By ALAN HACK

With the finish of this year’s episodes of “Manhattan” I have a few comments.

There was indeed friction between the Army and civilians involving cutting down trees and other issues. But when the story gets to the scientific and technical issues almost everything shown is wrong.

A key issue was the need to develop an implosion system when reactor generated Pu proved to have too much spontaneous fission to be used in a gun type assembly. But rather than there being resistance to developing implosion, the Lab was immediately reorganized and enlarged to proceed with implosion.

The relationship between the Army and civilian lab employees also was very different than depicted. For example, the military had very little authority within the “fence.” In fact, with the exception of
senior officers such as Captain Parsons and the SED’s, army personnel were not even allowed inside.

Secretary Stimson would not have had time to get involved in the details of implosion. As far as I can tell Oppenheimer never met with the president, all communications would have gone through Dr.
Conant and Gen. Groves. Army MP’s were not going around arresting civilians as they had no such authority. Army personnel who proved to be unreliable were usually shipped off to the Aleutians or some such remote place rather than jailed.

In no way were the Germans ahead of the US in developing the bomb. There was no American spy in the German effort, as he would have had nothing to report. The US did not learn details of the
German bomb project until the ALSOS mission entered Europe with the allies in 1944. Remember that Heisenberg never produced a working reactor. All of Heisenbergs’s Uranium was collected and sent back to the US as feed stock at Oak Ridge.

So enjoy the show but don’t believe a word of it.