The 80th anniversary last week of the atomic bombings that helped end World War II came at a most peculiar time. That is in part because we can’t mark that anniversary without also noting the astonishing Manhattan Project that built atomic weapons.
The Manhattan Project was a towering achievement, one of the great stories of human effort and accomplishment. Yet the Trump administration has been systematically dismantling the culture of research that the Manhattan Project and World War II bequeathed us, a culture that propelled American prosperity.
At no other time in modern history has a country so thoroughly turned its back on its core national strengths. The very elements that made the Manhattan Project such a success are today under assault. With devastating cuts to science and health research, the administration is turning its back on a history of being powered and renewed by the innovation and vision of immigrants. What America may find is that we have squandered the greatest gift of the Manhattan Project — which, in the end, wasn’t the bomb but a new way of looking at how science and government can work together.
That the Manhattan Project happened is itself a minor miracle. For nearly two years, the U.S. military seemed to want nothing to do with the effort of inventing an atomic bomb.
From 1939 to 1941, a ragtag group of mostly Jewish refugee scientists from Hitler’s Europe, including Albert Einstein, approached the government and met with military officials. The scientists educated them on the discovery of nuclear fission, its implications for war and their fears that Hitler would develop an atomic bomb first.
The military brushed them off. “The colonels kept rather aloof,” the physicist Eugene Wigner recalled after one such meeting in October 1939, as Hitler took Poland. “They were friendly, they smiled, but they never expected to see a working atomic bomb in this world.”
One of those colonels told Wigner and Edward Teller, dismissively, that he would award $10,000 to whoever could develop a death ray and prove it by killing a goat — the implication being he imagined that project more likely than a bomb that unlocked the power of the fundamental building block of the universe.
That the push came from refugees from fascist Europe was not a coincidence. “These people — these Hungarian-, German- and Italian-born — knew the organization in dictatorial countries; it occurred to them that there might be ties between research and military applications, that in Germany all scientific work might have been enrolled in the war effort,” Laura Fermi — the wife of the atomic pioneer Enrico — wrote later. “American-born and -raised physicists had not yet found the door out of their ivory tower: The first knew the military state and the concentration of powers, the latter had seen only democracy and free enterprise.”
The physicist Arthur Holly Compton — who would go on to lead the effort to build the world’s first nuclear reactor in December 1942, tucked in an old squash court at the University of Chicago — explained: “Research in new fields of science had not been recognized by the United States government as a significant source of national strength. There was at Washington no individual or office having power to deal adequately with a new scientific development whose importance, though urgent and vital, was ill defined. It was simply not in our tradition.”
That arms-length relationship didn’t last long. What came to be known as the Manhattan Project, a $2 billion initiative, employed hundreds of thousands of Americans by 1945 in sites from Oak Ridge, Tenn., to Los Alamos, N.M. World War II efforts like it and the “Rad Lab” at M.I.T., which helped pioneer radar, forever transformed the country and the world.
Out of this grew a tradition of government-supported science, technology and education efforts. Those fields became a source of national strength and arguably the primary driver of American economic hegemony and prosperity in the eight decades since.
Organizations like the national labs at Oak Ridge, Los Alamos and Berkeley that grew out of the Manhattan Project became the backbone of a stunning period of scientific and technological advances in the decades after the war. They were joined by the National Science Foundation (founded in 1950); Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA (founded in 1958); and the National Institutes of Health, which became a major grant-maker after the war — not to mention a host of other agencies like NASA and the Department of Energy.
The return on a relatively modest government investment has been astounding; DARPA alone helped birth the internet, GPS and Moderna’s Covid-19 vaccine.
Today, just as China’s own research and development efforts take off, the Trump administration has been erasing this legacy. Agencies like the National Science Foundation have been gutted, and the administration’s war on universities is already leading to huge cuts at science and health labs around the country; the Republican Congress and Trump administration are squashing progress in technologies like solar panels and electric vehicles that the rest of the world is mostly keen to adopt, likely leaving the United States not only behind but potentially not even in the game.
Even necessities like weather forecasting and high-quality government data collection face wreckage, and officials are starting to unwind public health advances like fluoride in water and mandatory childhood vaccinations. Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s Department of Health and Human Services is targeting for cuts research breakthroughs that appear just around the corner — including mRNA-based treatments that could help address high-mortality diseases like glioblastoma and pancreatic cancer.
In addition, there is the administration’s war on immigration and its hostility to foreign researchers and students coming to the United States to build careers, discover breakthroughs and found start-ups that could transform the world. For much of the past century, the pull of America’s great universities, openness to science and tradition of democracy has brought the smartest minds to our shores, just as it did Fermi, Wigner, Teller and most of the other core participants in the Manhattan Project.
Among the country’s most elite business club — the five companies with over a $2 trillion market cap — immigrants and their offspring played a key role in all of them, from Apple’s Steve Jobs (the son of a Syrian immigrant) and Google’s Sergey Brin (born in Moscow) to the Taiwanese-born Jensen Huang of Nvidia and even Amazon, whose founder, Jeff Bezos, got a critical early investment from his adoptive father, a Cuban refugee.
It is all the more puzzling that the attack on universities and government-supported research has come from the Trump administration — which in 2020 led the closest and equally herculean analogue of a modern Manhattan Project, the Operation Warp Speed effort to develop and distribute a Covid-19 vaccine in stunning time. It is equally puzzling that this model of development is undermined by figures like Elon Musk, a one-time immigrant student, and Marc Andreessen, whose fortune came from Netscape, which was built on inventions supported by funding from the National Science Foundation.
The world stands on the precipice of breakthroughs in artificial intelligence that might, with time, prove as transformational as the unlocking of the atom did during World War II. Whether we can hold onto our scientific advantage, though, is an open question.
If China is able to capitalize on our self-inflicted wounds to invent and secure the future of the 21st century instead, we may find that we have squandered the greatest gift of the Manhattan Project.
Garrett F. Graff is a journalist, a historian and the author, most recently, of “The Devil Reached Toward the Sky: An Oral History of the Making and Unleashing of the Atomic Bomb.”
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