♪♪
-Hey, good afternoon, everybody.
It is 12:00 on the dot here in New Orleans, Louisiana.
We are central time, so. [ Chuckles ]
But anyway, so glad to welcome everybody today for our webinar
about what you've been seeing, you know, going on your screen.
"Trinity," the first test of the atomic bomb,
and then also using the atomic bombs in World War II.
That's really our focus today.
And we will be joined by an awesome graphic novelist,
his name is Jonathon Fedderborm,
during the second half of this presentation today,
and he's going to be sharing with you a bit
from his graphic novel, "Trinity."
He'll actually be reading a portion of it for you as well,
and answering any questions you guys have.
Before we get started,
I just want to give you a few reminders
about how this program actually works.
So first off to say that Adobe Connect,
which is the software that we're using right now,
eats up a lot of bandwidth.
So if you could, it will make your experience
a little bit better and hopefully everything
will stream a little faster,
close out any programs that are using the Internet right now.
That will kind of help that situation.
If you have any stalling or lagging or anything like that,
something funny, you know, I always say,
you know, X out of here and refresh your window.
Sometimes, I don't know why that does the trick, but it does.
So, and then lastly,
hopefully we're coming through clear enough here,
but sometimes the volume levels differ
between the videos we play
and, you know, the live microphone,
so what I would love for you all to do if you could is,
you know, you can adjust your speaker volume
throughout the program, either manually on your computer
or you see there's a top menu bar
at the top of this window here,
and you'll see a speaker icon next to the, on that menu bar.
You click that little arrow next to it,
it will allow you to adjust your speaker
or your microphone volume,
excuse me, or speaker volume, excuse me, in here.
So that will allow you to adjust
if there's any kind of changes in volume
which sometimes happen with this platform.
Also to note, too, we're going to move from this area in here
and then we're going to transition into
another webinar room in just one second.
So actually, let's do that right now.
So you're going to see your screen change,
and also you're going to see me hopefully in one second,
and let's adjust this here before we put the camera on.
There we go.
Oh, let me adjust it some more. You can't even see us.
That helps. Okay. Awesome.
So I'm going to start sharing
and you all can see me, Chrissy. Hey, everyone.
I'm the virtual classroom coordinator here at the museum.
This is Rob Wallace. -Hi.
-He is our STEM education coordinator,
and today we'll be talking about this very subject
you see on screen.
What we'll have you do for the rest of the program,
you've seen that chat pod went away.
Below us now is something called a "Q and A Pod,"
and if you have questions for us
and then eventually questions for Jonathan,
the graphic novelist,
please type them in that Q and A pod there.
We'll be looking at them throughout the program,
seeing if there's any good questions popping up.
Also, teachers in the room, I just wanted to let you know
before we kind of get started here and forget,
this session is being recorded right now
especially for that distance learning academy
where lots of students are watching from Michigan,
so you'll be able to access this anytime
after the program is over
and I will be sending everyone an e-mail
after on how to actually access this.
So today we're going to, you know, really dive in
to how this invention,
you know, atomic bomb, how it was created
in really such a short span of time as you're going to see.
We're going to go through a timeline today
and you'll see that.
We'll be examining the discoveries
of scientists to create,
you know, one of the most powerful weapons
the world has ever seen.
You'll notice that Rob and I and eventually Jonathan,
we're going to be talking about these same events
and kind of in different ways.
You know, sometimes you can tell the same story in multiple ways.
You're going to see that today.
We're going to obviously be live on camera here
and doing some demonstrations and showing you some slides,
and Jonathan is going to read a portion of his graphic novel
to you all in just a bit.
So some of the same sort of concepts
delivered in very different ways,
which I think will be a lot of fun today,
and so that's how we're going to really explore this,
especially examining the science behind it,
at least as best as we can in an hour.
So that's our goal here to be done by 1:00,
so even though we could probably talk about this topic
for, you know, at least a few weeks, yeah,
so we don't want to keep you that long.
So let's dive right in actually with,
I always like to start these programs with a poll question,
and I know actually this poll might block what this is,
but you guys should hopefully know this
off the top of the app.
So we're going to, let's see here, I got the poll up.
So what did this on screen, maybe I can put it,
let me actually move this and put it above it
so you guys can really see.
What do you think this is, and I'm going to broadcast
the results in just a second here.
All right. This has maybe been an easy question.
I'll give it a few more minutes or a few more seconds.
All right.
I think I asked too easy of a question.
Hopefully we'll challenge you guys later.
-It's an iconic image. -Yes.
So, broadcasting, yes.
You all know that this is an atom.
We can't start this program without talking about,
you know, an atom, and because we're going to be
starting with this very small, and then working large, right.
So very good, everybody. Yes.
This is an atom. All right.
Hopefully I can test your knowledge later, too.
So we know the different parts of an atom.
We're going to point out the electrons here.
And then, of course, we'll be talking about
this protons and neutrons
we'll be talking about a lot today, forming the nucleus.
And you all know that we are made of atoms,
we're surrounded by billions of atoms,
and when we talk about the atomic bomb eventually,
we're not just going to be talking about one atom,
we're talking about billions
and billions of atoms doing this reaction
that we're about to show you here on screen.
And we're going to start off, we're going to do this kind of
as a timeline chronologically here,
and we're going to start off with 1939 with the discovery,
you know, of fission.
Scientists, they were running these different kinds
of experiments to learn about atoms
and their properties and all of their potential,
and during these experiments,
the scientists got some strange results.
And in one of these tests,
they were going through these different processes
with Uranium atoms
and they saw that the nucleus of these atoms split,
and they weren't really sure
of what to make of the results, right, Rob?
-They had a sample of Uranium
and they were shooting neutrons at it
to try to see what would happen,
and really they were trying to understand
how is a nucleus of an atom built, what is it like,
so they were shooting neutrons at it.
They had recently figured out how to do that
and it was actually 1938, and a reaction occurred.
They found out that they had some other chemicals in there
and that it wasn't Uranium anymore,
and they got a ton of energy released at the same time,
and they weren't sure what to do about it.
These were two guys in Germany doing this research.
It's interesting that most of the research on fission
and atoms and stuff was being done in Germany,
and a collaborator of theirs, Lisa Meitner,
had had to move to Sweden because she was a Jewish person,
and so she had to leave Germany and go to...
and they wrote her, sent her the results,
and she said, "Oh, you know what's happened is
that that Uranium has split in half,
and that's why you don't have Uranium anymore,
you have these two other chemicals,"
and she named it fission.
-So fission, kind of a basic definition,
is a reaction where the nucleus of an atom
is split and all of that energy is released,
and it is a tremendous amount of energy.
And actually to demonstrate that,
we have a little video for you today.
We've got a couple videos.
They're a little bit silly, I'm going to tell you right now.
In this video, we're going to actually use a balloon
to mimic what a nucleus would be like,
and we're going to split that nucleus and see what happens.
We're going to do it in slow motion, too, so watch out.
So what I'm going to do for all of these clips,
everyone, just so you know,
make sure that they play nicely, crossing my fingers here,
I'm going to pause our camera here live, play that
[ Lost signal ]
-So I'm Rob and I'm here to explain Niel Bohr's
[Indistinct] model of the nucleus and fission.
So a nucleus is like a big liquid drop, he said,
and when the nucleus gets big and unstable it can split,
and so energy can come in
and it can force the two sides apart,
and then something can come in that neutron
and it can split the two sides.
[ Pop ]
And they have a lot of energy when they split.
Let's see it again in slow motion.
[ Speaking in slow motion ]
[ Slow motion pop ]
-I feel like I should have slowed that down
even more for you all because even in that, like,
very slow motion, you saw how quickly
those two sides of the balloon,
you know, went the other way, right,
went the opposite ways from each other.
That's the kind, you know, as I said,
mimicking this kind of energy when you split a nucleus.
So when we were talking about actually German scientists
working on this kind of relates
to what's going on here in our next slide.
So they were worried about, you know, as they were studying
this energy, you know, potential,
they were starting to figure that through this process
called fission, they thought that maybe
this release of energy and release of lots of energy,
that could be potentially used to create a weapon.
And so many of these scientists making these deductions,
as I said, were from Europe and specifically Germany,
and they had a fear that with war breaking out,
look at the year, it's 1939,
these discoveries could be put into use by,
you know, the wrong people.
So actually two scientists approached Albert Einstein,
who you see here, and they asked Einstein
to write a letter to President Roosevelt
about the potential of this energy
and how it could be used.
Because I said, think about it, Nazi Germany, you know,
they had the potential maybe of developing this sort of weapon,
and with Hitler seizing territory throughout Europe,
this became really scary, right.
So this is the letter that Einstein wrote to the president.
-Right.
And the two scientists, I think one of them was Polish
and one of them was Czech,
and so they came to Einstein
because Einstein was a very famous,
very respected scientist,
and they knew that he would share their concerns.
And actually, Niels Bohr had brought the news of,
right before war broke out in 1939,
Niels Bohr had come to a conference in Washington D.C.
and talked about the results of fission,
and Marshall, you asked about fission
and why do we call it fission,
and she just borrowed a term from biology.
The other term and time in science
when we talk about fission is when single celled organisms
like bacteria, when they split,
they call that fission.
So it's the same sort of thing,
it's a word that means splitting or into two.
-Great. Thanks.
Thanks for answering that question.
So with this news and with this letter that Roosevelt receives,
he decides to create an advisory committee on Uranium,
but really it's kind of slow moving
between 1940 and '41, right?
-It's what government advisory programs do.
They don't go very fast. -Yeah.
Well, if anything, they decided to rename it
the Advisory Committee on Uranium.
First it was like the S-1 project,
and then it became the Manhattan project.
If you have Uranium in your title, right,
it's not secret enough.
-That's not a very secret way to be doing it.
-Yeah. Exactly.
-But that changed with a big event,
and here's where I get to ask you another poll question.
And that big event was this.
It happened on December 7th of 1941,
or another way to ask this is,
well, how did the United States get involved in World War II?
Thinking this might be another easy question,
but I'm going to put it out there and, well, yeah.
Man, I should have challenged you all more.
I'm going to let it kind of go
and then I'll reveal the results,
but everybody looks like they're on their A game today, so.
All right. I'm going to broadcast. Yes.
United States got involved in World War II
because Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, Hawaii.
It was a surprise attack, a secret attack.
As we saw, I'm going to hide this poll,
on December 7th of 1941,
and our U.S. Pacific fleet that was stationed
in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, was attacked.
Two thousand four hundred plus Americans died in the attack.
And then, on December 8th as we see here...
-Yesterday, December 7th, 1941,
a date which will live in infamy,
the United States of America was suddenly
and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces
of the empire of Japan.
-So in that famous speech, as I said,
Roosevelt was asking Congress to declare war on Japan.
That happens almost unanimously, and then a few days after that,
Germany declares war on the U.S.
So if we think about it, within the span of what,
less than a week, the United States is attacked,
U.S. declares war,
and then someone else or other countries declare war
on the United States.
-Yup. -So that kind of speeds up,
then, this process of this Manhattan Project.
-It's kind of funny that an attack by Japan
caused us to move forward our concern about Germany.
-About Germany. Yeah.
But then in the end, the weapon was used...
-Against Japan. -Well, we'll get to that.
We'll get to that.
So by 1942, as I said, things start to speed up
and the War Department takes over the Manhattan Project,
and under the leadership of Leslie Groves
who you see on screen there, there's a real picture
and then actually you can see just some of Jonathan's
drawings, too, throughout this as well.
So thanks, Jonathan, for that.
And the scientific director today, Robert Oppenheimer,
the Manhattan Project would undertake this tremendous task
of creating the atomic weapon.
In total, these numbers astound me.
The Manhattan Project employed 130,000 people,
and it cost two billion dollars.
It was the largest scientific research project to date
and you can see actually,
look at all the places here on our map
where the research and development
took place all across the country.
-There were others in Canada, too, and three of those places,
Oak Ridge, Los Alamos, and the one in Washington state,
those are still government research center.
-Yeah. Yeah.
So, and we also see there's,
we're going to be talking about fuel development
in two kind of key places in Oak Ridge,
Tennessee, and then in Hanford, Washington.
The other crazy thing, right, Rob,
is that most people at these places
didn't really realize what they were doing.
-They had no idea what they were doing.
They were just told trained in a small, very specific
thing, you know, just do this,
tell us when this needle goes over here...
-Right. Yeah. -...and they didn't know
what they were doing.
-Giving specific tasks, you know, and...
-And I was mostly, at most of them,
all the scientists were concentrated at Los Alamos,
so those guys did know what they were doing.
Maybe not the clerical workers on the site,
but that's where they were building the bomb mechanism,
so they really had to mentally prepare for that.
-That's where actually J. Robert Oppenheimer
set up shop, in Los Alamos in New Mexico,
and as I said, we'll talk about that
a little bit more in just a bit.
So we're going to go back to this whole idea of fission
and I just want to make sure
that you all are paying attention here,
and so I'm going to ask you one more time what fission is.
So let's see what you guys say.
Maybe this will be the most challenging of questions,
and then I'll broadcast the results.
Well, Rob, it looks like they might not have been listening.
Okay. Oh, now it's turning around.
-Oh, change your minds. There you go.
-So you guys can flip flop if you want, change your mind here.
You're also, if this does seem a little fuzzy material,
as I said, Jonathan's going to be reading to you,
reading his section about fission a little bit
so you can refresh your memory on that.
Okay. All right.
You do know what it is, so here you go.
Yes.
It is C, when the nucleus of an atom
is split and energy is released.
So we're going to go back to that idea.
Instead of just talking about it with one atom,
we need to talk about it with multiple atoms,
potentially hundreds of thousands
and millions and billions of atoms, right,
and that really was something
that was discovered by this man, Enrico Fermi.
He, in 1942, discovered
what a sustained nuclear chain reaction was.
Can you talk about that a little more, Rob?
-Yeah.
So first of all, this is, like, a huge moment in history.
For thousands of years, people have been splitting compounds,
splitting one compound from another compound,
burning wood, making gun powder.
We released energy by breaking atoms apart,
you know, one atom from another one.
And then suddenly, we've discovered
how to split an atom itself,
and that's way more energy.
And what Fermi figured out was,
we saw that fission was undergoing and he said,
"But is there a way to make it not just go, poof,
but to make it happen slowly and continuously
and control the reaction?"
And it's kind of funny because he did this,
they were supposed to be building a big lab
for him out in the middle of nowhere
and they weren't going very fast,
so he took, there was a basement under the football field
at the University of Chicago,
and he built a nuclear reactor there,
found a way to slow down the reaction
so that it would control,
it happened in a controlled way, and he got it to work,
and then they immediately realized how dangerous this was
and finished his lab out in the middle of nowhere
so that he didn't blow up Chicago.
-Well, a way to kind of demonstrate for you all today
what a sustained nuclear chain reaction is,
we're going to use, well, actually,
I can hold it up so you can see.
We're going to be showing you another video demo
with dominoes,
and as I said, Jonathan's going to show you
how he illustrated this same sort of thing
in just a little bit. This one also --
[ Lost Signal ]
Hey, everyone.
Chrissy here, and what we're doing today
is we're going to show you
what a sustained nuclear chain reaction looks like.
Now, we can't use a microscope
or anything like that to show you,
so we need to blow it up a little bit.
And so what we're going to do to represent atoms
is actually using dominoes.
So we are going to see how one nucleus of one atom splits
and how it starts off a reaction.
So let's test it out.
You guys ready? Okay.
So in this first row of dominoes here,
this would be like a sustained nuclear chain reaction.
But what is happening here is only one atom splitting,
causing another one to split.
Something like this.
In another type of sustained nuclear chain reaction,
what we're trying to do instead,
especially when creating a weapon,
is we want that reaction to grow exponentially.
So in this case instead of one atom hitting another atom
when it splits over and over and over again,
we want one atom when it splits to hit two or more atoms.
Kind of something like this domino set up,
and imagine this going on and on and on and on and on.
Okay. Let's do it.
Okay, let's slow it down and see that in slow motion.
[ Talking in slow motion ]
[ Dominoes crash ]
I love how those dominoes, for some reason,
when they're slowed down to such a pace
that they sound like bowling pins falling over.
But think about that happening with billions
and billions of atoms, as I said.
That's the kind of reaction that we need to,
you know, eventually create a weapon,
and that's kind of what they were looking for, too.
-That's a lot of what they were calculating at Los Alamos was,
how much of these elements do we need
to be able to put in one spot to make a big explosion like that.
-Right. And speaking of...
-They call that critical math.
-Critical math.
So there's a good vocabulary word for everybody.
So speaking of elements, though, we are going to talk
about the periodic table of elements,
and actually a couple of them in particular.
Now, Rob, isn't it right that I mean,
any element could potentially fission.
-Uh-huh. -You could split the nucleus
of really element,
but there's some that are better than others, like Uranium.
-The bigger they are when you pack a, think about it.
You guys know that a nucleus has lots of positive protons in it,
and there's neutrons in it too,
but eventually you're packing
all those positive charges in there
and the force that's holding them all together
is not going to be able to hold them all together,
so the bigger the nucleus, the more likely it is to split,
and so if you look at the bottom of that periodic table,
it's the ones way down at the bottom that are the ones
that we think of as dangerous and nuclear and radioactive.
-So when, you know, so let's talk
about actually Uranium specifically.
So Uranium has, there it is right there,
it has 92 protons inside it's nucleus,
and that's where you see the 92 in the corner here.
And to get the atomic mass, which is the 238 in the bottom
there, why don't you, so there's that big nucleus.
I would be taking 92 protons and you add 146 neutrons,
and that's how you get that 238 mass right there
where you see in the bottom of that element.
And so that shows you it's a huge, huge nucleus.
But there's some Uranium in the world that exists
that only actually has 143 neutrons.
-Right. -So its mass is actually 235,
and so the 235, oh, why do you add 146, someone asked.
146 is also, that's the amount of neutrons in the nucleus.
So the amount of protons plus the amount of neutrons together,
boom, you get the 238 mass.
So, but as I was saying with the 235, that has only 143 neutrons,
and that makes that nucleus even more unstable.
And so it's so unstable
it's a lot easier to split, right.
-Yeah. -There's a lot less work
involved in splitting those nuclei versus others.
-Right. And some isotopes are better than others
for creating these reactions.
-So we want to, you've maybe heard that term,
like, enriched Uranium before,
and maybe not known what it meant or what that entailed.
Well, that's pulling out that isotope that's more unstable.
An isotope is a variant of an element.
How do you enrich Uranium?
What, was that a centrifuge, right, and all that?
-Right. That's right.
If you were following the news about Iran
and watching their nuclear weapon development,
there was talk about centrifuges
and how many centrifuges were we going to let them have,
and we sent them a virus
that caused their centrifuges to blow up,
and that's how you separate it out.
Because when things weigh a different amount
or when you spin them around,
the heavier ones are going to spin,
are going to have more momentum and go to the outside.
So just like you would, you spin blood in a centrifuge
to get all the blood cells down at the bottom
and the plasma, it's the same thing.
If you spin Uranium, you're going to get the lighter 235,
which is what you want, at the center,
and the heavier 238 on the outside.
Now, 235, less than one percent of Uranium,
if you could just get Uranium out of the ground,
less than one percent of it is 235,
and most of the rest is 238.
And so it's hard work to get them apart.
-Now, we have a demonstration for you all.
Our centrifuge, well we don't have a centrifuge here
at the World War II museum,
but we have our own little version of it.
It's a salad spinner. -A salad spinner.
-And what we're going to do is kind of show you
how a centrifuge would work.
I'm going to be moving the camera now so you all,
sorry if anybody gets sea sick here,
but this is...
Oh, let me get the right angle here.
There we go. -All right. So this is 235.
-That's the corn pops.
-And these red beans, which are very important to us
in New Orleans, are the 238.
And you can see they're all mixed up
so I could slowly go through there.
That would be a lot of work to get those 235s out.
So what I can do is I can spin the centrifuge around,
and now you can see that it's a little bit,
they're a little bit separated.
So it takes a lot of work,
but I can get some corn pops out of here,
I mean 238, having 235 out of there.
-235? Yeah, corn pops.
-And, you know, if I run it again
I can separate them even more.
And so by doing this a few times...
I can eventually get...
-All the corn pops out or most of them out.
-Yeah. -Right.
-And so it's a better way to get them out.
It's a way to get them out and get what I want.
-So anybody want that concoction of corn pops and red beans?
I don't know. That might not sound very appetizing.
-They're kind of stale and sticky.
-Yeah. -Stale corn pops and red beans.
So, but anyway, that's U-235 and U-238.
And so that is what they were doing,
that's what they were working on in those two main places
where they're doing bomb fuel production
in Hanford, Washington.
They're actually doing that same sort of thing,
but with Plutonium.
-Well, what they're doing there is if you take 238
and you put it in a reactor for a long time,
it becomes Plutonium.
-Oh, okay. Gotcha.
So it's a little bit different, the process.
But back in Oak Ridge, Tennessee,
they're working making Uranium fuel.
Now, so these places are working on developing fuel
for the bomb back at Los Alamos.
They're trying to figure out a casing
so that those reactions don't happen accidentally.
I can't tell you how many times I filmed that domino scene
because I would knock the dominoes over with my elbow...
-Accidentally.
-...you know, that kind of thing.
These things can accidentally start to react,
so you want to make a casing
that prevents that from happening,
makes so you can do it when you want to do that.
So that's what they were working on back at Los Alamos
among many other things. -Yeah.
How they keep it apart and then make it a critical mass occur
just when you need to detonate the bomb,
so if the critical mass occurs earlier,
it's going to blow up too early.
-So by, you know, July really,
they're putting all the pieces together
and you can see the first atomic bomb
was the test of Trinity on July 16th of 1945.
They are testing this in the deserts of New Mexico
in Alamogordo, New Mexico, and the test was a success.
And many years later, Robert Oppenheimer said,
"We knew that the world would not be the same."
You know, they realized, you know, all this work they put in,
they realized they made something
tremendously destructive, you know.
-Yeah. A lot of the scientists
were a little bit uncomfortable
with what they were doing, and it's interesting,
I think that it's fascinating to me
is that they only discovered Plutonium in like, 1940,
and by 1945 this was a Plutonium bomb, so.
-So in five years. -It was really fast.
-Yeah.
And then really, essentially almost less than a month later,
Harry Truman was calling for the bomb,
and this is kind of how it worked in short.
So Franklin Delano Roosevelt,
our president who you saw earlier,
he died in April of 1945, making Truman the president,
and... -Truman didn't know about it.
-... Yeah, until he became president.
And so he had this committee to kind of brief him and help him
make these decisions about this kind of weapon,
and the committee kind of eventually said,
I think in July, or maybe it was in June
they gave the thumbs up, they gave the go ahead
that they think we should use it,
and it kind of brings up that question,
I think Jonathan brings it up in the book really well,
but you know, if you make this thing,
why would you not use it, right.
So you had a good analogy for it.
-Well, yeah.
You don't make a hammer and then leave it on the shelf.
I mean, you get a hammer because you're going to use it.
-Right.
So, you know, essentially as this process was happening,
there was really no way, you know, of stopping it.
In July of 1945, the Potsdam Conference
goes on between allied nations,
and they decide to send this declaration to Japan
on July 26th of 1945
asking for an unconditional Japanese surrender.
That was initially met with silence, and on July 31st,
Truman gives the official bomb approval by this,
look at this, like, wrinkly letter here.
It doesn't say much.
It doesn't say exactly what he's doing here,
but he's giving approval
and, as you can see, not sooner than August 2nd.
You all know this.
Probably you've reviewed this history a lot.
On August 6th of 1945, the first atomic bomb
is dropped on Hiroshima, Japan.
Its nickname is Little Boy.
This one is actually a uranium bomb.
The other two were plutonium, and in Hiroshima,
140,000 people are killed from the blast,
and we see some...
Again, I think you've all probably seen images
of just total and complete destruction,
the city, if anything, just shells of buildings
still standing, but not much other than that,
and 3 days later,
a second atomic bomb is dropped on August 9th.
Fat Man is its nickname.
It's dropped on Nagasaki.
As we said, this one is a plutonium bomb,
and total destruction there as well.
You can see some images from our digital collection
there on-screen.
-And Nagasaki wasn't the original target.
-No. Because of weather, I think
they had to change course, so...
-Yeah, it was switched to Nagasaki
because the other town was covered with clouds.
-Yeah, and 75,000 people were killed in Nagasaki,
and what I want to play -- I think John and...
Sorry.
-August 9th, the bomb was exploded above the city,
and in the towering mushroom, Japan could read its doom.
This was more than a routine bombing,
it was the funeral pyre of an aggressor nation.
The bomb had been purposely exploded high
so that the greatest part of its radioactive material
was dissipated in the stratosphere.
[ Dramatic music plays ]
♪♪
From the air, the skeletons o f the Mitsubishi plants
made evident that Nagasaki's
war-making power was totally destroyed.
For the valley area of little more than 3 square miles,
blast and fire reduced the industrial plants
and surrounding buildings to blackened rubble.
♪♪
The Mitsubishi Steel and Arms Works
extended almost a mile in length.
Before the blast, these were modern buildings
constructed like our own American factories.
Closer examination of the ruins
shows the same complete destruction
that characterized the ruins of Hiroshima.
-The video, of course, doesn't mention the human cost,
but you can see at least the physical cost
on the ground there at Nagasaki.
-Yeah. -And, really,
there was no real, you know, answer to a weapon...
This was the first time weapons like this have ever been used,
so Japan really had,
you know, no response other than surrender, you know.
-They didn't know what it was we dropped on them.
They just knew... -Yeah, that it was serious,
and it led to their eventual surrender
on August 15th of 1945.
Those official surrender documents were signed
actually on September 2nd of 1945 aboard
the USS Missouri, one of our battleships,
and that really brings a close to World War II.
In Europe, the war had ended a few months before,
and actually the 70th anniversary of that is tomorrow,
and then now, with this surrender,
the war is finally over.
Now, of course, that's, you know,
kind of the close of World War II.
That is not nearly the close of the story of atomic weapons.
We still see their legacy every single day today.
-A big story in Iran. -Yeah.
Unfortunately, you know, as I said,
we could take weeks to talk about this,
and we don't have weeks.
We just have an hour, so I want to right now
turn it over to Jonathan Fetter-Vorm.
He is the author and illustrator,
graphic novelist, of "Trinity,"
and he's going to do a little bit of a reading for you all.
I'm going to actually bring it up right now,
so those of you who aren't familiar with the book,
and, Jonathan, I think I just enabled your mic and webcam.
-Oh, yeah. Right. -Let me see here.
Yeah. I did. -Can you hear me now?
-Just want to make sure, and so whenever you get a chance...
-Good.
-...plug in that microphone, and there you go.
Looks like you are about to show up right there.
-Thanks for having me.
-It's great to meet you sort of.
-All right. Let's see if we can hear you.
Ooh, all right. Okay. We can hear you.
Yeah, you're coming through loud and clear.
Thanks so much for joining us today.
You know, we're so excited to be... Yeah.
So we had our take with the silly video so that...
-Oh, good. This is exciting.
It was nice to see the domino trick
actually played out with real dominoes.
It's one thing to draw it in a cartoon form,
which you're going to see now.
-...be here today and, of course, as you know,
reading this for everybody.
-Yeah.
Yeah, it's hard to draw that. Okay.
So I'm going to read from some selections
from the beginning of my graphic novel "Trinity,"
and we're going to go over some of the stuff
that you covered already in the webinar,
but, yeah, let's go. Okay.
So we start in the desert in Alamogordo the day
before the Trinity test.
"'Clearance badges.' 'Oh, good afternoon, Doctor.'"
This is Oppenheimer in the car.
"'What's your name, Solider?' 'Private Daniels, sir.'
'Have you ever heard of Prometheus, Private Daniels?'
'No, sir. I don't recall that name.'
'Well, the Ancient Greeks believed that Prometheus
did something terrible.
He broke the law of the gods
when he stole a secret from them.
For his crimes, Zeus, the king of the gods,
shackled Prometheus to a mountaintop,
and every day, the punishment was the same,
every day for the rest of eternity.'
'That's a hell of a rap. What did he do that was so bad?'
'He gave humans knowledge for which we weren't ready.
He showed us how to make fire.'
In the deserts of New Mexico on a patch of sagebrush
and sand code-named Trinity,
another ancient secret was about to be revealed.
Atop a 100-foot tower sat the world's first atomic bomb,
a construction of metal and wire with the potential
to burn as bright as a star,
that is, if it would burn at all.
The bomb and the secret to its otherworldly fire
was conceived many years before in the cities of Europe.
It was Paris, France, 1898.
The chemist Marie Curie and her husband, Pierre,
discovered the elements polonium and radium,
which both emitted a mysterious energy.
They called this energy radio activity.
So some elements as we saw earlier like uranium
are inherently unstable.
They throw off energy and in the process
transform into other elements,
so if you let a brick of uranium sit for, say,
4 1/2 billion years,
chances are that half of it will turn into lead.
This is called radioactive decay,
and it's happening around us in nature.
So several years after the Curies discovered this,
two German scientists..."
This is Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann.
"...derive some very strange results
from a rather routine experiment.
Hahn and Strassmann bombarded uranium nitrate with neutrons,
and instead of producing radium, they wound up with barium.
'These results make no sense.
They must be contaminated. Let us write to Lise.
A fresh pair of eyes might help.'
Well, Lise Meitner should have been working side by side
with her colleagues, but the year was 1939.
Lise Meitner was Jewish,
and she was forced to escape from Germany
as the Nazis rose to power.
Meitner wrote back that she thought the results showed
that neutrons were breaking the uranium atoms into pieces,
and they named this process nuclear fission.
It was very exciting news.
Fission is the reaction that makes all of the things
that we associate with nuclear energy possible.
To explain fission, it helps to take a closer look
at the inside of an atom."
So here is my version of the drawing that we saw earlier
in the PowerPoint.
"As you know, atoms are composed of three kinds of particles:
neutrons, protons, which are positively charged,
and electrons, which have a negative charge.
So these particles bind together
thanks to the interplay of very powerful opposing forces.
The electrostatic force, the big arrows,
pushes particles away from each other
and a so-called strong force pulls particles together.
When these powerful forces fall out of equilibrium,
the atom breaks or fissions apart, like that balloon.
So when Hahn and Strassmann conducted their experiment,
they launched a neutron into an atom of uranium,
a metal that was made up of the heaviest
and largest atoms known at the time.
Because a neutron has no electrical charge,
it can slip through the powerful wall
of electrons that surrounds every atom.
You can see here this extra neutron is absorbed
into the already bloated uranium nucleus,
upsetting that careful balance of forces
that holds the atom together,
and in a flash, the whole atom fractures.
Its protons and electrons and neutrons
rearrange themselves into different elements.
The reaction also releases stray neutrons,
which fly off on their own,
but the most significant byproduct of this collision
is energy and lots of it.
Just how much energy comes from a nuclear reaction?
About 70 million times more energy
than from a chemical reaction.
So if, for example, you fissioned 1 kilogram of uranium,
about the size of a ping-pong ball,
it would make the same size explosion as 20,000 tons of TNT.
One little chunk of uranium has more potential explosive energy
than a pile of TNT tacked 10 stories high.
If fission could work on a large enough scale,
instead of just one atom at a time,
mankind stood to gain more than merely the ability
to make explosions.
In fact, fission promised to reveal
some of the deepest mysteries of the universe."
We're going to jump ahead a little bit.
This is 1939, before the Manhattan Project
has really gone into full swing,
and here's Enrico Fermi and Leo Szilard.
"Szilard and Fermi had demonstrated
a dramatic phenomenon particular
to nuclear fission, a chain reaction.
Achieving a chain reaction
is the single most important concept
in the production of nuclear energy."
Okay. So remember that fission produces three things:
a staggering amount of energy,
new atoms and a few stray neutrons.
"The energy from fission is what makes bombs
and nuclear reactors so powerful,
but that energy means nothing
if you can't get more than a couple of atoms to fission.
In other words, the only way to get
any significant amount of energy
is to fission as many atoms as possible and all at once."
This is where a chain reaction comes in,
and here are the dominoes.
"The concept of a chain reaction is relatively simple:
The product of one reaction
is enough to start another reaction.
In this model, let's say that the fission is the act
of tipping over dominoes.
If the dominoes are lined up too far apart, the reaction stops,
but if they're lined up perfectly,
close enough together, then all we have to do is topple
the first domino in the row
and the rest will fall. The same is true of fission.
With enough atoms arranged in just the right configuration,
a reaction can go on indefinitely."
We're going to skip ahead now.
Now, we're in the height of the Manhattan Project
and General Leslie Groves, who we've met, and Enrico Fermi.
"Groves had built the factory as necessary to make bomb fuel,
and Fermi had demonstrated the viability
of making a chain reaction.
Only one facet of the atomic bomb was still missing
and that was criticality.
Criticality is a term used to describe the ideal conditions
for a chain reaction.
A row of dominoes is critical
if each domino that falls knocks over one other.
Fermi assembled a critical mass of uranium in the reactor,
and he achieved a linear chain reaction,
which is to say that each atom that fissioned
caused one other atom to fission.
Theoretically, this sort of reaction can go on forever
if you have infinite atoms,
but it's not going to get any bigger.
A bomb, however, requires something more explosive:
a chain reaction that grows exponentially.
A bomb requires a super critical mass.
So imagine an area the size of a basketball court
and a pile of dominoes.
To make a super critical mass, line up the dominoes
so that each one that falls will knock over two more dominoes,
and each one of those will knock over two more."
I wish that we could have done this in a basketball court.
This would have been a much more fun demonstration,
but this is essentially what's happening
inside the core of an atomic bomb.
"The reactive material, uranium or plutonium, is packed together
so tightly that when one atom fissions,
the released neutrons can't help but to hit two more atoms,
causing them to fission as well.
In other words, once a super critical mass is assembled,
an exponential chain reaction is practically inevitable.
Variations on this kind of super critical reaction
happen often in nature, avalanches, epidemics,
but it's a lot harder for humans to recreate
these sorts of complex systems.
A super critical reaction requires
an astounding amount of work and organization
just to get all the necessary pieces
arranged in the right order.
All this work, whether it's lining up dominoes
or enriching uranium, builds toward one single moment:
the moment when what was once impossible becomes inevitable.
In that moment, the logic of the chain reaction takes over.
The fire will only stop when there's nothing left to burn."
So now we're going to skip ahead further.
This is the night before the Trinity test.
"Members of the Armed Forces Public Relations Department
are busy drafting press releases,
one to explain what was likely going to be a very big explosion
and another in case that explosion proved to be too big.
Outside the command center,
scientists were staking out spots
from which to watch the blast."
This is Edward Teller here.
"'What are you doing?'
'They told us to lie like this to shield our eyes.'
'Nonesense,' he said.
'We must look the beast in the eye.'"
Here's some other scientist.
"'Hey, what's in that bottle?' 'Suntan lotion.
You want some, you know, just in case?'"
And then Enrico Fermi.
"'It's a simple diagnostic, really.
If I drop these scraps from a fixed height
and measure their drift as a function of displacement
from the shock wave...'"
And in the control center.
"'The X unit is fully charged, 30 seconds now.
T-minus 15 seconds. T-minus 10 seconds.
Minus 5 seconds, 4, 3, 2, 1, 0.'
In the beginning, there was only a spark.
It leapt from the firing switch
across the leads of 32 detonators.
The spark ignited the explosive lenses,
which focused the force of their blast inwards,
crushing the plutonium core into a super critical mass.
The first plutonium atoms began to fission,
releasing energy and excess neutrons,
which went on to fission more atoms,
which fissioned more atoms in turn and so on exponentially.
As the fissioning atoms released their boundless energy,
the surrounding material heated up and expanded outwards
until the remaining plutonium atoms
were too far apart for the reaction to continue,
but just as the quantum reaction came to an end,
the visible explosion roared to life.
Energized material, hotter now than the surface of the sun,
blossomed outward in a churning sphere of super-heated gas.
The rest of the world fell away into darkness.
There was only the light.
In these fractions of a second, the atomic light was still pure.
It was not yet a bomb.
It was not yet a symbol of apocalypse.
It was not yet a part of our world.
In these fractions of a second,
the atomic light was still as timeless
and indifferent as the universe itself.
Darkened eyes of observers in the command center
more than 5 miles away saw a sudden flash to the east,
the glow of the atmosphere
burning like the filament of a light bulb.
The ball of fire glared brighter than three suns on a clear day,
so bright that 50 miles away,
a blind girl turned her head and asked,
'What is that?'
Oppenheimer, speaking years later, recalled his reaction.
'We knew the world would not be the same.
A few people laughed.
A few people cried. Most people were silent.
I remembered the line from Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad Gita,
'Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.'
'Robert! It worked!
The gadget worked! Let me shake your hand!'"
And this is a real quote.
"'Now we're all sons of bitches.'
By the next morning, the weather had cleared,
and the only evidence of the test
was the twisted stumps of the steel tower
and a crust of green radioactive glass,
the result of the incomprehensible heat
that blasted the desert sands.
What began as an experiment was now a working bomb.
The Manhattan Project had transitioned over
from the realm of science into that of politics,
diplomacy and war.
The chain reaction had started."
-All right, Jonathan. -Oh, great!
-Thanks so much for reading that.
I was just so captivated.
-That was great! That's great.
-I think everybody was so captivated, too,
that I'm waiting on some...
-Well, for me a big part of it was that my grandparents
actually worked on the Manhattan Project.
-So I have my own question. Is that okay with you?
-They were out in the deserts in eastern Washington
at the Hanford Reactor...
-I want to know, I mean, can you tell us a little bit more...
-So I remember growing up
hearing stories from my grandfather.
He was a welder, didn't know anything about radioactivity,
but he worked on the project, and he worked on it for years
without knowing what he was building
because it was all so secret.
The first time they realized what they had done
was the day after the bombs were dropped,
and they read it in the newspaper,
so I grew up hearing this story,
which just seemed too crazy to be true,
and so I started researching it,
and I actually included my grandparents
in a couple scenes here.
-Did you? Oh, that's so...
I'm going to look for them now in the book
-Well, one of the great things about the Manhattan Project
was that the government kept incredibly good documentation
of what they were doing, so they took photographs
of absolutely everything and a lot of those photographs
are in government archives
that you can research online, or you can...
You know, they're open to the public,
so I had a lot of photos that I was drawing from,
and then probably the most fun part
was that I went around to all of these sites.
So twice a year they open up the Trinity test site,
and you can actually drive out
in the middle of the desert in New Mexico,
and you can walk around at ground zero,
and the twisted stumps from this last scene, they're still there.
There's still these concrete stumps,
and that's all that's left after the blast.
So I spent about 2 weeks driving around the West
going to these nuclear test sites or power plants
or actually nuclear-disposal facilities,
so that was pretty fascinating.
I got to do a lot of drawing from your life there.
-That's so awesome. -Oh, that's a good question.
-This is my first one, so it was sort of,
you know, trial and error.
A big part of it was starting with individual scenes,
like some of the things that I just read to you.
-How do you put together an entire book, you know?
-I guess, like, coming up with the idea of dominoes,
that was an important one,
trying to come up with visual metaphors
that you can use to try to explain the science,
and then once you have those, then I link it
with stories of characters that I like.
The big thing about this story was trying to organize it
in a way that both made sense for the science,
helped explain the science,
but then also helped it do the history,
helped communicate the history of how these bombs were used,
and so the book, I divided it into three sections,
which is convenient because not only the fact
that the book is called "Trinity"
and the Trinity test site
but that there were three atomic bombs used,
and so each each one served a different purpose.
The Trinity test was to talk about the science.
The Hiroshima test was to talk about
some of the moral implications and what the bomb did to cities,
and then the Nagasaki explosion was the use of the bomb
against people and to show what the human cost of it was,
so that was how I structured the thing,
but, yeah, to make a comic,
I just started out doing a bunch of little doodles,
doing some sketches, writing a script,
sort of like a movie script,
you know, explaining what each panel is going to do,
and then lots of drawing over and over again for years.
That's a good question.
So the thing about comics is that there are
so many different stages.
You start with a script
and then sketches, and then you do pencils...
-Did you start at the beginning of the time and write...
-...and inks and lettering, and so you're going over
the same material over and over again.
So when I wrote it, it was sort of haphazard.
It was a scene here, a scene there,
but then I was sort of careful
when I was drawing it that I would save --
that I start at the beginning and wrote and drew to the end,
although I would jump around once in a while
because the thing about drawing 150 pages
is that you get better at drawing over the course of it,
so I wanted to make sure that the first drawings
weren't really bad and then the last drawings
really good, so I would switch it up a little bit.
I'd sketch a page in the beginning
and then sketch a page in the end
so that people wouldn't necessarily be able to see
that I was getting better at drawing hands,
which I definitely did by the end of it.
-We're getting an interesting question from like,
this is from the McFarland family [Indistinct].
-Oh, for sure. Yeah, I...
-They were asking, "Did you talk with anyone from Japan?"
-So to get to the first question,
no, I didn't talk to anyone from Japan.
I wish that I had known someone
that I could have talked to.
Subsequently, since the book has come out
and it was translated in Japanese,
I have had conversations with people
who are mainly historians or scholars of the time period,
but one of my goals in writing this book
was to try to tell parts of the story
from the Japanese perspective.
In terms of talking to other people involved
with the project, I sent,
like, versions of the script and drafts of the book
to two scientists who actually worked on the Manhattan Project,
and they both helped to, like, check the science,
make sure I had it all right,
and then also they did a good job of telling me,
you know, anecdotes about what it was like
working at Los Alamos or what it was like
working at Hanford, and then, like I said, my grandparents.
I interviewed them and wrote down some of their stories
about what it was like working in a company town as,
you know, workers there, and then online, again.
There are a lot of diaries and a lot of journals online
that have been declassified that the government,
you know, you can access, and you can learn a lot
about what the experiences of people
were like just from that.
And it's fun, too.
It was exciting to get to read --
It's amazing to read diary entires, I mean,
because a lot of the people who were fighting
in World War II were in their, you know...
late teens, early 20s, and at the time
when I was researching this book,
I was reading the journal of a guy
who was on the plane that dropped the bomb on Hiroshima,
and he was my age when he did it,
and it was amazing to be able to,
you know, read his diary entries.
Yeah, I actually used that a lot for "Trinity."
It was really helpful to understand the science.
Also, they have all of the equations,
and I used those equations on the blackboards in the drawings.
-...new scientists that came on to the project,
and you can download the whole book and read the whole thing.
-It doesn't make any sense to me, but...
-Yep.
-Yeah. -Yeah, aren't they beautiful?
I love those equations, and I could tell,
just looking at your book,
that those diagrams they made of the model of the bomb
and how it was going to go together,
I could see that you used that for your book.
-One of the things that I sort of knew about
but didn't really appreciate until I researched the story
was just how big the secret was of the Manhattan Project.
-...Surprise you that you didn't know
about the Manhattan Project or bombs or anything like that?
-Hundreds of thousands of people were involved
and only a few dozen of them knew what exactly was going on,
and there was even a time when the president,
when Truman took office, before he even knew
that an atomic bomb existed,
so it was amazing that you could do something on that scale
that cost so much taxpayer money and was completely secret.
-Yeah.
-It's unbelievable. All right.
Well, I see if there's any good other student questions.
-Exactly, yeah. So this is just the first --
The Trinity test is essentially the first half of the book,
and then the rest is about Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
And then the book actually finishes in modern day.
It finishes out in the deserts in New Mexico
at a nuclear waste-disposal site.
Well, my next project is actually --
It came out 2 days ago.
It's a graphic history of the Civil War.
It's called "Battle Lines," and I started that
while I was also working the A Bomb book, on "Trinity."
-It's been a long project, but it's finally out now.
Yeah, exactly.
-Well, now I'm going to finally learn some Civil War history.
-So, yeah.
In addition to getting "Trinity," yeah,
so now there's two Jonathan Fetter-Vorm books
out there that you all can buy.
Okay. So I have a closing question
because I know we're kind of getting towards the time.
This is, I guess, for all of us.
-Well, I think two things. -You know, [Indistinct].
I think first of all the threat of nuclear attack...
-I mean, why do you think people should still
learn about this subject?
-...has diminished since the Cold War,
but these bombs are still up there,
and there are until thousands of them,
so the more that people understand that,
the nuclear weapons, how terrifying they can be,
it's an important thing to know about.
And then I think also the idea of government secrecy,
of trying to learn as much as we can
about the history of projects
that are being funded with taxpayer money
that we don't necessarily get to vote about.
That all started with the Manhattan Project
and it's a legacy that we're still grappling with.
-Do you have anything to add to that, Ross?
-Yeah. I think, I mean, I'm a pro-science
kind of person, but at the same time...
-It's crazy. -...I think that scientists
need to have a responsibility for thinking about those tools,
those hammers they make and the bombs they make.
You know, we just saw the news that some Chinese scientists
have been editing, you know, genes in embryos, you know,
and it's like just because you can, should you?
I think that question will always be there for us,
and I think that it's not just big things like that.
I mean, we're still dealing not just with the nuclear effects,
but, I mean, a lot of health concerns today
are about new materials and plastics that we make,
and those were all World War II things,
and so I think it was a time
when we made huge strides and advances
and we solved a lot of problems, but when you solve problems,
you create problems that you don't know about yet, so...
-And I think -- didn't some of those scientists
as part of the Manhattan Project realize that, like,
J. Robert Oppenheimer, I mean, he, you know...
-He was an outcast... -Yeah.
-...after this because he...
-It's a bizarre encounter
between Oppenheimer and Truman in which Truman,
after the meeting, promises to never
let that guy in the office ever again
because Oppenheimer was so outspoken
against nuclear weapons after he built one.
-Yeah.
-I do. Yeah. Yeah. It's my last name.
It's www.fetter-vorm.com.
There's a hyphen between Fetter and Vorm.
-But, yeah, you can go online.
You can find me on Twitter or Facebook,
and a lot of my art, especially for my new book,
which just came out, it's all online, so...
-All right.
-Yeah.
-Awesome.
Well, unfortunately, we're 1 o'clock my time,
2 o'clock your time.
This has been such a wonderful conversation that,
as I said I kind of feel like I want this webinar to go on,
and I want to respect also teachers' time too
because I know they don't have endless hours
in the classroom to talk about this.
So on that note, I want to say, Johnathan, thank you so,
so much for participating in this,
and, Rob, thank you as well.
-Well, thank you. -And you can...
-Oh, I just want to thank you guys.
This has been fantastic. This is exciting.
-We have an ask-the-expert thing at the museum.
You can e-mail questions, and you can find out
a lot of stuff on our website.
-Yeah.
So, Johnathan, I think we cut you off.
What did you want to say?
Well, and everybody out there watching, yeah,
thank you so much for tuning in, too.
You know, I learned a lot,
and I've enjoyed hanging out with these two guys.
I hope you did too, and I think to close out for today
I'm going to switch it over to one more area.
You're actually -- we're going to go away,
but you're going to see some of the things
that Rob was talking about.
This is our Science & Technology in World War II website
here at the museum,
and you can actually go there right now,
and you can ask an expert question there,
and also here you can see, you know,
this is our last webinar for the school year,
which I'm kind of sad about.
-Yeah. -But we'll have more next year,
which is great. -We'll have more next year.
And if you miss us, you can watch this one over again.
-Yeah. So we'll have the recording available.
I will send information about that to all of the teachers.
It'll eventually be archived on our website,
and then lastly you saw, of course,
you can buy "Trinity" if you all haven't...
If you enjoyed the reading so much, as much as I did,
and you would be interested in purchasing it,
I mean, you can get it anywhere, but of course
we have it at our museum store
for a little bit of an extra discount.