Wednesday, Nov 2

I am now in the final stage of the trip as the remaining days will be mainly travel, hopefully with some nice scenery along the way. Today’s route was from Nashville to Knoxville, Tennessee with one stop along the way and, despite being almost all interstate highway, had scenic potential. The highway passes through a number of forests and fall foliage is said to be at its peak but the colors were subdued and there were precious few spots where there was a good display. The video and map are here.

The one tourist stop was at the American Museum of Science and Energy which is on the site of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Oak Ridge, TN. This was one of the three major sites where the Manhattan Project to develop a nuclear bomb was executed during World War 2. Together, all three sites make up the Manhattan Project National Historical Park and each tells the story with an emphasis on their location’s role. The other two locations are Hanford, Washington and Los Alamos, New Mexico.

The project was administered from Oak Ridge and much of the engineering prototyping was done here. They developed four possible ways of enriching Uranium and built factories for each one to see which worked best, it was here that the first self-sustaining nuclear reactor was built and that fissionable plutonium was first produced. The city to do all of this was built from nothing, on rolling hills, in about a year. Not only were there administrative buildings, labs, factories etc. but the infrastructure to house and support up to 50,000 people was constructed. What’s more, the site had to be completely secure and contractors and workers had to retain secrecy concerning its construction and purpose. There were many statistics about the number of schools, churches, hospitals etc. but two stood out to me: the “secret city” had the 6th biggest public transport system in the US and builders were completing an average of 33 new homes every day.

The story is always very emotional when you read about and see the old news reports on the decisions that were made as the project came to fruition and the story was told very well. I visited the Los Alamos site a few years ago, which is where the lead scientists were developing and testing the actual weapons. One thing I noticed was that the story there focused on the morality of developing and using these weapons and the debate among the scientists but, at Oak Ridge, there was nothing questioning the project.

The story is told with storyboards, such as the one below about the only test that was done before dropping the “Little Boy” bomb on Hiroshima, news reports, equipment used in the project and personal journals and letters. It was very engaging and emotional.