Episode Details

In this episode, we explore inside the manhattan project’s secret cities. In 1943, the US government essentially borrowed about 14 ,000 tons of solid silver from the treasury. They built a hidden city larger than most state capitals, and they employed tens of thousands of people who were completely in the dark about what they were actually doing. Right, which is just wild to think about today. Exactly. I mean, we usually think of a multi -billion dollar industrial empire as something that takes, you know, decades of slow growth to build. But this was an operation the size of the entire American automobile industry, constructed from scratch almost overnight. and somehow it remained the absolute best -kept secret of the Second World War. It really is a logistical reality that kind of defies conventional understanding. We are talking about taking a purely theoretical concept, something that up to that point only existed as math on university chalkboards, and willing it listening. It's like having thousands of people baking individual ingredients in separate kitchens, but only one guy in the country knows they're actually assembling a cake. That is the perfect analogy. Compartmentalization was the absolute bedrock of their security apparatus. Workers only knew the specific task directly in front of them. The most striking example of this is the calatron girls at Oak Ridge. Oh, I love this story. Yeah. These were young women, like Gladys Owens, hired to sit on tall stools and monitor arrays of dials and switches. Their instructions were remarkably simple. They just had to keep a needle in a certain range by turning a knob. And they had absolutely no idea they were operating electromagnetic isotope separators. None whatsoever. They were operating calutrons, which used massive magnetic fields to bend the flight paths of uranium ions. Because the desired uranium -235 atom is slightly lighter