Years before, I had taken graduate school courses in cultural anthropology. I had journeyed with Franz Boas—figuratively speaking—as he explored the fluid boundaries and social units of Native American tribes in the Pacific Northwest in the 1890s and early 1900s. I had peered over Margaret Mead’s shoulder as she had researched the casual sexual couplings of teenagers on the South Pacific island of Samoa in the 1920s. But the unique cultural creation that was Oak Ridge—a small, secret, authority-dominated enclave where tens of thousands of young men and women were treated almost like worker ants in an anthill, except for a handful of military and scientific leaders who possessed the social status and secret knowledge traditionally reserved for an elite caste of high priests: I had never peered at Oak Ridge through the inquiring lens of an anthropologist.
Now, the odd case study that was Oak Ridge all but consumed me. In the handful of days since I had cut a physicist’s body from the ice of a murky frozen swimming pool, Oak Ridge had come to occupy most of my waking thoughts and more than a few of my dreams, and one of the things I found amazing was that it had taken so many years—and such a dramatic turn of personal events—to trigger my fascination. It was impossible to live in East Tennessee without knowing that Oak Ridge had played a pivotal role in the Manhattan Project and the creation of the atomic bomb. It was almost as widely understood that in the decades that followed Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Oak Ridge had helped harness atoms for peace, in the form of nuclear power and radioisotopes for medical research and treatment. Beyond those superficial bullet points, though, I had never bothered to read much or think much about the opening chapter in the history of Oak Ridge. As I considered it now, I marveled, again and again, how profoundly this tiny city had changed not just the nation but the entire world. Talk about a lever and a place to stand: nuclear energy was about as long and strong as a lever could get—I suppose a poet might argue that love or hatred could be stronger, but as a scientist, I would find that argument somewhat abstract and unconvincing—and Oak Ridge had been the fulcrum, the fixed point around which the lever of the atom had swiveled to move the earth.
Oak Ridge wasn’t the only Manhattan Project installation, of course. There was also Los Alamos, New Mexico, where hundreds of physicists and other scientists devoted themselves to turning theoretical physics into deliverable bombs. And there was Hanford, Washington, where mammoth reactors—scaled-up versions of Novak’s reactor in Oak Ridge—cranked out the bomb-sized quantities of plutonium. But Oak Ridge was the biggest of the sites, and everything Los Alamos and Hanford did was built on the foundation of Oak Ridge. That alone made the city a fascinating specimen.
But there was more. There was the whole heroic and heartbreaking backdrop to Oak Ridge’s creation behind the veil of secrecy: there was World War II. I wasn’t born until a decade after Germany and Japan surrendered, so I knew only what I’d read and heard and seen, and that was only a small smattering of the historical record and archival images and firsthand stories. But from what I knew, it truly embodied the best of times and the worst of times; the best of mankind, and the cruelest and most depraved.
The scale of the cruelty and suffering and loss was beyond my comprehension. The most famous number, of course, was six million: the number of Jews killed by the Nazis as they implemented the madness of Hitler’s “Final Solution.” But tens of millions more had died, too—another forty million civilians, by some reckonings, and twenty-five million soldiers. Although some four hundred thousand U.S. soldiers were killed in three and a half years of fighting—a dreadful toll, to be sure—American losses represented only a tiny fraction of the war’s total. In China, the war dead totaled nearly four million soldiers and sixteen million civilians as Japan’s armies cut a deadly swath through China. The Soviet Union lost twenty million people as well, almost equally divided between soldiers and civilians, as the German army ground itself down in a prolonged and bloody eastern campaign. Seventy-two million deaths, by bombings, firestorms, massacres, diseases, starvation. How was it possible, I wondered, for so many people to die in such a short time without the very fabric of civilization collapsing? And how did the hundreds of millions of grieving survivors carry on in the face of such sorrow?
As my truck topped the rise and dropped once more into the valley where Oak Ridge sprawled, I looked at the place with new eyes. Against a global backdrop of unrelenting, apocalyptic death, this small place, which to modern eyes might look haphazard and provisional and ordinary, had been the focal point of the biggest, most complex, and most urgent endeavor the world had ever known. That endeavor was all the more amazing considering that it was accomplished without the world’s knowledge. Until that knowledge had burst, brighter than a hundred suns, above two cities in Japan.