Manhattan Project
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Control panels and operators for calutrons at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. During the Manhattan Project the operators, mostly women, worked in shifts covering 24 hours a day.The Manhattan Project, or more formally, the Manhattan Engineering District, was an effort during World War II to develop the first nuclear weapons by the United States with assistance from the United Kingdom and Canada. Its research was directed by American physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, and overall by General Leslie R. Groves after it became clear that a weapon based on nuclear fission was possible and that Nazi Germany was also investigating such weapons of its own.
Though it involved over thirty different research and production sites, the Manhattan Project was largely carried out in three secret scientific cities that were established by power of eminent domain: Hanford, Washington, Los Alamos, New Mexico, and Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Some families in Tennessee were given two weeks notice to vacate the family farm lands they had had for generations. The Los Alamos lab was built on a mesa that previously hosted the Los Alamos Ranch School, a private residential boys school that featured the outdoors and horses (famous alumni included William Burroughs). The Hanford site, which grew to almost 1000 square miles (2,600 km²), incorporated land from some farms and two small towns, Hanford and White Bluff. The existence of these cities was officially kept secret until the end of the war.
The Project culminated in the design, production, and detonation of three nuclear weapons in 1945. The first was on July 16: "Trinity", the world's first nuclear test, near Alamogordo, New Mexico. The second was the weapon "Little Boy", detonated on August 6, over the city of Hiroshima, Japan. The third was the weapon "Fat Man", detonated on August 9, over the city of Nagasaki, Japan.
The three primary sites of the project exist today as Hanford Site, Los Alamos National Laboratory, and Oak Ridge National Laboratory. By 1945, the Project employed over 130,000 people at its peak and cost a total of nearly $2 billion USD ($21 billion in 1996 dollars [1] (
http://www.brookings.edu/FP/PROJECTS/NUCWCOST/MANHATTN.HTM)). The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki killed several hundred thousand people immediately, and many thousands more in later years.
