Ideas for Projects

Here are a number of half-formed ideas for projects. This list is designed to give you some topics to ponder. Your final project certainly need not be limited to what I've put down here.

• Famous People: There are lots of interesting characters in Rhodes book. Feynman, Szilard, Bohr, Einstein, Groves, Truman, Meitner, Oppenheimer, Teller, Wigner, Fermi, Pauli, Heisenberg, Pauling. There are excellent biographies about many of these people. (Pauling may be especially interesting. He won a Nobel prize for chemistry and a Nobel peace prize for his anti-nuclear weapons work in the '50's. There's lots written by him and lots written about him.)

• Not so famous people: What about the "ordinary" people who helped make the bomb? Workers at Los Alamos, Hanford, and Oak Ridge. What was their experience like? Of particular interest might be looking at the experiences of the women who worked on the projects.

• Oral Histories: There are lots of folks to interview. WWII Vets. A bunch of the people who worked on the bomb projects are still alive. Fran Day knows some people at Oak Ridge. And we may be able to find some physicists to talk to.

• City of Hiroshima: What happened to Hiroshima, and how did Japan rebuild the city?

• Big Science: How did the Manhattan project help establish the culture of "big science?" How did it establish funding patterns and how did it change the perception of science in the eyes of the public and policy-makers? To what extent is, say, the Human Genome Project, the grandchild of the Manhattan Project?

• The Decision: Should we have dropped the bomb? Why did we drop the bomb? Was it necessary? Who made the decision?

• The Narrative of the Decision: What do we believe today about the decision? How did policy-makers (and others) choose to tell the story of the decision to drop the bomb? How has this story evolved over time?

• The Enola Gay Exhibit Controversy: Examine the remarkable controversy over how to present an exhibit of the Enola Gay at the national air and space museum. Why was it so controversial? How did the conflict get resolved?

• Gender Gap: Studies show that men and women have remarkable different perceptions of atomic weapons. Why is this?

• What is Science: Lots and lots and lots of people have written on this. Perhaps a panel discussion of COA and Jackson lab scientists would be interesting.

• The Bomb in Fiction and Art: Themes/Images of the bomb in art: prose, poetry, visual art, etc.

• Textbooks: How is the Manhattan project and the decision to drop the bomb presented in different history textbooks? An examination of some non-U.S. texts could be particularly interesting.

• Newspaper Accounts: How was the bomb presented in early newspaper accounts? Maybe look at archives of Bar Harbor Times, or the local newspaper for your hometown.

• Arms Race/Cold War: How did the events of 1945 help start the cold war? What role did nuclear weapons play in the "logic" of the cold war?

• Alternative Visions of Science: One of the legacies of the Manhattan project is a particular style (on the societal level) of viewing, funding, and supporting science and technology. What alternative models are there?

• Psychological Effects of the Bomb: How did the bomb effect its victims. Also, how did the scientists, General Groves, Paul Tibbets (pilot of Enola Gay) handle their decision after the fact?

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