6 - Race and the Manhattan Project

Summary

No universal history leads from savagery to humanitarianism, but there is one leading from the slingshot to the megaton bomb.

Theodor Adorno

Anglo-Saxon science has developed a new explosive 2,000 times as destructive as any known before.

H. V. Kaltenborn, News Report, NBC (6 August 1945)

So we strive to save civilization, and we learn how to wreck it, all on the same weekend.

Raymond Gram Swing, on the eve of the atomic bomb test at Bikini

(1 July 1946)

This chapter discusses three novels set during the USA's project to construct the first atomic bomb. These novels, each written during a different period of the Cold War, explicitly refer to the racial politics of the Manhattan Project, and in particular the contested assumption that the first atomic weapons were white (specifically Anglo-Saxon) bombs. This assumption is made by characters within these novels, and was present in the US media of the period. Writing in the Chicago Defender in September 1945, NAACP Executive Secretary Walter White criticized Winston Churchill's desire to keep the bomb under ‘Anglo-Saxon’ control. The same month, Roy Wilkins wrote an editorial in the NAACP magazine The Crisis linking the atomic bombing of Japan to the racist perception of Japanese subhumanity and asked ‘Who is barbarian and who is civilized?’

The successful development of this new military technology was publicly announced after the atomic bombs had been used against the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the assumption outlined above was not the dominant one in the American press. Instead, the significance of Nazi Germany's persecution of the Jews in the race to build an atomic weapon was emphasized: several periodicals commented that the Manhattan Project scientists had originally lived in Europe and migrated to the United States to avoid persecution. Journalists posed this as a just repercussion of Nazism's anti-Semitic policies: fascist intolerance drove away the scientists capable of building a weapon to win the war, whereas the special conditions of the United States (and only those conditions) made the building of the first atomic bomb possible. One such condition was America's class and ethnic diversity, as Time magazine noted in 1945: ‘Professors, including many Nobel Prize winners, deserted their campuses to live in dusty deserts.