Manhattan Project

The Manhattan Project

In 1939, the Nazis were rumored to be developing an atomic bomb. The United States initiated its own program under the Army Corps of Engineers in June 1942. America needed to build an atomic weapon before Germany or Japan did.
General Leslie R. Groves, Deputy Chief of Construction of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, was appointed to direct this top-secret project. He established three large engineering and production centers at remote U.S. sites: the Clinton Engineer Works at Oak Ridge, Tenn.; the Hanford Engineer Works in eastern Washington State; and Project Y, a code-named site 100 miles north of Albuquerque at Los Alamos, N.M.
Meanwhile, experiments in a small laboratory beneath the University of Chicago's abandoned Stagg Field were expanding understanding of atomic theory. The first controlled nuclear reaction occurred under Stagg Field. Italian physicist Enrico Fermi managed the University of Chicago reactor, called Chicago Pile 1 (CP-1). Nobel Prize-w...