The Potsdam Conference: July 17th 1945 – The Big Three

Before heading to bed last night, President Truman opened up his diary and wrote about his impressions and reactions from his earlier afternoon tour in Berlin. He ended his entry with:

“What a pity the human animal is not able to put his moral thinking into practice…I hope for some sort of peace – but I fear that machines are ahead of morals by some centuries and when morals catch up perhaps there’ll be no reason for any of it.”

At 5:29am in New Mexico (1:29pm in Berlin) the previous day – while Truman was on his tour and thinking about how the nefarious human animal was not able to put his moral thinking into practice – the United States successfully tested the world’s first atomic bomb. The nearly five year old nuclear program – code named the ‘Manhattan Project’ – was now almost finished.

The Manhattan Project was conceived out of the fear and understanding that Germany was engaged in a nuclear program of their own in the 1930s.

In 1938, German chemists Fritz Strassmann and Otto Hahn barraged uranium with neutrons which resulted in the detection of the element, barium, something that was interpreted as a nuclear fission soon thereafter by Austrian scientists Lise Meitner and Otto Frisch. Once this information traveled out of Germany, many began to fear that Hitler would not hesitate to use a nuclear weapon if this new science were to assist in developing one.

After top scientists like Albert Einstein urged the United States government to respond to this harrowing new potential threat, President Roosevelt appointed various scientists and military officials to form a committee and conduct research to find out how uranium could be used as a weapon.

This so-called ‘Advisory Committee on Uranium’ would soon become the ‘Office of Scientific Research and Development’ (OSRD) in 1941 which is also around the same time that Italian scientist Enrico Fermi – who fled Italy in 1938 to escape the Italian racial laws that affected his Jewish wife – brought his expertise in nuclear chain reactions to the committee. Eventually the United States Army Corps of Engineers joined the ORSD after the U.S. officially entered WWII, making it a highly classified military operation with some of the world’s most brilliant scientists – many of whom had fled fascism in Europe – assisting the program.