Smyth Report
Cover of 1945 Princeton edition
|
|
| Author | Henry DeWolf Smyth |
|---|---|
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Publisher | Princeton University |
|
Publication date
|
1945 |
| Pages | 264 |
| OCLC | 770285 |
| LC Class | 595388938 |
| Text | Atomic Energy for Military Purposes at Internet Archive |
The Smyth Report is the common name of an administrative history written by physicist Henry DeWolf Smyth about the Manhattan Project, the Allied effort to develop atomic bombs during World War II. The full title of the report is A General Account of the Development of Methods of Using Atomic Energy for Military Purposes. It was released to the public on August 12, 1945, just days after the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August 6 and 9.
Smyth was commissioned to write the report by Major General Leslie R. Groves, Jr., the director of the Manhattan Project. The Smyth Report was the first official account of the development of the atomic bombs and the basic physical processes behind them. It also served as an indication as to what information was declassified; anything in the Smyth Report could be discussed openly. For this reason, the Smyth Report focused heavily on information, such as basic nuclear physics, which was either already widely known in the scientific community or easily deducible by a competent scientist, and omitted details about chemistry, metallurgy, and ordnance. This would ultimately give a false impression that the Manhattan Project was all about physics.
The Smyth Report sold almost 127,000 copies in its first eight printings, and was on The New York Times best-seller list from mid-October 1945 until late January 1946. It has been translated into over 40 languages.
Henry D. Smyth was a professor of physics and chairman of the physics department of Princeton University from 1935 to 1949. During World War II, he was involved in the Manhattan Project from early 1941, initially as a member of the National Defense Research Committee’s Committee on Uranium, and later as an associate director of the Metallurgical Laboratory in Chicago. In late 1943, the President of Princeton University, Harold W. Dodds, began insisting that Smyth work part-time at Princeton, where there was a shortage of physicists because so many of them were engaged in war work. Princeton had commitments to teach army and navy personnel, and he needed physicists like Smyth to meet those commitments. Smyth therefore became a consultant at Chicago, where he was in charge of designing a nuclear reactor that used heavy water as a neutron moderator, and commuted from Princeton, working in Chicago on alternate weeks.
...
Wikipedia