Oak Ridge in Wartime

Book Reviews

The Nuclear Age: Britain's Role

The Greatest Power on Earth. The Interna-tional Race for Nuclear Supremacy. RONALDW. CLARK. Harper and Row, New York,1981. x, 342 pp. + plates. $13.95.

Journalist turned free-lance author,Clark is one of our day's most prolificwriters. This book is, by my count, his55th since 1948, his 12th on science andscience-based technology, and his sec-

ond on the origins of the nuclear age.

Not surprisingly, he has based it largelyon prior studies that have described howscientists and engineers, urged on bystatesmen and soldiers, translated im-plausible conjectures about subatomicenergy into deadly realities between 1939and 1954. Yet Clark does more thanprovide a lively rendering of earlier his-torical research. He presents the resultsof his own archival work, chiefly in thePublic Record Office (London) and theCherwell and Tizard papers. And hemakes good use of this evidence in reit-erating the thesis-first espoused by theBritish during World War II and subse-quently developed by Clark himself inThe Birth ofthe Bomb: The Untold Storyof Britain's Part in the Weapon ThatChanged the World (1961) and by Marga-ret Gowing in Britain andAtomic Energy1939-194S (1964)-that Britain played a

significant role in the opening of thenuclear era.

British physicists, according to Clark,were initially as skeptical as most of theircolleagues around the world about theimmediate prospects for fission weap-

ons. In April 1940, however, a secretcommittee of British physicists was es-

tablished to consider the possibilityraised by the refugees Frisch and Peierlsthat a superbomb might be made fromuranium-235. The MAUD (Ministry ofAircraft Uranium Development) Com-mittee proceeded to canvass the problemfrom all angles, including Halban's pro-

posal that a heavy-water and uraniumpile be used to generate fissile plutoni-um. In July 1941 it recommended an all-Dout effort to develop uranium-235bombs. This recommendation was soon

approved by Churchill, and a bomb proj-ect was organized under the code name

Tube Alloys. Meanwhile, the MAUD324

Committee's report was being used byBush and Conant in the United Statesboth to focus the American physicists'inquiries and to secure Roosevelt's sup-

port. The British report played, that is, adecisive role in the initiation of both theBritish and the American bomb projects.From this juncture, Britain's role in

the technical arena was relatively unim-portant. The British were too hardpressed by the Germans to allocate therequisite resources to their project.Moreover, on account of differences re-

garding postwar objectives, the Britishhad little access to the American projectuntil fall 1943, by which time they were

too far behind to make more than minorcontributions. Despite being eclipsed inthe technical arena, Britain, as repre-sented by Churchill, played an importantrole in setting policy. Churchill's influ-ence was especially pronounced on theissue of disclosure to the Soviet Union.In August 1943 he persuaded Rooseveltof the desirability of nondisclosure tothird parties. Thereafter he managed tothwart Bohr and others who, in hopes ofaverting a nuclear arms race, were advis-ing that Russia be officially informed ofAmerican progress. Churchill, it is evi-dent not only from Clark's account butespecially from Martin Sherwin's AWorld Destroyed: The Atomic Bomb andthe Grand Alliance (1975), regarded suchthinking as hopelessly optimistic aboutSoviet intentions. He seems to have as-

sumed that an arms race was inevitableand hence that America and Britainshould have as great a lead as possible.Alas, Churchill was probably correct, as

Clark suggests, in thinking that earlydisclosure would not have prevented thepostwar competition.

This supposition, however, contra-dicts Clark's oft-repeated view that thedevelopment of nuclear weapons intro-duced a new stage in world politics.Indeed, present global armaments indi-cate that statesmen and soldiers still donot comprehend the havoc their arsenalscan wreak.

KARL HUFBAUERDepartment of History,University of California,Irvine 92717

City Behind a Fence. Oak Ridge, Tennessee,1942-1946. CHARLES W. JOHNSON andCHARLES 0. JACKSON. University of Tennes-see Press, Knoxville, 1981. xxiv, 248 pp.,illus. Cloth, $18.50; paper, $9.50.

In their introduction to City Behind aFence, the authors propose to partiallyremedy what they consider to be a "curi-ous oversight" in earlier works on thehistory of the Manhattan Project. Theypoint out that until now historians havefailed to adequately examine the threesecret support communities establishedand directed by the Army in conjunctionwith the wartime atomic weapons devel-opment program. They argue that OakRidge, Tennessee, Hanford, Washing-ton, and Los Alamos, New Mexico, areworthy of study "if only because thesuccessful operation of these communi-ties was so crucial to the successfulconclusion of the Manhattan Project'satomic mission."

Clearly, however, that was not theonly or even the primary motivation forthis book. Much more, the project stemsfrom the authors' interest in and proxim-ity to Oak Ridge itself. They view theorigin of the unique and still somewhatincongruous city as a "fascinating epi-sode in American social history." Theyrequest that their book be evaluated onthe basis of their success in answeringthe question: "What must have been thenature of the 'secret city' and what did itmean to live there in the war period?"

Stating that the technical activities ateach of the three major Manhattan Proj-ect sites have already been given muchattention, the authors concentrate on theorganizations and people responsible forthe management and operation of theOak Ridge "townsite" itself. They con-sulted voluminous records of the Man-hattan Engineer District of the ArmyCorps of Engineers (the MED headquar-ters were moved to Oak Ridge in 1943);they examined the papers of Leslie R.Groves, the leader of the MED; and theysystematically reviewed newspapers andperiodicals from the region and else-where. To supplement these writtensources, the authors conducted approxi-mately 75 one-hour interviews with OakRidgers who had lived in Oak Ridge or inthe surrounding counties during the war.

It is noteworthy that the authors didnot consult records of the industrial oruniversity contractors who built or oper-ated the major facilities of the ClintonEngineer Works (the code -name giventhe entire Oak Ridge project), nor didthey obtain access to the existing man-

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agement or administrative files generat-ed within the research and productionfacilities themselves. Although such rec-

ords are not preserved in every case,

those that are available could havehelped provide the valuable perspectiveof the workplace-a perspective that isalmost totally absent from City Behind a

Fence. Even the recollections gleanedfrom the tape-recorded interviews are allcited anonymously; and attitudes andopinions are never meaningfully corre-

lated with the experiences of the subjectson the job.From City Behind a Fence we do learn

a great deal about the planning, organiza-tion, and operation of the townsite; we

learn of the often difficult relationshipsbetween Oak Ridgers and their Tennes-sean neighbors; about racial segregationand discrimination and the associatedrationalizations; about the incessantpopulation pressure and its effects (thepopulation of Oak Ridge ballooned fromthe planned 13,000 to more than 75,000during the course of the war); about theArmy's efforts to keep a low profilewhile maintaining ultimate authorityover nearly every aspect of town life;and about the direct and indirect effectsof the Army's insistence on the strictestof security measures. This informationand the insights provided by the authorsare in many cases new and valuable.They indeed contribute to our ability tounderstand the atomic bomb project forwhat it was: a centrally planned scien-tific, technical, industrial, and social en-

terprise of unprecedented complexity.Whether the account actually reveals

what it must have been like to live in OakRidge during the war is not so clear. Inany case, there is little in City Behind a

Fence to shed light on the closely related16 OCTOBER 1981

question of what it must have been liketo work there. And it must be askedwhether the decision to discuss the townas isolated from the workplace, leavingthe latter to the technical histories, infact reflects the specializations of thehistorians more than it is a meaningful or

appropriate division of the subject mat-ter at hand. The separation of life fromwork in wartime Oak Ridge will, I sus-

pect, seem especially arbitrary to thosereaders of Science who have an interestin and some familiarity with the extraor-dinary and consuming efforts of the sci-entists, engineers, managers, techni-cians, and other workers at the variousOak Ridge plants.

ALLAN A. NEEDELLNational Air and Space Museum,Smithsonian Institution,Washington, D.C. 20560

Observations in the Infrared

Infrared Astronomy. Papers from a sympo-sium, Kona, Hawaii, June 1980. C. G. WYNN-WILLIAMs and D. P. CRUIKSHANK, Eds. Rei-del, Boston, 1981 (distributor, Kluwer Bos-ton, Hingham, Mass.). xvi, 376 pp., illus.Cloth, $47.50; paper, $23.50. InternationalAstronomical Union Symposium No. 96.

Infrared astronomy has grown explo-sively over the last 15 years, and thesymposium of which this book is theproceedings represented a milestone inthe maturing of the field. Instead of theaccustomed potpourri of instrumentaltechniques and observational results, theconference sessions were limited to theinfrared aspects of planetary astronomy,interstellar clouds and star-forming re-

gions, galactic structure, and galaxies.

The proceedings consist of the 21 reviewpapers presented at the symposium to-gether with the discussions that followedthem. The book is a surprisingly well-balanced and up-to-date overview of cur-rent research in these fields and shouldbe valuable to a much wider audiencethan infrared specialists.Four papers dealing with infrared

spectroscopy of the atmospheres of plan-ets, satellites, and asteroids and spec-trophotometry of their surfaces providean impressive catalog of results yieldedby these techniques. D. Morrison pointsout that with the advantages of hindsightit is clear that infrared observers weredetecting the effects of volcanism on theJovian satellite lo long before Voyager.It seems clear from the paper that infra-red techniques will continue to play animportant role in planetary astronomy,particularly in the study of objects inac-cessible to space missions and in studiesof atmospheric structure and composi-tion and long-term temporal variations.Ten of the papers are devoted to infra-

red studies of molecular clouds and re-gions of star formation. The archetype ofsuch regions, the Orion molecular cloud,has now been studied in great detail witha wide variety of observational tech-niques. The improved observations haverevealed a progressively more complexsituation, and the extraordinary level ofactivity at the cloud core is far from theprevious picture of an interstellar cloudgently condensing to form stars. Obser-vations of a growing number of similarregions attest that the Orion scenario isthe rule rather than the exception. Itseems that infrared is living up to itsearly promise of allowing the investiga-tion of star formation processes in mo-lecular clouds but that the road to a fullunderstanding of the processes may belong and hard.

Papers on galactic structure and extra-galactic sources make up a substantialpart of the proceedings. The paucity ofpre-1976 papers referred to in these pa-pers is testimony to the rapid expansionof the field. Three reviews, "Infraredstudies of the stellar content in extraga-lactic systems" (M. Aaronson), "Rapidstar formation in galactic nuclei" (G. H.Rieke), and "The infrared properties ofactive extragalactic nuclei" (B. T. Soiferand G. Neugebauer), cover the applica-tion of current infrared techniques to aspectrum of extragalactic objects rangingfrom spiral galaxies through Seyferts toquasars and BL Lac objects. The natureof the "nonstellar" component of theinfrared flux of many nuclei is only be-ginning to be specified. Though rapidstar formation and thermal emission by

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