low point of the Manhattan Project

The low point of the Project had to be when Fermi, backed by Teller and eventually Oppenheimer, considered using radioactive materials to poison the German food supply. Oppenheimer wanted to make sure that this not be done until they were sure that at least 500,000 deaths would result.

It’s good evidence of the barbarizing influence of wars for survival, especially given Oppenheimer’s usual fondness for conceptions of non-violence drawn from Eastern philosophy.

The background to considering this possibility was the desperate reaction to intelligence reports that the Nazis were about to put a “secret weapon” to use. That weapon turned out to be the V-1 and V-2 rockets, though it was not yet clear that the German atomic bomb project had gone off the rails… partly due to resource crises after Stalingrad, partly due to heavy water shortages after three Allied attacks at or near the Norsk Hydro plant in Norway– a British-backed Norwegian commando strike on the plant, a later American bombing raid there, and finally a British-backed Norwegian bomb planted in the ferry meant to take the remaining heavy water to Germany.