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Janet Beard's new novel, The Atomic City Girls (Morrow), dramatizes a somewhat overlooked chapter in the annals of the Manhattan Project. Though history and fiction often focus on Los Alamos, secret research and development was also conducted at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, the clandestine site for the uranium enrichment plants, the liquid thermal diffusion plant, and the pilot plutonium production reactor necessary for the development of the atomic bomb. Beard's well-researched account of daily life behind the scenes and headlines, daily life in a time and a place that would contribute to changing warfare and the world forever, attempts to inhabit and explore this other side and site of the story.

Oak Ridge, a hastily created facility, was the temporary home to 30,000 individuals. Beard depicts a hierarchical society with distinct classes and differing levels of privilege, security clearance, and hardship. By way of underscoring these distinctions, she tells the story from the perspective of several narrators, each representing a different part of this Oak Ridge community, and each possessing his or her own limited perspective and understanding of the secret goal of the work of the community. The characters' human-scale stories are also interwoven with the powerful backdrop of a world at war, and the activities at Oak Ridge in the years leading up to the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are amplified and influenced by the historical moment.

The primary narrator is June Walker, a young woman from Tennessee who goes to work at Oak Ridge after her fiancé is killed in the war. Secondary narrators include June's roommate Cici, a social climber enjoying good times at Oak Ridge parties and determined to secure a wealthy fiancé; Sam Cantor, a Jewish physicist from New York; and Joe Brewer, a Negro-to use the novel's parlance of the time-construction worker. Choosing to exemplify each type, class, or social group with an individual, Beard does run the risk of reducing her characters to stereotypes. But happily, one of the author's strengths is an ability to develop rounded characters with distinctive personal perspectives, experiences, and convincing flaws and blind spots. She particularly excels at using internal monologue to convey the sometimes contradictory yearnings of each of her point of view characters. No one is as simple as she or he at first seems, nor one dimensional. The most arresting voice and subplot belong to Joe Brewer. The author provides unsentimental, detailed description of the conditions in which Joe lived and worked, the demands and risks he faced, and the inadequate recognition and compensation he received. The prejudice and injustice faced by African Americans participating at home and overseas in WWII is over-looked in popular historical fiction, but not in The Atomic City Girls.

Over the course of the story, each character in his or her way moves from innocence to at least partial knowledge of the ramifications, scope, and impact of the project. Scientist Sam Cantor's change over time is particularly well-rendered. His mood upon arrival at Oak Ridge is ebullient: "He had the wonderful certainty that he was doing the very thing that he was born to do." By the conclusion of the book, his response to the news that the bomb has dropped is ambivalent and muted: "Sam had the terrible notion that he might start to cry, even though he hadn't cried in years."

I recommend the book in particular to those seeking stories of World War II events behind the headlines, on the home front. Like Women of Los Alamos, by Tara Shea Nesbitt, Beard's story explores a unique domestic backstory in the development of the atomic bomb as experienced by both witting and unwitting participants. The high stakes of war, the implications and consequences of employing atomic weaponry, remain relevant and resonant issues today. I found this novel an informative portrayal of a significant historical episode often reduced to footnote status.

Happily, The Atomic City Girls is also a good read. Beard manages to imbue this well-researched novel with warmth and charm. The book also feels personal rather than academic or dry, maybe owing partly to the fact that the author's aunt work at Oak Park. Perhaps by way of homage to her relative, Beard makes the interesting choice of choosing to illustrate the novel by inserting photographs from the Department of Energy archives. While these photographs of Oak Ridge residents at work and at play are delightful and closely tied to the action and themes of the narrative, I found them ultimately a distraction rather than an enhancement. In memoir and biography, and less frequently in fiction, photographs can serve to underscore the author's accuracy and amplify the reader's understanding. Here, however, the photographs don't seem essential to the work. As a reader, I tend to like my fiction straight and enjoy the opportunity to see a well-presented novel's world like this one with my mind's eye.

Either way, Beard has a good story to tell, and tells it well.

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Janet Beard's new novel, The Atomic City Girls (Morrow), dramatizes a somewhat overlooked chapter in the annals of the Manhattan Project. Though history and fiction often focus on Los Alamos, secret research and development was also conducted at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, the clandestine site for the uranium enrichment plants, the liquid thermal diffusion plant, and the pilot plutonium production reactor necessary for the development of the atomic bomb.

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The Atomic City Girls has 8,132 ratings and 1,068 reviews. Angela M said: 3.5 stars rounded up.The title of this novel is a misnomer in some ways. It's...

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Oak Ridge was the home of the uranium enrichment plants (K-25 and Y-12), the liquid thermal diffusion plant (S-50), and the pilot plutonium production reactor (X-10 Graphite Reactor).

Site Selection

In 1942, General Leslie Groves approved Oak Ridge, Tennessee, as the site for the pilot plutonium plant and the uranium enrichment plant. Manhattan Project engineers had to quickly build a town to accommodate 30,000 workers--as well as build the enormously complex plants.

By the time President Roosevelt authorized the Manhattan Project on December 28, 1942, work on the east Tennessee site where the first production facilities were to be built was already underway. On Saturday, September 19, Groves had approved the acquisition of 59,000 acres of land along the Clinch River, 20 miles west of Knoxville, Tennessee. Also approved was the removal of the relatively few families on the marginal farmland and extensive site preparation to provide the transportation, communications, and utility needs of the town and production plants that would occupy the previously undeveloped area. At first, this location was known as "Site X" and later changed to the Clinton Engineer Works, named after the nearest town. After the war, the name was again changed officially to Oak Ridge.

Building Oak Ridge

Original plans called for the military reservation to house approximately 13,000 people in prefabricated housing, trailers, and wood dormitories. By the time the Manhattan Engineer District headquarters were moved from Washington, DC to Tennessee in the summer of 1943 (Groves kept the Manhattan Project's office in Washington and placed Col. Kenneth D. Nichols in command at Tennessee), estimates for the town of Oak Ridge had been revised upward to 45,000 people. By the end of the war, Oak Ridge was the fifth largest city in Tennessee. While the Army and its contractors tried desperately to keep up with the rapid influx of workers and their families, services always lagged behind demand.

The town site was in the northeast corner of the reservation, a strip less than one mile wide and six miles long with hilly terrain descending from the Black Oak Ridge in the north. Town planners were originally to provide housing for an estimated 30,000 people, but by 1945, the population had reached 75,000. Architectural firm Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM) envisioned pleasant neighborhood communities with libraries, schools and shopping centers. However, wartime constraints limited the availability of labor and materials. Rather than performing time-consuming grading, houses were adjusted to fit the contours of the land. Most of Oak Ridge's kitchens faced the street to minimize the length of plumbing and utility lines.

Life at Oak Ridge

Materials were in short supply, so the first houses were built of prefabricated panels of cement and asbestos or cemesto board. They were known as "alphabet houses" because each of the handful of home designs was assigned a letter of the alphabet. There were small, two bedroom "A" houses, "C" houses with extra bedrooms, "D" houses with a dining room, and so forth for a total of 3,000 cemesto-type homes. Later, thousands of prefabricated houses were sent to Oak Ridge in sections complete with walls, floors, room partitions, plumbing and wiring. Workers turned over 30 or 40 houses to occupants each day. The Roane-Anderson Company administered all housing facilities.

Part of Oak Ridge's appeal to Manhattan Project planners was nearby Knoxville with its population of 111,000. However, the top-secret project was not warmly welcomed in Knoxville, arousing both suspicion and resentment. Many saw the people flooding into East Tennessee from all over the country-and the world-as "furriners" who could not be questioned. In a time of austerity and rationing, others resented Oak Ridge residents arriving with unlimited ration stamps and fistfuls of cash. Oak Ridgers who ventured into Knoxville were easy to spot. The quickly constructed secret city was blanketed in a thick layer of mud. As a result, its residents' muddy shoes were a dead giveaway as to their origin.

The Plants

The four production facility sites were located in valleys away from the town. This provided security and containment in case of accidental explosions. The Y-12 area, home of the electromagnetic plant, was closest to Oak Ridge, being one ridge away to the south. Farther to the south and west lay both the X-10 area, which contained the experimental plutonium pile and separation facilities, and K-25, site of the gaseous diffusion plant and later the S-50 thermal diffusion plant.

X-10 Graphite Reactor

The X-10 Graphite Reactor was the first reactor built after the successful experimental "Chicago Pile I" at the University of Chicago. On December 2, 1942, using a lattice of graphite blocks and uranium rods, Enrico Fermi proved that a nuclear chain reaction could be controlled. Scientists knew that it would only be a matter of time before the energy of the atom could be harnessed for a bomb.

Purpose

The X-10 Graphite Reactor was a semi-works (pilot plant) facility based on design and engineering information developed at the Metallurgical Laboratory at the University of Chicago. Based on Fermi's pile (CP-1), the X-10 Reactor and associated chemical extraction facility, produced the world's first plutonium outside the laboratory. Technology developed at Oak Ridge formed the foundation upon which the giant plutonium producing facilities at Hanford were based.

DuPont broke ground for the X-10 complex at Oak Ridge in February 1943. The site would include an air-cooled experimental pile reactor, a pilot chemical separation plant, and various support facilities. Cooper produced blueprints for the chemical separation plants in time for construction to begin in March. A series of huge underground concrete cells, the first of which sat under the pile, extended to one story above ground. Aluminum cans containing uranium slugs would drop into the first cell of the chemical separation facility and dissolve and then begin the extraction process.

The pile building itself went up during the spring and summer of 1943, a huge concrete shell seven feet thick with hundreds of holes for uranium slug placement. Slugs were to plutonium piles what barrier was to gaseous diffusion; that is, an obstacle that could shut down the entire process. ALCOA (Aluminum Company of America) was the only firm left working on a process to enclose uranium 235 within aluminum sheaths, and it was still having problems. Initial production provided mixed results, with many cans failing vacuum tests because of faulty seams.

Going Critical

The moment everyone had been waiting for came in late October 1943 when DuPont completed construction and tests of the X-10 pile. After thousands of uranium slugs were loaded, the pile went critical in the early morning of November 4th and produced its first plutonium by the end of the month. Criticality was achieved with only half of the channels filled with uranium. During the next several months, Compton gradually raised the power level of the pile and increased plutonium yield.

Chemical separation techniques using the bismuth phosphate process were so successful that Los Alamos received its first plutonium samples beginning in the spring of 1944. Fission studies of these samples at Los Alamos during the summer heavily influenced bomb design.

After the War

In 1946, X-10 began producing peacetime radioisotopes for use in industry, agriculture, medicine and research. The pile was permanently shut down in 1963 and designated a National Historic Landmark in 1966 and a National Historic Chemical Landmark in 2008. The reactor has also been recently renovated and is often included in tours provided by ORNL to visitors.

Y-12 Plant

The Y-12 Plant in Oak Ridge used the electromagnetic separation method, developed by Ernest Lawrence at University of California-Berkeley, to separate uranium isotopes, and was the most developed way to produce fissile material at the start of the Manhattan Project. When an electrically-charged atom was placed in a magnetic field, it would trace a circular path with a radius determined by the atom's mass. U-235 was lighter than U-238 and could be isolated by placing a collecting pocket in its path.

Although the Lewis Committee report had placed gaseous diffusion ahead of the electromagnetic approach, many were still betting in early 1943 that Lawrence and his mass spectrograph would eventually predominate. Lawrence and his laboratory of mechanics at Berkeley continued to experiment with the giant 184-inch magnet, trying to reach a consensus on which shims, sources, and collectors to incorporate into the Y-12 design for the Oak Ridge plant. Research on magnet size and placement and beam resolution eventually led to a "racetrack" configuration of two magnets with forty-eight gaps containing two vacuum tanks each per building, with ten buildings being necessary to provide the 2,000 sources and collectors needed to separate 100 grams of uranium 235 daily. It was hoped that improvements in calutron design, or placing multiple sources and collectors in each tank, might increase efficiency and reduce the number of tanks and buildings required, but experimental results were inconclusive even as Stone & Webster of Boston, the Y-12 contractor, prepared to break ground.

Planning the Plant

At a meeting of Groves, Lawrence, and John Lotz of Stone & Webster in Berkeley late in December 1942, Y-12 plans took shape. It was agreed that Stone & Webster would take over design and construction of a 500-tank facility, while Lawrence's laboratory would play a supporting role by supplying experimental data. By the time another summit conference on Y-12 took place in Berkeley on January 13 and 14, Groves had persuaded the Tennessee Eastman Company to sign on as plant operator and arranged for various parts of the electromagnetic equipment to be manufactured by the Westinghouse Electric Company, the Allis-Chalmers Manufacturing Company and the Chapman Valve Manufacturing Company. At the same time, General Electric agreed to provide electrical equipment.

On January 14, after a day of presentations and a demonstration of the experimental tanks in the cyclotron building, Groves stunned the Y-12 contractors by insisting that the first racetrack of ninety-six tanks be in operation by July 1 and that 500 tanks be delivered by year's end. Given that each racetrack assembly was 122 feet long, 77 feet wide and 15 feet high, the completed plant was to be the size of three, large two-story buildings, tank design was still in flux, and chemical extraction facilities also would have to be built, Groves' demands were little less than shocking. Nonetheless, Groves maintained that his schedule could be met.

For the next two months Lawrence, the contractors, and the Army negotiated over the final design. While all involved could see possible improvements, there simply was not enough time to incorporate every suggested modification. Y-12 design was finalized at a March 17 meeting in Boston, with one major modification - the inclusion of a second stage of the electromagnetic process. The purpose of this second stage was to take the enriched uranium 235 derived from several runs of the first stage and use it as the "feed material" for a second stage of racetracks containing tanks approximately half the size of those in the first. Groves approved this arrangement and work began on both the Alpha (first-stage) and Beta (second-stage) tracks.

Breaking Ground

Groundbreaking for the Alpha plant took place on February 18, 1943. Soon blueprints could not be produced fast enough to keep up with construction as Stone & Webster labored to meet Groves' deadline. The Beta facility was actually begun before formal authorization. While laborers were aggressively recruited, there was always a shortage of workers skilled enough to perform jobs according to the rigid specifications. (A further complication was that some tasks could be performed only by workers with special security clearances). Huge amounts of material had to be obtained (38 million board feet of lumber, for instance), and the magnets needed so much copper for windings that the Army had to borrow close to 15,000 tons of silver bullion from the United States Treasury to fabricate into strips and wind onto coils as a substitute for copper. Treasury silver was also used to manufacture the busbars that ran around the top of the racetracks.

Replacing copper with silver solved the immediate problem of the magnets and busbars, but persistent shortages of electronic tubes, generators, regulators, and other equipment plagued the electromagnetic project and posed the most serious threat to Groves' deadline. Furthermore, last minute design changes continued to frustrate equipment manufacturers. Nonetheless, when Lawrence toured with Y-12 contractors in May of 1943, he was impressed by the scale of operations. Lawrence returned to Berkeley rededicated to the "awful job" of finishing the racetracks on time.

Lawrence and his colleagues continued to look for ways to improve the electromagnetic process. Lawrence found that hot (high positive voltage) electrical sources could replace the single cold (grounded) source in future plants, providing more efficient use of power, reducing insulator failure, and making it possible to use multiple rather than single beams. Meanwhile, receiver design evolved quickly enough in spring and summer 1943 to be incorporated into the Alpha plant. Work at the Radiation Laboratory picked up additional speed in March with the authorization of the Beta process. With Alpha technology far from perfected, Lawrence and his staff now had to participate in planning for an unanticipated stage of the electromagnetic process.

Racing Against Time

While the scientists in Berkeley studied changes that would be required in the down-sized Beta racetracks, engineering work at Oak Ridge prescribed specific design modifications. For a variety of reasons, including simplicity of maintenance, Tennessee Eastman decided that the Beta plant would consist of a rectangular, rather than oval, arrangement of two tracks of thirty-six tanks each. Factoring this configuration into their calculations, Lawrence and his coworkers bent their efforts to developing chemical processing techniques that would minimize the loss of enriched uranium during Beta production runs. To make certain that Alpha had enough feed material, Lawrence arranged for research on an alternate method at Brown University and expanded efforts at Berkeley. With what was left of his time and money in early 1943 Lawrence built prototypes of both Alpha and Beta units at Berkeley for testing and training operating personnel. Meanwhile Tennessee Eastman, running behind schedule, raced to complete experimental models so that training and test runs could be performed at Oak Ridge.

But in the midst of encouraging progress in construction and research on the electromagnetic process in July came discouraging news from Oppenheimer's isolated laboratory in Los Alamos, set up in 1943 to consolidate work on atomic weapons. Oppenheimer warned that three times more fissionable material would be required for a bomb than earlier estimates had indicated. Even with satisfactory performance of the racetracks, it was now possible that they might not produce enough purified uranium 235 in time.

Lawrence responded to this crisis in characteristic fashion: He immediately lobbied Groves to incorporate multiple sources into the racetracks under construction and to build even more racetracks. Groves decided to build the first four as planned but, after receiving favorable reports from both Stone & Webster and Tennessee Eastman, allowed a four-beam source in the fifth. Convinced that the electromagnetic process would work and sensing that estimates from Los Alamos might be revised downward in the future, Groves let Lawrence talk him into building a new plant - in effect, doubling the size of the Y-12 complex. The new facility, Groves reported to the Military Policy Committee on September 9, would consist of two buildings, each with two rectangular racetracks of ninety-six tanks operating with four-beam sources.

Setbacks

During the summer and fall of 1943 the first electromagnetic plant began to take shape. The huge building to house the operating equipment was readied as manufacturers began to deliver everything from electrical switches to motors, valves, and tanks. While construction forces now totaled more than 15,000 people, another 5,000 operating and maintenance personnel were hired and trained. Then between October and mid-December, Y-12 paid the price for being a new technology that had not been put through its paces in a pilot plant. Vacuum tanks in the first Alpha racetrack leaked and shimmied out of line due to unforeseen tremendous magnetic forces, welds failed, electrical circuits malfunctioned, and operators made frequent and costly mistakes. Most seriously, the magnet coils shorted out because of rust and sediment in the cooling oil.

Groves arrived on December 15 and shut the entire racetrack down. The coils were sent back to Allis-Chalmers with hope that they could be cleaned without being dismantled entirely, while measures were taken to prevent recurrence of the shorting problem. The second Alpha track now bore the weight of the electromagnetic effort. In spite of precautions aimed at correcting the electrical and oil related problems that had shut down Alpha 1, the second Alpha fared little better when it started up in mid-January 1944. While all tanks operated at least for short periods, performance was sporadic and maintenance could not keep up with the electrical failures and defective parts. Like its predecessor, Alpha 2 was a maintenance nightmare.

Alpha 2 eventually produced about 200 grams of twelve-percent uranium 235 by the end of February 1944, enough to send samples to Los Alamos as well as feed the new Beta unit but not enough to satisfy estimates of weapon requirements. The first four Alpha tracks did not operate together until April, a full four months behind schedule. While maintenance improved, output was well under previous expectations. The opening of the Beta building on March 11, 1944 led to further disappointment. Beam resolution was so unsatisfactory that a complete redesign was required. To make matters worse, word spread that the K-25 gaseous diffusion process was in deep trouble because of its ongoing barrier crisis. K-25 had been counted upon to provide uranium enriched enough to serve as feed material for the Beta tracks. Now it would be producing such slight enrichment that the Alpha tracks would have to process K-25's material, requiring extensive redesign and retooling of tanks, doors and liners, particularly in units that would be wired to run as hot, rather than as cold electrical sources.

Expanding Y-12

It became clear to Groves that he would have to find a way for a combination of isotope separation processes to produce enough fissionable material for bombs. This meant making changes in the racetracks so that they could process the slightly enriched material that was being produced at K-25. He then concentrated on further expansion of the electromagnetic facilities. Lawrence, seconded by Oppenheimer, believed that four more racetracks should be built to accompany the nine already finished or under construction. Groves agreed with this approach, though he was not sure that the additional racetracks could be built in time to make a difference.

As the K-25 stock continued to drop and plutonium prospects remained uncertain, Lawrence lobbied yet again for further expansion of Y-12, arguing that it provided the only possible avenue to a bomb by 1945. His plan was to convert all tanks to multiple beams and to build, yet again, two more racetracks. By this time even the British had given up on gaseous diffusion and urged acceptance of Lawrence's plan.

Time was quickly running out, and an element of desperation crept into decisions made at a meeting on July 4, 1944. Groves met with the Oak Ridge contractors to consider proposals Lawrence had prepared after assessing once again the resources and abilities of the Berkeley Radiation Laboratory. There was to be no change in the completed racetracks; there simply was not enough time. Some improvements were to be made in the racetracks then under construction. In the most important decision made at the meeting, Lawrence was to throw all he had into a completely new type of "calutron" that would use a thirty-beam source. Technical support would come from both Westinghouse and General Electric, which would cease work on four-beam development. It was a gamble in a high-stakes game, but sticking with the Alpha and Beta racetracks might have been an even greater gamble.

K-25 Plant

The K-25 Plant in Oak Ridge, TN housed the massive gaseous diffusion apparatus used to partially enrich uranium before it was sent to the nearby Y-12 Plant. "K-25" comes from Kellex Corporation, the contractor that designed and built the plant, and uranium-235, often shortened to "25." The K-25 plant was an enormously ambitious and risky undertaking. A mile-long, U-shaped building, the K-25 plant was the world's largest roofed building at the time. British scientists working on the "tube alloy," code for the atomic bomb project, first advocated the gaseous diffusion method in March 1941. Because of the Nazi bombing of England, any production plants had to be located elsewhere.

Columbia University's John R. Dunning and Eugene Booth began working in 1941 on the gaseous diffusion process. The goal was to separate the isotopes of U-235 from U-238 by turning uranium metal into uranium hexaflouride gas and pumping it through a barrier material that had millions of microscopic holes. Developing an effective barrier material was the greatest challenge. Columbia University's SAM Labs, Kellex Corporation, and Union Carbide all pursued major programs addressing this very difficult problem, and all contributed to its final solution. General Groves ordered construction to begin and the plant was one-third complete before a solution was found.

Planning the Plant

Eleven miles southwest of Oak Ridge on the Clinch River was the site of the planned K-25 Gaseous Diffusion plant upon which so much hope had rested when it was authorized in late 1942. Championed by the British and placed first by the Lewis Committee, gaseous diffusion seemed to be based on sound theory but had not yet produced any samples of enriched uranium-235.

At Oak Ridge, on a relatively flat area of about 5,000 acres, site preparation for the K-25 power plant began in June. Throughout the summer, contractors contended with primitive roads as they shipped in the materials needed to build what became the world's largest steam electric plant. In September work began on the cascade building, plans for which had changed dramatically since the spring. Now there were to be fifty four-story buildings (2,000,000 square feet) in a U-shape measuring a half-mile long by 1,000 feet wide. Innovative foundation techniques were required to avoid setting thousands of concrete piers to support load-bearing walls.

Since it was eleven miles from the headquarters at Oak Ridge, the K-25 site developed into a satellite town. Housing was supplied, as was a full array of service facilities for the population that eventually reached 15,000. Dubbed "Happy Valley" by the inhabitants, the town had housing similar to that in Oak Ridge, but, like headquarters, it too experienced chronic shortages. Even with a contractor camp with facilities for 2,000 workers nearby, half of the construction force had to commute to the site daily.

K-25 cost $512 million to build, or $6.5 billion in 2010 dollars. The mile-long, U-shaped plant covered forty-four acres, was four stories high and up to 400 feet wide. Engineers developed special coatings for the hundreds of miles of pipes and equipment to withstand the corrosive uranium hexaflouride gas that would pass through the plant's 3,000 repetitive diffusion stages (together making up a cascade).

The entire process was hermetically sealed like a thermos bottle, as any moisture could cause a violent reaction with the uranium hexafluoride. Even minute pinhole leaks and contamination from fingerprints were major concerns. A special leak detector was invented and every component of the entire system underwent a "cleanliness control" procedure before it was installed.

Downgrading K-25

In late summer of 1943 it was decided that K-25 would play a lesser role than originally intended. Instead of producing fully enriched uranium 235, the new gaseous diffusion plant would provide around fifty-percent enrichment for use as feeder material for Y-12. This would be accomplished by eliminating the more troublesome upper part of the cascade. Even this level of enrichment was not assured since a suitable barrier for the diffusion process still did not exist. The decision to downgrade K-25 was part of the larger decision to double the capacity of Y-12 and fit with Groves' new strategy of utilizing a combination of separation methods to produce enough fissionable material for bombs as soon as possible.

There was no doubt in Groves' mind that gaseous diffusion still had to be pursued vigorously. Not only had major resources already been expended on the program, but there was also the possibility that it might yet prove successful. Y-12 was in trouble as 1944 began, and the plutonium pile projects (X-10) were just getting underway. A workable barrier design might put K-25 ahead in the race for the bomb. Unfortunately, no one had been able to fabricate barrier material of sufficient quality. The only alternative remaining was to increase production enough to compensate for the low percentage of barrier that met specifications. As Lawrence prepared to throw everything he had into a thirty-beam source for Y-12, Groves ordered a crash barrier program, hoping to prevent K-25 from standing idle as the race for the bomb continued.

After the War

The K-25 plant was more reliable and efficient than anyone predicted. After the war, the K-25 was expanded with the K-27, K-29, K-31 and K-33 plants built as additional stages of the process. The plants produced the majority of the U-235 for the Cold War arsenal. The K-25 plant was the first large-scale fully automated factory in history. Because of the complexity and size of the plant, 9,000 employees working in three shifts were needed to monitor its operations.

Until 1985, K-25 produced fuel for civilian nuclear power reactors around the world. In addition, K-25 developed a commercially competitive gas centrifuge technology. K-25's innovative technologies served the nation in World War II and the Cold War with great distinction.

S-50 Plant

The theory behind investing in S-50 was that the enrichment process might work best if the three plants were used in a series. In practice, this proved to be correct. The uranium product was slightly enriched at S-50 (one to two percent U-235) and this was fed into the K-25 plant. The gaseous diffusion process raised the enrichment to about 20 percent. This was fed into the Y-12 plant for the final enrichment cycle. Through this serial approach, the first atomic bomb received its enriched uranium.

Oppenheimer Gets Involved

As problems with both Y-12 and K-25 reached crisis proportions in the spring and summer of 1944, the Manhattan Project received help from an unexpected source - the United States Navy. President Roosevelt had instructed that the atomic bomb effort be an Army program and that the Navy be excluded from deliberations. Navy research on atomic power, conducted primarily for submarines, received no direct aid from Groves, who, in fact, was not up-to-date on the state of navy efforts when he received a letter on the subject from Oppenheimer in April 1944.

Oppenheimer informed Groves that Philip Abelson's experiments on thermal diffusion at the Philadelphia Navy Yard deserved a closer look. Abelson was building a plant to produce enriched uranium to be completed by early July 1944. It might be possible, Oppenheimer thought, to help Abelson complete and expand his plant and use its slightly enriched product as feed material for Y-12 until the problems plaguing K-25 could be resolved.

The liquid thermal diffusion process had been evaluated as early as 1940 by the Uranium Committee, when Abelson was still with the National Bureau of Standards. In 1941 he moved his research to the Naval Research Laboratory, where there was more support for his work. During the summer of 1942 Bush and Conant received reports about Abelson's research but concluded that it would take too long for the thermal diffusion process to make a major contribution to the bomb effort, especially since the electromagnetic and pile projects were making satisfactory progress.

Supporting Thermal Diffusion

After a visit with Abelson in January 1943, Bush encouraged the Navy to increase its support of thermal diffusion. A thorough review of Abelson's project early in 1943, however, concluded that thermal diffusion work should be expanded but should not be considered as a replacement for gaseous diffusion, which was better understood theoretically. Abelson continued his work independently of the Manhattan Project. He obtained authorization to build a new plant at the Philadelphia Navy Yard, where construction began in January 1944.

(Note: The Navy, and specifically the Philadelphia Navy Yard, was chosen by Abelson because of their experience dealing with huge ship boilers which produced steam. Steam was the essential source of heat required for the liquid thermal diffusion process.)

Groves immediately saw the value of Oppenheimer's suggestion and sent a group to Philadelphia to visit Abelson's facility. A quick analysis demonstrated that a thermal diffusion plant could indeed be built at Oak Ridge and placed in operation by early 1945. The steam required in the convection columns was already at hand in the form of the almost completed K-25 power plant (the largest in the world). It would be relatively simple to provide steam to the thermal diffusion plant and produce enriched uranium, while providing electricity for the K-25 plant when it was finished. Groves gave the contractor, the H. K. Ferguson Company of Cleveland, just ninety days from September 27 to bring a 2,142 column plant on line (In comparison, Abelson's plant in Philadelphia contained 100 columns). There was no time to waste as Happy Valley in Oak Ridge braced itself for a new influx of 10,000 workers.

Building the Plant

Closely patterned on the Navy pilot plant in Philadelphia, the S-50 plant consisted of 2,142 uniform columns, each 48 feet high. Manufacturing this plant to exacting specifications within 90-days would be no small feat. Indeed, 21 firms turned down the assignment before the H. K. Ferguson Company, an engineering firm in Cleveland, accepted the challenge.

The construction of the plant demanded a high level of precision. It required nearly perfectly round columns with a uranium hexafluoride layer spacing of only 0.010 inches (3 sheets of paper) thick! In order to meet the nearly impossible deadline, operators, electricians and welders scrambled to complete the project and even used passenger trains to transport construction materials. In the end, the contractors beat the deadline and completed the S-50 plant in just 69 days.

The S-50 production plant required an enormous amount of energy and was shut down in 1946. The K-25 plant was most effective.

Further Reading

For more information on the Manhattan Project's sites in Tennessee and the scientists who worked there, please consider purchasing our Guide to the Manhattan Project in Tennessee, which can be found on the Atomic Heritage Foundation's online store or at Amazon.
The text for this page was taken and adapted from the U.S. Department of Energy's official Manhattan Project history: F. G. Gosling, The Manhattan Project: Making the Atomic Bomb (DOE/MA-0001; Washington: History Division, Department of Energy, January 1999), 19-26, 31-32.

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Oak Ridge was the home of the uranium enrichment plants (K-25 and Y-12), the liquid thermal diffusion plant (S-50), and the pilot plutonium production reactor (X-10 Graphite Reactor). Site SelectionIn 1942, General Leslie Groves approved Oak Ridge, Tennessee, as the site for the pilot plutonium plant and the uranium enrichment plant.

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I asked my driver, a young woman from this Bible Belt country, where the plants were. "We'll git to 'em," she said with a knowing smile. "It takes time." And like a trained guide she pointed to the neighborhoods and called them off: "Where you're staying, that's Jackson Square, main residential and business section." I scribbled in my notebook: Pine Valley, Elm Grove, Grove Center, Jefferson Center, Middletown, Happy Valley. While pointing out the neighborhoods, she also suggested that I jot down the A&P's, the Farmers' Markets, Supermarkets, and a hot dog stand selling Coney Island dogs for ten cents. She called my attention to the fact that in the Trailer Camps the streets were named after animals: Squirrel, Terrier, Raccoon. But I didn't ask her how come there was a Lincoln Road in the heart of Tennessee.

"I want you-all to write a good story about Oak Ridge," she said warningly. "There's been many of you writers from the North, but I ain't seen a good story yet. You fellas don't seem to git the sperit of this place." I heard a great deal more on the subject of "the spirit" from articulate residents during my stay.

"There's 53 old cemeteries here," my informant continued, "spread over the 95,000 acres of Roane an' Anderson Counties. When the people was moved off the land for the Project to commence, the Army promised it would take care of the cemeteries. And they do." On Decoration Day the approximately 3,000 former inhabitants of these ridges are all granted passes to come and decorate the graves. "What happens when somebody on the Project dies?" I asked. "Well," my driver said, "they's shipped back home where they's from." What's more, she added, few people ever die here, because most of the workers are young. "I never seen a grandmother in two years I been here," she said.

The plants are widely dispersed and hidden in the valleys. Miles of wooded areas separate them from one another and from the residential districts. Mountains and ridges prevent any observation until you are actually near them. First come the warning signs, then the big fences and guard towers, and in the background are the massive atomic fortresses. Again there are no smokestacks, and no smoke pours out. I said to my guide it didn't seem to me as if anything were going on inside those plants. "Plenty going on," she replied, "just ain't no smoke to it."

The mystery deepened even more with the realization that while a great many things entered the huge structures, very little seemed to come out. Later I learned that it required big quantities of ore and many complicated processes-done here and elsewhere-finally to isolate the negligible bit of precious uranium from the mixture of U-235 and U-238.

There are several methods of extracting the uranium. The Tennessee Eastman plant, known as Y-12, and comprising 270 buildings, uses the electro-magnetic process. Carbide and Carbon Corporation, K-25, occupying 71 buildings, obtains the same results by gaseous diffusion. S-50, operated by the Fercleve Corporation, employs the thermal-diffusion method. All these processes have been tested, and they all work. X-10, the Clinton Laboratories, formerly connected with DuPont, are doing research on plutonium, the main plant being at the Hanford Engineering Works in the State of Washington.

Three shifts keep the plants in operation day and night, and thousands of workers and technicians from Oak Ridge and its environs check in past the maze of fences, guards and more guards. Few of them ever see the finished product, and before the Bomb struck Hiroshima they hadn't the least inkling of what was going on behind the thick walls that separated them from the radioactive uranium. Charlie Chaplin's awe at entering the super-modern factory in "Modern Times" was nothing compared to what the Project workers first experienced in the plants. Charlie at least saw what he was making. The Ridgers still can't see, but they know. There's a purpose to all the button-pushing and fantastic equipment.

"I still don't see how a gadget can take the place of a brain," a worker said philosophically," but leave it to them long-hairs to think things out."

Three years ago the Manhattan Engineer District was a plan. The Black Oak Ridge country was chosen as one of the three atomic sites for its electric power, supplied by the TVA, its inaccessibility to enemy attacks, its water supply and the then uncritical labor area. The small farmers who inhabited these ridges were moved off the land with proper remuneration and dispatch. They could not be told why.

The bulldozers moved in, and with them arrived the jeeps and automobiles. The army, having the scientists in mind at first, built several hundred permanent houses and put fireplaces in them. Often the fireplaces were there before the walls were up. Then the plans were changed, and more houses were built. More workers arrived, and the need for shelter became acute. They started building barracks, hutments and the TVA came to the rescue with those square, matchbox demountables. And finally the trailers were brought in and set up below the ridges.

It was not an inspired migration. Many were lured by high wages; others by promises of comfortable living. The scientists, those who had worked with the Project in other parts of the country, knew the reasons. The GI's came because they were told to come. One woman said it was a good way of getting rid of her husband. "I knew he couldn't follow me past the gates."

They waded in the red-clay mud, and some walked about barefoot for fear of losing their shoes. The clay was hard and they had to water it at night in order to dig it next morning. People knew there was no gold to be found in the Cumberlands, and therefore it is the more remarkable that they worked with such fervor and pioneering zeal.

When Oak Ridge had 15,000 inhabitants, there was only one grocery store in town. Businessmen, unable to find out the potential number of customers or clients, were reluctant to move in. One five-and-ten concern asked for a contract barring competitors for a period of ten years. Slowly, warily, entrepreneurs set up shop in Oak Ridge. And they've done quite well by themselves, so well, in fact, that the OPA has had to step in on occasion to curb some enterprising souls.

Roads were laid out, buses started to operate, taxi-cabs were brought in. Neon lights went up on business establishments, and some people started calling Oak Ridge "home." They cut weeds and planted Victory gardens and raised pets. People started having children, many children. "Pretty near all there was to do in those days," a father said.

Today the city has its Boosters and Junior Chamber of Commerce, and a Women's Club. It has beauticians; one hair stylist advertises as being connected "formerly [with] Helena Rubinstein's Fifth Avenue, NY." There are tennis and handball courts. A symphony orchestra, composed of Project employees, is led by a prominent scientist. There are seven recreation halls into which people can wander and join a bridge game or participate in community singing. There are several movie houses and a Little Theater and a high school. But Oak Ridge still has no sidewalks. "When I first came here," a youngster of ten said, "I missed sidewalks most. Now I don't care."

Some people point with pride. Others point at "Colored Hutments," where living facilities are primitive, to say the least, though comparable to some of the housing for white workmen. Negro children are not permitted to go to school with whites; they journey to nearby Clinton for their education. And for that reason many Negroes did not bring their children to Oak Ridge. Plans are now being made to provide school facilities for the Negroes as soon as a sufficient number of children are enrolled to justify it. They have one recreation hall, the Atom Club, and one movie house, which is located 12 miles from their hutments, in the K-25 area.

The GI scientists point to the great discrepancy in salaries.

No one points at the food served at Oak Ridge cafeterias, and that's as it should be.

One of the town's most interesting institutions is the Oak Ridge Hospital. It is an experiment in what its brilliant young director, a lieutenant colonel, says "has absolutely no relationship with socialized medicine." He calls it "The Group Insurance Plan." Nevertheless, I advise Dr. Fishbein not to be lulled by the colonel's reassurances. The plan works something like this: each family head pays $4 a month, and the medical services include all his children below the age of 19. Doctors make private calls, but the fees go to the hospital. There is no private practice. The hospital has 300 beds and can handle 1,500 in-patients monthly. Five psychiatrists are attached to the institution, and their emphasis is on what they call group therapy. The hospital is staffed with high-caliber practitioners, many of them from the Mayo Clinic. Everybody in Oak Ridge can afford to enjoy good health.

This is the only city in the United States which has no unemployment and no reconversion problem. There are no election headaches, since the councilmen act only in an advisory capacity to the District Engineer, who is both an army officer and the mayor. Those who acquire an additional child try to move from a B-house to a C-house, and so on up to a F-house, which rents for $73 a month. And those who marry and are lucky move from their "Single" dormitories to an A-house. But no matter where they move, most of it is Cemesto (cement and asbestos rolled into sheets). And there's a feeling of temporariness about the whole place. The one bank in town is bulging with assets, for which the state of Tennessee is not ungrateful. The inhabitants of Knoxville have learned to tolerate the outsiders, if not for their ways, for the revenue they've brought.

There is a tendency among many to talk about the "past" and about "the spirit" they had "in those days." A few have left for the other "home," but most are waiting. The Bomb that pulverized Hiroshima was the reason for their existence. The world was shaken to its very foundations. Now the people who've unchained this fury are thinking of its implications not only for their immediate tomorrow, but for the world's also.

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A Visit to the Secret Town in Tennessee That Gave Birth to the Atomic Bomb

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Eighteen miles west of Knoxville lies the town of Oak Ridge, birthplace of the atomic bomb. We drove over a recently constructed road and I asked the driver, a young private, when the road was built and how far it extended.

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The Atomic City: Why Oak Ridge Was Chosen for the Manhattan Project

On August 6 and August 9, 1945, the United States dropped atomic bombs on the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan. The attacks helped bring an end to World War II and changed the face of geopolitics and modern warfare forever. Soon after the first bomb dropped, the local newspaper in Oak Ridge, TN ran the banner headline, "Oak Ridge Attacks Japan".

The Oak Ridge Journal was absolutely right; their small city in East Tennessee had played a pivotal role in the development of the world's first nuclear weapons. Unbeknownst to the rest of the country, and to most of the people living in Oak Ridge, the so-called "Secret City" was at the epicenter of the Manhattan Project, the American-led effort to build an atomic bomb.

Since the fateful events of August 1945, many people have wondered why Oak Ridge was chosen for the Manhattan Project. Here at Explore Oak Ridge, we decided to do a little research to bring you the answer to this question.

A Decision for General Groves

According to City Behind A Fence, a history of Oak Ridge during WWII, the decision to build a nuclear development site in East Tennessee was made personally by General Leslie Groves on September 19, 1942. Groves had only been appointed the commander of the Manhattan Project two days prior.

A number of locations for the nuclear site were considered over the summer, including Shasta Dam in California, two spots outside of Chicago, and several areas in Washington state, as well as a few other locations in East Tennessee. However, all of these potential sites were deemed either too small or too vulnerable to enemy attack.

Why Oak Ridge Was Chosen for the Manhattan Project

In contrast to the other possible locations, Groves found that the site scouted in East Tennessee had virtually ideal conditions for the military's plans. Here are some of the major reasons why Oak Ridge was chosen for the Manhattan Project:

Remote Location

Groves wanted to ensure that the Manhattan Project kept a low profile, and Oak Ridge's rural location definitely fit the bill. The fact that Tennessee is a landlocked state located away from the coast reduced the chance that the Germans or Japanese would be able to bomb the nuclear site.

Perfect Population Size

East Tennessee had just the right amount of people for the Manhattan Project's purposes. On one hand, the military was looking for an area that was not too densely populated because it was concerned about the potential dangers of building its industrial plants. The proposed nuclear site in East Tennessee would only displace about 1,000 families. On the other hand, the Manhattan Project needed enough people to work at the new plants. Fortunately, the nearby city of Knoxville, which boasted a population of 111,000 residents, was ripe for labor recruitment. The South, as a whole, was filled with people looking for non-agrarian employment.

Land, Water, and Electricity

In September of 1942, the Manhattan Project planned on building four different types of production plants (pile, electromagnetic, gaseous diffusion, and centrifuge) at one site. Ultimately, the centrifuge process was abandoned and the large atomic pile needed to produce plutonium was located elsewhere. However, the original plan to construct all four plants in the same vicinity contributed to East Tennessee's appeal.

The electromagnetic, gaseous diffusion, and centrifuge plants all required significant amounts of electricity, which could be found at the Tennessee Valley Authority hydroelectric plants at Norris Dam. East Tennessee also offered good quality water and ample land for the project. As an added bonus, the land was cheap: only $50 - 60 per acre, on average.

The Secret City is Born

Under orders from General Groves, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers purchased 59,000 acres of land along the Clinch River. Originally known as Site X or Clinton Engineer Works, the nuclear site was eventually renamed Oak Ridge. With its promise of jobs, the new city drew in tens of thousands of families, becoming the fifth-largest city in Tennessee.

Throughout the war, Oak Ridge was protected by guarded gates, and workers at the plants were sworn to secrecy. Few people in town were aware that the military was pursuing an atomic bomb onsite; they only knew information relevant to their specific job duties. It was not until the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 that the true purpose of the Secret City became clear to the masses.

For more information about Oak Ridge's fascinating past, visit our History page!

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The Atomic City: Why Oak Ridge Was Chosen for the Manhattan Project

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The Atomic City: Why Oak Ridge Was Chosen for the Manhattan Project On August 6 and August 9, 1945, the United States dropped atomic bombs on the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan. The attacks helped bring an end to World War II and changed the face of geopolitics and modern warfare forever.

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In 1943, after graduating from Washington and Lee University, Bill Wilcox landed a coveted job as a government chemist and was sent to a city that didn't exist.

Oak Ridge, Tennessee, then known only as the Clinton Engineering Works, was conspicuously absent from any map. On 60,000 acres of farmland framed by the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains, it was one of the United States' three secret cities-remote sites chosen by Manhattan Project director Gen. Leslie Groves, evacuated of their civilian inhabitants, and developed for the specific purpose of producing an atomic bomb. The men and women of the Clinton Engineering Works would help provide the material for the bomb. "I was told I would be working on uranium, and was sternly cautioned, 'That's the last time you will hear that word, and you must never speak it,'" Wilcox, now 87, recalled.

Wilcox's experience was atypical of the 75,000 government workers and construction personnel who populated the gated district from 1942 to 1945. Many had never heard of uranium until August 6, 1945-65 years ago-when radio broadcasts and newspapers announced that the most powerful weapon ever created had been dropped on a city in Japan, ending the war 22 days later.

The Clinton Engineering Works opened its gates to the public in 1949, and was renamed Oak Ridge; today, its residents are keenly aware of their atomic heritage. The city is home to two of the most advanced neutron science research centers in the world, and the government is still the area's major employer. But Oak Ridge has come a long way from the stretch of cultivated fields stippled with charmless industrial plants, prefabricated houses, and signs warning its denizens, "What you see here...when you leave here, let it stay here." Trees that were planted in wartime have since grown tall, and the city is clean and well manicured. Still, the opportunities to celebrate its unique place in history are plentiful.

Visitors to Oak Ridge should start their journey at the American Museum of Science and Energy, which provides a wonderful overview of the city's wartime past. Its exceptional exhibit includes an original 576-square-foot flat-top house-the type of dwelling a scientist or plant worker would have moved into with his family during the war years. The boxy prefab building, composed of three sections, was designed for quick assembly; at the height of the Manhattan Project, a house went up every 30 minutes.

Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill, the architecture firm commissioned to design the original communities within the Clinton Engineering Works, created several types of homes for Manhattan Project workers, including dormitories for single men and women. Many were made of cemesto, a mixture of cement and asbestos. House hunting was never an issue for new residents, who were assigned accommodations based on their position and rank. The houses were rented, not sold, and modifications were forbidden. Ten years after the war, the government put the houses up for sale. Bill Wilcox, now the Oak Ridge city historian, reports that 90 percent of those buildings are still in use throughout the city. Though homeowners have made changes-siding, eaves, paint-to distinguish their houses from the others, some Oak Ridge neighborhoods still retain an eerie, modular quality.

A short distance from the American Museum of Science and Energy is A. K. Bissell Park, home of the Secret City Commemorative Walk, a recent and charming addition to the city from its Rotary Club. Located in a beautiful garden, the walk is a memorial to the individuals who came to Oak Ridge during the war. Stroll along the figure eight-shaped path and take in the bronze plaques offering stories of wartime life. Though the work was intense, the young residents had fun, too. Many of them, like Wilcox, were just out of college; the average age in the community during the war was only 27. Tennis courts, then the only paved surface, doubled as dance floors. Residents remember the time as one of excitement, enjoyment, and devotion to a common cause.

Much of what originally brought people to Oak Ridge can still be seen: three of four plants used to produce material for the atomic bomb survive. These buildings are within 30 minutes of the city center, on what are today the sites of Oak Ridge National Laboratory, the Department of Energy East Tennessee Technology Park, and the Y-12 National Security Complex. On weekdays, the Department of Energy (DOE) operates a three-hour bus tour of these facilities, isolated in a 17-mile-long valley studded by parallel ridges-a major reason the spot was chosen for the Manhattan Project in the first place. If a catastrophic explosion occurred, the ridges would act as buffers between the plants.

Oak Ridge National Laboratory was established in 1948 from the facility codenamed X-10, where plutonium was extracted from irradiated slugs of uranium, and encompasses the original graphite reactor. The exterior and interior of the building that houses the reactor are, as they were then, army green. No longer in service today, the facility is a well-preserved throwback to the days when it produced radioisotopes. With no air conditioning or heating, windows at the top provided the only airflow. Inside, visitors can stare into the giant face of the graphite reactor, which is pocked with more than 1,200 openings into which workers once inserted uranium slugs with long rods. The dark control room, cluttered with knobs, switches, and analog clocks and controls, seems simple and ancient compared with today's sleek technology.

From a nearby overlook, to the west on State Highway 58, you can see the original K-25 building-the plant where U-235, the fissionable uranium isotope, was separated from U-238, the heavier, more stable isotope, using a process called gaseous diffusion. It cost $500 million to build (the equivalent of more than $6 billion today), and when it was completed in 1945 it was one of the largest single-roofed buildings in the world.

Dormant since 1987, the enormous U-shaped structure has deteriorated and is currently being torn down. It contains original equipment, some of which is still classified. The demolition will cost more than $1 billion and will take several more years, at which time the area will be used for industries in the Department of Energy's Eastern Tennessee Technology Park. However, the government plans to preserve K-25's Gaseous Diffusion Process Building along with some of its equipment, so future generations can learn of K-25's World War II-and Cold War-era contributions.

The closest a visitor can get to K-25 is via the Secret City Scenic Excursion Train, which follows a rail line that carried construction equipment and supplies in 1943 and 1944. Also visible on the route is a Tennessee Valley Authority substation from the 1940s, which helped generate the the massive amount of electricity required by the plants. The popular 12-mile roundtrip excursion runs the first and third Saturdays of summer months.

The city's third remaining Manhattan Project plant, Y-12, is a bustling DOE facility that still manufactures, manages, and stores nuclear materials. Aside from the New Hope Center for visitors with a small exhibit hall, access is restricted. But it is remarkable to think that Oak Ridge's legacy continues today. On this site, beginning in 1943, workers created weapons-grade uranium using a process called electromagnetic isotope separation. Those who knew they were working with uranium were instructed to call it by a code name, tuballoy. One local story tells of a Y-12 scientist who, after seeing newspaper reports that the uranium in the Hiroshima bomb had come from Oak Ridge, was finally able to speak the name of the secret he kept since he first came to Tennessee and ran through the laboratory hallway screaming, "Uranium! Uranium!"

That seems to be a common trait among the men and women who settled Oak Ridge: the eagerness to reveal, and preserve, the secrets of their atomic city.
Planning a trip? Visit the Oak Ridge Convention and Visitors Bureau for more information.
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Oak Ridge, the Town the Atomic Bomb Built | HistoryNet

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In 1943, after graduating from Washington and Lee University, Bill Wilcox landed a coveted job as a government chemist and was sent to a city that didn't exist. Oak Ridge, Tennessee, then known only as the Clinton Engineering Works, was conspicuously absent from any map.

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Adolf Hitler's quest to build a master race drove European scientific talent into the United States' ranks, giving the nation a jump-start on the race to develop the first atomic bomb.

But even as the United States held its arms open to immigrating scientists, many persecuted Jews, it constrained African-Americans who wanted to commit their talents to the war effort.

Nowhere was this more evident than in Oak Ridge, constructed in the segregated South after President Franklin D. Roosevelt authorized the Manhattan Project in 1942.

Refugees welcomed African-American talent

In the project's early stages, about a dozen black scientists and technicians were welcomed by the refugee researchers working in New York and Chicago.

"The scientists working on the project were generally more open-minded," said Edward Anders, a former University of Chicago professor. "Many were foreign-born and so the whole idea of discrimination against blacks was repugnant."

But soon the project needed room for a larger nuclear reactor and plants that could produce a supply of the Uranium-235 isotope. A "secret city" was built in the rural farmland of Anderson County, and teams of scientists were transferred there.

More: 15 African-Americans who were hidden heroes of the Manhattan Project

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While white Americans and European refugee scientists could work freely on the site, black researchers could not. The "Solid South" bloc of Democrats in Congress insisted that the new city reflect the Jim Crow segregation laws that persisted in the 1940s.

So the history of the Manhattan Project in Oak Ridge was written with the black scientific contributions left behind.

Two largely forgotten figures were J. Ernest Wilkins and George Warren Reed, who had worked with European refugee scientists Enrico Fermi and Leo Szilard at the Chicago Metallurgical Laboratory, or "Met Lab," until their research was moved south without them.

A doctorate at age 19

J. Ernest Wilkins Jr. was by all definitions a prodigy.

His roots were saturated in education. Wilkins' grandfather founded St. Mark's Methodist Church in New York City, and his father, a lawyer and labor leader, would later be appointed the assistant secretary of education by President Dwight D. Eisenhower, making him the first African-American to hold an undersecretary position in the United States government.

His mother, Lucille Robinson Wilkins, was equally accomplished. She had a master's degree from the University of Chicago and studied progressive education techniques, ensuring all of her children entered school several grades ahead.

"He grew up in this very sort of hothouse environment in which accomplishment and educational achievement was the calling of the realm, so to speak," said Wilkins' niece, Carolyn Wilkins. "He really was encouraged at every step to excel, and he did so."

At age 13, Wilkins became the youngest person ever admitted to the University of Chicago. He received his first bachelor's degree in mathematics at age 16. He earned his master's degree the next year and finished his doctorate at age 19 before going on to teach math at the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama.

Within a year, the government recruited him to join the Manhattan Project at his alma mater, where Chicago Pile 1, the world's first nuclear reactor, had just been built.

There, Wilkins researched neutron energy, reactor physics and engineering with Fermi and Eugene Wigner.

In a short year, he discovered three scientific phenomena that bear his name today: the Wilkins Effect, the Wilkins Spectra, and the Wigner Wilkins Spectra, which deal with the motion of subatomic particles.

Just 21 years old when he started working on the Manhattan Project, he was among the brightest young minds America had on its team designing an atomic bomb.

Blacks lived in segregated 'hutments'

But in Oak Ridge, African-Americans could hold only labor positions. They were required to live in government-built "hutments," encampments of 16-by-16-foot plywood structures that stood just off South Illinois Avenue, where a Panera Bread and Aubrey's restaurant stand today.

The huts had shutter windows, one stove and were without plumbing.

Men and women - including married couples - were not permitted to live together, and their children were not allowed to live on the reservation at all. The women's hutment was fenced in, and women had to be back inside the fence by curfew.

Kattie Strickland, an African-American woman who worked as a janitor in Oak Ridge, told the Atomic Heritage Foundation that her job in Oak Ridge was well paid. After some negotiation by a manager, she was even able to secure pay equal to her male counterparts.

The indignities of segregation, though, were facts of life.

Seth Wheatley, a white engineer who worked at what is now Y-12 National Security Complex, told the Atomic Heritage Foundation about the day he was riding the secret city's bus line to Knoxville.

"I happened to get on and sit in the last remaining seat, and a Negro was sitting there halfway back in the bus. And shortly after we started out, the bus driver noted that a black man was not sitting on the back row where he was supposed to be, and he stopped the bus along the side of the road," Wheatley recalled.

"And I can still see him getting up and walking back and almost grabbing the guy to make him get back to where he's supposed to be."

Wheatley said he got up and walked to the back row to sit down with the man.

'Not possible for him to continue'

There was no allowance for black scientists, and when Wilkins' research was transferred to Oak Ridge's X-10 Graphite Reactor in 1944, he was left behind.

Edward Teller, another Jewish physicist who fled the Axis, saw that as an opportunity. He wrote a letter to Harold Urey, director of war research, asking him to recruit Wilkins to support a New York team that was calculating how atmospheric opacity could affect the atomic bomb.

"Knowing that men of high qualifications are scarce these days, I thought that it might be useful that I suggest a capable person for this job. Mr. Wilkins in Wigner's group at the Metallurgical Laboratory has been doing, according to Wigner, excellent work," Teller wrote.

"He is a colored man and since Wigner's group is moving to (Oak Ridge) it is not possible for him to continue work with that group. I think that it might be a good idea to secure his services for our work."

Wilkins continued working at the Met Lab for two more years.

It is not known whether he knew at the time that his research would be used to craft the atomic bomb. What is known is that he was one of 70 Manhattan Project scientists who signed Szilard's petition urging then-President Harry Truman not to use the atomic bomb on Japan without first demonstrating its power.

"They saw the great power of the weapon or felt they knew what the power of the weapon was, and their preference was not to drop it," said Ronald Mickens, a former colleague of Wilkins' at Clark Atlanta University, "particularly as it became clear that the Germans were not going to complete their atomic weapons before the war in Europe ended. Remember, that was the primary reason the Manhattan Project was set up."

Belated acceptance at Oak Ridge

After the war, Wilkins wanted to work at a major university.

"That just was not possible," said Mickens, "as was the case for most, if not all, African-American scientists."

Instead, Wilkins went to work as a mathematician for an optical company in New York and eventually at the Nuclear Development Corporation of America.

He was interested in the peaceful applications of nuclear energy and helped design a power-generating nuclear reactor.

"He's just one of those people who is so well rounded that he could just go into situations and really excel," said Talitha Washington, who crossed paths with Wilkins throughout her undergraduate and graduate education in Atlanta, and arranged a master's session in his honor.

"I think at one point when he was in the industry, they were kind of questioning him because he was a mathematician and he worked with engineers," she said.

So, he earned two more degrees at New York University: a bachelor's and master's in mechanical engineering.

He went on to establish Howard University's mathematics Ph.D. program and served as president of the American Nuclear Society. He was the second African-American elected to the National Academy of Engineering, one of the highest honors an engineer can receive.

Eventually, Wilkins did get an Oak Ridge appointment, serving on the board of directors of the Oak Ridge Associated Universities for six years in the 1980s before taking a teaching position at Clark Atlanta University.

The 14-page resume he submitted to ORAU listed about 100 scientific papers he'd authored in the 40 years since the city turned him away.

On May 1, 2011, Wilkins died in Arizona at age 87. His scientific career spanned seven decades.

A hand-built log cabin school

George Warren Reed's trajectory into the Manhattan Project wasn't all that different from Wilkins'.

He was a second-generation African-American college student, a result of his family's great passion and perseverance in education.

His father, who had to drop out of college to fight in World War I, had higher hopes for his children. He hand-built a log cabin school near Montrose, Virginia, so the state government would send a teacher.

"All his kids went through high school and on to some other kind of education or training," said Mark Morrison Reed, George's son. "So it went back at least three generations with the importance of education. I think almost all of Dad's cousins actually had gone to college and that was expected."

One of Reed's uncles attended the Hampton Institute. Another was a Howard medical school graduate and the associate dean of Howard University's Medical School.

When Reed was in school, his mother, a graduate of Miners Teachers College, never let him take a job to help support the family, instead requiring him to come straight home and work on his homework.

"So they were unequivocal about this, that the first thing was to get an education. And my parents pretty much were the same way," Morrison Reed said.

Reed finished his master's degree at Howard University in 1944.

'1-A' and ready for service

Before George Reed died, his son interviewed him about his Manhattan Project work.

George Reed was classified as 1-A, or "available" for the draft, and wanted to contribute to the war effort using chemistry. He began looking at opportunities at the Met Lab in Chicago and at Columbia University, where he soon began working.

"My life story would be very different had not World War II intervened with the need to more fully utilize all the nation's manpower and with the continued opening up of opportunities to all," Reed told his son.

"We didn't know it at the time, but we were developing the atomic bomb," he said. "I was trained as an organic chemist and we were purifying uranium, but at that time I was totally in the dark; we didn't even talk to the people in the lab next to us."

Many of Reed's white colleagues at Columbia were drafted into military training and then returned to work on the Manhattan Project as privates and corporals, allowing them to accrue benefits, such as the G.I. Bill, for their research time.

"So I went to my draft board in Washington and said, 'Look, these people are going in like this. I think I should go in this way, too, and I'm 1-A,' " Reed recalled.

"When they got back to me, they said, 'Look, we are not allowed to touch you.' I said, 'But these guys are going to go in and when the war is over they're going to have all the benefits of having been in the Army and I'm not going to have anything.'

"And they said, 'We are just not allowed to touch you.' "

'Negro scientists aren't welcome'

Color was a barrier again when the move to Oak Ridge began.

The laboratory managers told employees they had the option to transfer to a place that did not have a name but had red earth and jobs for the white scientists.

"I went to the personnel director in New York and said, 'Look, there is something wrong with this. Why can't I go when everybody else is given the opportunity?' "

"It just can't work that way," the man told Reed. "Negro scientists aren't welcome down there."

He continued working in New York until the war ended in 1945. Afterward, he went to Chicago to work at the Met Lab, and eventually at Argonne National Laboratory as he finished his Ph.D.

'One of the most brilliant men'

Edward Anders, a professor at the University of Chicago, met Reed at a conference just months before Oak Ridge desegregated in 1955. The two struck up a friendship through conversations about science and the civil rights movement.

Anders said Reed approached even difficult topics like racism and discrimination with the objectivity of a scientist.

"He was one of the most brilliant men I've ever met in my life," Anders said. "He just had a very regal, aristocratic bearing about him. He was a very modest man, but he couldn't help it, people just knew right away how smart he was."

The two began attending conferences together, flying into cities on Friday nights and leaving Sunday afternoons. Even in these seemingly benign situations, Anders remembered the effect growing up and working in a culture of discrimination had on his friend.

"I remember we were at the airport at the check-in counter," Anders recalled. "There was George and it was a warm summer day. We were in short sleeves and he was wearing a suit. And we remarked, 'Well George, you're all dressed up.' And he said, 'I have to.' And we knew the meaning of that."

Morrison Reed said his father credited surviving and thriving as an African-American scientist in the mid-20th century to his move to Chicago, instead of to Oak Ridge.

He remained connected to the University of Chicago and Argonne National Laboratory for much of his life, though he took a hiatus in the 1970s to study meteorites and lunar samples. He was one of the scientists who examined lunar rock samples from Apollo space missions and received NASA's Exceptional Scientific Achievement Medal for using a nuclear reactor to determine that lunar rock contained minerals that could not be found on Earth.

Reed published more than 120 scientific papers over his career. He died Aug. 31, 2015, at his home in Chicago.

"It's almost impossible to imagine what it would have been like, had I been born in 1949 in Oak Ridge," his son said. "Where was he going to live, and where would I be going to school, and where are the black middle-class families that were my parents' peers? What would my mother do with her master's in social work?"

"It could have been different," Morrison Reed said, "that's for sure."

Desegregation comes to Oak Ridge

After the war, African-American families were allowed to live together in the hutment villages. But by that time the structures were falling apart. Reporters who visited the site pointed out leaky roofs, exposed wiring, broken boardwalks, garbage overflow, rodent infestations and community bathrooms that served as many as 77 families each.

African-Americans who needed medical care were limited to one ward of the hospital and one section of the dental clinic, and the schools were segregated.

Chicago Tribune correspondent Enoch P. Waters called Oak Ridge a "City of Paradoxes" in 1945 for its expensive research endeavors and poor conditions for about 7,000 African-American laborers who helped make the work possible. About 1,000 of them remained in the city after the war.

"If through the work done here America has advanced science, it is equally true that in the way it has forced Negroes to live here America has retarded the cause of democracy," he wrote. "And this is ironical because it was to preserve democracy that this whole project was brought into being."

Oak Ridge Councilman Waldo Cohn was nearly recalled for his 1953 resolution to desegregate schools. He wrote to U.S. Rep. Howard Baker Sr. about the "tempest-in-a-teapot" his resolution stirred up.

It ultimately took an order from the Atomic Energy Commission in 1955 to integrate the schools, and Oak Ridge became the first Southern city to do it. But the segregation of neighborhoods prevented full school district integration for more than a decade. Businesses and workplaces took a little longer.

The end of the war meant the city was no longer secret, and visiting scientists of diverse races and nationalities brought progress to the town - in time, great progress.

'The quality of one's ideas'

Today the Manhattan Project's X-10 Graphite Reactor site - now called Oak Ridge National Laboratory - welcomes scientists from around the world and almost 30 percent of the laboratory's employees are people of color, including the laboratory's director, Dr. Thomas Zacharia.

More: ORNL Director Thomas Zacharia reflects on first 7 months in his post

"I feel fortunate to have built my career in an era that is much more conscious of the value of diversity than was the case in years past," Zacharia said. "Breakthrough discoveries are not limited by one's race or ethnicity. In fact, diversity provides a valuable advantage in exploring new frontiers.

"Science advances most quickly when the only limit is the quality of one's ideas; ideas are sharpened and strengthened when they are subjected to the scrutiny of smart people with different perspectives and backgrounds."

More: Learn more about how Knox News is making everyone's story told.

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Bias kept black scientists out of Oak Ridge's atomic bomb work

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Adolf Hitler's quest to build a master race drove European scientific talent into the United States' ranks, giving the nation a jump-start on the race to develop the first atomic bomb. But even as the United States held its arms open to immigrating scientists, many persecuted Jews, it constrained African-Americans who wanted to commit their talents to the war effort.

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Hungarian-American physicist Leo Szilard’s petition sought to avert use of the atomic bombs against Japan.

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Bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki - Causes, Impact & Lives Lost

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On August 6, 1945, during World War II (1939-45), an American B-29 bomber dropped the world’s first deployed atomic bomb over the Japanese city of Hiroshima, immediately killing 80,000 people. Three days later, a second bomb was dropped on Nagasaki, killing an estimated 40,000 people.

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Over the years, "the Government" had come to East Tennessee in many forms, varying from the Civil War Confederacy to the Tennessee Valley Authority of the 1930s, but the most dramatic and least public incursion followed quickly on the heels of the Great Depression during the Second World War. Government officials, most of them wearing the uniform of the U.S. Army and the insignia of the Corps of Engineers, arrived quietly in the summer of 1942 to observe, study, consult maps, and leave. They were followed, more ominously, by men with surveyor's stakes.

The nation had been at war with Japan, Germany, and Italy since the preceding December. Even prior to the nation's military involvement, President Franklin D. Roosevelt had been informed of an unexpected and serious potential danger by concerned scientists. In 1939 Leo Szillard and Eugene P. Wigner persuaded Albert Einstein to sign a letter warning Roosevelt of the possibility that Adolph Hitler's Nazi Germany could construct a revolutionary weapon through atomic fission capable of creating vast amounts of explosive power. Heeding the warning, Roosevelt began a tentative exploration of the possibilities of constructing an atomic bomb. But only after Pearl Harbor and the American entry into the war was the project pursued with urgency.

That urgency brought newly promoted Brigadier General Leslie R. Groves to East Tennessee in September 1942. He had been appointed to head the recently created Manhattan Engineer District, or, more commonly, the Manhattan Project. His task was to supervise the location, planning, and construction of whatever facilities were necessary to construct an atomic bomb before the Germans could do it.

This remote area of East Tennessee seemed to meet many of the requirements for the main work site. Approximately one thousand families, roughly four thousand people, lived in the area of primary interest to the government planners. Mostly farmers, the residents were clustered around small crossroads centers with names like Wheat, Elza, Scarboro, and Robertsville. Moving them would not present a large problem for the army.

Some of the planned processes would require vast amounts of electricity, which the TVA could provide. There was an abundance of clean water, a good rail line, adequate roads, and the land could be acquired cheaply. Topographically, the reservation was a long valley divided into smaller segments by ridges. This meant that the individual processing plants could be separated geographically, so that if, in an unforeseen disaster, one blew up, the others would not explode like firecrackers on a string. The town itself was sited on the eastern end of the reservation, away from the plants.

Land acquisition began quickly. In the fall of 1942 residents were informed, sometimes simply by notices nailed to their front fence posts, that they would have to leave; the government was taking their land. A year later, the eviction process was complete. Although most of the former residents accepted the government offers for their land, a few brought legal action challenging the valuations. Roane County lost approximately one-eighth of its land area to the project, but the focus of the project was east, toward Clinton and Knoxville, rather than south and west, toward Kingston and Harriman, and Anderson County was more directly affected by the government's activities. Oak Ridge, the town created by the project, was only eight miles from Clinton, the seat of Anderson County, which gave up one-seventh of its land to the project. State Highway 61, which had run directly through the reservation site, was closed and rerouted to the north, through Motlow. The reservation site was approximately seventeen miles long, averaging seven miles in width, and encompassing some 59,000 acres.

Providing security for a project of such scope and purpose involved intense planning. The Clinch River surrounded the reservation on three sides, providing a natural defense. On the exposed northern side, the army erected a fence, which was patrolled by armed guards. Knoxville, a city of 110,000 people who provided the labor base for the construction and support work force, was thirty miles away, isolating the work site from the outside world. As a further measure of security, the site was provided with an ambiguous title, the Clinton Engineering Works (CEW). All personnel entering the site were required to have a pass and a purpose. On the site itself, army security personnel tried to separate scientists and engineers associated with the various segments of the project to prevent them from discussing their work with one another. Of course, these efforts extended to outside contacts as well. A passion for secrecy dominated the early years of the community and extended into the tension-filled era of the Cold War, marking Oak Ridge with a concern for security unique among Tennessee cities in the five decades following World War II.

The town was an adjunct to the plants. Built as well as possible in order to keep the gathering scientific and engineering personnel reasonably content, the town was planned by the prominent firm of Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill, who designed plans to house eight thousand people. The town was laid out along the south side of Black Oak Ridge, with Outer Drive at the top and Tennessee Avenue and Oak Ridge Turnpike running parallel, east to west, along the bottom of the ridge. Avenues, named for the states and arranged alphabetically north to south, connected the east-west thoroughfares. Courts, roads, and lanes branching off the avenues received names beginning with the same first letter. For example, all the streets off Delaware Avenue began with the letter "D." The simplified arrangement proved to be a great boon in a community where everyone was a newcomer.

The nearly insatiable demands of the project for additional workers placed planners and contractors in the position of constantly attempting to catch up and constantly failing in their efforts. The well-planned family homes, "cemestoes" (bonded cement and asbestos), were supplemented by apartments and by dormitories for single workers. But they were also quickly overwhelmed, and more temporary housing of limited livability including trailers, barracks, hutments, plywood Flat Tops, and "Victory Cottages" sprang up along the ridge and spread into the valley.

Recruitment of scientific talent took a variety of forms, including personal contacts among the members of the nation's leading academic and scientific institutions. Foreign scholars, forced out of Italy, Germany, and Eastern Europe by the Fascists and Nazis, added to the pool. Scientifically trained personnel drafted into the ranks of the army were assigned to the Special Engineer Detachment (SED), often before recruits had had much more than the basics of basic training, a situation that developed them into a creative, but often quite unmilitary unit. The Corps of Engineers, of course, made up the major part of the military presence, but, later in the war, two companies of WACs expanded the number of uniformed personnel.

At the heart of the scientific and engineering effort were the facilities designed as X-10, Y-12, and K-25. Stone and Webster Corporation was the primary contractor for these facilities. Oak Ridge would serve as the headquarters for the entire national project, house a graphite reactor, and provide facilities for separating the fissionable isotope uranium 235 from the much more plentiful U-238.

Construction for X-10 and the graphite reactor began in February 1943. It would serve as a pilot plant for creating a new, fissionable element, plutonium, and separating it chemically. Larger quantities of plutonium would be produced at the Hanford site in eastern Washington. During the war, X-10 was built and operated by a combination of contractors which included Du Pont, the Metallurgical Laboratory of the University of Chicago, and Monsanto Chemical Corporation. After the war it was designated as Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) and served as a laboratory for nuclear research, leading the nation in research in nuclear power and nuclear medicine. After 1948 supervision was transferred to Union Carbide's Nuclear Division. "The Lab" continues to conduct basic research in physics and other sciences and produces radioactive isotopes with many uses in science and industry.

Since it was not certain in 1942 which method of separating U-235 would yield the quickest and richest result, the original plan was to pursue as many methods as seemed feasible. Y-12, operated by Tennessee Eastman Corporation, used an electromagnetic separation process. After the war Y-12 was operated by Union Carbide and was primarily responsible for shaping nuclear components for weapons. The K-25 plant, operated from the beginning by Union Carbide Corporation, used a very different gaseous diffusion process where highly corrosive uranium hexaflouride gas was passed repeatedly through membranes, allowing the slightly lighter U-235 isotopes to be gradually concentrated. Construction on Y-12 was begun in the spring of 1943, and K-25 was built in the fall. A third process, S-50, using thermal diffusion was begun too late to have any impact on events and was not carried to completion.

The scientists and engineers gathered together at Oak Ridge, nearly all of them very young, found themselves working terribly long hours on some of the most exciting work many of them would ever do. Repeatedly, they demonstrated that what conventional wisdom said could not be done could, in fact, be accomplished in less time than anyone thought possible. During and after the war, Oak Ridgers provided much of the theoretical and practical grounding for the developing nuclear industry.

Beginning with the arrival of construction workers in spring 1943, Oak Ridge had grown to an astounding 66,000 residents by the summer of 1944, before peaking at a population of 75,000 by the summer of 1945. The reservation demanded a work force of 80,000. In 1944 the two-year-old town was the fifth largest city in Tennessee with the sixth largest bus operation in the nation. Many of those who worked but did not live in Oak Ridge were bused in, some from distances of more than fifty miles. Some who lived off the reservation commuted by car, but wartime shortages of tires and gasoline limited automobile use. The right to live in Oak Ridge depended on employment there, while housing itself was designated by worker position and family size.

The original design of the town included an area in the eastern section designated as the "Negro Village," with dormitories and some well-built homes. However, the operating companies did not hire African Americans in positions that qualified them for that type of housing, and the Negro Village was quickly absorbed into the larger white community. African American employees lived in hutments further west that were segregated both by race and by gender. The Oak Ridge community, as was the case in government projects throughout the nation, complied with local custom in racial matters, and Tennessee was, by law and custom, a segregated state in the 1940s. However, the practice of segregation met some local resistance, and in 1955 Oak Ridge became one of the first cities in the South to mandate desegregation of its public schools.

Tensions between those who came to Oak Ridge and those who gave up the land for the facilities or who lived in close conjunction with the reservation became apparent during the war and continued to some extent after 1945. Those who had lived prior to 1942 in what was to become Oak Ridge had identified closely with the land where their families had lived and farmed, often for generations. Some who had been forced off their land harbored resentment for many years. The newcomers had no roots in Tennessee and viewed themselves as temporary residents. The majority of the new residents were young and filled with the camaraderie fostered by work on a project they felt certain would win the war. In addition to the young and enthusiastic outsiders who had little in common with traditional area residents, the project absorbed large numbers of local workers attracted by high wages, excitement, and patriotism. The competition for scarce labor did little to foster good relations with outside employers, especially as it extended beyond the demand for construction and laboratory personnel. In order to educate the children of Oak Ridge employees, the city demanded the best teachers available and paid significantly more than surrounding school districts to get them. The high standard of education produced in Oak Ridge became a source of pride for the city's residents, but the loss of teaching staff and the higher wages bred resentment in school districts outside the fence. Many viewed Oak Ridge as a highly secret, probably wasteful, and certainly enormous federal project. In an era of war-generated shortages, fears, and discontent, it was easy to blame the project and the people living and working there for broader problems.

Despite the tensions, the work proceeded swiftly and on schedule. The small amounts of concentrated fissionable U-235 were hand-carried to the newly created facility at Los Alamos, New Mexico, where, under the leadership of Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer, they were shaped into the nuclear weapon nicknamed "Little Boy." Plutonium from Hanford formed the heart of the second bomb, "Fat Man." The first bomb was dropped over Hiroshima at slightly after 9:00 a.m. local time on August 6, 1945. Three mornings later, the second bomb exploded over Nagasaki. On August 14, Japanese Emperor Hirohito surrendered his nation. World War II ended with the signing of the surrender document in Tokyo Bay on September 2, 1945. In the summer of 1942, General Groves had predicted the United States would have the bomb in three years. Oak Ridgers greeted the news of the Hiroshima explosion with a mixture of enthusiasm for the expected end of the war, concern for the future, and unease growing out of the three-year period of absolute secrecy. But the overall mood was one of self-congratulation and relief.

From the earliest days of the project, the assumption had been that the Manhattan Project was a temporary, wartime endeavor that would be closed with the return of peace. At war's end, some employees promptly packed up and returned to their former lives or made plans for new opportunities. Others lingered, though, interested in the announcement by Colonel Kenneth D. Nichols, the ranking army officer on the reservation, that the project would continue for at least the immediate future. With the completion of construction, building laborers left, and the number of operating personnel also declined, though not as precipitously. By 1947, when the Atomic Energy Commission took over immediate control of the project, the town's population had fallen to under 40,000; the 1950 Census showed 30,205 residents, fewer than half its former number, though Oak Ridge was still the fifth largest city in the state. The population of Oak Ridge remained at or near that level for the following fifty years. Control of the facilities shifted from AEC to the Department of Energy in 1977, and Martin Marietta Corporation took over direction of operations from Union Carbide in 1984.

In the years following the war, the town became more "civilian-looking" as occupants painted their homes a variety of colors, Southern Bell took over the operation of the telephone company, and the guard/police force changed uniforms from khaki to blue. In 1949 the gates came down; by the 1950s houses were made available for sale, first to those who occupied them, and then to others. The heritage of cultural activities begun by the earliest Oak Ridgers continued to enrich the life of the community through a myriad of civic organizations, the playhouse, the symphony, the ballet company, the community band, and a variety of concert series.

With the increasing tensions of the Cold War and the inability of the nation to place nuclear weapons under international control or to eliminate them altogether, Oak Ridge and other facilities of the former Manhattan Project continued to be of vital importance to the nation's defense. But research in nuclear power, radioisotopes, and other aspects of nuclear medicine became a more significant part of the research and development work in Oak Ridge. Cooperation with industry to solve a wide variety of problems was also by the 1980s an increasingly large part of the community's efforts. Facing a somewhat uneasy future in the mid-1990s with the end of the Cold War and the uncertainties surrounding the use of nuclear power, the large professional/scientific community and the highly skilled work force share the belief that, even with smaller defense budgets, Oak Ridge will continue to function as a leader in high technology enterprises.

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Over the years, "the Government" had come to East Tennessee in many forms, varying from the Civil War Confederacy to the Tennessee Valley Authority of the 1930s, but the most dramatic and least public incursion followed quickly on the heels of the Great Depression during the Second World War.

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A. Countries involved in war - World War 2

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Top 20 Greatest Songs 1940-1949 (According to Dave's Music Database)