I have written myself into a corner. Perhaps someone could help me.
My time-traveller (a historian from Howard University), has started the Manhattan Project early. If things go as we might expect, the Bomb will be ready by mid-1943. That would ruin the story.
How, by what sort of industrial accident, the death of which key person, what kind of whatever could I use to set Manhattan back to say, early 1944?
The death of whomever was managing those centerfuges that separated out U235? Then maybe some really bad managment could have delayed obtaining the pure isotope in time.
The only problem is that I think the Plutonium bomb followed really close behind. Still, an accident at Oak Ridge Tennessee ought to cause some major delays.
Actually, I just learned that the Trinity bomb was a plutonium bomb, so plutonium was first.
Probably the most key person was Leslie Groves: Leslie Groves - Wikipedia
If he was killed in a car accident, I could easily see the project schedule slipping because it wasn’t getting adequate funding. Almost anyone else’s death, even Oppenheimer wouldn’t delay the final bomb delivery date that much. If George Kistiakowsky was killed, it might delay Fat Man, but it wouldn’t affect Little Boy. If Oak Ridge were to be damaged, that might delay the project as a whole.
Centrifuges weren’t used in the Manhattan project - a combination of gaseous diffusion and electromagnetic separation (mass spectrometry) was.
I (and so my time-traveler) has never heard of gaseous diffusion and electromagnetic separation. Everyone knows about centrifuges. Would this pit them on the wrong technical path and delay them?
What is my German time-traveller prevented certain people from getting to America?
Big fire at Oak Ridge, possible German sabotage.
Hoover’s FBI going on a witch-hunt in the program.
Probably.
I doubt the technology was available in the 40’s to make a practical centrifuge separation system. It might look attractive, but the Engineers should kill the idea as unworkable. If, some how, it got a go, then it would probably be a long and painful failure.
It should be noted that many isotope separation techniques were tried during the project. There were two that were finally used only because the Mass Spectrometry method was too slow (and breakdown-prone) to work by itself.
Forest fire, in East Tennessee.
Set by a disgruntled farmer, who lost his land, either to the construction of Oak Ridge (it didn’t exist before the War), by said farmer, losing his farm to the TVA dams flodding it, or else a German spy.
Based on my reading of Richard Rhodes’ book, “The Making of the Atomic Bomb”, it was so complex I’m amazed it worked on the first try. Anything could have gone wrong.
Ideas just off the top of my head:
As already suggested in this thread, the absence of any key people would do the trick (Groves, Oppenheimer, Teller, Fermi, Deke Parsons…).
How about Leo Szilard doesn’t have the idea in the first place until much later?
The B-29 doesn’t get developed quickly enough. Even if you have the bomb, you need an aircraft big enough to carry it all the way to Japan.
Szilard fails to convince Einstein to add his name to the letter urging the U.S. government to develop the bomb.
FDR fails to act on the advice he was given to develop the bomb before the Germans could.
The Truman Committee succeeds in finding out where all the secret money is going, and delays funding for the Manhattan Project. (As I recall, Truman began looking into it and was asked to back off by Henry Stimson).
The Trinity Test fails for a really mundane reason. For example, when they went to actually assemble the final components on the shot tower, some of the pieces didn’t fit because the temperature had caused a few parts to expand beyond tolerances. They put the pieces in contact until they came to the same temp and then fit, but suppose that didn’t work and they just couldn’t physically assemble it? Everyone takes the opportunity of delay to work on other problems, and the whole thing gets set back months and months.
There’s a famous photo of a sergeant holding a shock-mounted case with the plutonium core for the Trinity Test. He hand carried it from a car to the shot tower for installation. I always imagined what would have happened if he’d dropped it. No explosion of course, but if the dimensions were altered even slightly by the bump…
That’s probably enough. Good luck!
You could sicken many of the key scientists with radiation poisoning.
Maybe it’s too successful and they have a Chernobyl-type accident?
How about problems with getting the needed supplies of uranium? A big mining disaster or something.
What about a tornado or other type of storm?
I was thinking along the lines of another major attack on the United States, which diverted attention just enough to address the immediate survival of the continental US, but not enough to stop all work on the bomb–enough that we thought it was all over, but not completely . . . I mean, was it over when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor?
Tripler
'Cause when the going gets tough, the tough get going.
Richard Feynman visited Oak Ridge from Los Alamos during the Manhattan Project. The Oak Ridge folks were given very limited, and extremely compartmentalized, information on what they were making and how to safely handle and store it. Feynman straightened them out, and prevented the Oak Ridge plant from experiencing a “criticality accident”. Delay or cancel his trip east, and you have your delay in producing The Bomb. Plus a giant radioactive mess in eastern Tennessee, near at least one major river.
Cite: Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!
Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman is a great read whether you use this incident or not. Building the first nuclear weapons was an engineering triumph, and any of a number of mundane problems could have slowed down the project. (ETA: Like Mach Tuck said upthread.)
Heck, just have the FBI delay Oppenheimer’s involvement in the project for a few months.
A serious contagious illness like poliomyelitis, tuberculosis, or a serious influenza outbreak among the development team could have caused a major setback. This was, in fact, a very real concern; Dick Feynman’s first wife, Arline, had t.b. and the Lab management was very concerned about the possibility of infection via that vector, and make Feynman agree to a range of restrictions regarding contact i.e. no kissing, sharing of food products, regular screening, et cetera. It is unclear how closely Feynman actually followed these instructions; in Perfectly Reasonable Deviations from the Beaten Track: The Letters of Richard P. Feynman there is mention in his letters of a pregnancy scare with Arline.
There are also the Soviet spies inside the Project, although they were more interested in sneaking data out than sabotaging the Project.
As far as a single death, the loss of someone like Oppenheimer or Bethe might have been something of a blow but the momentum and collection of talent was such that the Program would have proceeded apace. I agree that the premature death of General Groves, while not involved in the technical side of things, would have had a larger overall impact on the progress of the program than the death of anyone on the development team.
Stranger
Oppenheimer was only seriously investigated after the war, in 1947. (Groves insisted that Oppie was critical to the success of the program.) The depth of the investigation was probably spurred by comments from Teller who frequently vied with Oppenheimer over a number of issues. At any rate, while Oppenheimer did great work in coordinating between other scientists, he didn’t do a lot of critical technical work on the program itself (despite being a first rate physicist and at one time considered to be short-listed for the Nobel Prize for Physics).
Stranger
didn’t most of the uranium used in the project come from Canada? how about something that leads to Canada getting out of the war and not participating in the Project? for instance, what if the outrage over the Dieppe raid, coupled with the conscription crisis, had lead Canada to withdraw in 1942? since Australia also has substantial uranium reserves, the cut-off of Canadian uranium could eventually be replaced by Australian ore, but it would cause a delay.
Thank you all. I shall sleep on it.