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The theory of building a bomb that involved the splitting of atoms had been around for some time. When two German scientists in 1938 split an atom and noted how much energy was released,
the theory gained significance.
The United States formed several committees, and top scientists Albert Einstein and Leo Slizard warned President Roosevelt about the practicality of making such a bomb. The
"Einstein Letter" was sent, Oct. 11, 1939, and warned that such a bomb could be developed in Germany. Still, the U.S. dragged its feet for the next couple of years.
In the meantime, Germany was pressing ahead
with atomic research. A heavy water plant was built, a cyclotron was nearly completed, and the Germans were massing some great scientists and engineers behind the project.
Atomic research was being conducted at
universities throughout the U.S., but it wasn't until 1942 that the Manhattan Engineering District was created by the U.S. Army Corp of Engineers. It later became know as the Manhattan Project.
Still the program
languished because of poor coordination and leadership. On Sept. 17, 1942, General Leslie Groves, the engineer in charge of building the Pentagon, was put in charge of the project. Groves was brash and pushy, but
took immediate steps to get the project moving.
The day after he took the job, he ordered the purchase of over 1,000 tons of uranium ore from the Belgian Congo that had been stored in New York harbor. The next
day, he ordered the purchase of 52,000 acres in Tennessee to build a plant to process the ore into fissionable material.
On Oct. 15, 1942, Groves named Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer as the head of the complex at Los
Alamos, New Mexico, where the bomb would actually be created.
Enrico Fermi, an Italian who had fled his fascist homeland because his wife was Jewish, headed a team of scientists at the University of Chicago. On
Dec. 2, 1942, under the west stands of the abandoned Stagg Football Field, the first controlled chain reaction was created.
Making a bomb, though, was still a theory. It was not know if uranium or plutonium
would be best for the core of the bomb, and so Groves built the Oak Ridge plant in Tennessee (originally called the Clinton Engineering Works) to process uranium and the Hanford Engineering Works in Washington state
to process plutonium.
The scale of the plants boggles the mind. Within months, Oak Ridge had become the fifth largest city in Tennessee with 75,000 people. The complex contained a 350-bed hospital, 55 miles of
railroad, 13 supermarkets, nine drug stores and a complete school system.
Success did not come immediately, though. Several different processes were developed for creating the U-235 out of uranium ore, but none
of them were working very well.
Nearly everyone in the plants at Oak Ridge and Hanford were in the dark about the ultimate goal of the project. A news release that came out of Oak Ridge after the war described
what it was like as tons of ore came into the plant, and seemingly nothing came out:
"This created an atmosphere of unreality in which giant plants operated feverishly, day and night, to produce nothing that
could be seen or touched."
In the meantime, the Germans were also having problems with their atomic research. In June, 1942, a nuclear reactor that had been built near Liepzig exploded. The program
also suffered from lack of central leadership, some scientific mistakes, and Hitler's greater interest using Germany's resources toward the rocket program.
The German program took its biggest hit, literally, in
late 1944 when its heavy water operation was severely damaged by Allied bombing.
At the same time, the U.S. effort was gaining speed. By December of 1944, Oak Ridge was producing 90 grams a day of U-235. It was
estimated that a bomb would need about 40 kilograms of the material.
Harry S. Truman was not informed of the Manhattan Project until President Roosevelt died, and he was not fully briefed until nearly May of
1945. On July 16th, the first atomic bomb, called "Gadget," was set off at Alamagordo testing range in New Mexico.
Two atomic bombs had been created, one using uranium and the other plutonium, and both were
ready to go once enough core material was available. The bombs were dropped at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan, in August 1945 and precipitated the end of the war.
In the end, the Manhattan Project had cost about
$2 billion and is considered the greatest coordinated scientific project ever undertaken in the United States.
(Information for this historical piece came from various sources including research done by Dr. Jim
Gerber of the World War II Roundtable in Minnesota, and from the private historical collection of Catherine Filippi Piccolo.)
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