[News Terms] Salvation or Destruction, the 'Manhattan Project'

With the popularity of the movie 'Oppenheimer,' the historical significance of the United States' atomic bomb development plan, the 'Manhattan Project,' which served as its background, and the controversies surrounding it are once again drawing attention.

In 1939, when World War II broke out, the United States formed the Manhattan Project team composed of nuclear scientists, physicists, and engineers with the goal of developing an atomic bomb. As concerns grew that Nazi Germany might develop nuclear weapons first, the U.S., unwilling to lose the initiative in the war, quickly responded under the approval of then-President Roosevelt.

The overall head of the Manhattan Project, which ran from 1942 to 1946, was U.S. Army Major General Leslie Groves. In other words, this project was a military operation aimed at producing a weapon of mass destruction for actual combat, not just a scientific experiment. The person appointed as the research and development director was Robert Oppenheimer. He led the top scientists of the era, including Nobel laureates, at a massive research complex built in Los Alamos, New Mexico, to begin developing the atomic bomb. Not only American scientists but also European scientists who fled Nazi persecution and scientists representing allied countries such as the United Kingdom and Canada participated in the project.

The budget allocated to the project alone was $2 billion, which is estimated to be about $33 billion (approximately 40 trillion KRW) in today's terms. At its peak, as many as 130,000 personnel, including scientists, engineers, soldiers, and laborers, were involved. However, it was a secret project conducted under strict security, unknown to the general public or outsiders.

On July 16, 1945, the world's first nuclear test, the 'Trinity Test,' was successfully conducted at Alamogordo, 340 km south of Los Alamos. At the time, scientists expected an explosion equivalent to 5,000 tons of TNT (trinitrotoluene), but the actual blast was equivalent to 20,000 tons of TNT. A month later, on August 6, the atomic bomb 'Little Boy' was dropped on Hiroshima, and on August 9, 'Fat Man' was dropped on Nagasaki, leading to Japan's surrender and the end of World War II.

However, scientists soon began to seriously worry about the tremendous destructive power of the atomic bomb. At the moment of the bombing, 70,000 people lost their lives in Hiroshima, and more than 100,000 people gradually died afterward from burns and radiation sickness. The Manhattan Project scientists, who had been driven by the mission to develop the atomic bomb before Nazi Germany could, worked after the war to ensure that nuclear energy would be used only for peaceful purposes. Oppenheimer himself opposed the development of the hydrogen bomb and military expansion after witnessing the suffering of many Japanese victims of the bombings, and during this process, he was even suspected of being a 'Soviet spy.'

Whether the United States should have used the atomic bomb at that time remains a subject of debate today. Proponents argue that the nuclear bombings ended the war early and saved hundreds of thousands of precious American lives. On the other hand, critics contend that although Germany had already abandoned nuclear development, the U.S. government created a climate of fear as if Germany was about to possess nuclear weapons, and despite intelligence confirming Japan was preparing to surrender, the government kept this secret from scientists, sacrificing hundreds of thousands of innocent lives for political justification.