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president’s attention, and when Einstein warned of the potential destructive capacity of nuclear fission, Roosevelt listened. When he said evidence suggested the Germans were already at work on a nuclear weapon, the president took action. At FDR’s direction an Advisory Committee on Uranium was established to explore a weapons program. The uranium committee was annexed by the National Defense Research Council and then in May 1941 melded into the Office of Scientific Research and Development, headed by Vannevar Bush. But its initial work was unpromising. The expense of isotope separation plus the uncertainty of whether a controlled chain reaction was even possible appeared to rule out a bomb-making program.

Meanwhile, British scientists, working independently, concluded that a deliverable bomb could be constructed using as little as twenty-five pounds of fissionable material and that if sufficient resources were devoted to the project the first weapon could be ready by the end of 1943.29 Churchill gave the go-ahead at the end of August 1941, and on September 3 the British chiefs of staff concurred. “Although personally I am quite content with existing explosives,” wrote Churchill, “I feel we must not stand in the path of improvement.”30

After reviewing the British findings, Vannevar Bush recommended to Roosevelt that the United States expedite its research for an atomic bomb. That was October 9, 1941. The project, Bush warned, would require a vast industrial plant “costing many times as much as a major oil refinery”—an estimate woefully short of what the project would ultimately entail.31 The president pigeonholed Bush’s recommendation. Then came Pearl Harbor. On January 19, 1942, he returned the memo to Bush with a terse reply handwritten on White House stationery:

V.B.

OK—returned—I think you had best keep this in your own safe.

—FDR32

Roosevelt’s “OK” galvanized American efforts. Secretary of War Stimson went to Capitol Hill for the money—“I don’t want to know why,” said Sam Rayburn, who arranged with Appropriations Committee chairman Clarence Cannon to conceal the funds in the War Department budget.33 Robert Oppenheimer of the University of California assembled physicists to work on bomb design; General Leslie R. Groves of the Corps of Engineers, fresh from building the Pentagon, assumed direction of the “Manhattan Project,” named for a mythical Manhattan engineering district; and in December 1942 Enrico Fermi, an Italian Nobel laureate who had fled to the United States with his Jewish wife after Italy enacted Nazi-like racial laws, attained a sustained chain reaction in his Chicago laboratory, establishing the reality of what until then had been merely a theoretical prospect. Curiously, while the United States and Britain were moving ahead, Germany dropped out of the race. In the autumn of 1942 Albert Speer, the Third Reich’s armaments minister, after conferring with scientists Otto Hahn and Werner Heisenberg, decided the construction of an atomic bomb was too uncertain and too expensive. “It would have meant giving up all other projects.” The decision to cancel the effort came easily for Speer. Hitler was uninterested in an atomic weapon and disparaged nuclear science as “Jewish physics.”34* Japan also discontinued its efforts in 1943, scientists telling the government that neither the United States nor Germany could possibly develop a weapon that would be usable in the current war.35

From the beginning Churchill and Roosevelt agreed to cooperate. In October 1941, shortly after their meeting off Newfoundland, FDR wrote Churchill suggesting that American and British nuclear efforts be coordinated “or even jointly conducted.”36 Churchill followed up during his visit to Hyde Park in June 1942. At the prime minister’s suggestion it was agreed that the programs be combined and that future research and development be conducted in the United States. Churchill believed continued German air attacks made it unwise to locate the massive facilities needed to construct a bomb in Great Britain.37 This momentous decision to