The Atomic Easter Egg

Visiting one of America's most inscrutable national parks

Nov 09, 2020

Hello! Welcome back to Interior Analytics, a newsletter about the business of American nature.

Today, I write about one of the most obscure national parks in America and why it deserves our attention. In 2019, over 327 million people visited our 421 national parks and historic places but only a few of those get the most love, and for good reason: 25 national parks make up about 40% of total visitation (and at least 1M people annually) with names like Yellowstone, Yosemite and Grand Canyon leading the way. These are name brands. But collectively, the ‘not so name brand’ parks are as important as ever. Today I highlight one of the more inscrutable landmarks in the system: The Manhattan Project National Historical Park

Photo: nps.gov

When most people think of our national parks, their first reference might be to the famous rock formations of Yosemite or the expansiveness of the Grand Canyon. These exceptional natural wonders, without a doubt, carry the Department of Interior’s most famous (and best) idea (national parks) to the masses. But over the many years since Yellowstone became the world’s first national park, there have been some truly remarkable additions to the American network of historic landmarks.

From the beginning, national park system sites were selected based on criteria heavily weighted in natural attributes and less on historic value. It wasn’t until Franklin Roosevelt, with the swipe of a pen and an executive order in 1933, that the criteria expanded to include purely historic and important cultural sites to the registry. This widened the roster to include more diverse landmarks like battlefields, places of birth (such as presidents), and places of significance to our country’s history.

Photo: Trinity detonation, United States Department of Energy - Trinity and Beyond: The Atomic Bomb Movie

One of the more recent additions in 2015 aimed to preserve the infamous story and historical impact behind the development of the world’s first atomic bomb. More famously remembered as The Manhattan Project.

As described best by the park itself:

The Manhattan Project and its legacy is a complex story. It's the story of more than 600,000 Americans leaving their homes and families to work on a project they were told was vital to the war effort. It's the story of generals, physicists, chemists, mathematicians, and engineers pushing and broadening the limits of human knowledge and technological achievement in ways never before imagined. It is also the story of the death and destruction associated with World War II, and a new weapon capable of unimagined levels of devastation. A visit to the Manhattan Project National Historical Park provides an opportunity to view the sites that helped the United States end World War II and challenges us to think about how the world has changed with the dawn of the nuclear age.

What is unique about the Manhattan Project National Historic Park is that it is spread amongst three physical locations across the country where many of the stories unfolded. Each yarn, like the fissioning of atoms in a nuclear chain reaction, provides a compelling interpretation of the locations and the souls involved, the process, and the aftermath of one of the most consequential scientific endeavors in the history of mankind.

Atomic City

For instance, you can travel to Los Alamos, NM (known by the locals as Atomic City), and visit the battery of sites where over 6,000 scientists worked to assemble and test the first atomic bombs. Here you can visualize the scale and commitment to the operation, which was guided famously and secretively by the United States government led by J Robert Oppenheimer.

You can participate in walking tours of the many “bunkered” sites where so much of the dangerous assembly work occurred for the “Trinity Device”, the first nuclear detonation ever, at approximately 5:29 am on July 16th 1945 in nearby Alamogordo, New Mexico, (now home to the active White Sands Missile Range). Or close your eyes and imagine the work taking place to create what eventually became known as “Little Boy”, the bomb that was dropped over Hiroshima, Japan less than one month after the famous Trinity trial.

Photograph: Sue McMillan

B-Reactor at Hanford

At the Hanford, Washington site, explore the technology that fueled the payloads of these weapons of mass destruction. Here, you can also learn about the clandestine site selection and controversial expulsion of Native American people from their lands that would eventually house the expansive operation to enrich these elements.

Set along the picturesque Columbia River valley, experience the “B-Reactor” site, while mixing in some beautiful natural sight seeing. Digest the dark secrets that are housed at this inconspicuous, yet famous location, becoming the source for the plutonium needed to create the Trinity detonation. Amazingly, what looks to be a quiet, rural factory, in the middle of Washington state, was in fact home to 51,000 workers who had little information as to the what they were working on or what was about to happen.

Correction: A previously published version incorrectly characterized the B-Reactor site as a location where Uranium was enriched. This actually took place at Oak Ridge. Email versions will not be updated. Thanks to Manhattan Project National Park for pointing this out!

Manhattan Project @MnhtnProjectNPS

@sambarkley_ Thank you for the great profile; one correction is necessary, however. Hanford was a plutonium production site where the world's first industrial nuclear reactors were constructed. Uranium enrichment was carried out at oak ridge

The reactor core at Hanford. Photo: Jeff Keyser/Flickr

Oak Ridge

And finally, the third site (of the Trinity, if you will), in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, which housed the administrative nerve center for the entire project. Here, you can learn about the 75,000 people it took to successfully operate such a large scale and secret mechanism to beat the Nazis to this important technological finish line.

Oak Ridge Labs, TN Photo: Wikimedia Commons

One of the more fascinating stories at Oak Ridge is of the “Calutron Girls” who played a key role in the project (although completely unbeknownst to them at the time). In 1945, at a critical juncture in the war and when the race to secure an atomic bomb was accelerating, the leaders of the Manhattan Project were short on labor. They called on local Tennessee high school women to monitor dials and record the findings of a calutron, a specialized machine that separated enriched uranium isotopes, which ended up being a defining technological advancement and the difference maker in the project’s ultimate success.

Photo: The Calutron Girls, Ed Wescott

You can also learn about Enrico Fermi, an Italian immigrant and physicist who famously fled an increasingly fascist Italy via Stockholm while accepting the Nobel prize for his groundbreaking work on “neutron bombardment”. Once he landed in America he became a part of the scientific team on the Manhattan Project and his findings were the building blocks that led to the development of the atomic bomb that quickly ended World War Two. Fermi will be remembered most for his efforts towards the project but the scientific advancements that came as a result of his findings will be his legacy. Innovations, such as large scale nuclear energy and the safe use of radioactive materials in many industrial, agricultural and medical applications have saved millions of lives and continues to provide the world with the most efficient, climate friendly and cheapest form of energy.

Enrico Fermi’s Easter Egg. Photo: US Department of Energy

Bonus content: From the US Department of Energy:

The formula written on the blackboard in this famous photo of Enrico Fermi has been at the center of a small controversy for years. Several physicists found an error in this formula. In the first line, Fermi has clearly corrected an incorrect sign (changing a plus to a minus). The second line, however, is written . The Greek letter alpha is usually used to denote what is called the "fine structure constant," and the correct expression for it is .

Is it true, as some say, that this is an error on the part of one of the greatest physicists of this century? Or, as others who knew of his famous sense of humor say, as they point to the twinkle in his eye, that he purposely left the wrong formula on the blackboard as a puzzle for posterity.

The ultimate Easter egg

Perhaps the ultimate “Easter egg” of these sites and this story is that the vast majority of labor (600,000+ people) were not made privy to the details of their end goal.

According to a quote attributed to Gladys Owens, one of the few Calutron Girls, a manager at the Oak Ridge facility once told them:

"We can train you how to do what is needed, but cannot tell you what you are doing. I can only tell you that if our enemies beat us to it, God have mercy on us!"

Photo: Oak Ridge Public Library

Visiting these sites, one must reflect upon the tremendous amount of stress put upon these people, not only during the secretive project, but well after the bombs had been dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. What burden did they carry as soon as the motives of their work became clear? On the one hand, they had a hand in ending the war, on the other, they unwittingly helped propel a single act that killed over 200,000 people, devastating a country, and changing the world’s geopolitical trajectory forever.

Find your park

Rather than show us dramatic natural wonders, this national park tells us a compelling story. And unlike the slow-moving glaciers that carved out some of our most famous national landscapes, this singular project instantly changed the world as we knew it.

The geothermal phenomena of Yellowstone can be found nowhere else on earth and I most certainly understand the allure of the skittle-like colors painted across the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. But just like the park legislation itself, I encourage a broader selection criteria when choosing your next road trip as you venture across the country in search of our great national parks. You never know what Easter egg you might find!

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