I’m looking forward to the second season of “Manhattan,” which is currently under production and will air sometime this summer on WGN. It’s a fictionalized account of the lives of scientists and their families, who were gathered at Los Alamos during World War II to work on producing an atomic bomb.
The story centers on a nuclear physicist, Frank Winter, who struggles to develop an innovative triggering device for the atomic bomb. He is a composite of two real scientists, Seth Neddermeyer, and the man who was brought in to salvage the project, Harvard professor George Kistiakowsky.
There are only a handful of relatively well-known Ukrainian nuclear scientists who worked on the Soviet Union’s atomic bomb project – most were ethnic Russians who studied and worked at the Leningrad Technical Institute. They started working on an atomic bomb, once they learned of similar efforts in England, Germany and the U.S. during the second world war.
Conducting basic research with a war raging around you is extremely difficult, and neither the Nazis nor the USSR were close to building a bomb by war’s end. The Soviets succeeded in 1949, only after a very effective espionage program got them the plans from the U.S.
Perhaps the most famous Ukrainian-born scientist in the U.S. involved in the atom bomb project was a physical chemist and explosives expert named George Bohdan Kistiakowsky. He provided the crucial discovery that made the Hiroshima atom bomb possible – the critical trigger mechanism – an implosion device that triggered the fissile plutonium to start its reaction in a controlled manner.
The TV show is a terrific fictionalized account about some of the world’s top scientists – composites of 10 contemporaneous and future Nobel laureates, working secretly on developing the atomic bomb. Naturally, being TV, it is also about the toll it takes on their lives and families, and the austere conditions they worked under.
It was the largest concentration of brilliant scientists and engineers ever assembled in one place, constantly squabbling with each other to advance their ideas and theories, while under pressure to complete the bomb that would end the two wars being fought in Europe and the Pacific, and saving countless lives.
For many at Los Alamos and the wartime White House, research was proceeding much too slowly at Los Alamos. Frank Winter kept a daily tally of America’s casualties. That was the constant pressure felt by all the scientists, who also feared that Europe and America would lose the war.
After the discovery of nuclear fission in the late 1930s, scientists were excited by the prospects that such reactions could generate large amounts of energy. Soon after, they began to fear the consequences, as war loomed on the horizon. On August 2, 1939, Albert Einstein and physicist Leo Szilard wrote a letter to President Franklin D. Roosevelt, advising him to provide funding for research on using nuclear fission as a weapon since Nazi Germany might also be conducting similar research.
That letter was the trigger for the creation of the Manhattan Project, named after the location of the office of Maj. Gen. Leslie Groves, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, who directed the overall project. Ultimately, over 600,000 people were employed in that effort, at numerous sites across the U.S.
Einstein was a pacifist, and did not seek to be involved in the Manhattan project, nor was he asked. He opposed the subsequent Cold War with the USSR, and later regretted sending the letter to Roosevelt. Einstein was high on FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover’s list of people with questionable loyalties.
A short time later, a Soviet physicist, Georgy Flyorov, who had many friends in the West, noticed that Western physicists were no longer publishing their works in scientific journals. He deduced that such work had become classified and that the West was working on an atomic bomb. Flyorov wrote a letter directly to Joseph Stalin in 1942 and convinced him to initiate a comparable program in the Urals.
At Los Alamos, early work focused on “gun-type” designs as the triggering device, which fired one piece of uranium into another to create a nuclear chain reaction. Uranium was hard to process, while plutonium was easier to produce. As a result, the scientists at Los Alamos began developing an implosion design for a plutonium-based bomb, as this material was relatively plentiful.
This is where Kistiakowsky comes into the Manhattan Project story. He was born on November 18, 1900, in Kyiv. He fought in the anti-Communist White Army’s infantry and tank corps. Fleeing the Bolshevik Revolution, he emigrated to Berlin, where he earned a doctorate (1925), and then to the U.S. where he taught at Princeton (1926-1930). During that period, he married and had a daughter, Vera, who is now a professor emerita at MIT. He then went to Harvard in 1931 and stayed there until his death in December 1982.
His father, Bohdan Kistiakowsky, was a well-known Ukrainian sociologist and professor at Kyiv University, and member of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences. His uncle, Dr. Ihor Kistiakowsky, was internal affairs minister in the government of Hetman Pavlo Skoropadsky.
At Harvard, Kistiakowsky became one of the world’s leading explosives experts, and in 1941 he became a member of the National Academy of Sciences. It was that expertise that led him to join the war effort, along with many of his academic compatriots.
Most scientists worked for the National Defense Research Committee (NDRC), and Kistiakowsky became technical director (1942-1944) of the Explosives Research Laboratory, where he oversaw the development of new forms of explosives, more powerful than TNT, including what are now commonly called plastic explosives.
He was involved in research on the theory of explosions and the development of shaped charges, which focus the energy of an explosion to magnify the power. It was that research which attracted the attention of Robert Oppenheimer, the technical director of the Manhattan Project who brought him in as a consultant in October 1943.
There, he met up with Neddermeyer (Frank Winter in the TV series), who was convinced that an implosion-type device was needed to trigger the plutonium-based bomb, but did not have the technical expertise to perfect such a device.
In January 1944 Kistiakowsky was placed in charge of X Division at Los Alamos, and Neddermeyer worked as part of Kistiakowsky’s team. In an interview in 1982, Kistiakowsky credited Neddermeyer with the fundamental development of the explosive lenses necessary for an implosion-type nuclear weapon.
On the apocalyptic dawn of July 16, 1945, they both watched as the first bomb was detonated in the Trinity test. No one really knew what was going to happen. Scientists made bets on the outcome the night before. Enrico Fermi bet that no one would survive the blast. Kistiakowsky bet his month’s salary against $10 by Oppenheimer that the implosion device would work. There was shock and awe, and celebrations that day, but also great relief that the bomb had worked as designed.
Twenty-one days later, on August 6, 1945, three B-29 bombers flew towards Japan. A great 30,000-foot cloud of smoke swirled above Hiroshima, and could be seen from the Enola Gay, 400 miles away on its return to its base in the Marianas.
There were no parties at Los Alamos that day, as the magnitude of the destruction overcame the scientists who had created the bomb. It was that guilt which led many of them to speak out against nuclear power and become anti-war activists later in life. Kistiakowsky later became a leader among those activists.
An article appeared in the June 6, 1959, issue of The Ukrainian Weekly with the headline “Dr. George Bohdan Kistiakowsky, Ukrainian-Born Scientist, Named Special Assistant to President.” In 1957, during the Eisenhower administration, Kistiakowsky was appointed to the President’s Science Advisory Committee and succeeded James R. Killian as chairman in 1959. He directed the newly created Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) in 1959-1961.
During that tenure, Kistiakowsky was involved in some of the basic nuclear disarmament issues of that era – policies which still stand today. He understood that inspections could not adequately control nuclear proliferation, especially on submarines, and advocated for a disarmament approach. In January 1960, as part of arms control planning and negotiation, he suggested the “threshold concept.” Under this proposal, all nuclear tests above the level of seismic detection technology would be forbidden.
After such an agreement, the U.S. and USSR would work jointly to improve detection technology, revising the permissible test yield downward as techniques improved. Unfortunately, talks broke down as a result of the U-2 Crisis of 1960 in May. In 1965-1972, Kistiakowsky served as vice-president of the National Academy of Sciences.
He retired from Harvard in 1972 and in later years was active in an antiwar organization, the Council for a Livable World. He severed his connections with the government in protest against the U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War. In 1977 he assumed the chairmanship of the council, campaigning against nuclear proliferation.
In the July 22, 1959, issue of The Ukrainian Weekly, there was a story, “Dr. G.B. Kistiakowsky Confirms His Ukrainian Background,” in which he discussed his Ukrainian heritage and his membership in many Ukrainian societies, including the Shevchenko Scientific Society. That same week, President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed Public Law 86-90, proclaiming Captive Nations Week.
In a 1982 interview, nearly a year before Kistiakowsky died, noted historian Richard Rhodes asked Kistiakowsky, “You are Russian, right?” Kistiakowsky responded “I am a Ukrainian, which is like saying to a Scotsman, ‘Are you an Englishman?’ ”
In many ways, Kistiakowsky’s accomplishments in the field of explosives paralleled that of Alfred Nobel, who invented TNT. Though he received numerous prestigious awards throughout his career, ironically, the one prize that eluded him was the Nobel Prize. At the very least, he should have been a candidate for the Nobel Peace Prize. Regardless, George Kistiakowsky was one of Ukraine’s greatest and most accomplished scientists, ranking with Volodymyr Vernadsky, who was a geochemist and co-founder of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences.