Chem

The Manhattan Project (1942-1947) is the common name for the United States'efforts to create an atomic bomb. The name comes from the Manhattan Division of the Corp of Engineers, the group created todevelop three secret locations for atomic weapons research. In Oak Ridge, Tennessee, uranium-235 was separated from natural uranium. A Hanford, Washington, plant separated plutonium from uranium. Thebomb was designed and assembled in Los Alamos, New Mexico, under the direction of J. Robert Oppenheimer. In 1945, the bombs were dropped over Japan, bringing about the surrender of the JapaneseEmpire.

Project Beginnings
In 1939, Albert Einstein and Leo Szilard, a Hungarian Physicist, wrote a letter to United States President Franklin D. Roosevelt, warning Roosevelt of the possibility ofatomic and nuclear weapons. This threat, along with increasingly-expansionist Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan, led Roosevelt to create the Advisory Committee on Uranium.

Meanwhile, in the UnitedKingdom, expatriate German physicists devised a theoretical process for creating fission weapons. Within six months of the formation of its own committee, the British government had begun development of anatomic weapon.

Throughout 1940 and 1941, American physicists were also working on the development of atomic weapons. In December 1941, the United States entered World War II following the Japanesebombing of Pearl Harbor. By mid-1942, the U.S. Army Corp of Engineers District was ordered to consolidate the U.S. efforts toward development of an atomic bomb. A new district organization, with thedeliberately misleading name Manhattan Engineer District, was created to oversee the work.

Development of the Three Manhattan Project Sites
In September 1942, under the leadership of General BrehonSomervell, a large amount of high-quality uranium was purchased from a storage facility on Staten Island. Groves also purchased the land in Oak Ridge that would be the site of the research into the...