I’m probably one of the last physicists out there to do so, but at last, I watched Oppenheimer during the Christmas break. And doing so, invariably, reignited my awe for the Manhattan Project and its leadership.

The main question on my mind is: how on earth did the Manhattan Project succeed? Despite the ample resources, every aspect of the project was riddled with risks:

  • Massive science uncertainty. Nuclear fission was only first observed at the start of WW2, and at the start of the project, nobody could even claim with a straight face that there were no laws of physics prohibiting the construction of the bomb
  • Limited talent pool. Today’s deep-tech struggles to find talented PhDs with the right background, but there are likely 20-30x more of them than there were in the 1940s. Also, the science was completely new - there were no people with a ‘PhD in nuclear fission’!
  • Secrecy and militarisation. Your average scientist is a free-thinking anti-authoritarian pacifist. All right, modern pacifism probably only became a thing post-Vietnam, but still, I doubt researchers of the day loved secrecy, chain-of-command, and the weapons focus. So while patriotism and fear of Hitler are surely strong motivators, it’s still a tough sell!
  • No groundwork. As the project starts, nothing is ready to go. There is no uranium enrichment plant, no military facility, no labs… Everything must be built from the ground up. If you set up a research lab in 2024 that needs a new building, you’ll be lucky if it gets built by 2030. Los Alamos was built in the middle of nowhere, in less than 1 year, and housed 3500 people!
  • Incredible pressure. Hey scientists, thanks for joining our new weapons research program. Looking forward to seeing your invention - just remember, whatever you build must be at least 100x more powerful than anything the world has ever seen. Of course, take your time - work-life balance is important for productivity! But remember, if the Germans build it first, the war is lost, and your friends will die. Of course, we can run small-scale tests before we deploy the actual bomb! We have just put 100,000 people to work, and in a couple of years, they’ll have enough material for one trial - so no stress, but do make it count!

But above all, I am puzzled by the leadership challenge the project must have faced. Manhattan project employed about 100,000 people at a time, with a total turnover of about 500,000, spread over two dozen sites. Imagine someone asked you to build an organisation of this scale in a matter of months! That’s completely insane, and there aren’t many people who can do that without the whole organisation descending into chaos or paralysis. The US military, and people like Gen. Groves, have my utmost respect for putting this together.

The project management at Los Alamos sounds like a similarly crazy story. A technical team of several hundred scientists and technicians, with an impossible task, strong personalities, and incredible pressure. At the helm of it, a savant theoretical physicist, with limited experience in experimental science or people’s management, and likely no exposure to project management, strategy, or politics. I don’t know how exactly Oppenheimer came to lead Project Y - nobody in their right mind would today give this job to someone with his CV - but it was clearly a jackpot, since a project this complex had no chance to succeed without off-the-charts exceptional leadership. Leadership was clearly what Oppenheimer was born for, and I admire the people who actually realised that when it looked unlikely.

I appreciate I may be romanticising the Manhattan Project a bit, as it is a poster child for both the golden era of physics and the golden era of progress. Sitting here well into the 21st century, it is sometimes disheartening to see how slowly most things are moving - and in particular, how atoms are moving so much slower than bits. I think that in my mind, Los Alamos - whose goal was literally to move atoms as fast as possible to avoid an existential catastrophe - symbolises the progress-oriented world I would like to see once again.