In 2018, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine issued an Interim Report evaluating the general viability of the U.S. Department of Energy's National Nuclear Security Administration's (DOE-NNSA's) conceptual plans for disposing of 34 metric tons (MT) of surplus plutonium in the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP), a deep geologic repository near Carlsbad, New Mexico. It provided a preliminary assessment of the general viability of DOE-NNSA's conceptual plans, focused on some of the barriers to their implementation. This final report addresses the remaining issues and echoes the recommendations from the interim study.

"Nuclear weapons, since their conception, have been the subject of secrecy. In the months after the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the American scientific establishment, the American government, and the American public all wrestled with what was called the "problem of secrecy," wondering not only whether secrecy was appropriate and effective as a means of controlling this new technology but also whether it was compatible with the country's core values. Out of a messy context of propaganda, confusion, spy scares, and the grave counsel of competing groups of scientists, what historian Alex Wellerstein calls a "new regime of secrecy" was put into place. It was unlike any other previous or since. Nuclear secrets were given their own unique legal designation in American law ("restricted data"), one that operates differently than all other forms of national security classification and exists to this day. Drawing on massive amounts of declassified files, including records released by the government for the first time at the author's request, Restricted Data is a narrative account of nuclear secrecy and the tensions and uncertainty that built as the Cold War continued. In the US, both science and democracy are pitted against nuclear secrecy, and this makes its history uniquely compelling and timely"--

Examines the past, present, and future of the Los Alamos research center, which was created to assemble the world's first atomic weapon.

"World War II was the largest and most destructive conflict in human history. It was an existential struggle that pitted irreconcilable political systems and ideologies against one another across the globe in a decade of violence unlike any other. There is little doubt today that the United States had to engage in the fighting, especially after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. The conflict was, in the words of historians Allan Millett and Williamson Murray, "a war to be won." As the world's largest industrial power, the United States put forth a supreme effort to produce the weapons, munitions, and military formations essential to achieving victory. When the war finally ended, the finale signaled by atomic mushroom clouds over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, upwards of 60 million people had perished in the inferno. Of course, the human toll represented only part of the devastation; global environments also suffered greatly. The growth and devastation of the Second World War significantly changed American landscapes as well. The war created or significantly expanded a number of industries, put land to new uses, spurred urbanization, and left a legacy of pollution that would in time create a new term: Superfund site"--

At the height of the race to build an atomic bomb, an indoor tennis court in one of the Midwest's most affluent residential neighborhoods became a secret Manhattan Project laboratory. Polonium in the Playhouse: The Manhattan Project's Secret Chemistry Work in Dayton, Ohio presents the intriguing story of how this most unlikely site in Dayton, Ohio, became one of the most classified portions of the Manhattan Project. Seized by the War Department in 1944 for the bomb project, the Runnymede Playhouse was transformed into a polonium processing facility, providing a critical radioactive ingredient for the bomb initiator--the mechanism that triggered a chain reaction. With the help of a Soviet spy working undercover at the site, it was also key to the Soviet Union's atomic bomb program. The work was directed by industrial chemist Charles Allen Thomas who had been chosen by J. Robert Oppenheimer and General Leslie Groves to coordinate Manhattan Project chemistry and metallurgy. As one of the nation's first science administrators, Thomas was responsible for choreographing the plutonium work at Los Alamos and the Project's key laboratories. The elegant glass-roofed building belonged to his wife's family. Weaving Manhattan Project history with the life and work of the scientist, industrial leader and singing-showman Thomas, Polonium in the Playhouse offers a fascinating look at the vast and complicated program that changed world history and introduces the men and women who raced against time to build the initiator for the bomb.

An important investigation of the sociocultural fallout of America's work on the atomic bomb In The Nuclear Borderlands, Joseph Masco offers an in-depth look at the long-term consequences of the Manhattan Project. Masco examines how diverse groups in and around Los Alamos, New Mexico understood and responded to the U.S. nuclear weapons project in the post–Cold War period. He shows that the American focus on potential nuclear apocalypse during the Cold War obscured the broader effects of the nuclear complex on society, and that the atomic bomb produced a new cognitive orientation toward daily life, reconfiguring concepts of time, nature, race, and citizenship. This updated edition includes a brand-new preface by the author discussing current developments in nuclear politics and the scientific impact of the nuclear age on the present epoch of a human-altered climate.

A chilling, fast-moving study of the nuclear weapons plant in the Denver suburbs, told through the experiences of managers, workers, activists, and neighbors who were all so deeply affected by the hazardous plant.

An inside account of one of the most innovative R&D ecosystems of the 20th century, from the man who was at the center of it all. Over a 60-year career in public affairs, Vannevar Bush—engineer, inventor, educator, and public face of government-funded science—sought to eliminate roadblocks to innovation in science and technology. In Pieces of the Action, a collection of memoir-essays, he reflects on his role in shaping the policies and organizations that powered American research and development in the mid-20th century. As the architect and administrator of an R&D pipeline that efficiently coordinated the work of civilian scientists and the military during World War II, he was central to catalyzing the development of radar and the proximity fuze, the mass production of penicillin, and the initiation of the Manhattan Project. Pieces of the Action offers his hard-won lessons on how to operate and manage effectively within complex organizations, build bridges between people and disciplines, and drive ambitious, unprecedented programs to fruition. With wry humor, Bush also shares personal observations and anecdotes—pelting cows with apples, poking fun at servicemen who tried to keep his own invention secret from him—that offer a glimpse of the personality behind the accolades. Originally published in 1970, this updated edition includes 15 archival images from Bush’s life and career and a foreword from entrepreneur and Idea Machines podcast host Ben Reinhardt that contextualizes the lessons Pieces of the Action can offer to contemporary readers: that change depends both on heroic individuals and effective organizations; that a leader’s job is one of coordination; and that the path from idea to innovation is a long and winding one, inextricably bound to those involved—those enduring figures who have a piece of the action.

When the vast wartime factories of the Manhattan Project began producing plutonium in quantities never before seen on earth, scientists working on the top-secret bomb-building program grew apprehensive. Fearful that plutonium might cause a cancer epidemic among workers and desperate to learn more about what it could do to the human body, the Manhattan Project's medical doctors embarked upon an experiment in which eighteen unsuspecting patients in hospital wards throughout the country were secretly injected with the cancer-causing substance. Most of these patients would go to their graves without ever knowing what had been done to them. Now, in The Plutonium Files, Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Eileen Welsome reveals for the first time the breadth of the extraordinary fifty-year cover-up surrounding the plutonium injections, as well as the deceitful nature of thousands of other experiments conducted on American citizens in the postwar years. Welsome's remarkable investigation spans the 1930s to the 1990s and draws upon hundreds of newly declassified documents and other primary sources to disclose this shadowy chapter in American history. She gives a voice to such innocents as Helen Hutchison, a young woman who entered a prenatal clinic in Nashville for a routine checkup and was instead given a radioactive "cocktail" to drink; Gordon Shattuck, one of several boys at a state school for the developmentally disabled in Massachusetts who was fed radioactive oatmeal for breakfast; and Maude Jacobs, a Cincinnati woman suffering from cancer and subjected to an experimental radiation treatment designed to help military planners learn how to win a nuclear war. Welsome also tells the stories of the scientists themselves, many of whom learned the ways of secrecy on the Manhattan Project. Among them are Stafford Warren, a grand figure whose bravado masked a cunning intelligence; Joseph Hamilton, who felt he was immune to the dangers of radiation only to suffer later from a fatal leukemia; and physician Louis Hempelmann, one of the most enthusiastic supporters of the plan to inject humans with potentially carcinogenic doses of plutonium. Hidden discussions of fifty years past are reconstructed here, wherein trusted government officials debated the ethical and legal implications of the experiments, demolishing forever the argument that these studies took place in a less enlightened era. Powered by her groundbreaking reportage and singular narrative gifts, Eileen Welsome has created a work of profound humanity as well as major historical significance. From the Hardcover edition.