2000 HSS/PSA Program 1 - History of Science Society

HSS Abstracts
Rebecca␣ P. Schwartz, Princeton University
Writing the Authorized Biography of the Manhattan Project:
Henry DeWolf Smyth and the Smyth Report
The increased authority of physicists as a result of their successful work on
the Manhattan Project is a standard theme in the history of American physics.
But how did Americans come to know about physicists’ work on the atomic
bomb, which after all remained entirely classified after World War II, so that
the physicists could benefit thereby? An important piece of the answer is the
Smyth Report, the official governmental report on the Manhattan Project, which
was released days after the atomic bombs were dropped. Coming as it did into
a security-imposed vacuum, the Smyth Report served as the sole resource to a
nation seeking to learn about this new and fearsome weapon. In this paper, I
examine how Henry DeWolf Smyth, a Princeton University physicist, crafted
his report to convey to the American people a carefully controlled picture of
the Manhattan Project. Using drafts of the report and Smyth’s correspondence
from the archives of the American Philosophical Society, I show that besides
for considerations of national security, Smyth also edited his report to reflect
well on the Army and British scientists, to minimize the dangers of radioactive
fallout, and, most importantly, to emphasize the roles of physicists on the
Manhattan Project while downplaying the vital contributions of chemists and
engineers. In doing so, Smyth was guided by his own predispositions as to
what constituted interesting science, and what was merely technical problem
solving. Although the Smyth Report is not well remembered today, its impact
is apparent in the way that so much scholarship about the Manhattan Project
continues its emphasis on physicists, implicitly dismissing the others without
whom success could not have been realized. This is not necessarily reflective
of the reality of the Manhattan Project, but rather of how it was portrayed in
this early and important work.
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Silvan␣ S. Schweber Brandeis University
Interdisciplinarity, Theory, the Computer and the Physical Sciences
Teams of physical scientists—metallurgists, physical chemists, physicists,
engineers—had often been organized at the Bell Laboratories and at the General
Electric Research Laboratory to solve pressing problems in the development
and improvement of particular devices. During World War II research teams in
which members of sufficiently different background to cover all aspects of a
given situation were assembled to address the problems of designing radar sets,
nuclear piles, proximity fuses, atomic bombs, ..., of implementing operational
research, and formulating answers to numerous other problems that waging a
total war entails. After the war the value of such teams and the contribution of