The Manhattan Project began modestly in 1939. It grew to employ more than 130,000 people and cost nearly US$2 billion. The first nuclear device ever detonated was an implosion-type bomb at the Trinity test, conducted at New Mexico’s Alamogordo Bombing and Gunnery Range on 16 July 1945.
About Manhattan Project in brief
The Manhattan Project began modestly in 1939. It grew to employ more than 130,000 people and cost nearly US$2 billion. Over 90 percent of the cost was for building factories and to produce fissile material, with less than 10 percent for development and production of the weapons. The project was also charged with gathering intelligence on the German nuclear weapon project. Despite the Manhattan Project’s tight security, Soviet atomic spies successfully penetrated the program. The first nuclear device ever detonated was an implosion-type bomb at the Trinity test, conducted at New Mexico’s Alamogordo Bombing and Gunnery Range on 16 July 1945. Little Boy and Fat Man bombs were used a month later in the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, respectively, with Manhattan Project personnel serving as bomb assembly technicians, and as weaponeers on the attack aircraft. The Manhattan Project conducted weapons testing at Bikini Atoll as part of Operation Crossroads, developed new weapons, promoted the development of the network of national laboratories, supported medical research into radiology and laid the foundations for the nuclear navy. It maintained control over American atomic weapons research and production until the formation of the United States Atomic Energy Commission in January 1947. It urged the U.S. to take steps to acquire stockpiles of uranium and accelerate research of Enrico Fermi and others into the nuclear chain reactions. In August 1939, Hungarian-born physicists Leo Szilard and Eugene Wigner drafted the Einstein–Szilard letter, which warned of the potential development of a new type of powerful type of atomic bomb.
The letter was signed by Albert Einstein and delivered to President Franklin D. Roosevelt in November 1939. In October 1939, a meeting of the Committee on Uranium held a meeting on 21 October, which was attended by Szilárd and Edward Teller, who reported back to Roosevelt that uranium would provide a possible source of bombs with a vastly greater destructiveness than anything now known. In November 1939, the committee reported back that uranium-235 was now a vastly better source of uranium than uranium-238. The meeting was held in New York City, and the letter was delivered to FDR in November 1940. It was the first meeting of a committee that would later become the National Advisory Committee on the Uranium Sources and Reactions (NASR). In October 1941, the NASR was formed, and in November 1942, the first nuclear bomb was detonated at Trinity, New Mexico. In December 1943, the project was expanded to cover more than 30 sites across the United. States, the United Kingdom, and Canada. In April 1944, the Project was directed by Major General Leslie Groves, who was also the director of the Los Alamos Laboratory that designed the actual bombs. In May 1945, the Manhattan District was designated as the Army component of the project; Manhattan gradually superseded the official codename, Development of Substitute Materials, for the entire project. Along the way, theProject absorbed its earlier British counterpart, Tube Alloys.
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This page is based on the article Manhattan Project published in Wikipedia (as of Dec. 03, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
