Dr. Robert S. Norris

REVIEWS AND AWARDS FOR RACING FOR THE BOMB 2002 Distinguished Writing Award for Biographies and Memoirs Army Historical Foundation

Groves "left a trove of private papers, which Norris has deftly exploited in addition to office logs and Army records and numerous interviews that he and Goldberg conducted. The result is an authoritative biography that is important for its illuminating account of both the man and his crucial role in the race for the bomb." Daniel Kevles, The New York Times Book Review, June 30, 2002 Read the full review.

"One might not expect a prominent member of the Natural Resources Defense Council to write kindly about Groves, the man whom eyewitnesses and students of the atom bomb's creation love to despise. Groves's political conservatism, suspicion of academics, and obsession with secrecy made him ludicrous to some, downright menacing to others. Yet this well-executed biography evinces an honest respect for Groves without disguising those sides of the man.... As a window into the U.S. Army of the interwar period and World War II, as well as the birth of the nuclear age and its American culture, this is an exceptionally fine work." Eliot A. Cohen, Foreign Affairs, September/October 2002 Read the full review.

"With lucid prose, clear organization, and a sympathetic yet critical eye, Norris distills and disentangles a complex and in some respects secrecy-enshrouded story. He delivers a readable, solid account that helps put the Manhattan Project's 'indispensable man' into context and explains how he was so successful in amassing and wielding power to achieve his principal goal of completing a workable atomic bomb in time for use during World War II." James G. Hershberg, The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, May-June 2002 Read the full review.

"Just as sailors and soldiers are lauded for their courage, so too should we acknowledge historians who boldly assume and complete tough and important research. Robert Norris merits a snappy salute for his definitive biography of Army Lieutenant General Leslie R. Groves, the leading military figure in the creation of the atomic bomb." Al Christman, U.S. Naval Institute, Proceedings, September 2002

Additional reviews of Racing for the Bomb are available online: The Washington Post American Scientist A review of Racing for the Bomb appears on the Steerforth Press website

Dr. Robert S. Norris, a senior research associate with the NRDC nuclear program, is a 20-year veteran of nuclear arms control and nonproliferation efforts. He directs the Nuclear Weapons Databook Project and is the co-editor of the Nuclear Weapons Databook series, the five-volume definitive encyclopedia of nuclear weapons.

Q: The paperback version of your book, Racing for the Bomb: General Leslie R. Groves, the Manhattan Project's Indispensable Man is out in April 2003. Tell us about the book, and what insights you took from researching Groves's World War II project to develop the world's first nuclear bomb. Why "indispensable"?

A: Most of the focus on the Manhattan Project has been on the scientists and on the science. And the books on the enterprise were written from that perspective. As important as that was, it's only one part of the larger story of how the bomb got built. If we take a step back, we see General Groves intimately involved at every step, making most of the major decisions and shaping the outcome. His desk in Washington was the center of the project, not the laboratory in Los Alamos. It was an enormous undertaking requiring extraordinary skills -- both administrative and engineering.

Q: How did you come to be interested in Groves? Obviously your expertise in nuclear weapons issues is a link, but some might expect that you'd be more likely to vilify him than praise him.

A: Well, a few folks have been surprised, I think, that "Norris gave Groves a fair shake." My interest in it is principally because of the nuclear angle, but there were a couple of other factors. Actually, Stanley Goldberg, a science historian and colleague, had the good idea of doing a scholarly biography on Groves, and he did years of research, accumulating many, many boxes of photocopied documents. Very sadly, he died of a rare disease, quickly and unexpectedly in 1996, and so I approached his family about taking up the project, and seeing it through. The other important factor was that Groves is a critical part of the story of this remarkable project that changed the course of the 20th century in a number of ways. And yet his piece of the tale has never been told in a serious way by an independent voice. That's a fairly rare commodity in the biography business -- a key player in a world-changing event whose story is largely untold for 50 years.

Q: What prepared Groves for the job of running the Manhattan Project?

A: The Army got the green light to go for the bomb in the summer of 1942 -- six months after the U.S. entry into the war. At that point Groves had just completed two years of construction projects in the United States for the Army, building dozens of training camps, munitions plants, airfields, depots, and so on. Basically the Army was ramping up for war, growing from a pre-War force of 135,000 to 8 million during the war. That meant building facilities, training recruits -- all kinds of things, and on a huge scale. Groves oversaw hundreds of projects costing about $8 billion -- four times the cost of the Manhattan Project, by the way. It was good preparation, because of course the Manhattan Project was in every way an "extra large" project itself. At its peak, more than 150,000 people were working on it.

Q: How secret can a project of that size really be?

A: In Leslie Groves's hands, very secret. Vice President Truman didn't know about it until FDR's death, and Groves's wife and children were every bit as surprised as everyone else to learn on the morning of August 6, 1945 what he had been doing for the past three years. Groves also worked to lock the other allied countries out of the project as well, with varying degrees of success, and even ordered that some of his own scientists be followed by security agents.

Q: And how has that approach to information shaped the American nuclear program?

A: The culture of secrecy Groves created during the Manhattan Project continued on with the American weapons program right through the Cold War, and even continues to this day. Part of that has to do with his habit of creating decentralized offices, with a lot of the decision-making control in the field. The Department of Energy still follows that model, and it bears Groves's imprint.

FROM RACING FOR THE BOMB BY ROBERT NORRIS: The Manhattan Project was "a gigantic industrial and engineering construction effort...rapidly accomplished, using unorthodox means, and dealing in uncertain technologies.... Without Groves's organizational and managerial skills, and construction know-how, the project would have taken longer to accomplish or perhaps even failed."

Q: Was that secrecy unnecessary?

A: I don't think anyone would challenge the proposition that secrecy in nuclear weapons programs is important for a lot of reasons. On the other hand, it comes with a price in a democratic society, and it's inviting for some public officials to hide behind it from time to time.

Q: What if the Manhattan Project had failed?

A: An interesting question. The bomb was going to be developed; the issue was whether it would be ready for that war -- so "failure" by Groves's standards would have been to not have a bomb ready to use against the Axis. Whatever we may think of President Truman's decision to use the bomb against Japan, we can be certain that had it not been used, the immediate effect would have been full-scale Soviet entry, continued conventional bombing, a naval blockade of Japan and possibly an American invasion in November of 1945. That would certainly have cost many lives on all sides. And when it was over and Japan defeated, the Allies would probably have partitioned Japan in some way, in recognition of the Soviet role. So it would be a very different post-war Japan. Also, had the bomb not been used and thus the nations of the world not had clear evidence of what a devastating new weapon of war it was, it might have been used at some later date, say in the Korean War or during the many Berlin crises of the Cold War.

FROM RACING FOR THE BOMB BY ROBERT NORRIS: "For Groves the challenge of mastering atomic energy was evidence, as he said, 'that when man is willing to make the effort, he is capable of accomplishing virtually anything.' His success has left us with numerous challenges of our own; threats of terrorist A-bombs, environmental problems without solutions, new aspirants and new arms races. Mastering these will require special skills. It would be good to have the General here to help."

Q: How do you think the Manhattan Project is remembered today?

A: It has come to be a metaphor over the years for huge undertakings successfully achieved through massive organization and American ingenuity. We often hear politicians speak of the need for a Manhattan-style project to combat cancer or AIDS, or to rebuild America's urban infrastructure or to address homeland security issues, and so on. And it's a fine metaphor, and in its way, an expression of the need for unity and determination to address particular problems. After looking at Groves, I can tell you that not too many people could have done what he did -- pulling all the pieces together as he did. I've also come to the belief that the Manhattan Project is probably a unique instance that really can't be replicated. It was wartime, and the nation's very survival was at stake. It had the highest priority during the war, as well as the full backing of the president and the military. He had unlimited resources in terms of money and scientists. And it was all done in complete secrecy: Congress didn't know about it, neither did the press. Those are conditions that would be hard to re-create.

Q: How has the experience of researching and writing this book affected your work at NRDC?

A: I have a much better understanding of the physics and the engineering involved in building a bomb, and also a better sense of how and why the United States structured its nuclear programs the way it did, and how that shaped the thinking of presidents, cabinet secretaries, military leaders and others. It was a remarkable experience for me, and I'm very grateful to Stan Goldberg's family for sharing his research with me, and to NRDC for all of its support while I was preparing the book, and after it was published.

Photo: Keith Harvey

last revised 3.3.03