How America Built A Secret Appalachian City To Develop Atomic Weapons – West Virginia Public Broadcasting
General Leslie R. Groves (center left, against wall) holds his first press conference in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, after dropping the atomic bomb.Home » Stories » How America Built A Secret Appalachian City To Develop Atomic Weapons
How America Built A Secret Appalachian City To Develop Atomic Weapons
By Mason Adams, Published February 4, 2026 – 4:23 pm
This conversation originally aired in the Feb. 2, 2026 episode of Inside Appalachia.
In the 1940s, scientists worked feverishly to create the atomic bomb, which ultimately was dropped on two Japanese cities in August 1945.
Appalachia played a key part in the project through the creation and development of Oak Ridge, Tennessee, a secret city that was developed by the federal government beginning in 1942.
A new PBS American Experience film explores that history. It’s called Bombshell, and details how the U.S. manipulated the public narrative about the bomb’s development and deployment.
- See also at: https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/films/bombshell/ and embedded from YouTube at the end of this post.
Author Greg Mitchell appears as an expert in the film and spoke with Inside Appalachia host Mason Adams.
The transcript below has been lightly edited for clarity.
Adams: Oak Ridge, Tennessee, was and continues to be, a center for nuclear research. Can you talk a little bit about the role it played during the development of the atomic bomb?
Mitchell: Well, it was absolutely vital. For better or worse, we would not have had the atomic bomb without the Oak Ridge project. In a nutshell, when the go-ahead was given to attempt to build an atomic bomb, which was very iffy, we needed uranium and some plutonium to help create the bomb. And that’s very, very rare in nature, so they had to basically create it.
The key plant, especially at the start, would be Oak Ridge. Of course, it didn’t exist when the war started. They had to clear the land and drive out local residents, of which there weren’t that many. The Oak Ridge area was chosen because the Tennessee Valley Authority, was nearby, and it was open land. It had to be top secret. I mean secret, secret — secret beyond belief, almost. Massive spending went into building these very large facilities, very large plants, very large laboratories. People may have the vision of chemists in their little labs with test tubes, but it was nothing like that. It was an enormous, enormous project.
Los Alamos gets all the publicity, with [Robert] Oppenheimer and General [Leslie] Groves and so forth. Probably a lot of people think that the bomb was basically created at Los Alamos, when in fact it was just various scientists and other experts, designing and discussing. But they needed the raw materials, and that had to come mainly from Oak Ridge and from Hanford, Washington, another secret, secret city. Oak Ridge, to do this, used what became known as uranium enrichment — all these very, very difficult processes that had to be done. They needed so many employees and workers that the “secret city” had to end up having schools and hospitals and movie theaters and grocery stores, everything that would be in a city. And the city grew to 75,000 residents, and there was always an enormous housing shortage, issues like that.
It was segregated as the South was then, but they did incredible work in accomplishing the goals of getting just enough uranium and plutonium to be able to make the early bombs. When the war ended, Oak Ridge was still there. Its population went down, but it continued on. Today, it’s still an important area. I think there’s only 31,000 population, but it’s a real city.
Adams: We’ll come back to Oak Ridge in just a minute, but I wanted to talk real quickly about the PBS documentary Bombshell, in which you appear. It details how the U.S. government downplayed and pushed back on coverage of its atomic weapons program. How and why was the federal government trying to influence press reports about the Manhattan Project and the bombings in Japan?
Mitchell: Well, it was a sensitive area. On the one hand, you had the image — and what was put out right from the start, from day one, — was that this weapon would be crucial in ending the war and saving American lives and so forth. Of course, the atomic bomb itself was secret, so they had to announce both the bombing of Japan and the existence of an atomic weapon at the same time. As you can imagine, there was massive publicity about it. One part of the documentary is about the New York Times reporter William L. Lawrence, who had joined the Manhattan Project during its early years and became its chief propagandist. He gave up his job at the New York Times temporarily, and then he went back to New York Times and wrote pieces based on his inside experience. He was not exactly an unbiased observer. There’s a section in the film about William L. Lawrence, who is known as “Atomic Bill.”
The American public responded to the atomic bombings of Japan. Some people were appalled that we dropped the bomb over two cities and that the vast, vast majority of those killed were civilians. But probably the overwhelming majority felt that it helped end the war, and that, at least in these cases, they welcomed the use of the bomb, and embraced it at least temporarily. The problem was that we were planning to build more and bigger bombs, and so people were scared about those bombs being used against us.
Caption: People suffering burns received dabs of transformer oil brought from the nearby Hiroshima Electric Railway. The girl in the foreground, wearing a sailor style uniform with a triangular collar, and the girl to her left were second-year students at Hiroshima Girls’ Commercial School (then 13 years old) who experienced the atomic bombing at the Hiroshima Postal Savings Bureau in Senda-machi 1-chome, where they were mobilized to work, but survived
The boy second to the right of the police officer from the Ujina Police Station was a first-year student at Hiroshima Municipal Junior High School (then 12 years old) who experienced the atomic bombing in Koami-cho (now part of Naka Ward), where he was helping to demolish buildings to create fire lanes. It is believed he was on his way to his home in Danbarasuehiro-cho (now Danbara in Minami Ward), where he lived with his parents. He went missing and his remains were never found. (Distance from hypocenter 2200 meters.)
Photo taken in August 1945, by Yoshito Matsushige, Chugoku Shimbun.
Photo Credit: Chugoku Shimbun/Kyodo News Images. Photo Credit: Chugoku Shimbun/Kyodo News Images
Adams: In Bombshell, there’s a section of the film about Harold Jacobson. He’s a scientist at Oak Ridge in Bombshell. You describe him as “a junior Manhattan Project Scientist at Oak Ridge, no big deal, no key figure,” but he does figure into the film and into history. What did he do? What happened?
Mitchell: Probably the main concern on the publicity front that needed to be managed by the government was the fact of radiation with this bomb, they tried to picture it as just a massively bigger bomb, and did not want to focus on the radiation aspects. Of course, that’s what made this bomb even more different. They called it propaganda and a hoax, the fact that Japanese civilians were dying from radiation disease afterwards. This was this very scary new aspect of the bomb that they had. It put the bomb more in the category of chemical or biological weapons, which were banned around the world even then.
Harold Jacobson was quoted as — I don’t know if it was originally in the New York Times, but it was in the New York Times and newspapers around the country — claiming that we wouldn’t be able to occupy Hiroshima for, I think, 70 years. Somehow, he came to that because of lingering radiation. Of course, U.S. troops were heading to Hiroshima and Nagasaki with our soldiers for occupation. So that was especially scary. There was a flurry of attention for his claim. A few U.S. scientists got in there very early and did readings, which were accurate or not, but Oppenheimer himself was quoted saying, “No, this is nonsense.” So many experts weighed in that Jacobson’s views were pushed aside and largely forgotten. At least he drew attention to the fact that there was a tremendous radiation issue surrounding the atomic bomb.
Adams: Eighty years later, how have these claims sorted out? Was Jacobson right? Were Oppenheimer and the government scientists right? What’s your read?
Mitchell: As a historian, I’ve spent a month in Hiroshima, and I can tell you, it’s an average very, very large city. People had to move back there. Like any disaster, you have all these thousands of people uprooted, and they moved back and searched for their families and found some remains and found, in some cases, where their houses had stood and all that. There was a big drive to move back there, and the U.S., in fact, sent in an occupying force starting a month or so after the bombing. Studies have been done ever since, and they found definitely an increase in various forms of cancer, various genetic defects, other sorts of illnesses and diseases connected to radiation exposure. But there always was a question, was it from the immediate exposure from the day of the bomb or the couple days after, or people being affected a month later? But clearly there was many, many thousands who were negatively affected by being exposed to radiation after the bombing.
Adams: Here in 2025, all these years later, we’re still dealing with the fallout from these events, and journalists are dealing with similar efforts by the federal government to control coverage. So, what lessons do you draw from this historic episode? What do you think this documentary and this moment in history has to tell us today?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pp8mh8iZTe4
See also: The film “Oppenheimer,” linked below…
Oppenheimer Plot: The story of J. Robert Oppenheimer's role in the development of the atomic bomb during World War II. The Movie DB: 8.036/10 Information Runtime: 181 min Genre: Drama, History Language: Dutch, English Country: United Kingdom, United States of America Budget: $100,000,000 Revenue: $952,000,000 Homepage: https://www.universalpictures.com/movies/oppenheimer Release date: July 19 2023Editor’s Note: Read the rest of the story, at the below link.
Continue/Read Original Article Here: How America Built A Secret Appalachian City To Develop Atomic Weapons – West Virginia Public Broadcasting
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