Manhattan Project insignia. Image courtesy of Alex Wellerstein

In January 2017, the National Park Service completed an important step by publishing the Manhattan Project National Historical Park's (NHP) foundation document. This document establishes a baseline for park planning and interpretive activities and provides basic guidance for planning and management decisions. 

 

As presented in the foundation document, NPS promises to engage visitors in learning about the "Secret Cities," assessing the Manhattan Project's scientific and engineering advances, and reflecting on the dawn of the nuclear age and its legacy for today. NPS will now begin the multiyear process of creating a general management plan that will guide the Manhattan Project NHP's operations for twenty years.  

The B Reactor at Hanford

On February 14-15, the National Parks Friends Alliance held its biannual meeting in Arlington, Virginia. The meeting brought together more than 100 people from organizations dedicated to supporting America's national parks from Acadia to Yosemite to Klondike.

AHF took advantage of the Friends Alliance meeting to gather ideas for how best to support the Manhattan Project National Historical Park (NHP) at Oak Ridge, TN, Hanford, WA, and Los Alamos, NM. Despite great diversity among the parks, the Friends groups face many common challenges.

Interim NPS director Mike Reynolds emphasized that national parks must represent the stories of America's diverse communities. For the Manhattan Project, this would include the stories of women, Native Americans, Hispanos, and African-Americans.

	Students enthralled by the B Reactor. Photo courtesy Mark Boster/Los Angeles Times.

In honor of the National Park Service's 2016 centennial, the National Park Foundation raised some $500 million to support the parks. According to the National Parks Conservation Association, the national parks welcomed nearly 331 million visitors, a new record, in 2016. 

NPS and the National Park Foundation plan to continue two popular initiatives. Every Kid in a Park gives every fourth-grade student in the country free access to national parks. Last year, several fourth grades classes were awed by the B Reactor.  The Find Your Park campaign encourages Americans to visit national parks and intends to highlight lesser-known national parks and historic sites.

In 2016, Congress passed the National Park Service Centennial Act, which promotes the educational role of the Park Service and creates an endowment for NPS. Due to years of funding constraints, NPS currently faces a $12 billion maintenance backlog. In addition, the funds available for new parks have been limited.  The Centennial Act is an important step in ensuring a sustainable financial future for NPS, but many challenges remain. 

	Philip Abelson

From his research at the University of California, Berkeley before the war to his Manhattan Project work to his years at the Carnegie Institution of Washington, Philip Abelson made many contributions to 20th-century American science.

In 1939, after working for Ernest Lawrence and receiving his Ph.D. in nuclear physics from Berkeley, Abelson began to work at the Geophysical Laboratory at the Carnegie Institution of Washington. In 1940, he and Edwin McMillan co-discovered the radioactive element neptunium.

That same year, Abelson began to develop liquid thermal diffusion, a new method to separate uranium isotopes, at the Bureau of Standards. The U.S. Navy was interested in producing nuclear-powered submarines and in 1941 recruited him to work on thermal diffusion the Naval Research Laboratory. Eventually, Abelson received authorization to build a pilot plant in the Philadelphia Navy Yard. With the U.S. now embroiled in World War II, he worked relentlessly: "I was at it more than twelve hours a day, seven days a week. I wouldn't go home to bed but would just sleep right there."

In 1944, aware of the difficulties the Manhattan Project was experiencing with the gaseous diffusion process, Abelson informed J. Robert Oppenheimer about the progress he had made using thermal diffusion. Shortly thereafter, General Leslie Groves ordered that a thermal diffusion plant be built at Oak Ridge. In an impressive 69 days, the S-50 plant (left) was completed, with 2,100 columns that all had perfectly round copper tubing inside nickel tubes. The distance between the inner and outer tubes had to be precisely 0.025 centimeters in order for the separation of the isotopes to work.

After being slightly enriched (1-2%) at the S-50 plant, uranium was then fed into the K-25 gaseous diffusion plant and then the Y-12 electromagnetic separation plant. This serial approach ensured enough uranium would be produced for the Little Boy atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima.

In the years following the war, Abelson began exploring biology and geology and published an important work on E. coli in 1955. In 1962, he became the editor of the journal Science, where he published his insightful editorials for 23 years. He also served as the director of the Geophysics Laboratory at the Carnegie Institution of Washington, and then as the Institution's president.

For younger generations, Abelson advised, "If this country wants to have the best chance of succeeding well in the future, it better see to it that its science and technology is top-notch. Because if anything, there will be more developments."

Abelson passed away in 2004 at age 91 in Washington, DC.  For the full Spotlight article on Abelson, please click here. All quotations are drawn from an interview conducted with Abelson in 2002 by the Atomic Heritage Foundation. To listen to a 1966 interview with Abelson by journalist Stephane Groueff, please click here.

	Lester Tenney

We are sad to report the passing of World War II veteran and Bataan Death March survivor Lester Tenney at age 96 on February 24, 2017.

Tenney was serving in the Philippines when he was captured by the Imperial Japanese Army in 1942. He and his fellow soldiers were forced to trek 75 miles on the infamous Bataan Death March, in which thousands died from  starvation, dehydration, and gratuitous violence.

 

Tenney was then enslaved for three years in a Japanese coal mine in Omuta, across the bay from Nagasaki. In a 2013 interview with the Atomic Heritage Foundation, Tenney recalled the atomic bombing of Nagasaki: "We were in our prison camp in Omuta. We heard an explosion and we saw a tremendous cloud rise. It was the bomb at Nagasaki that we heard. I guess we were witnesses to it because we were right there. We didn't know what it was. But the war ended one week later."

 After the war, Tenney received business degrees from San Diego State University and the University of Southern California and became a college professor. He also spearheaded the post-war movement that pushed Japan to acknowledge the mistreatment of American POWs during World War II. In addition to calling for apologies from the Japanese government and Japanese mining companies, Tenney made enormous efforts to educate both Japanese schoolchildren and American society on what had happened during the war. In 1995, he published an account of his wartime experiences in a book called "My Hitch in Hell."

Tenney attended Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's 2015 speech to the U.S. Congress in which Abe expressed "my eternal condolences to the souls of all American people that were lost during World War II." The Japanese leader later made an apology in person to Tenney. In January 2017, mining company Mitsubishi Materials Corporation sent an apology letter to Tenney. Although this was not the specific company that owned the mine where Tenney was forced to work, he expressed optimism that other companies would follow suit.

Tenney remarked that all the while he pursued these apologies, he had come to realize that he had to forgive. "I couldn't go there and talk with them if I hadn't learned to forgive and get on with my life. So, the forgiveness that I did was not for them. The forgiveness was for me," he explained in his interview. "By my forgiving, I opened up my door. I've often said that my friends who still hate, they're still prisoners. They're still prisoners. They have not been released yet."

In addition to those efforts, he also formed a company called Care Packages from Home, which sends care packages to soldiers in Afghanistan, after realizing he had never received his own package as a solider.

For more about Tenney and his life, see his obituary in the San Diego Union-Tribune. To watch AHF's full interview with Tenney, click here.

Here is a roundup of some of the best articles published on the history of science, the Manhattan Project, World War II, and the Cold War this month.

• Hiroshima app shows tourists pre-bomb sights: BBC reports on a new app that will allow visitors to Hiroshima to see what stood at each site before and after the atomic bombing.

Louis Hempelmann - Part 4: Hempelmann worked as a doctor at Los Alamos during the Manhattan Project and was close friends with J. Robert Oppenheimer. In this interview, he discusses the other doctors at Los Alamos and their roles, including his own occasional role as anesthetist. He recalls visiting a radium dial plant to observe how the company protected its workers from radiation, and how they adopted similar practices at Los Alamos.

Robert I. ("Bob") Howes Jr. is an American physicist. He was a young child when his father, Robert Ingersoll Howes, was recruited to work as a scientist on the Manhattan Project in Los Alamos, New Mexico. In this interview, Howes shares snapshots of daily life in the Los Alamos community from the perspective of a child. He also describes some of the interactions between the Manhattan Project and local Pueblos and recalls the misadventures of the family dog.

Ruth Howes is professor emerita of physics and astronomy at Ball State University with an interest in the history of women physicists. She has researched and written on the role of female scientists in the Manhattan Project. Howes is the co-author of "Their Day in the Sun: Women of the Manhattan Project," which tells the "hidden story of the contribution of women in the effort to develop the atomic bomb."

John Manley Part 1 & Part 2: Manley was a nuclear physicist who worked for the Manhattan Project from its early days. After the war, Manley served as the Executive Secretary of the General Advisory Committee (GAC) of the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), and later also became Associate Director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory. In these interviews, Manley discusses how he came into these positions and reflects upon the relationship of the GAC and the AEC. He recalls Oppenheimer's relationship with others on the GAC, including James B. Conant, and Oppenheimer's leadership on the GAC.  He also explains the founding of Los Alamos and and reflects on Oppenheimer's transition into the "great administrator."

Julie Melton is an author and expert on civil society, development, and democratization. She is the daughter of Manhattan Project historian David Hawkins and Frances Hawkins, the founder of the nursery school at Los Alamos. During the Manhattan Project, her family lived in the same four-family house as Victor and Ellen Weisskopf, who became some of their closest friends. In this interview, she shares her childhood memories of Los Alamos and anecdotes about prominent Manhattan Project scientists. She also describes her parents' involvement in the Communist Party at Berkeley, where her father met J. Robert Oppenheimer. She concludes with a brief reflection on the frustrations of being a woman at Los Alamos.