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In a regional depository of the National Archives is a file containing a photograph that has
lost its caption and so seems at first to float without anchor in time or place. An 8x10 glossy, it
presents with diffident specificity a desk and chair, a man, and behind the man a map of the United
States.
Like everything within it, the photograph is standard-issue. Made (we assume) by an army
photographer as a publicity shot, it describes the geography of a military bureaucracy, bland and
efficient. Only the map seems suggestive. It is pocked by push-pins, marking sites of some sort,
locations.
To immerse ourselves in the picture and its context, to seek its meanings, is to enter into
unexpected complexities. The man is Colonel K.D. Nichols, District Engineer for the Manhattan
Engineer District, the section of the Army Corps of Engineers responsible for building and
running the Manhattan Project and hence for bringing atomic holocaust to the globe. The pins on
the map behind him show the locations of various facilities of the Manhattan District: medical,
manufacturing, research, assembly, stockpiling, and the like. From this multitude of sites and
people, resources and possibilities, came the unity of will needed to win this war.
This picture might seem the quintessence of the Manhattan Project's history as we have
come to understand it since those early August days of 1945 when the planes banked away from
roaring upsurges of destruction at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, when an American president warned
that the enemy had "reaped the whirlwind," and when Americans danced and sang in the streets to
celebrate the end of the war.
In its mundanity, it proposes a reassuring narrative to a nation and a world confronted
with a terrifying new form of warfare and mass destruction: it celebrates the very
matter-of-factness with which, the myth tells us, American scientists, government figures, military
planners, GIs and ordinary citizens all cooperated to bring forth this decisive new instrument of
moral vengeance and apply it, in the name of peace and freedom, to bring about the end of old
tyrannies and the control of new ones.
In this regard, the picture is a marvelous foil, for Colonel Nichols seems so uneasy in his
role as hero, the environment too bland for remarkable acts and great moments. The map behind
seems the only potent symbol, and it, too, is pressed back from histrionics. It seems, in fact,
hardly a symbol of America at all. Space, place, and person all promise a sort of history-- a
documentary history-- without need of historians.
Yet the map is there, a backdrop for the undramatic drama in which America, sprawling
and diverse, came to draw upon its peculiar resources, physical, social and human, to create this
superweapon and win the last good war. It proposes space, geography, to be an implicit and
crucial backdrop to the scientific and military achievements of the Manhattan Project. This is the
myth of the Manhattan Project, a powerful narrative, drawing the American past into a global
future. And it offers itself for analysis, for unmasking and disentangling the threads that might
comprise such a cultural history as I have written.
*
This is a story about the birth of America's atomic spaces, their creation by military fiat
and necessity, their occupation by people, buildings, and social networks, their consolidation into
a new type of cultural environment, penetrating work, leisure, environment, language, and belief,
and present even today as a significant, if surreptitious, strain of American culture.
This is the history of that atomic culture. The Manhattan Engineer District-- formal term
for the wartime Manhattan Project-- occupied three main sites and more than a hundred smaller
ones, from Alamogordo, New Mexico to Trail, in British Columbia, and included secret locations
in places like Rochester, New York, Ames, Iowa, and Berkeley, California. At the three principal
sites-- Oak Ridge, Tennessee, Los Alamos, New Mexico, and Hanford, Washington-- the District
employed as many as 125,000 people at one time, hundreds of thousands over the years between
1942 and 1946. Vast sites (one nearly as large as a state), hidden in mountains and mesas, or set
in desert lands bounded by layers of wall, fences, security patrols, guards: these became American
communities as the District built its factories and towns and set up its systems of authority and
regulation, in order to invent and manufacture the most destructive and dangerous weapons in the
history of humankind.
The Manhattan District began by carving out spaces; on these spaces it constructed a new
social and cultural environment: streets, houses, factories, all the requirements for modern social
life. These changed spaces brought people, and their behavior had to be regulated. The result
was a new sort of social landscape, one which melded the peculiar needs of the project and the
particular beliefs of its military-industrial rulers with the broader currents of American culture and
tradition outside the fences.
Most communities come about through an admixture of planning and inadvertency,
melding tradition and novelty, developing a history or histories, interconnecting with their
surroundings, drawing from them and influencing them in turn. This was only marginally the case
with the Manhattan Engineer District and its cultural geography. Somewhere between an army
base and a utopian social experiment, the MED as a whole and each of its three separate sites
joined a small handful of American planned communities of the twentieth century. At Oak Ridge,
the District's planners hired the firm of Skidmore, Owings Merrill, and did so primarily because of
SOM's involvement with utopian housing and building programs of the Depression era. SOM
responded accordingly, though the result was not an architect's or planner's utopia. At the
Hanford, Washington, site, District contractor du Pont and District planners concurred in hiring a
small local architect to create a planned community-within-a-community. There, too, the
architecture of utopia set itself within the harsh landscape of military expediency.
These impulses toward utopian planning had to meld with the military planning models.
General Groves, shadowy director of the MED, had made his career by studying, and building,
military bases, environments that were simultaneously spartan grids of self-sacrifice to the will of
the state and profoundly intrusive spaces of individual and social management and regulation.
Groves' last construction project was a different kind of extension of the modern social
landscape, the largest ever undertaken by the military: a giant multi-sided model of a
bureaucracy- as-fortress-- the Pentagon. His influence on the Pentagon had been to ruthlessly
enforce efficiencies of scale and mass-regulation to keep the project on time and budget. Its
influence on him had been to provide a paradigm for imagining military bureaucracy mapped out
as space and symbol.
Groves himself represented a larger tradition of military bureaucracy devoted to the
manipulation and transformation of American spaces to the goal of greater efficiency and the
control of nature, bedded within the Army Corps of Engineers. The Manhattan District was but
one part of this powerful legacy, and Groves was but one among the thousands of Corps officers,
engineers, veterans, contractors and companies that carried the long tradition of the Corps into
the novel world of atomic weapons invention, production and deployment.
The resulting physical landscapes manufactured by the District formed one manifestation
of a complex and evolving ideology blending corporate capitalism, government social
management, and military codes of coercion and obedience, into a new sort of alternative culture
hewn from a more heterogenous and heterodox American cultural landscape.
But the District's goal was not to produce communities but to produce weapons in and
from those communities. To do this required people, brought from outside the fences and the
particular environment of the atomic spaces. Atomic scientists, pipe fitters, concrete pourers,
housewives, musicians, writers, engineers, social workers; expatriate European Jews, Okies and
Arkies, farmers, city folk, African-Americans (then, they were Negroes, or "coloreds"), American
Indians; men, women and children: all of them came to the District. Their coming changed the
District even as the District changed them.
Here physical landscape and social landscape blur into something larger and more
amorphous-- culture. District officials saw, more or less, the ways this incursion of people,
traditions, and beliefs threatened their program; they sought, more or less directly, to eradicate
that threat where possible, and to redirect it where necessary. This they did in the spheres of law
and regulation, in the broad intercession in everyday life I have called (rather ironically) social
work. They did this also through the programs devoted to ensuring secrecy and security on the
project. And they did it through the invention, manipulation, and transformation of languages:
spoken and written, but also visual, gestural and symbolic. To the issues surrounding this process
of cultural control I have devoted the second section of this book, a section that ends with a test
case in the intersection of law, regulation, language, and belief-- the case of medicine on the
Manhattan Project.
The Manhattan Engineer District created a new form of American cultural landscape with
one herculean goal in mind: the manufacture of a new form of atomic superweapon in time to use
it on the Japanese. The goal was achieved, and the explosion of consequence from that
achievement has still not finished washing its forces over us. But I have chosen in this book to
look at a different set of consequences, less visible, less spectacular, but in their own way perhaps
as important and influential. Having begun a cultural geography of the Manhattan Project, I have
ended looking at the ways the project expanded into American life (and beyond that, global
history) and influenced the world we live in. This is an ending I have left deliberately sketchy and
suggestive. My goal when I began this book was to propose new interpretations of this most
important event in American cultural history, and I hope to leave a broad swath of open space
around my own project. And so I have ended the story at the moment when the Manhattan
Engineer District absorbed itself into other, broader streams of American and global cultural
history, leaving my own photographs of the site as a deeply personal residue, and leaving it to
others to debate the implications of that final (and continuing) transformation from past to
present.
*
It is the conceit of this book to propose the Manhattan Project as a geographical
enterprise, defined by space as reality and as metaphor. I have written a cultural history of three
places and the consequences of their occupation by a wartime project. The webs that connected
those places and gave their occupants a shared reality are not necessarily clear or easy to express.
Wherever possible, I have sought to look straight at the thing itself-- the landscape, the program,
the factory, house, room, person, act, voice, speech, word. I take these things as significant-- as
signifying the larger patterns and imperatives that drove these individuals who made and lived
within and around them. To stare long and hard at one artifact is to be led in widening spirals out
to the largest enterprises of the District, and when we do that, we see the ways in which this
Manhattan District, this atomic culture it engendered and sought to control, drew from precedents
in the past and prefigured so many of the underlying, and often unspoken, imperatives of our
present.
Already we have begun this work, looking at that photograph of a man, a desk, a map. It
is the same with memos, with regulations, orders, letters, events. My task, as I have seen it, has
been to present these so that they are engrossing and their significance clear, and to knit these
fragments into stories, the stories into narratives, the narratives into a history.
Most of the materials of the Manhattan District are hidden in plain view, rendered
insignificant by their sheer bulk, the chaotic condition of their origins and their eventual
dismemberment and storage, the inevitable encryption that results when security officials
selectively declassify government documents and, having declassified, disarray and disguise the
historical record. In each file there might be memos, letters, forms, plans: all the residues of a
powerful and complex bureaucracy. Most are written in a language hard at best to understand,
often utterly incomprehensible without knowledge of physics, of business, of military codes, of all
the surrounding contexts that make up the Manhattan District. Yet from them we can build a
story not simply engrossing but disturbingly premonitory for our own time. Here we can begin to
understand what it was that Eisenhower feared as "the military-industrial complex": a new and
immensely powerful consortium of institutions ranging across the worlds of business, government
and the military, devoted to eternal self-perpetuation and eventual colonization of the American
democracy. Here we can see the sources of a painful environmental legacy that confronts us
today, and will doggedly shadow us for decades, perhaps centuries, to come.
Today, the atomic spaces of the Manhattan Engineer District are known as legendary
swamps and deserts of toxic horror. Nothing seems safe, and no one immune. The dangers that
today threaten to eat a larger and larger share of federal dollars in order to isolate, to neutralize,
and to rectify, come as the consequence of the larger constitution of the District as an ideological
and social system, and also a system of belief. So also with the bequests of radiation injury and
toxic poisoning-- those we know and those still waiting to be revealed-- that surround the sites or
spill from their descendants.
These are the physical traces of the Manhattan Project: noxious regions, injured workers
and bystanders, stockpiles of weapons and tanks of untreatable wastes. This is what is often called
the poisonous legacy of the Manhattan Project. It is the stuff of news, and has been for some
years. The papers tell of the iniquities of government-sponsored radiation poisoning-- whether of
retarded children in state homes, hospitalized patients in prestigious medical institutions,
or"downwinders" breathing the air and drinking the milk tainted by the making and testing of
atomic weapons. Politicians, bureaucrats, reformers, journalists and reporters have found, again
and again, the fallout of the atomic era. But this physical residue is only the consequence of a
larger cultural legacy which affects far more of our global life.
The Manhattan Project is a compelling subject. It is our heritage, and its implications reach
into our present, into our everyday lives. The Manhattan Project lies at the center of our
mythology, whether we know it or not. It is one of the origin myths of the age in which we have
lived for the last half-century and more. Nature and technology, science and faith, fear and
arrogance: all these dualities, central to our uneasy sense of ourselves, come together on the
three sites of the Manhattan Engineer District, and the enterprises of war and invention for which
they were made.
Central it is, and yet also in danger of disappearing from the consciousness, and the
conscience, of our cultural and moral life. We are in danger of forgetting. But if we do, it will be
a peculiar forgetting, the sort that comes when things become so deeply imbedded in everyday
discourse, and yet are so painful, ambiguous, and complex, that they come to seem a part of the
ground upon which we stand to survey the world and measure our place within it.
And so I have written this story of the spaces and places where the myth came into being,
and the people who transformed those spaces and then occupied, however uneasily, a new sort of
America, forged in wartime but extending far beyond it.
It is an engrossing story because, within its boundaries, we recognize what matters to us
as a nation-- loose, contesting, troubled though we might be. The Manhattan Project laid itself out
on sacred lands (sacred to native peoples and to settlers both), striking from them their
sacredness. It took from us myths of great power, used and transformed them, wrote them anew
to its own ends. Its institutions weren't simply divergent from the dominant American
institutions-- democracy, free speech, contests of ideologies, the troubled murmur of the populace
demanding our rights, the contests for power, the streetcorner dances and the popular songs, the
grumbling of teachers and the anarchy of schoolchildren. Rather, it expressed in physical, social
and political terms a strain of American culture which has existed, if at a more surreptitious level,
throughout the modern era. Within its own boundaries, the Manhattan Project suppressed the
larger climate of cultural heterodoxy with its special form of order, forged and justified by the
extraordinary circumstances of the last great war.
In the years since the Project ended, we might think that its special purpose and special
nature had disappeared from around us, overwhelmed by peacetime prosperity and Cold War
fears. But this has not happened. Instead, the Manhattan District opened its fences and took
down its walls, bringing a bit of openness within its boundaries, while it exported its own systems
of belief, its artifacts and its geography into the many streams of American life.
But these are large and uneasy issues. They lie underneath the everyday circumstances
that make up the atomic culture. For this is a story of lands, sacred lands, taken and altered. It is
a story of men and women, buildings, work, pleasure, punishment, language, food, bodies: and
out of all of these, consequences.