Women of the Manhattan Project

Ed Ayers: We’re going to talk more specifically now about the making of the atomic bomb. Basically, the atomic bomb is the harnessing of the energy released in nuclear fission.

Speaker 6: -Is the harnessing of the energy released in nuclear fission to create an explosion. And in the early 1940s, American scientists wanted to harness this power before Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan.

Brian Balogh: The Manhattan Project was born out of this effort. And in 1942, at the University of Chicago, a group of scientists led by Enrico Fermi created the first controlled, self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction. Where did they do it? Under the stands of the football field.

Interviewer 1: Well, because I know in that famous photograph of the people at the University of Chicago.

Brian Balogh: This is a 1986 interview with [Leona Marshall Libby 00:19:42], who was a 23 year old grad student on Fermi’s team. She was responsible for creating neutron counters that would determine if they had achieved a nuclear reaction.

Interviewer 1: Well, were there any … This is kind of a digression, I suppose, but I’m just curious if you had any particular … If anybody took note of the fact you were a woman. Did you have any problems?

Leona M. L.: What do you mean?

Interviewer 1: Were you treated differently or not?

Leona M. L.: That’s a pretty dumb thing to say.

Interviewer 1: I know you mentioned that you had your separate restroom at Hanford, I guess.

Leona M. L.: Yeah, wasn’t that fun. That was fun. I’m going to make one phone call. Excuse me.

Interviewer 1: I’ll turn this off.

Brian Balogh: Leona Marshall Libby may have been the only woman present on that historic day, but many women were involved in the Manhattan Project. That’s because most male scientists had already been recruited to work on radar and sonar research.

Ruth Howes: So they were left with European emigres and women.

Brian Balogh: That’s historian Ruth Howes. I sat down her to listen to the interview tapes.

Ruth Howes: And the European emigres fortunately were people like Enrico Fermi, and Leo Szilard, who were absolutely super scientists.

Brian Balogh: We have some tape here from Kathleen Maxwell, and she was the only woman scientist in her whole division, located in New Jersey. And she talks about her time working on the Manhattan Project. Let’s take a listen to this.

Interviewer 2: So with you and everyone you worked with, there was a real sense of urgency to get the job done.

Kathleen M.: And [inaudible 00:21:18], if you started working on something, you worked until it was finished. 4:30 didn’t mean anything, or 5:00. You worked until you were tired, or you had a point of stopping, and then start the next day. You stuck with what you were working on, and you worked weekends. Weekends didn’t mean a thing. You worked whatever you were doing that seemed to be where you knew what you had to do next.

Interviewer 2: Did anyone ever explain why you were working on this, or was it all sort of “Keep your head down and just do what you’re told?”

Kathleen M.: It’s neither. We knew what we were working on. We knew how important it was. And there was no question about what came first.

Brian Balogh: So, Ruth, what do you make about those working conditions and hours?

Ruth Howes: They were generally widespread on the project. There’s a great story about physicist [Diz Graves 00:22:37], who was at Los Alamos, and she finished an experiment while timing labor contractions on a stopwatch. So most of them hid their pregnancy, and went right on with the job, and I can tell you for a fact that as late as 1969, there were no rules about having to leave radiation work for pregnancy.

Brian Balogh: Today we know a lot more about the health risks of radiation than we did then. What was known, and were these workers, men and women, concerned about working with radioactive materials?

Ruth Howes: Not particularly. The best story I’ve got along these lines is Diz Graves, who was pregnant at the time of the Trinity tests, and because nobody was sure exactly what the explosives at Trinity would do, Diz Graves and her husband were sent to Carrizozo, New Mexico, to monitor the fallout from the blast.

Brian Balogh: Kind of from the frying pan to the fire in terms of safety, wouldn’t you say?

Ruth Howes: Yes, I certainly would. I don’t think anybody was very concerned.

Brian Balogh: Now, you are a physicist. I want you to listen to this next tape from Isabella Karle, and she’s talking about her scientific contributions.

Isabella Karle: And there were, of course, no rules. This is a new element. Its chemistry was unknown. That was part of our objective, to find out how it behaves with other chemicals, and how to synthesize a new compound containing plutonium that was only plutonium chloride, in my case, with no impurities.

Isabella Karle: I could see why they selected me … Well, selected that project for me, because in graduate school, although I was working on other problems, I was familiar with vacuum lines. Vacuum lines were quite amusing in science. I was familiar on how to measure very low pressures in vacuum lines. How to blow glass, put the glass tubes together, put [inaudible 00:25:22] in, how to cool or heat. In other words, I had that background in getting my PhD. This was all very new at that time in the history of science.

Brian Balogh: Ruth?

Ruth Howes: It’s very interesting. It’s typical of the work that was done on the project. People didn’t know anything about uranium or plutonium. For example, they discovered that you can’t make a gun type bomb out of plutonium because it pre-detonates, and you get a giant fizzle, so you needed to implode a sphere of plutonium, and that meant shaped charges. Nobody knew anything about shaped charges, so they had to learn real fast.

Brian Balogh: All right, one last clip, Ruth. I want to play … We started this segment with a tape of Leona Marshall Libby. The interviewer in this exchange mentions Hanford, and that, of course, is one of the sites in the Manhattan Project. One charged with refining or making plutonium, if I’m not mistaken. Take a listen to this.

Interviewer 1: Since you were involved at Hanford, which made plutonium for the Nagasaki bomb, I have been asking people if, at the time or now, that they have a feeling that that second bomb was necessary to end the war. What’s your feeling on that? Or do you recall what you felt then?

Leona M. L.: I certainly do. My brother in law was captain of the first [inaudible 00:27:21] minesweeper scheduled into Sasebo Harbor. My brother was a Marine with a flamethrower on Okinawa. It was a desperate time, I think. We did right, and we couldn’t have done differently.

Interviewer 1: In hindsight, some historians have suggested that maybe the second bomb wasn’t necessary.

Leona M. L.: Yeah, I know. [crosstalk 00:27:59]

Interviewer 1: But I …

Leona M. L.: The guys at [inaudible 00:28:02] shelters.

Interviewer 1: But they also usually will say that no one knows for sure either-

Leona M. L.: No.

Interviewer 1: -at this late date.

Leona M. L.: When you’re in a war to the death, I don’t think you stand around saying, “Is it right?”

Brian Balogh: Did you find that attitude towards even dropping the second bomb on Nagasaki when many historians have argued Japan was literally in the process of surrendering, or close to it? Do you find that to be characteristic of the women who worked on the Manhattan Project?

Ruth Howes: Yes, very. Most of them, you asked them if they regretted working on the bomb during World War II, and most of them will tell you, “No, it was all I could do to support he war effort. My …” husband/fiance/brother, you fill in the blanks, “was overseas fighting.” And you have to remember that V.E. Day came before the bomb was ready.

Brian Balogh: Sure.

Ruth Howes: And so the effort was then to get the bomb ready to drop on Japan.

Brian Balogh: Ruth, how did you get interested in this topic in the first place?

Ruth Howes: We met a couple of women who’d worked on the Manhattan Project at American Physical Society meetings, and decided we’d found the only research one could do at a cocktail party. So we did that, and just kept finding women. We found 300 before we were through.

Brian Balogh: That’s a lot of cocktails, Ruth.

Ruth Howes: Yes, well, I mean, what could I say?

Brian Balogh: Ruth Howes is Professor Emerite of Physics and Astronomy at Ball State University. She’s the co-author of Their Day in the Sun: Women of the Manhattan Project.