During mid-1939 famed Hungarian physicist Leo Szilard initiated an effort among the still small community of U.S. nuclear physicists — all well known to one another as well as to their colleagues in Europe — to focus the attention of the U.S. government on the military potential of atomic power — particularly that Nazi Germany sought to develop it.
He got advice to draft a letter directly to President Franklin D. Roosevelt, and further advice from Alexander Sachs, a prominent banker/economist/academic and close acquaintance of the president. Sachs advised that the letter should be signed with an indisptably famous scientific signature.
Szilard traveled to the Long Island summer residence of Albert Einstein to put the case before him for a letter from Einstein to warn FDR of the perils of a NAZI bomb.
Einstein agreed. He dictated the letter in German, Szilard had it translated into English, sending it back to Einstein for his signature. Addressed to the president, dated Aug. 2, 1939, the letter returned to Szilard Aug. 9 signed, “Yours Truly, Albert Einstein”.
On Aug. 15, Szilard gave the letter to Sachs to give directly and personally to Roosevelt. FDR’s attention was caught up soon after by the outbreak of WWII when Germany invaded Poland on Sept. 1, delaying the meeting sought by Sachs.
Sachs got his appointment at the White House a month later, presenting the letter to Roosevelt on Oct. 11. In a follow-up visit the next morning, he got the president’s full attention as FDR summoned aides to set in motion what would become the Manhattan Project.
A great deal more transpired but the letter and Sachs’s persistence resulted in the president issuing the first directives leading ultimately to establishing the Manhattan Project in January 1942, which developed the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August 6 and 8, 1945 forcing Japan to surrender. Later Einstein would say that had he known the German effort to create an atomic weapon would fail, he would not have signed the letter. But he didn’t and couldn’t know at the time and so the perils of the nuclear age began.
By war’s end, the Manhattan Project had absorbed the lesser British atomic research project named Tube Alloys, employed 130,000 people at nearly 20 sites in the U.S. and Canada, most notably at three key sites, Oak Ridge, Tenn., Hanford, Washington, and Los Alamos, New Mexico — the latter location where Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer directed research by hundreds of scientists who developed and built the A-bombs.
The Manhattan Project cost just under $2 billion during the five years from 1942 to 1947 that it ramped up and achieved full operation — about $23 billion in 2020 dollars, which is a rounding note for the Department of Defense gifted by President Trump with a $780 billion annual budget.
The Manhattan Project was so secret that when Harry S. Truman became president upon the death of FDR on April 12, 1945, he knew nothing about it until Army Chief of Staff Gen. George C. Marshall met with him the next day in the White House to let him in on the secret and to burden him with the knowledge that any decision and order to use the weapon would be Truman’s alone.
Now, 75 years since it ended, the United States faces its gravest conflict since the military pandemic of WWII that claimed 425,000 American lives among an estimated 60 million deaths worldwide.
This time the enemy is not Germans/Nazis/Italians/Fascists/Japan/Imperialists. It is the disease Covid-19.
Ultimately we are told — and we know — that to defeat this enemy we, the United States and all the world must develop an effective vaccine.
News reports lately tell us there is a worldwide crash program to find a useful vaccine here in the U.S. but also in China, the United Kingdom, Germany, Italy and other nations.
The reports say there are 108 such projects underway including eight in early-stage tests but that before being used any vaccine must be effective in large-scale human trials.
From the American perspective what we need is a compression of the fierce urgency and focus of the Manhattan Project, in which the federal government oversaw, directed and coordinated the entirety.
This time the weapon to be developed is a vaccine. But what is entailed in that? Why does it need the Manhattan Project intensity and efficacy? And does our government, the Trump government, understand this? Is it capable of accomplishing it? Clearly, from all that has gone before the past three years and during this crisis, emphatically the answers to the last two questions are no and no.
Time is wasting. Just as the U.S. Army and Gen. Leslie Grove commanded the Manhattan Project, while Oppenheimer led and directed its research this is something that needed to start at least a month ago, should be started immediately and should be put into the hands of the CDC for its medical science and the hands of the Department of Defense for management, logistical planning, and control.
The White House should direct them to do it and otherwise stay out of the way — stay out of the way — as FDR did with the Manhattan Project but for periodic reports.
This project must be under federal agency control — not federal political direction — with unlimited funding and the most competent management possible because to discover, test, manufacture, distribute and administer 330 million vaccine doses (or do it twice if it takes two shots as some vaccines do) demands it.
To do all that efficiently and effectively, efficiently, and do it over the next six to nine months without corruption, without infection by a black market, with price controls, federal funding, and total federal command calls for capability, commitment, management, and control akin to the Manhattan Project.
When you or I or anyone receives the vaccine, if and when there is one, it should be administered through a detailed, mandatory nationwide plan or it will risk failure and the kind of chaos, lying, cheating and incompetence that has marked the production and supply of protective medical gear and of testing for the virus. Those gross failures are predictors for what will happen with vaccines without a rational command plan.
From start to finish, from top to bottom this must be, should be a federally directed project to cause researchers to work together as they did at Los Alamos, to test and accelerate testing of suitable vaccine candidates collectively not competitively, to produce one or more vaccines with government command through the Defense Production Act over those pharmaceutical companies with the capacity to ramp up manufacturing swiftly.
The government, not the pharmaceutical industry and certainly not panic and influence markets should set the price — at no more than cost plus a small profit percentage over cost but no more, no more than that.
Production, allocation, and distribution of a vaccine or vaccines should be planned, coordinated and carried out with government direction but not by the market because in the market there will be price gouging, favoritism, discrimination, tampering — all the things that in George Orwell’s imagination made some animals more equal than others.
It should be done on a scale organized by region, by state, by county and then within each county on a prescribed town by town and city by city timetable that enables local health authorities — supported by local law enforcement to maintain order at vaccination sites — to schedule your vaccination, mine, everyone’s with certainty, clarity, fairness and public calm.
Do we have a government capable of this? No, clearly we do not.
Do we have a government that even understands this? No, we do not.
What is the likely result then if a vaccine or vaccines are discovered while Donald Trump is in the White House surrounded by the self-serving, self-dealing louts and incompetents that surround him? Most likely, far, far greater chaos.
In his first inaugural speech, FDR famously assured Americans, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself”.
What would he have done if Covid-19 had been his enemy rather than the Great Depression or, later, Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan?
FDR would have organized something as big as the New Deal, something as complete and urgent as the Manhattan Project to get it done — and get it done in time. Right now, right now, time is a-wasting.
Peeling the Onion 