Manhattan '45 : Janus year (on the Janus campus) in the Janus city

Ah, yes the year 1945 : it was the best of times , it was the worst of times.

It just all very much depended on who you chose to listen to.

To the many boosters of the baby-killing/war-ending Manhattan Project (like its leader General Leslie Groves) the year had given America the potential for global mass nuclear destruction 'too cheap to meter' : a future so bright that the world's morticians would have to wear shades.

Big Science, Big Modern Science had won the war against barbarians from the pre-scientific Dark Ages. The war's successful conclusion suggested that 1945 might just be the apogee of Modernity, all its centuries of promises finally fulfilled.

But to Theodor Adorno, Hiroshima, the Katyn Forest and Auschwitz were but the signs of the inevitable collective fall of Modernity and of the Enlightenment, no matter what varied ideological flag the mods had chosen to masquerade under.

(Cue 1945 as the nadir of Modernity and the birth year of post-Modernity.)

Indeed the tiny island of Manhattan, the former wartime home of both Groves and Adorno, had much to contribute to the global dialectic stew that year.

For the Manhattan nuclear Project seemed fully capable of delivering death to the globe at wholesale rates, promising to ensure hundreds of millions or more dead at the push of a red button.

Meanwhile, Manhattan's (natural) penicillin Project had just as dramatically brought the promise of a normal life of three score and ten to hundreds of millions or more who might otherwise expect to die prematurely from bacterial infections.

So if Manhattan's blast, heat and radiation didn't get you, its naturally brewed penicillin just might save you.

And all this happened (nuclear weapons, Adorno's musings, natural penicillin) on the Janus like campus of Columbia University in that eternally Janus like city of Manhattan in the Janus like year of 1945.

Okay, Hollywood fiction meisters, do you think you can top that ?

Real life 1940s comic book 'superhero' : Jewish nebbish Robert Oppenheimer and his plan to 'do good' with secret atomic powers

Move over Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster and let a real 1940s Jewish nebbish take the Superman wheel !

Gotham City-born Robert Oppenheimer secretly cloaked a bloodthirsty propensity to inflict supreme violence 'to do good' behind a rather mousy public exterior.

But his words at the top level meetings that determined when and where the first A-bombs were to be dropped reveal a man fully in grip of the traditional American monomyth of redemptive violence 'to do good' (pace John Sheldon Lawrence & Robert Jewett) via a war-ending superweapon (pace H Bruce Franklin).

Lawrence, Jewett and Franklin repeatedly document that these myths gripped both factual and fictional America , both Americas feeding off each other.

It is easy to caricature right wing Republican-leaning  Leslie Groves and Vannevar Bush as war-mongers , intent only on 'doing bad'.

Much less easy than trying to account for left-leaning Oppenheimer's propensity to kill hundreds of thousands of women and children to 'do good'.

The case of Oppenheimer forces us to confront the power of these enduring American shibboleths (the monomyth of justified extra-legal violence to 'do good' and America's right to the unique possession of a secret war-ending superweapon) in the mainstream of ordinary American thought ....

The OTHER Manhattan Project only made moral arguments rather than A-Bombs : but its impact has been immense

Moral conservatives such as today's American Republican Party frequently argue that morally medical care (such as expensive life saving drugs like Avastin) should only go to those who have worked hard enough to afford them.

They maintain this argument ( hello Obamacare !) even if this means that these drugs as a result of this limited market demand will remain in limited production forever and so be expensive forever.


The opposite moral argument (as made by Dr Martin Henry Dawson in his battle with the Allied governments in WWII) calls for the government to greatly expands the lifesaver's potential market by initially subsidizing the drug so that it available to all regardless of income, geography, race ,gender etc.

It is claimed this will encourage new producers to come in and try and find ways to compete with the established producer by lowering their production costs and hence ultimately reduce the price of the drug to the consumer.

Penicillin G provides the best possible example of this argument, proving the validity of this economical argument beyond all measure.

But greatly expanding the universe of people with affordable access to lifesaving Penicillin G also had an unexpectedly profound impact on the entire world's health.

Unusually cheap abundant public domain Penicillin G saved the lives of many people who are ordinarily too poor or in two remote regions to be treated and who thus remained reserve pools of highly virulent - and contagious - strains of the bacterial diseases that were endemic or epidemic worldwide for millenniums.

In a form of quasi Herd Immunity, billions of us (I estimate ten billion of us so far) have indirectly benefited when tens of millions of us directly had their lives saved by penicillin G shots.

Dangerously contagious bacterial diseases that terrified our grandmothers, that hung like the Sword of Damocles over all households rich or poor, are no more.

Those of us under the age of fifty have never even heard of most of them and few doctors practising today have even seen a single case of them.

The Big Manhattan Project made the A Bomb and made a huge array of massive buildings - it was big in every concrete sense of the word.

By contrast, the other Manhattan Project, that of Dr Dawson, only made moral arguments (and a little home brew penicillin) rather than Bombs or Buildings.

But who can save that this project's impact  - 75 years on - is not way, way bigger than that of the project headed by Robert Oppenheimer and Leslie Groves.... 

Wartime Manhattan's OTHER 4F project...

Dr Martin Henry Dawson 's PEN project (producing natural
penicillin systemics to save the lives of  tossed-aside SBE patients) was only one of the two projects in wartime Manhattan that was centred upon the 4Fs.

No one, then or now, would disagree that Dawson was focused upon trying to save the lives of certain neglected 4Fs,above all else.

But my argument that the MED project, aka Leslie Groves Manhattan Engineering District project to build and drop an atomic bomb upon civilians,was focused on 4Fs will produce a hot disagreement among most.

I intend to demonstrate that the bloody mano-a-mano combat in the trenches of WWI, between the 1As of the world's civilized powers, led to the view among the eugenically-oriented majority of the civilized middle class that such warfare was extremely dysgenic for the 'race'.

'If war must happen,and sometimes it must', they reasoned,' it must be waged by our sides' 1As safe inside big machines'.

And it must waged upon the enemy's figurative 4Fs of the 4Fs : those too old, too young or too sickly to fight and living safely ,well behind the frontlines.

Clouds of gas, or of germs, or of radiation or of fire would descend upon the cities of the enemy and kill enough of these 4Fs until their frontline 1A relatives surrendered, without our frontline 1As having to fire a shot.

And our homefront 4Fs would also assume an unwitting combat role - the sickly poor, seeking charity medical care, would instead be experimented upon with prototypes of these deadly clouds, so we perfect them before we tried them upon the enemy 4Fs.

Ellen Welsome's THE PLUTONIUM FILES details these chilling medical experiments inflicted upon some of America's weakest, by the MED project.

Aktion T4, the Nazi war upon their Aryan weak, was the testing ground for their later war upon Jews, Poles,Gypsies et all in the Holocaust.

Just as the Nazis invoked a collective punishment upon innocent 4F civilians for the deaths of their 1A troops by the Resistance , killing 100 4F civilians for every one 1A soldier killed, so too America vowed to revenge the 2800 1As killed at Pearl Harbor a 100 times over by bombing Japanese civilians.

John Dower's WAR WITHOUT MERCY details that revenge against rather than fighting for life-sustaining values was what motivated most of America (from top leaders down to ordinary citizens) during World War Two.

And at least 280,000 Japanese civilians did die in the two atomic bomb blasts --- collective punishment indeed.

I won't claim to be telling a wholly new tale - just presenting it in a light rarely seen before....

The Manhattan Project: Hidden in Plain Sight

Mention the Manhattan Engineering District (MED) aka 'The Manhattan Project', along with the wartime Atomic Bombs, and for most of us, our first thought is a mushroom cloud rising from a dry desert bed somewhere in the dusty south west of America.

Perhaps we think of other,later, Atomic Tests from similarly dusty deserts in Nevada and Utah. And their assembly - wasn't that done in isolated big plants inevitably set on dusty plains or deserts somewhere in southern and western America ? Isn't it still being done out there, somewhere ?

We are certain of one thing - none of this is taking place - or ever took place - anywhere near the wet, green, heavily urbanized American north east - certainly not in the New York City area.

THE DEVILISHLY CLEVER GENERAL GROVES

As is well known, the Atomic Bomb project was not just the most secret project in the Allied pipeline of new weapons, it was one of the few efforts rated 'Top Secret' that actually stayed truly top secret - even incoming President Truman knew nothing of it until he took office after FDR's death.

Many credit this to the mania for security to the Army Engineer Corps officer who really turned the faltering project around after he took charge in September 1942 - Colonel (and soon to be General) Leslie Groves.

Groves, born and raised in upstate New York, it is claimed, took a perverse delight in naming a project centered in rural wilderness in the South West after the biggest urban centre in the world - Manhattan - never the most popular part of New York State to its upstate residents.

Actually, it was a group decision to name the Top Secret project after Manhattan and that decision was even more brazen than any of us imagined.

The top secret project was hidden, in plain sight, in all of all places , Manhattan itself !

Most of the emotional high points of the wartime atomic project (and many of its technical solutions) happened on Manhattan or in the environs close around Manhattan and New York City.

Surprisingly, many of those warehouses,factories, office buildings and labs are still around.

Author Robert S Norris delights in reminding residents of the Big Apple that much of the world's atomic history lies all around them, unknown, as part of their daily work life environment.

It is easy to see how this confusion happened.

Most atomic authors, from 1945 till this day, have been voluntarily 'self-embedded' in the corps of the nuclear physicists, seeing the entire project through the physicists' eyes.

For the nuclear physicists, the world revolves around the Los Alamos weapons-development lab , set in the south west desert.

Without Los Alamos and its team of scientists, we won't have had the second , plutonium, (Nagasaki) bomb. But we would have had a bomb.

And it is worth noting that most of the deadly material in all of the world's Cold War nuclear arsenals was uranium, not plutonium - something you'd never gain from reading the average atomic author's breathless prose over the plutonium breakthrough.

(Uranium was a natural element, while until recently it was believed plutonium was man-made, artificial, synthetic - so it simply had to be the better and more exciting part of the atomic story.)

Actually, all of the physicists involved in the MED were, in a sense, mostly redundant after 1941 - if all had died in a plane crash in early 1942, the project would have still gone on to drop the Hiroshima bomb.

Chemists, engineers, metallurgists, factory artisans - all deserved more credit than the physicists for the first Bomb.

And in the early 1940s, most of the high tech firms and factories they worked for were headquartered or located in the greater New York City area....