The secret American development of nuclear weapons during the Second World War was organized by the Army Corps of Engineers as the Manhattan Engineer District and headed by Brigadier General Leslie Groves, in Manhattan, New York. The story of the Manhattan Project and the bomb often conjures up the weapon design laboratory led by Robert Oppenheimer on the isolated mesa of Los Alamos, New Mexico, or the massive nuclear weapon material production sites at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and Hanford, Washington. However, the small university town of Princeton, New Jersey, shares a part in these momentous developments. This presentation will address three aspects of Princeton's interventions in the Manhattan Project: Albert Einstein's ambiguous involvement in these efforts throughout the war; the heavy participation of faculty and students in the research; and the penning of the first official history of the Manhattan Project by physics department chair Henry DeWolf Smyth, written at the request of the head of the Project, General Leslie Groves, and published by Princeton University Press, which became the basis for the immediate postwar unclassified understanding of these weapons.
About the speaker: Michael D. Gordin is the Rosengarten Professor of Modern and Contemporary History and Dean of the College at Princeton University. He has published and edited over a dozen books on the history of modern science, including several works on the early history of nuclear weapons. His publications on this topic include Five Days in August: How World War II Became a Nuclear War (2007), Red Cloud at Dawn: Truman, Stalin, and the End of the Atomic Monopoly (2009), and (co-edited with G. John Ikenberry) The Age of Hiroshima (2020).