The Infrastructure

I’ve always been enchanted by lost cities, giant secret projects and the like.  Giant projects, of course, have been around since the advent of humans, everything from Stonehenge through the Apollo Project to send humans to the moon.  In between was the construction of Europe's cathedrals, the Panama Canal, America’s Transcontinental Railroad, the Suez Canal, the Great Eastern, Hoover Dam, and countless other projects, both exotic and prosaic, old and new, on virtually every continent that pop up at the simplest query of any Internet search engine. There is something inherently romantic about the ability of humans to organize and pursue such enormous projects to completion. But none of those just mentioned was secret, and most took a considerable amount of time.

              ..........Click on these images to enlarge.

Two views of the plutonium plant in Hanford, 
Washington, with a workforce of 45,000.

Some housing for Hanford's workforce.

The altered priorities of war, however, change everything, including the necessity of many activities being prosecuted rapidly and in secret. That said, it may or may not be common knowledge that the Manhattan Project, the U.S.’s Second World War bid to crash-build an atomic weapon, probably holds the record for the most vast, most secret, most vital, fastest engineering project in all human history. 

On September 17, 1942, U.S. Army General Leslie Groves was ordered to build an atomic bomb before the Nazis did. At that moment in time, all that existed in the USA was a growing palpable excitement as physicists learned of the potential of the atom, lots of equations (most derived from Einstein's E=mc²), much concerned extrapolation about how far along their German colleagues were, and a few experiments done in university labs. Since our best intelligence at the time showed that Hitler was well ahead of us, Groves was given a blank check with the entire unquestioned power, wealth, and resources of the United States at his disposal and, for all practical purposes, at his informed whim. It turns out that physicists in those days were an undisciplined lot, so one of the first things Groves did was install Robert Oppenhiemer to keep the scientists focused—easier said than done, as a good many of them were Nobel Prize winners!

The uranium 235 plant at Oak Ridge, Tennessee,
 with a workforce of 24,000.

Housing for some of Oakridge's workforce.

 

Two years and ten months later, on July 16, 1945, the Trinity bomb detonated in New Mexico. In between, there had sprung into being—literally from nothing, from an arid wilderness, a woodland valley, and a desert plateau, respectively—the plutonium plant in Hanford, Washington, with a workforce of 45,000; the uranium 235 plant at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, with a workforce of 24,000; and the bomb development facility at Los Alamos, New Mexico, with tens of thousands more. To me this is living proof that humans can do anything once they set their minds to it.

The road to Los Alamos.

At the end of the road.

                                   

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