We won the war. What’s next?

While V-J Day in August 1945 heralded the end of World War II for most of the country, it brought uncertainty to many of the men and women of the Manhattan Project.

They had been part of history’s greatest technological crash course—creating the first nuclear weapons less than seven years after the discovery of nuclear fission—but when the Manhattan Project ended, so did their draft deferments. Some, in fact, were sent to Germany and Japan as part of the post-war occupation.

The uncertainty had begun before the war’s end. The Army’s priority in the final months of the project was clear: Maintaining a modest R&D capability while pushing production as fast as possible. As a result, many junior scientists found themselves unexpectedly drafted into Uncle Sam’s army and released from the project. The Trinity test—the first detonation of a nuclear bomb—was an enormous technical accomplishment but also accelerated the shift away from the R&D that was essential in early pursuit of the bomb.

Some project sites went on standby. The X-10 site in Tennessee, however, had the fortune of being able to troubleshoot production issues at the Hanford site in Washington state and to assist research at the Los Alamos lab in New Mexico. As a result, X-10—later to become ORNL—remained fully staffed and funded.

For scientists, the Manhattan Project had not been about the bombs as much as it had been about the research. Nuclear science, which enjoyed the freshly minted term “nucleonics,” cut across long-established fields from physics to biology and held so much promise that it marked the beginning of a new era for science and civilization: the “Atomic Age.” 

X-10 wanted a piece of that action. Its leaders saw the lab as a center of excellence and an anchor to universities across the Southeast, yet a visitor could be forgiven for seeing only dust, mud and temporary structures. There was no guarantee it would survive the peace.

The lab remained in limbo—through leadership changes, shifting programs and priorities, and the transfer of control from the Army to the civilian Atomic Energy Commission—until 1948, when its survival was finally assured.

At one point, there was even a push to move X-10 to the Y-12 site one valley over.Fortunately, cooler heads prevailed when they contemplated the cost of decommissioning and rebuilding the lab’s Graphite Reactor.

ORNL owes its existence to a few key individuals—such as William Pollard, Eugene Wigner and Alvin Weinberg—who made it their life’s mission to ensure that the Tennessee laboratory survived and flourished. That Graphite Reactor—the world’s first continuously operating reactor—advanced many fields of study, including several that remain strengths of ORNL such as neutron science, biology and genetics, chemistry and materials science.

It was also the world’s largest producer of stable isotopes and radioisotopes. As an old newspaper headline put it dramatically: “Out of the fire of hell comes the cure for cancer!”