The Smyth Report (officially Atomic Energy for Military Purposes) is the common name of an administrative history written by the American physicist Henry DeWolf Smyth about the Manhattan Project, the Allied effort to develop atomic bombs during World War II. The subtitle of the report is A General Account of the Development of Methods of Using Atomic Energy for Military Purposes. It was released to the media on August 11, 1945, and the public on August 12, 1945, just days after the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August 6 and 9. Smyth was commissioned to write the report by Major General Leslie R. Groves, Jr., the director of the Manhattan Project. The Smyth Report was the first official account of the development of the atomic bombs and the basic physical processes behind them. It also served as an indication as to what information was declassified; anything in the Smyth Report could be discussed openly. For this reason, the Smyth Report focused heavily on information, such as basic nuclear physics, which was either already widely known in the scientific community or easily deducible by a competent scientist, and omitted details about chemistry, metallurgy, and ordnance. According to historian Rebecca Press Schwartz, this would ultimately give a false impression that the Manhattan Project was all about physics. The Smyth Report sold almost 127,000 copies in its first eight printings, and was on The New York Times best-seller list from mid-October 1945 until late January 1946. It has been translated into over 40 languages.
Background
Henry DeWolf Smyth was a professor of physics and chairman of the physics department of Princeton University from 1935 to 1949. During World War II, he was involved in the Manhattan Project from early 1941, initially as a member of the National Defense Research Committee's Committee on Uranium, and later as an associate director of the Metallurgical Laboratory in Chicago. In late 1943, the President of Princeton University, Harold W. Dodds, began insisting that Smyth work part-time at Princeton, where there was a shortage of physicists because so many of them were engaged in war work. Princeton had commitments to teach army and navy personnel, and he needed physicists like Smyth to meet those commitments. Smyth therefore became a consultant at Chicago, where he was in charge of designing a nuclear reactor that used heavy water as a neutron moderator, and commuted from Princeton, working in Chicago on alternate weeks. In early 1944, Smyth raised the possibility of producing an unclassified report for the general public on the achievements of the Manhattan Project. The director of the Metallurgical Laboratory, Arthur Compton, supported the idea. He arranged a meeting with James B. Conant, the President of Harvard University and one of the senior administrators of the Manhattan Project, who had similar thoughts. Conant took up the matter with the Manhattan Project's director, Major General Leslie R. Groves, Jr. In April, Smyth received a formal letter from Groves asking him to write such a report. Both the report and the choice of Smyth as its author were approved by the Manhattan Project's governing body, the Military Policy Committee, in May 1944. The Report was to serve two functions. First, it was to be the public and official U.S. government account of the development of the atomic bombs, outlining the development of the then-secret laboratories and production sites at Los Alamos, New Mexico, Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and Hanford, Washington, and the basic physical processes responsible for the functioning of nuclear weapons, in particular nuclear fission and the nuclear chain reaction. Second, it served as a reference for other scientists as to what information was declassified—anything said in the Smyth Report could be said freely in open literature. For this reason, the Smyth Report focused heavily on information already available in declassified literature, such as much of the basic nuclear physics used in weapons, which was either already widely known in the scientific community or could have been easily deduced by a competent scientist. Smyth stated the purpose of the Smyth Report in the Preface:
The ultimate responsibility for our nation's policy rests on its citizens and they can discharge such responsibilities wisely only if they are informed. The average citizen cannot be expected to understand clearly how an atomic bomb is constructed or how it works but there is in this country a substantial group of engineers and scientists who can understand such things and who can explain the potentialities of atomic bombs to their fellow citizens. The present report is written for this professional group and is a matter-of-fact, general account of work in the USA since 1939 aimed at the production of such bombs. It is neither a documented official history nor a technical treatise for experts. Secrecy requirements have affected both the detailed content and general emphasis so that many interesting developments have been omitted. This contrasted somewhat with what Groves wrote in the foreword:All pertinent scientific information which can be released to the public at this time without violating the needs of national security is contained in this volume. No requests for additional information should be made to private people or organizations associated directly or indirectly with the project. People disclosing or securing additional information by any means whatsoever without authorization are subject to severe penalties under the Espionage Act.
Writing
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