A-Bomb and Penicillin secrets 'Hidden in Plain Sight' : un-redacting wartime Manhattan's two "Projects"

The structure of my drama in five acts, "Manhattan Natural" (the other Manhattan Project) , has one obvious influence --- the efforts of science historian Robert S Norris to destroy the oldest and biggest myth of wartime's Atomic Bomb.

Norris , in "The Manhattan Project" (published by Black Dog and Leventhal) , first recounts the usual version of this pernicious myth.

We all know - vaguely - how it goes.


To misdirect curiosity away from all the secret atomic research going on in a remote desert location in the empty dusty American South West, the entire Project was supposedly - and very cleverly - given the title of that location's geographical and cultural opposite.

So the rural-focused A-bomb project was named after the most urban location in the world - Manhattan Island, with all its skyscrapers, in the far off and crowded American North East, two thousand miles away.

Norris seeks to destroy this utter nonsense .

"The Purloined Bomb"

He hints that Edgar Allan Poe himself might have approved the truly audacious cleverness that lay behind the naming of the top secret atomic project.

Because the A-Bomb was actually a secret 'hidden in plain sight', just as in Poe's famous story, "The Purloined Letter".

The easy - cheap - fast - part of the entire atomic project was the basic science bits - the realm of atomic physicists as atomic physicists.

The truly difficult parts - consuming tons of money , man and woman power and  scarce time, were the engineering and manufacturing aspects- chemists and metallurgists playing key roles.

 (Along with the printers who made the boxes Chiclet chewing gum came in !)

Most of the physicists, most of the time, were hands on engineers in all but formal title.

And much of all that activity - along with a lot of the basic science - happened in America's industrial and technical heartland.

In 1940 , that was definitely centred around New York , not in some empty desert.

After reading Norris,  it is clear that any history of the wartime atomic bomb that never once mentions personalities, institutions and events in the greater NYC area would read like one of those 'forthright' investigative reports loved by the CIA and NSA  - all those reams of redacted paper more black than white.

Here is a link to a tour of all of the many Manhattan sites connected to the A-Bomb that he conducted with science reporter William J Broad of the New York Times.

( Equally interesting atomic tours could be conducted in the other boroughs, on Long island and in nearby communities in New Jersey and the Hudson Valley.)

I knew Norris's claim of the Manhattan-ness of the Manhattan Project to be even more profoundly true of 'The other Manhattan Project' :  the successful development of wartime natural penicillin.

After about one hundred big books on penicillin , something entirely new : an account of the one successful penicillin project , not another hagiographic account of Oxford penicillin's failed effort.

(The unsuccessful development of wartime natural penicillin's rival , synthetic penicillin , by way of pointed contrast, happened everywhere but NYC !)

A very interesting and historically accurate account of the development of successful wartime penicillin can be told by simply centring it in New York City with Dr Martin Henry Dawson's team.

Outlier chapters will be added as events - sparked by Dawson's efforts in Manhattan - gradually emerge elsewhere.

I intend to parallel the story of Dawson's project with my recalling of the New York City aspects of the story of the A-bomb.

(Albeit in much less detail than from scholars like Norris.)

All this designed to highlight the truly Janus-like nature of the mercurial and mysterious little island of Manhattan : always seemingly two parts Gordon Gekko and two parts Emma Lazarus ....

The Manhattan Project: Hidden in Plain Sight

Mention the Manhattan Engineering District (MED) aka 'The Manhattan Project', along with the wartime Atomic Bombs, and for most of us, our first thought is a mushroom cloud rising from a dry desert bed somewhere in the dusty south west of America.

Perhaps we think of other,later, Atomic Tests from similarly dusty deserts in Nevada and Utah. And their assembly - wasn't that done in isolated big plants inevitably set on dusty plains or deserts somewhere in southern and western America ? Isn't it still being done out there, somewhere ?

We are certain of one thing - none of this is taking place - or ever took place - anywhere near the wet, green, heavily urbanized American north east - certainly not in the New York City area.

THE DEVILISHLY CLEVER GENERAL GROVES

As is well known, the Atomic Bomb project was not just the most secret project in the Allied pipeline of new weapons, it was one of the few efforts rated 'Top Secret' that actually stayed truly top secret - even incoming President Truman knew nothing of it until he took office after FDR's death.

Many credit this to the mania for security to the Army Engineer Corps officer who really turned the faltering project around after he took charge in September 1942 - Colonel (and soon to be General) Leslie Groves.

Groves, born and raised in upstate New York, it is claimed, took a perverse delight in naming a project centered in rural wilderness in the South West after the biggest urban centre in the world - Manhattan - never the most popular part of New York State to its upstate residents.

Actually, it was a group decision to name the Top Secret project after Manhattan and that decision was even more brazen than any of us imagined.

The top secret project was hidden, in plain sight, in all of all places , Manhattan itself !

Most of the emotional high points of the wartime atomic project (and many of its technical solutions) happened on Manhattan or in the environs close around Manhattan and New York City.

Surprisingly, many of those warehouses,factories, office buildings and labs are still around.

Author Robert S Norris delights in reminding residents of the Big Apple that much of the world's atomic history lies all around them, unknown, as part of their daily work life environment.

It is easy to see how this confusion happened.

Most atomic authors, from 1945 till this day, have been voluntarily 'self-embedded' in the corps of the nuclear physicists, seeing the entire project through the physicists' eyes.

For the nuclear physicists, the world revolves around the Los Alamos weapons-development lab , set in the south west desert.

Without Los Alamos and its team of scientists, we won't have had the second , plutonium, (Nagasaki) bomb. But we would have had a bomb.

And it is worth noting that most of the deadly material in all of the world's Cold War nuclear arsenals was uranium, not plutonium - something you'd never gain from reading the average atomic author's breathless prose over the plutonium breakthrough.

(Uranium was a natural element, while until recently it was believed plutonium was man-made, artificial, synthetic - so it simply had to be the better and more exciting part of the atomic story.)

Actually, all of the physicists involved in the MED were, in a sense, mostly redundant after 1941 - if all had died in a plane crash in early 1942, the project would have still gone on to drop the Hiroshima bomb.

Chemists, engineers, metallurgists, factory artisans - all deserved more credit than the physicists for the first Bomb.

And in the early 1940s, most of the high tech firms and factories they worked for were headquartered or located in the greater New York City area....