women in STEM story but unfortunately, it's a sad state of education story.

After I bought the tickets, she says to me, now who was this guy? Was he like a Nazi scientist or something?

My jaw hit the floor. Not so much that she didn't know who he was - at least she's going to attend the movie and find out, but the fact that she didn't even know whose side he was on. She does know that we stole some scientists from the Nazis but that is more space program related.

I spent a ton of dough on private girls school in Australia and on out of state tuition at the West Point of the South. I can't believe that they didn't cover the development of The Bomb in either of those settings.

Maybe it's just accepted these days that "Nukes are Bad M'Kay" and they don't even discuss the Manhattan Project in history class.

It's been a long time since I took American History in HS, or US Military History in college but I just can't believe that kids these days would not even know the particulars about how we won the War in the Pacific. Since the Pacific Theater affected Australia the most, you'd think that they would teach schoolchildren that their bacon was saved by The Yanks and their A-Bombs. Also by Yanks like my Grandfather who went to Brisbane before participating in amphibious assaults in New Guinea and The Philippines.

So I asked her why did she want to see a 3 hour long movie (runtime 180 minutes with $22 tickets) if she didn't even know who the guy was. She said she heard it was a good movie.

I sure hope it is a good movie, we'll see.

So my question for the parents out there is - What do your kids know about Robert Oppenheimer, The Manhattan Project, WWII in the Pacific?

Is this just an isolated incident or, are we in the midst of an American History Pandemic?

Politics because - our kids should being taught this at the HS and/or College level.

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I bet she had climate change garbage drummed into her the entire time she was in school though.

parents not taking responsibility for there childs education and thinkig paying private schools is the answer

Silver makes a lot more sense. That article seems like the authoritative account.

Ulysses90 said:

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Silver makes a lot more sense. That article seems like the authoritative account.

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I knew it was silver from my earlier reading. But I wanted to find a good article, so it wasn't just me saying "was not".

G Martin 87 said:

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• Somewhat ironically, the MP scientists had no ethical qualms about asking the Allies to assassinate Werner Heisenberg, who was part of Hitler's nuclear weapons program. The OSS tried several times without success. This apparently was a good thing because Heisenberg wasn't much of a help anyway.

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Yeah, he was uncertain about many things.

I visited Trinity site ~40 years ago. It was during the period of the media's full court press on fear mongering nuclear winter. Standing at Trinity site (a.k.a. Lake Lucero) as youngster made me wonder why no one was worried about radiation at ground zero a mere 40 years after the bomb. If I recall correctly, the tour guide said that standing there for several hours would still amount to less radiation exposure than from a typical chest x-ray. That could be wildly inaccurate but, it was safe enough for them to allow a bus tour.

zoneag said:

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My kids know that it wasn't over when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor

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Just shut it down!

We live in a society where progressives (fascist Nazis in their own way) are trying to convince the youth that the Holocaust is a myth.

Muy said:

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We live in a society where progressives (fascist Nazis in their own way) are trying to convince the youth that the Holocaust is a myth.

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Huh?

It got shut down for COVID, but Trinity site tours are back. First weekend in October and April. Very Large Array also shut down for COVID, I don't think they're back, but they used to have a big open house on the same weekend as the Trinity open house.

The Manhattan Project National Park at Los Alamos, was planning some "behind the fence" tours at LA, in the days preceding Trinity open house. The idea is that you could tour LA, and have time to get to Trinity the next day or so.

Los Alamos, Nuclear Museum in ABQ, then Trinity would be a cool three days

CanyonAg77 said:

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Ulysses90 said:

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Silver makes a lot more sense. That article seems like the authoritative account.

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I knew it was silver from my earlier reading. But I wanted to find a good article, so it wasn't just me saying "was not".

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i thought this topic came up on history board, I thought you also said they returned all but a small fraction back to the treasury???

Yes. The story U90 posted was accurate, except he thought It was gold, when it was actually silver

CanyonAg77 said:

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Zarathustra said:

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Here's why nobody remembers Oppenheimer.

I've talked to a bunch of people that can't wait to see the movie but not one person has mentioned any interesting fact about Oppenheimer. I've seen a bunch of Twitter threads promoting the movie as well, but not one of them mentioned even the smallest quirky fact about him. Same with 2 pages of post in this thread.

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I could tell you a lot about Oppie, but I've studied a lot of the history and read a bunch of the books

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This thread is proving my point. 6 pages and all I've learned about Oppenheimer is he worked on the Manhattan project and may or may not have lived in ABQ. There's more interesting facts about Sam Houston, Bohr, and Heisenberg.

I think it's safe to conclude he was a smart guy, but led a pretty boring life.

Zarathustra said:

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CanyonAg77 said:

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Zarathustra said:

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Here's why nobody remembers Oppenheimer.

I've talked to a bunch of people that can't wait to see the movie but not one person has mentioned any interesting fact about Oppenheimer. I've seen a bunch of Twitter threads promoting the movie as well, but not one of them mentioned even the smallest quirky fact about him. Same with 2 pages of post in this thread.

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I could tell you a lot about Oppie, but I've studied a lot of the history and read a bunch of the books

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This thread is proving my point. 6 pages and all I've learned about Oppenheimer is he worked on the Manhattan project and may or may not have lived in ABQ. There's more interesting facts about Sam Houston, Bohr, and Heisenberg.

I think it's safe to conclude he was a smart guy, but led a pretty boring life.

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Maybe so, but Feynman led a very colorful life.

kyledr04 said:

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I will always remember who Oppenheimer was. I had an Econ class first year at A&M. This had nothing to do with econ, but oh well. For some reason the TA decided if we could write down the name of the inventor of the atomic bomb we could get extra credit. I had no idea. If had known, I would have scored just enough to be exempt from the final. I'll never forget.

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That TA was a true sadist.

We weren't taught anything about the Manhattan Project and many of my classmates' parents worked at the Pantex nuclear weapon assembly plant. My history lessons also skipped the Holocaust and the entire Civil War. We ended the Fall semester in 1860 and came back to the end of the Reconstruction era. Most of what I "knew" about the Nazis was from watching Hogan's Heroes reruns. But I liked history and read about all of those things on my own or in my college history classes.

Guess I'm living proof that a self-motivated learner can overcome any shortcomings of a public school education. FWIW

I'd have to look at some of my references about Oppie to give exact facts. But I'm sure he was in research' and teaching before the war, maybe at Berkeley? A brilliant man, a little odd. He and Groves were often at odds, but were probably the ideal team to get the MP done.

Groves wanted secrecy and compartmentalized information. Oppie wanted free exchange of ideas, more like a college.

Oppie and the other scientists worked hard, but they played hard. They had frequent parties along Bathtub Row, they attended festivals and dances at the nearby Pueblo. They hiked, rode, and skied in the nearby mountains.

I believe the movie follows his postwar downfall, as his wife, and maybe Oppie, had joined the communist party in the 1930s. He security clearance was pulled, and he left the weapons program

torrid said:

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Zarathustra said:

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CanyonAg77 said:

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Zarathustra said:

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Here's why nobody remembers Oppenheimer.

I've talked to a bunch of people that can't wait to see the movie but not one person has mentioned any interesting fact about Oppenheimer. I've seen a bunch of Twitter threads promoting the movie as well, but not one of them mentioned even the smallest quirky fact about him. Same with 2 pages of post in this thread.

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I could tell you a lot about Oppie, but I've studied a lot of the history and read a bunch of the books

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This thread is proving my point. 6 pages and all I've learned about Oppenheimer is he worked on the Manhattan project and may or may not have lived in ABQ. There's more interesting facts about Sam Houston, Bohr, and Heisenberg.

I think it's safe to conclude he was a smart guy, but led a pretty boring life.

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Maybe so, but Feynman led a very colorful life.

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And wrote about it in a way that was accessible and entertaining to the layperson. Feynman's personality was I think much more colorful, and in any case has been much better preserved, than most people remembered for their scientific achievements.