Manhattan Project

Giving Up A Myth

Posted on by Cheryl Rofer

It is time for arms controllers and nuclear abolitionists to retire the Oppenheimer/ Manhattan Project myth.

The Oppenheimer/ Manhattan Project myth tells us that a group of people can rapidly build something that has never been built before when under the pressure of fear during war. Physicists, all white men, did it all, with Oppenheimer the most brilliant and at the center of the story. Recent modifications have added a few women and minorities to the capable, and have included the victims, who were not earlier included in the myth.

It’s an origin myth. It tells us how things came to be the way they are. The myth is similar to Pandora’s Box, in which breaching a forbidden barrier unleashes evils upon the world. Thus the focus on Oppenheimer, who is conscious of what he is doing and who later may feel remorse and is punished, but unjustly, like Prometheus as in the title of the book on which the film “Oppenheimer” is based.

Read More

Two Mavericks

Posted on by Cheryl Rofer

Edward Teller and Seth Neddermeyer both brought unconventional ideas to the Manhattan Project. One might have tanked the project had Robert Oppenheimer not kept him on a short leash. The other saved the project.

Teller was obsessed with the “Super,” a bomb that relied on hydrogen fusion rather than uranium fission to release enormous amounts of energy. When the project needed his efforts to go in another direction, he refused. He ultimately took his ambition and resentment to damaging Oppenheimer in the 1954 hearing that you will hear more about as news of the film comes out. But you probably haven’t heard of Neddermeyer.

Read More

On the Trail of a Fourth Soviet Spy at Los Alamos

Posted on by Cheryl Rofer

Three Soviet spies in the Manhattan Project are well known – Klaus Fuchs, David Greenglass, and Ted Hall. Fuchs and Greenglass were known publicly in the 1950s, but Hall’s story came out only in the 1990s.

Now more documents have been declassified, and Harvey Klehr and John Earl Haynes, who have done much to illuminate Soviet spying during that time, have found a fourth Soviet spy. They have found his path from the United States to East Germany and then Russia in 1952, escaping from possible arrest. Their article in the CIA’s “Studies in Intelligence” lays out what is known about him.

The spy’s name is Oscar Seborer. His story intersects with the FBI’s Project SOLO, in which they turned two members of the Communist Party in the USA. Their communications with Moscow seem to indicate that Seborer furnished information on the atomic bomb project, where he was a technician.

Seborer seems to have operated separately from the other spies, and his reporting seems to have been more to the GRU (Soviet military intelligence) than the civilian KGB. The two intelligence agencies have historically competed.

Klehr and Haynes have uncovered a fair bit of information about Seborer’s family, but not much about what he did at Los Alamos or what information he gave to Moscow. Maybe someone reading this knows something about the Seborer family or, as they called themselves in Russia, the Smiths.

 

Cross-posted at Balloon Juice.