Rickover H.


Admiral Rickover to Leslie Groves Re: Manhattan Project





HYMAN G. RICKOVER, Typed Letter Signed, to Leslie R. Groves Jr., July 20, 1963, Washington, DC. 1 p., 7" x 8". On Atomic Energy Commission letterhead. Stapled to multi-book review entitled “Dagger Without a Handle,” from The Times Literary Supplement, May 10, 1963. Very good.





Excerpts


“You may not have seen this book review, so I am sending it to you.”





Review:


“It was the task of General Groves, the author of Now It Can Be Told, to make the first atomic bomb. While his financial resources were seemingly unlimited scientific manpower was another matter, and his relations with Professor Oppenheimer were the crux on which the success of the Manhattan project turned.”





“no problems of ethics arose. Indeed, General Groves records himself with some unction as saying, when the size of the probable casualty list at Hiroshima was discussed, ‘I was thinking of the men who made the death march at Bataan.’”





Historical Background


General Groves published his account of the Manhattan Project as Now It Can Be Told: The Story of the Manhattan Project in 1962. The review attached to this letter covers Groves’s memoir, Bertrand Russell’s Unarmed Victory, and Clara Urquhart’s edited A Matter of Life.








Hyman G. Rickover (1900-1986) was born in Russian Poland into a Polish Jewish family and migrated to New York City with his family in 1906. Two years later, they moved to Chicago. He graduated from the United States Naval Academy in 1922 and was commissioned an ensign. He served on a destroyer and battleship before earning a master’s degree in electrical engineering from Columbia University in 1930. He served on submarines from 1929 to 1933 and commanded a minesweeper for three months in 1937, but was soon sent to Washington for work in the Bureau of Engineering. During World War II, he did repair and inspection duties and gained a reputation as a man who got things done. Rickover became an early proponent of the idea of nuclear propulsion for naval vessels, both submarines and surface ships. He led a team that developed a reliable nuclear reactor that could power submarines, the first being the USS Nautilus, the world’s first nuclear-powered vessel, launched in 1954. Promoted to vice admiral in 1958, Rickover received the first of two Congressional Gold Medals. Over the next three decades, Rickover interviewed and approved or rejected every officer being considered for a nuclear ship, eventually numbering in the tens of thousands of interviews. The Secretary of the Navy eventually forced Rickover’s retirement in January 1982, just after his eighty-second birthday, after sixty-three years of service in the U.S. Navy under thirteen presidents.





Leslie R. Groves Jr. (1896-1970) was a United States Army General with the Corps of Engineers who oversaw the construction of the Pentagon and directed the Manhattan Project that developed the atomic bomb during World War II. Born in New York to a Protestant pastor who became an army chaplain, Groves graduated from the United States Military Academy in 1918 in a course shortened because of World War I. He entered the Corps of Engineers and gained promotions to major by 1940. In 1941, he was charged with overseeing the construction of the Pentagon, the largest office building in the world, with more than five million square feet. Disappointed that he had not received a combat assignment, Groves instead took charge of the Manhattan Project, designed to develop an atomic bomb. He continued nominally to supervise the Pentagon project to avoid suspicion, gained promotion to brigadier general, and began his work in September 1942. The project headquarters was initially in the War Department building in Washington, but in August 1943, moved to Oak Ridge, Tennessee. He and physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer selected the site in Los Alamos, New Mexico, for a laboratory, and Groves pushed successfully for Oppenheimer to be placed in charge. Groves was in charge of obtaining critical uranium ores internationally and collecting military intelligence on Axis atomic research. Promoted to major general in March 1944, Groves received the Distinguished Service Medal for his work on the Manhattan Project after the war. In 1947, Groves became chief of the Armed Forces Special Weapons Project. He received a promotion to lieutenant general in January 1948, just days before meeting with Army Chief of Staff Dwight D. Eisenhower, who reviewed a long list of complaints against Groves. Assured that he would not become Chief of Engineers, Groves retired in February 1948. From 1948 to 1961, he was a vice president of Sperry Rand, an equipment and electronics firm. After retirement, he served as president of the West Point alumni association and wrote a book on the Manhattan Project, published in 1962.








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