Manhattan Project

The Manhattan Project was a pivotal research and development initiative during World War II, aimed at creating the atomic bomb.[3] The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) traces its origins to World War II and the Manhattan Project effort to build the first atomic bomb.[2] The Manhattan Project produced the first atomic bomb.[1]

Origins and Early Development

The story of the Manhattan Project began in 1938, when German scientists Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann inadvertently discovered nuclear fission.[5] A few months later, Albert Einstein and Leo Szilard sent a letter to President Roosevelt warning him that Germany might try to build an atomic bomb.[5][1] Franklin D. Roosevelt[1] received this warning in the summer of 1939.

In response, FDR formed the Uranium Committee, a group of top military and scientific experts to determine the feasibility of a nuclear chain reaction.[5] Nevertheless, initial research moved slowly until the spring of 1941, when the MAUD Committee (essentially the British equivalent to the Uranium Committee) issued a report affirming that an atomic bomb was possible and urging cooperation with the United States.[5]

The Manhattan Project was started in response to fears that German scientists had been working on a weapon using nuclear technology since the 1930s—and that Adolf Hitler was prepared to use it.[6] The Advisory Committee on Uranium's name was changed in 1940 to the National Defense Research Committee, before finally being renamed the Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD) in 1941 and adding Fermi to its list of members.[6]

Official Establishment

The Manhattan Project was officially created on August 13, 1942.[5] On August 13, 1942, the Army Corps created the Manhattan Engineer District, named for the location of its offices in New York City.[10] The name itself, "Manhattan Project," is commonly thought to be a misnomer, but its first offices were actually in Manhattan, at 270 Broadway. General Leslie R. Groves, who was appointed to head the project, decided to follow the custom of naming Corps of Engineers districts for the city in which they are located. The atomic bomb project thus became known as the Manhattan Engineer District (MED), or Manhattan Project for short.[5]

After receiving formal approval from President Roosevelt on December 28, 1942, the Manhattan Project developed into a massive undertaking that spread across the United States.[10] Its first major funding came in December, when President Roosevelt ordered an initial allotment of $500 million.[5]

Leadership and Organization

He was Leslie Groves, a brigadier general in the U.S. Army.[1] The head of the Manhattan Project's entire operation was Brigadier General Leslie R. Groves, a West-Point trained engineer who had previously been instrumental in the construction of the Pentagon building. Groves had accepted the assignment reluctantly, liking neither the risk of failure nor the fact that it was a home-front assignment. But once he accepted the job, he was determined to see it through to success.[8]

Initiated in 1942 under the direction of physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, the project was prompted by concerns over Nazi Germany potentially developing nuclear weapons.[3] Oppenheimer was an American theoretical physicist that is widely renowned as the father of the atomic bomb. Oppenheimer was born in 1904, and his profound intelligence could be observed in his early academic achievements, like being invited to lecture at the New York Mineralogical Club at the age of 12 and graduating from Harvard with a degree in chemistry in just three years. Following his graduation, Oppenheimer pursued graduate study in physics under Max Born, a highly distinguished theoretical physics professor from Germany. After receiving his doctorate in 1927, Oppenheimer returned to the United States where he worked as a physicist until eventually being sought out to lead the Manhattan Project.[11]

Key Scientists and Contributors

A diverse group of scientists, including notable figures like Albert Einstein and Enrico Fermi, contributed to the effort, which involved groundbreaking research in nuclear physics and engineering.[3] Among the scientists who worked on the Manhattan Project were Italian physicist Enrico Fermi, American theoretical physicist Richard Feynman, Hungarian-American mathematician John von Neumann, Hungarian-American theoretical physicist Edward Teller, and Polish-American mathematician Stanislaw Ulam (Einstein also worked as a consultant throughout the project).[3]

Leo Szilard was a Hungarian physicist that worked closely with Einstein to draft the aforementioned Einstein Letter to President Roosevelt that prompted the president to establish the Manhattan Project.[11] After a thorough investigation of uranium fission, Szilard partnered with Enrico Fermi and his team of engineers to develop the first self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction.[11]

It was developed at the metallurgical laboratory of the University of Chicago under the direction of Arthur Holly Compton and involved the transmutation in a reactor pile of uranium-238. In December 1942 Fermi finally succeeded in producing and controlling a fission chain reaction in this reactor pile at Chicago.[1] On the morning of 2 December 1942, a few dozen scientists and a handful of guests gathered under the bleachers of the disused football stadium "Stagg Field" in Chicago. There, where students had once played squash, the "Chicago Pile 1", or CP-1 for short, had been created under Fermi's direction. In this pile, a self-sustaining fission chain reaction was to be set in motion and controlled.[12]

Major Sites and Facilities

Most of this development took place in three secret communities located in Hanford, WA, Los Alamos, NM and Oak Ridge, TN.[19] As the direct descendent of the Manhattan Engineer District, the organization set up by the Army Corps of Engineers to develop and build the bomb, the Department continues to own and manage the Federal properties at most of the major Manhattan Project sites, including Oak Ridge, Tennessee; Hanford, Washington; and Los Alamos, New Mexico.[2]

Los Alamos

The Manhattan Project's weapons research laboratory was located at Los Alamos, New Mexico.[5] Los Alamos Laboratory—the creation of which was known as Project Y—was formally established on January 1, 1943. The complex is where the first Manhattan Project bombs were built and tested.[6] It includes the laboratories and living quarters of the Manhattan Project scientists in Los Alamos, New Mexico[21]

Oak Ridge

Oak Ridge was the home of the uranium enrichment plants (K-25 and Y-12), the liquid thermal diffusion plant (S-50), and the pilot plutonium production reactor (X-10 Graphite Reactor).[24] Roughly 75,000 people worked at the uranium enrichment facilities in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, at the height of World War II — most of them young women who traveled to this "secret city" far from their homes for the promise of steady, good-paying jobs that would help the war effort.[21]

Hanford

the site of the world's first industrial-scale plutonium reactor, known as the "B Reactor" in Hanford, Washington[21] Hanford, Washington, on the beautiful Columbia River, was the site selected for the full-scale plutonium production plant, the B Reactor.[24] By the summer of 1945, amounts of plutonium-239 sufficient to produce a nuclear explosion had become available from the Hanford Works, and weapon development and design were sufficiently advanced so that an actual field test of a nuclear explosive could be scheduled.[1]

Scale and Cost

After receiving formal approval from President Roosevelt on December 28, 1942, the Manhattan Project developed into a massive undertaking that spread across the United States. With over 30 project sites and over 100,000 workers, the Manhattan Project came to cost approximately $2.2 billion.[10] By this time the original $6,000 authorized for the Manhattan Project had grown to $2 billion.[1]

The work of these two sites — Oak Ridge and Hanford — constituted the vast bulk of the labor and expense of the Manhattan Project (roughly 80% of both). Without fuel, there could be no atomic bomb: it was and remains a key chokepoint in the development of nuclear weapons. As a result, it is important to conceptualize the Manhattan Project as much more than just basic science alone: without an all-out military-industrial effort, the United States would not have had an atomic bomb by the end of World War II.[8]

Trinity Test

On July 16, 1945, the project culminated in the successful detonation of the first nuclear bomb at the Trinity test in New Mexico.[3] The first atomic bomb was exploded at 5:30 am on July 16, 1945, at the Alamogordo air base 120 miles (193 km) south of Albuquerque, New Mexico. Oppenheimer had called the site "Trinity" in reference to one of John Donne's Holy Sonnets.[1]

Emitting as much energy as 21,000 tons of TNT and creating a fireball that measured roughly 2,000 feet in diameter, the first successful test of an atomic bomb, known as the Trinity Test, forever changed the history of the world.[10] On July 16, 1945, in a remote desert location near Alamogordo, New Mexico, the first atomic bomb was successfully detonated—the Trinity Test—creating an enormous mushroom cloud some 40,000 feet high and ushering in the Atomic Age.[6]

Bomb Designs and Deployment

The Manhattan Project ultimately produced two types of atomic bombs: the uranium-based "Little Boy," used on Hiroshima, and the plutonium-based "Fat Man," dropped on Nagasaki.[3] Scientists working under Oppenheimer had developed two distinct types of bombs: a uranium-based design called "the Little Boy" and a plutonium-based weapon called "the Fat Man."[6]

The Little Boy design utilized the "gun method," which was detonated by firing a mass of uranium-235 down a cylinder into another mass of uranium-235 to produce a chain reaction. Fat Man was an implosion-type device that used plutonium-239. In this design, plutonium was placed in the center of a hollowed-out sphere of high explosives, and a number of detonators located on the high explosive's surface were simultaneously fired pressurizing the core and increasing its density—creating an implosion that resulted in a chain reaction.[3]

Following Trinity, the U.S. government attempted to end World War II by detonating its uranium bomb nicknamed "Little Boy" over Hiroshima, Japan, on August 6, 1945. The blast destroyed approximately one-third of the city and caused about 140,000 causalities.[3] Japan's reluctance to surrender prompted the United States to drop its plutonium bomb nicknamed "Fat Man" over Nagasaki, Japan, three days later. This blast killed about 70,000 people, destroyed about one-third of the city, and subsequently ended the war.[3]

Legacy and Impact

The Manhattan Project left behind a complex legacy. In the immediate aftermath of World War II, it sparked a nuclear arms race during the Cold War.[5] However, the creation of these new destructive weapons would intensify a new type of conflict – the Cold War between the two remaining global superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union. When the Soviet Union tested their own atomic weapon in 1949, an arms race between the United States and the U.S.S.R. began.[4]

The Manhattan Project also influenced other nuclear programs, not only in the Soviet Union, but in the United Kingdom and in France, among other countries. Nevertheless, it also contributed to the development of peaceful nuclear innovations, including nuclear power.[5]

The revolutionary science of the Manhattan Project—namely the process of creating atomic explosions—was seemingly insurmountable, and paved the way for significant advancements in physics, chemistry, and mathematics. However, the historical impact of the atomic bombs dropped on Japan, as well as the philosophical and ethical ramifications, is an issue still debated today.[3]