2023 Blockbuster film 'Oppenheimer' led Catie Edmondson on a quest to find how Congress paid for the hydrogen bomb

 Jan. 23, 2024

Like many others in the summer of 2023, Catie Edmondson, Congressional correspondent for The New York Times, saw the historical drama documentary Oppenheimer, centered around physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer and the creation of the hydrogen bomb. Edmondson said on The New York Times' podcast The Daily that this film led to her following the financial rabbit hole of how Congress paid for the whole project, including the construction of the Los Alamos testing facilities.

Edmondson wondered whether Congress knew about the project to approve the money as it was a top secret project, but the money that would have been needed to support it was no small sum. Her initial search found few results, some lackluster Wikipedia lines and a textbook with a very brief and vague description.

Edmondson's starting point was to contact the library that kept former Speaker of the House Sam Rayburn's papers in Austin, Texas as he would have been in the room when the financial discussions were happening and when the decision was made, only to find that none of the documents had been digitized.

After the Sam Rayburn search yielded nothing, she landed on checking a memoir written by Elmer Thomas, a legislator from Oklahoma. Much to her surprise, Edmondson said that upon finding the memoir in the Library of Congress: "it was all there."

Edmondson found that rather than approving a budget for the Manhattan project, Franklin Delano Roosevelt's officials were skimming money from other budget items and putting that money toward the project. As fears of Germany beating the U.S. to the creation of a bomb arose, Roosevelt sent a memo to Vannevar Bush, who was overseeing the administration of the Manhattan project that simply read "Do you have the money?"

Congress was finally alerted to the existence of the Manhattan project as they needed to approve one last sum of money to finalize the bomb. The project was kept a secret by telling few members of Congress and ensuring that they realize the severity of the project. Roosevelt sends Henry L. Stimson to host a secret meeting among lawmakers to get them to approve a bill that would send the final $800 million to the Manhattan Project. The bill was passed as an innocuous sounding line item titled "expediting production."

I found it very interesting to follow Catie Edmondson down the rabbit hole of the financing of the Manhattan Project and how Congress was able to keep it a secret. It was also interesting to hear her methods of working through the challenges of lacking information on a question that she asked herself from watching a movie.