What was the Manhattan Project?
The Manhattan Project was the crash government project, which occurred from 1942 – 1946, whose purpose was to develop a nuclear bomb. It succeeded on 16 July 1945 at the Trinity Test in New Mexico and went on to produce the two atomic bombs which leveled the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki during WWII. Controlled by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, under the leadership of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the Manhattan Project is considered one of the most successful crash science/engineering projects of all time. Its success had huge implications for the Pacific Theater of WWII and the specter of nuclear war that has been with us ever since. The project grew to employ 130,000 people working at secret locations, and cost $20 billion US Dollars (conversion to 2004 currency). The Manhattan Project was kick-started by a letter written by Albert Einstein and Leó Szilárd to President Roosevelt, who argued that the Nazis could develop nuclear bombs which they could use to win the war. Leó Sz
John Rhoades: The Manhattan Project was an incredibly expensive, extraordinarily widespread project — it spanned the country from Handford, Washington, back to Oak Ridge, Tennessee. It was an effort to find the answer to could nuclear energy be used as an explosive device? Could it be done in enough time to beat the German’s to the punch, because we were quite certain that they were well along in the program by the time we’d learned about it. Interviewer: What exactly could this device do? John Rhoades: We knew that the principal of fission had sufficient stored energy within it, that it could create at least as much energy as the largest explosive then known to man, and probably larger. We had to do a lot of calculations before we knew how much to use and what its yield could be, but it was very clear that when those atoms finally came together and split it could create the most incredible amount of energy ever. Interviewer: Now describe in your own words how some of these brilliant
The Manhattan Project, formally called the Manhattan Engineer District, was the code name for the U.S. government project to develop an atomic bomb during World War II (1939-45). The name “Manhattan Project” was selected because much of the early research into the bomb was conducted at Columbia University in Manhattan, New York City. The project was initiated by Italian-born American physicist (a scientist specializing in the interaction between energy and matter) Enrico Fermi (1901-1954). Fermi organized a group of scientists, several of whom had come to the United States to escape fascism (a fiercely nationalistic, often racist, dictatorship) in their native Europe, that wished to aid the United States in the war effort. Among this group of scientist-refugees were Albert Einstein (1897-1955) and Hans Bethe (1906-). The process for creating an uncontrolled nuclear fission reaction had…
