A journey into how the U.S. funded the bomb
As I sat in a dark, cavernous movie theater in Berlin watching the film “Oppenheimer,” my mind was thousands of miles away.
Like many other people who turned out to see the biopic, I was captivated by Christopher Nolan’s portrayal of the Trinity test and Cillian Murphy’s performance as J. Robert Oppenheimer, the singularly ambitious, then morally conflicted father of the atomic bomb.
But as I watched images of the sprawling nuclear laboratory at Los Alamos flash across the screen, I couldn’t stop wondering: How did the U.S. government pay for the $2 billion project? Did Congress approve the money? And if so, how did lawmakers keep it a secret?
These arguably hairsplitting thoughts nagged at me thanks to my job as a congressional correspondent focused on federal spending. The assignment requires me to wade through dense legislative documents — sometimes on the order of thousands of pages — in search of projects and earmarks that lawmakers would rather taxpayers not know they are paying for.
But this was secrecy on a whole other scale.
I went home and Googled, expecting to find a Wikipedia entry or an article in a magazine. But all I found was a snippet from a textbook published by the National Counterintelligence Center. It mentioned that Roosevelt administration officials had sought in 1944 to smuggle money for the bomb into a military spending bill and were assisted by Congress.
I was incredulous. How could they have possibly hidden so much money? Was there really no resistance from legislators at all? I also knew that Los Alamos was built in 1943, a full year before congressional leaders secretly approved stand-alone funding for the bomb in 1944 — so how had the administration gotten the money for the project in the first place?
What followed, under the guise of what I pitched to my editor as a “fun historical memo,” was an obsessive search to find out the history of how Congress secretly funded the atomic bomb.
Over the next six months, I would visit the Library of Congress’ reading room, politely but relentlessly bug an archivist at the Sam Rayburn Library in Texas, and mine the diaries and memoirs of top congressional and military leaders, as well as the declassified history of the Manhattan Project commissioned by its director.
Those documents and interviews tell a story of presidential pressure, congressional complicity and even a touch of journalistic self-censorship.
It turns out that when Congress voted to fund the bomb, there was no debate and no
discussion. Only seven lawmakers in the entire Congress had any idea that they were approving $800 million — the equivalent of $13.6 billion today — to create a weapon of mass destruction that would soon kill and maim more than 200,000 people, ushering in the atomic age. papers are kept. Kauffman told me that there were numerous documents pertaining to the atomic bomb but that the earliest dated to 1945 — in other words, a full year after that the pivotal meeting.
One more folder, labeled “War Department” and cataloged with records from 1944, seemed promising. But the file’s only content, Kauffman found, was a letter “regarding the eligibility, policies and regulations for the award of the Combat and Expert Infantryman Badges.”
The only first-person account I could find from Rayburn, a 1957 interview from his home in Bonham, Texas, with historian Forrest Pogue, gave the kind of clipped summary that I was hoping to avoid. But it did explain how lawmakers, who are famously bad at keeping their mouths shut, managed to keep this incredibly juicy secret. The answer is that they didn’t.
Rayburn said he once saw one of the congressmen who had attended the meeting talking to a reporter. The congressman, Rayburn said, “looked funny when I saw him.”
“I talked to the newspaperman later and said, ‘You are a good American, aren’t you — you love your country?’” Rayburn recalled. “He said, ‘Of course.’ I said, ‘Then don’t print anything about what he just told you.’ He didn’t, and it was all right.”
My other lucky break was that Stimson, the war secretary, was an avid diarist.
I got access to those diaries thanks to Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library and learned that it was Roosevelt himself who ultimately gave Stimson the go-ahead to brief a select few members of Congress, just a few days before each chamber was poised to pass the military spending bill.
But I was still looking for an account from a lawmaker in the room — ideally one that could explain how Congress approved all of that spending without realizing it. meeting — he wrote that Stimson said the bomb could “do as much damage as 10,000 tons of any explosive known at that time” — but he had also included the budgetary tables of money spent on the Manhattan Project. He had even written to Stimson and the Senate Appropriations Committee secretaries who served on the panel for onthe-record versions of their stories.
One jumped out at me. Thomas seemed incredulous that, in his memory, the secret had never been shared with Congress outside those two meetings. Could that have been true?
Appropriations aides wrote back to him: “At no time during the consideration of appropriations dealing with the prosecution of the war, either on the record or off the record, was the atomic bomb ever mentioned. During the war years, we had no knowledge in the committee as to what appropriations were available and used for this purpose.”
(Thomas and Rayburn, who were in separate meetings and gave separate recollections of the briefings, recalled that the military requested $800 million; the official accounts written by the military say it was $600 million — a housekeeping difference of about $3 billion in today’s money.)
His account helped me understand why there were so few recorded contemporaneous accounts of the meeting from lawmakers themselves. Thomas was invited to the secret huddle just a few hours in advance — an invitation that came from the Senate majority leader by phone, with a warning.
“He asked that I not advise any person of my whereabouts as there was to be an important conference that should not be disturbed,” Thomas recalled.
“Of course I can, but where in Tennessee are we going to hide it?”
Thomas’ memoir skewered that story. In his recollection, Mckellar — who had not even been invited to the secret briefing in the Capitol — had in fact confided to fellow members of the panel that the government was building something in his state “which he feared might turn out to be a ‘white elephant.’”
“He stated that the government had secured a very large tract” and “had constructed many buildings and a vast number of residences; that the land was being enclosed with an expensive form of fencing; and that no one, not even the constructors constructing the improvements, had any idea as to what use was to be made of the project,” Thomas wrote.
Only one question remained: Where exactly in the budget had the administration hidden the money for the bomb?
Finding a bill that passed eight decades ago is harder than you might think, but after a number of creative searches, I pulled up a record of a Senate hearing examining the bill. Attached was a report breaking down the legislation.
I paged through, stopped and smiled when I saw it. There it was, the innocuous phrase that hid an $800 million secret: “expediting production.”