Oak Ridge and the Secret City

In the autumn of nineteen forty-two, the United States government quietly purchased approximately sixty thousand acres of farmland in Anderson County, Tennessee, displacing roughly one thousand families, approximately three thousand people, who were given short notice and a small check. The government called the project the Clinton Engineer Works. The locals, when they eventually found out what had happened, called it Oak Ridge.

Oak Ridge was one of three secret cities built by the Manhattan Project to develop an atomic bomb. Its specific task was uranium enrichment: separating the fissile isotope U-two-three-five from the far more common U-two-three-eight in quantities sufficient for a weapon. By nineteen forty-five, Oak Ridge had a population of roughly seventy-five thousand workers and their families, making it the fifth largest city in Tennessee, though it appeared on no official map and its residents were forbidden to discuss what they were doing even with their own families.

The gaseous diffusion plant at Oak Ridge was the largest building in the world at the time of its construction. Workers tended machinery and gauges whose purpose they did not understand, following procedures they had been told were vital without being told why. Many of them later said they guessed they were doing something important for the war.

A number of them said they figured it out on August sixth, nineteen forty-five, when they heard the radio report from Hiroshima. The two bombings killed somewhere between one hundred and two hundred thousand people, primarily civilians. Historians continue to debate the decision and its consequences.

Oak Ridge itself became a permanent federal laboratory and today houses the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, still one of the largest science and energy research facilities in the United States.