Manhattan Project Propaganda

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1:00This year, experience the NHL playoffs your way. Want to watch a single? Do or die Game 7. A full week of heavy-hitting back-and-forth series. Then check out Slings 1-3 and 7-day passes. Watch the chase for the cup on ESPN and TNT, starting as low as $4.99. No long-term contracts or overpaying. Just live hockey at home or when you want it. Sling lets you do that. Visit sling.com to learn more. One day in June 1945, publisher Datis Smith got a call in his office at Princeton University Press.

1:38On the line was Henry DeWolf Smythe, a theoretical physicist at Princeton. Smythe had some questions about the press's plans that summer. Usually, instead of allowing workers to take vacations whenever, the press shut down their whole operation for two weeks and made everyone take leave at once. The physicist Smythe asked the publisher, Smith, whether they planned to do that again that summer. The publisher said, yes. Why? Smythe said, because the government needs to print 5,000 copies of something.

2:08The publisher asked, oh, copies of what? Smythe said, I can't tell you. It's top secret. Which confused the publisher. They needed 5,000 copies of a top secret document? The physicist chuckled. Yes, this information is top secret now. But in August, it will be the headline story in every newspaper in the world. The publisher was baffled. What on earth was Smythe talking about? Today, it is easy to guess what.

2:40The atomic bomb. The scientist Smythe had authored a book-length report on atomic bombs for public release after the first one got dropped. And, as the first publication on the bomb, Smythe's report would prove extremely influential. And extremely biased. So biased that it continues to warp our views on everything from Robert Oppenheimer to the very nature of the Manhattan Project. In short, the so-called Smythe Report is one of the most effective pieces of propaganda in American history.

3:11This is The Disappearing Spoon by Sam Keen, a topsy-turvy, science-y history podcast where footnotes become the real story.

Henry DeWolf Smythe Biography

3:35Henry DeWolf Smythe got involved with the Manhattan Project early, in 1941. Although he worked at Princeton, he spent every other week at the project's metallurgical lab in Chicago. There, he chaired two divisions, on chain reactions and on isotope separation. Smythe later joked about how tight security was. The heads of different divisions were forbidden from talking to each other. So every time he talked to himself, he was technically breaking the law. In 1944, Smythe began thinking about how atomic bombs

4:06would shape the post-war world. He approached General Leslie Groves, the head of the Manhattan Project. Smythe suggested producing a report on the bomb to inform the public and help officials make better decisions. Groves liked the idea. Then Groves told Smythe, and since it was your idea, you write it. No good deed goes unpunished. Groves was normally a maniac about secrecy, but he had learned a hard lesson earlier in the war. In 1943, construction began on a plutonium plant in Hanford, Washington,

4:39and Groves forbade anyone from talking about it. But reporters saw this giant plant going up and had questions. And the secrecy only made them more curious. They started poking around. They wondered, what was Groves hiding? Paradoxically, trying to keep something secret sometimes draws attention to it. So later, Groves hit upon a different tactic. If he handed reporters information up front, they would be happy. They would file their stories and forget about things. Better still, he could pretend to give up the information grudgingly,

5:11as if the reporters had outfoxed him. Reporters love that. In reality, Groves controlled what he told them and got them to file stories that deflected attention. He was quite effective at manipulating the media. He took the same approach with the Smythe report on atomic bombs. He didn't want Smythe to lie, but he did want him to shade the truth in misleading ways. Smythe wrote the report in his office at Princeton, but only after security upgrades. Metal bars were installed over the windows, and a massive safe was shoved in front of his door.

5:43Smythe had to enter and exit through his secretary's adjoining office. Then armed guards sat outside the office 24 hours a day. They also patted Smythe down to make sure he was not smuggling documents out in his pants. One day, Smythe arrived to learn that a guard had been shot and killed. This caused panic. Had German or Japanese spies gotten to him? An investigation found out that, sadly, the soldier had committed suicide, but the incident only ratcheted up the tension.

6:15Smythe finished the book in spring 1945. Armed guards then delivered 50 mimeographed copies to top Manhattan Project officials. Many of them hated it. For instance, Robert Oppenheimer thought that Smythe had overemphasized the role of his team at Los Alamos. But Oppenheimer was ignored. Groves had other criticisms. He refused to let Smythe discuss the moral implications of the book. He struck those passages out. Groves also wanted more scientists mentioned by name. This was another security trick.

6:47Groves reasoned that if scientists got explicit credit for their work here, they would be less likely to seek credit through other, less controllable channels, like the media. As historians have noted, the Smythe report is a strange document. For the first time in history, a nation had built a secret weapon that gave it a huge advantage over rivals and then immediately published details about how to build one. British scientists thought the Americans were crazy. But Groves was determined. He had Smythe approach Princeton University Press about printing up copies.

7:19Ultimately, Princeton turned the job down. Its publisher worried that the government would inevitably fall behind schedule and lock his team out for longer than two weeks. So Groves had the government printing office run off a thousand copies instead. Each worker there got separate pages to print and was forbidden from looking at other pages. That way, no one had a complete picture. Groves locked the thousand copies into a safe in the Pentagon. The report's official title was Atomic Bombs. But Groves didn't want anyone knowing ahead of time that the army had such a bomb.

7:52So on the title page, only the lumbering subtitle appeared. A general account of the development of methods using atomic energy for military purposes under the auspices of the United States government, 1940 to 1945. Groves then had a rubber stamp made. His officers were supposed to stamp the real title, Atomic Bombs, on the title page as copies shipped out. But in the scramble after the bomb fell, they forgot to do this. So that cumbersome subtitle became the book's official name.

8:23As one historian joked, it was a report so secret that it forgot its own title. That terrible title is why most people call it the Smythe Report today. Groves handed out copies to reporters on August 11th. And sure enough, it made headlines worldwide. The Princeton publisher, Datis Smith, saw a headline while on vacation at the ocean. He had just gone swimming. Suddenly, everything clicked in his mind. That's what Smythe had been feeling him out about. Smith had no money in his swim trunks, so he commandeered some coins that his daughters had saved for Coca-Colas,

8:57then ran off to call Smythe from a payphone. During their conversation, Smythe asked if Princeton wanted to publish another edition for the public. The publisher, Smythe, did, badly. He expected the book to be a big seller. In fact, Smythe wanted the job so badly that he decided to return to Princeton immediately. He didn't want to cut his kids' vacation short, so he left them with his wife and hitchhiked home, still in his sopping bathing suit. The publisher faced one big obstacle. Due to wartime rationing, there was a severe paper shortage.

9:28So Smythe crashed a Princeton alumni schmoozing event, and he buttonholed two brothers who ran a paper company. They were playing poker, but Smythe insisted they step outside. There, he begged for help. He needed 30 tons of paper in 12 days. The brothers went goggle-eyed. Smythe might as well have asked for 30 tons of gold. But after a week of scrambling, the brothers found a freight car of paper in New England and diverted it to Princeton. Just three weeks after Princeton got the manuscript, bound copies of the book appeared.

9:58Smythe was quite proud of this, especially because the book contained only four typos, two of which readers caught, and two of which Smith's 75-year-old mother noticed. The book did prove a hit. The public was ravenous for information about these superweapons, and 100,000 copies sold the first year. The book spent three months on the New York Times bestseller list. Smythe had mixed feelings about this. To encourage the dissemination of information, he stated in the introduction that anyone could reproduce or even plagiarize passages.

10:30He also waived all royalties. He later calculated that this benevolence cost him $26,000, half a million dollars today. In fact, Smythe lost money on the book. Despite waiving royalties, he still had to pay a copyright fee. On the other hand, the ultimate satisfaction for any writer is being read and discussed. And Smythe's report was on everyone's lips. Indeed, just as he and Groves hoped, the whole world was soon spreading their propaganda without even realizing it.

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12:57It's time to bust out the tongs and enjoy USTA-certified tender steaks, juicy burgers, and more from Omaha Steaks. And you can get 50% off site-wide at OmahaSteaks.com. Plus, you get an extra $35 off with promo code YUM at checkout. Terms apply. See site for details. There's nothing like firing up that grill for the first cookout of the summer. And with so many protein options, you're bound to be able to make something for anybody. What better way to honor the Memorial Day holiday than with a meal from America's original butcher?

13:28Every entree is flash-frozen, vacuum-sealed, and ready for when you want to grill. Omaha Steaks removes the guesswork by delivering expert-crafted beef with guaranteed quality and consistency. Start your summer off right with Omaha Steaks. Visit OmahaSteaks.com right now for 50% off site-wide during the Memorial Day sale. And for an extra $35 off, use promo code YUM at checkout. That's OmahaSteaks.com with promo code YUM at checkout. Terms apply. See site for details. This year, experience the NHL playoffs your way.

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Smythe Report Critique

14:29Again, the Smythe report contained no falsehoods, but it was part of a misinformation campaign. And the big lie at the heart of the report is this, that physics was the key to building an atomic bomb, especially the theoretical physics that Robert Oppenheimer and others did at Los Alamos. In truth, physics played only a modest role in the Manhattan Project. Consider these stats. Overall, the Manhattan Project cost $2 billion. That's almost $40 billion today. And two sites, the Hanford plant to make plutonium

15:01and the Oak Ridge site to enrich uranium, gobbled up 80% of that budget, $1.6 billion. In comparison, Los Alamos's budget was a piddly $75 million, just 4% of the total. Or consider personnel. The Manhattan Project employed thousands of chemists, thousands of engineers, thousands of metallurgists and miners and construction workers. Overall, half a million people worked on the project. Just 2,500 were at Los Alamos.

15:31And even at Los Alamos, theoretical physicists made up just 7% of the staff. There were three times as many chemists there, four times as many engineers. So why does Los Alamos loom so large in our minds today? A few reasons. The scientists there did assemble the bomb and detonate the first one in the Trinity test. That was obviously important. Plus, they solved one crucial problem. The plutonium bomb required taking a subcritical mass of the element and crushing it down into a critical mass that would go bang.

16:03They planned to do this with explosives placed around the outside. And designing those explosives was complicated. All the triggers had to fire at the exact same instant, or the bomb would fizzle. No one had ever built such precise equipment. And those who solved this problem deserve a ton of credit. People also adore Los Alamos because of all the fascinating personalities there. The jester Richard Feynman. The puckish Enrico Fermi. The doomed Robert Oppenheimer. Several physicists also wrote memoirs that made Los Alamos seem like an idyllic scientific summer camp.

16:36But one reason those names seem so weighty today is the Smythe Report. It lionized physicists, especially theoretical physicists. And as the first word on the atomic bomb, it gave them a huge platform. It made them heroes. And that's exactly why most scientists on the Manhattan Project hated the Smythe Report. Consider George Kistiakowski. He designed those vital explosives for the plutonium bomb. He was not even mentioned in the Smythe Report. The report also slighted the metallurgical lab in Chicago,

17:08even though Smythe worked there. One Met Lab veteran was Glenn Seaborg, who discovered plutonium. He wrote Smythe a furious letter about the report, saying that he and his colleagues felt snubbed and belittled. So why did Smythe write such a distorted report? Two reasons. First, Smythe was a theoretical physicist himself. And, as someone who was a physics major in college, I can tell you, theoretical physicists are snobs. They think their subject is the hardest, most demanding field in all of science.

17:39To them, everyone else is putzing around with trivial matters. So naturally, Smythe focused on theoretical physics in his report. In fact, in explaining how mass turned into energy during an atomic explosion, his report popularized what is now the most iconic equation in science. It wasn't Einstein who made E equals mc squared famous. It was Smythe. The second reason he focused on theoretical physics was that none of it was classified. The key concepts for making an atomic bomb are atomic fission and a chain reaction.

18:11Both of those ideas had been published in Europe before World War II even started. So Smythe could pretend he was revealing some big important secret. E equals mc squared and all. When in reality, he was giving nothing away. This had Groves' fingerprints all over it. Make a big show of revealing some information, and reporters won't dig any further. Overall, the report made the public think that building atomic bombs was all about physics, and that brains were more important than brawn. Neither of those things are true.

18:43Now, don't get me wrong. Theoretical physics was obviously important here. The fission at the heart of the bomb had to be worked out on paper first, in detail. But the work did not stop there. A bomb on paper is about as much use as a picture of a flying car. The real key to building an atomic bomb is not understanding fission on a theoretical level. It's those billion-dollar processing plants to make plutonium and to enrich uranium. It's engineering and chemistry and even management of people. Talking about physics alone

19:14misses the point. And in focusing on chain reactions and E equals MC squared, the Smythe report omitted other important stuff. How to enrich uranium. How to make plutonium efficiently. How much radioactive material a bomb needs. How to build the explosives to crush plutonium down. And on and on. In all, the report distracted people with gee whiz physics and left out all the details an enemy would actually need to build a bomb. Speaking of enemies, I have put together a bonus episode

19:45at patreon.com slash disappearing spoon about the Soviet Union's response to the Smythe report. It explains how they scoured it and used clever tricks to extract more information than meets the eye. The bonus also explains why the report was so beloved in the notorious Siberian gulag. All that at patreon.com slash disappearing spoon. Eighty years later, we are still dealing with the fallout of the Smythe report and its misleading emphasis on physics. We've all seen those cliche movie scenes

20:16with a group of scientists locked in a room. They're scribbling equations on a blackboard, devising some superweapon. Even Dr. Seuss has a scene like that in the Butter Battle book with its topdest, secretest brain nest. That framing comes from the Smythe report. The Smythe report also had major consequences for Robert Oppenheimer. Although he had objected to the report, Oppenheimer did benefit from it. It made him famous as the father of the atomic bomb. He then got choice advisory roles in Washington. But that increased status

20:48came with increased scrutiny. If theoretical physics was supposedly the key to making atomic bombs, well, the government decided they had better keep a close eye on those physicists. McCarthyites would not have targeted Oppenheimer and stripped away his security clearance if Smythe's report had not made him seem so important. Incidentally, Smythe served on the board that interrogated Oppenheimer over his security clearance. Other members smeared Oppenheimer as a disloyal communist, and Smythe got offered bribes to vote against Oppenheimer.

21:18He refused. Still, he was the only one of the five commissioners to vote that Oppenheimer was innocent. Smythe made Oppenheimer, but he could not save him. And without Smythe, Oppenheimer would not be the folk hero he is today, the subject of an Oscar-winning movie. The Smythe report is about as far from a movie script as you can get. It's dull, dry, technical. But there's eight decades worth of drama packed in there if you just know how to read it.

21:51This is the Disappearing Spoon Podcast. If you like the show, please subscribe, leave a five-star review, or tell friends and family. Reviews, subscriptions, and word of mouth really do help. Also, please support the show at patreon.com slash disappearing spoon. It costs as little as seven cents per day for ad-free shows. You can also get bonus episodes and signed books. You can find more incredible stories in my books. Check out samkeen.com. You can also inquire about booking me

22:22as a speaker at your school or event. This episode was written, edited, and produced by me, Sam Keen. Thanks for listening.

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