Indonesian Caliphate
23. Manhattan Project (United States Nuclear Weapons Project)

The Manhattan Project or more formally, the Manhattan Engineering District, was a World War II research and development project to develop the first nuclear weapons. The project was led by the United States with assistance from the United Kingdom and Canada. His research was organized by American physicist Julius Robert Oppenheimer, and overall by General Leslie R. Groves once became clear that weapons based on nuclear fission could be developed and that Nazi Germany was also developing similar weapons.

Although the project involved more than 30 different research and production sites, the Manhattan Project was largely implemented in three secret scientific venues established by eminent domain powers: Hanford, Washington, and others, Los Alamos, New Mexico, and Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Los Alamos National Laboratory was built on a “mesa” that was formerly the site of Los Alamos Ranch School, a private male-only school specializing in outdoor and equine housing. The Hanford site, which grew by almost 1,000 square miles (2,600 km²), took over irrigated rice fields, orchards, railroads and two farming communities, Hanford and White Bluffs. The Oak Ridge facility covers an area of more than 60,000 acres (243 km²) from several agricultural communities. Some Tennessee families were given two weeks to vacate the family farmland they had lived on for generations.

The locations of Los Alamos, Oak Ridge, and Hanford were kept secret until the end of WWII.

The Manhattan Project produced the design, production, and detonation of three nuclear bombs in 1945. The first, using plutonium made in Hanford, was tested on July 16 at the Trinity Site, the world's first nuclear test, near Alamogordo, New Mexico. The second, a uranium bomb called Little Boy was detonated on August 6 in the Japanese city of Hiroshima. The third, a plutonium bomb called Fat Man, was detonated on August 9 over the Japanese city of Nagasaki.

Its main location still exists today as the Hanford Site, Los Alamos National Laboratory, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, National Security Complex and several other factories.

By 1945, the Project employed more than 130,000 people at its peak and spent nearly AS$2 billion. (20 billion in 2004 dollars based on ICP.

Between World War I and World War II, the United States rose to prominence in nuclear physics, fueled by the work of some immigrants and local physicists. These scientists have developed the basic tools for nuclear research – cyclotron and other particle accelerators— and have used the new tools to discover new substances, including radioisotopes like Carbon-14.

The initial idea of nuclear energy

Enrico Fermi recalls the beginning of the project in a speech he made in 1954 when he retired as President of the American Physical Society.

I remember the first month, January 1939, when I started working at the Pupin Laboratory because things happened very quickly. In that period, Niels Bohr was still teaching at Princeton University and I remember one afternoon willis Lamb came back very excited and said that Bohr had leaked great news. The big news was about the discovery of nuclear fission and the outline of its interpretation. Later that month, there were several meetings in Washington where the importance of the new discovery was discussed in “semi-jocular” talks as a possible source of nuclear power.

Nuclear scientists Leon Szilard, Edward Teller and Eugene Wigner (all Jewish refugees from Hungary because of Hitler) believed that the energy released in nuclear fission could be used in bombs by the Germans. They persuaded Albert Einstein, one of the world's most famous scientists and also a Jewish refugee, to commemorate President Franklin D. Roosevelt would harm this in a letter on August 2, 1939 drafted by Szilard . In return for the warning Roosevelt encouraged further research into the national security implications of nuclear fission. After the bombing of Hiroshima, Einstein later commented “I was able to burn my hand for writing a letter to Roosevelt.” The Navy awarded the first atomic energy funding of $6,000 for the fraphite experiment, which grew into the Manhattan Project under the scientific leadership of J. Robert Oppenheimer and Enrico Fermi.

Roosevelt created the ad hoc Uranium Committee under “chairmanship” chairman of the National Bureau of Standards Lyman Briggs. He began a small research program in 1939 at the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, where physicist Philip Abelson examined the separation of uranium isotopes. At Columbia University, Italian-born nuclear physicist Enrico Fermi built a prototype nuclear reactor using various configurations of graphite and uranium. On October 9, 1941 Roosevelt authorized the development of nuclear weapons.

Vannevar Bush, director of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, set up the National Defense Research Committee in 1940 to mobilize U. S. scientific resources to support the war.

New laboratories were created, including the Radiation Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which helped develop the radar, and the Underwater Sound Laboratory in San Diego, which developed sonar.

The National Defense Research Council (NDRC) also took over the uranium project. In 1940, Bush and Roosevelt created the Office of Scientific Research and Development to develop the effort.

The Uranium project made no progress in the spring of 1941, when news came of the British tally by Otto Frisch and Fritz Peierls. The report, prepared by the MAUD Committee, is a subcommittee for “Scientific Survey of Air Warfare “ under G.P. Thomson, professor of physics at Imperial College, London, showed that the amount of fissile isotope of uranium, U-235, can produce very few explosions equal to several hundred thousand tons of TNT.

The National Academy of Sciences proposed a full-fledged effort to build nuclear weapons, Bush created a special committee, the S-1 Committee, to guide the effort. This happened the day before the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, on December 7, 1941, and meant the start of the war for the United States.

Scientists at the physics departments of the University of Chicago Metallurgical Laboratory, the University of California Radiation Laboratory and Columbia University, accelerated their work to prepare nuclear materials for a weapon. They had to learn to separate Uranium 235 from raw uranium ore (mostly from Uranium 238), and they also had to be able to create plutonium, an extremely rare element, with natural Uranium bombardment (U-238) in a reactor with neutrons produced by Uranium 235. Starting in 1942, a large plant was made to produce Uranium 235 at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee and to produce plutonium at Hanford Site outside Richland, Washington.

Physicist and Nobel laureate Arthur Holly Compton set up the Metallurgical Laboratory at the University of Chicago in early 1942 to study plutonium and fission piles. Compton asked Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer of the University of California to take charge of research in rapid neutron counting, crucial to the possibility of a nuclear weapon. John Manley, a physicist at the University of Chicago's Metallurgical Laboratory, is assigned to help Dr. Oppenheimer sought answers by coordinating and contacting several groups of experimental physicists scattered around the country.

In the spring of 1942, Oppenheimer and Robert Serber of the University of Illinois, worked on the problems of neutron diffusion (how neutrons move in chain reactions) and hydrodynamics (how the explosions produced by chain reactions behave).

To review the results of this work and the general theory of the fission reaction, Oppenheimer held a summer study at the University of California, Berkeley in June 1942. Theoretical Hans Bethe, John Van Vleck, Edward Teller, Felix Bloch, Emil Konopinski, Robert Serber, Stanley S. Frankel, and Eldred C. Nelson (the last three were former Oppenheimer students) concluded that a fission bomb could have occurred. These scientists suggest that the reaction can be initiated by making a critical mass – the number of nuclear explosions sufficient to hold it – either by firing two subcritical masses of plutonium or uranium 235 together or by crushing (“imploding”) an empty ball made of such material with a large explosive blanket. (Serber credits the initial idea of the implosion to Tolman). Until the amount can be known further, this is all that can be done.

Teller saw another possibility: By surrounding the fission bomb with deuterium and tritium, a much more powerful “bom super” could be created. The concept is based on research into the production of energy in the stars created by Bethe before the war. When detonation waves from fission bombs are moved through a mixture of deuterium and tritium nuclei, they fuse together to produce more energy than fission can produce, in the process of nuclear fusion, such elements diffuse in the sun to create light and heat.

Bethe felt skeptical, and Teller pushed strongly for her “super” bomb, and proposed scheme after scheme, Bethe rejected it all. The idea had to be put aside when the fission bomb, and the war, were over. “The super” bomb or thermonuclear device, was produced after the war and tested in 1952, after the political war between Teller and Oppenheimer, which ended in the defeat of Oppenheimer who lost his official status, and using a different method from Teller's idea, Bethe was right when he rejected it.)

Teller also raised the possibility that an atomic bomb could “ignite the atmospheric”, due to a hypothetical fusion reaction of nitrogen nuclei. Bethe points out, according to Serber, that theoretically cannot happen; in her book The Road from Los Alamos. Bethe said that a rejection was written by Kononpinski, C. Marvin, and Teller in the LA-602 report (opened in secrecy in February 1973), suggests it is unlikely. According to Serber, Oppenheimer told Arthur Compton, who could not remain silent. Then this goes to the document that continues to Washington” which leads to the question “ never given rest”. According to Bethe, this chaos came again in 1975 when it appeared in a magazine article by H. C. Dudley, who got this idea from a report by Pearl Buck from an interview he had with Arthur Compton in 1959, in which he did not understand Compton entirely! This anxiety never goes away in the minds of some people until the Trinity test; even if Bethe were wrong, we would never know.

The summer conference, the results of which were later summarized by Serber at “The Los Alamos Primer” (LA-1 online), provided the original theoretical basis based on the design of the atomic bomb, which was designed by the, that later became the main task at Los Alamos during the war, and the idea of the H-bomb, which haunted the Laboratory in the postwar period.

The measurement of the interaction of fast neutrons with materials in a bomb is important because the number of neutrons produced in uranium and plutonium fission must be known, and because the substance that surrounds nuclear material today has the ability to reflect, or scatter, neutrons back into a chain reaction before they explode in order to increase the energy produced. Therefore, the neutron dispersal properties of the material must be measured to find the best reflector.

Estimating explosive power requires knowledge of many other nuclear features, it includes junctions (a measure of the likelihood of a meeting between particles that produce in a specified effect) for nuclear neutron processes in uranium and other elements. Fast neutrons can only be produced by particle accelerators, which were still an uncommon tool in the physics department in 1942.

Better coordination is needed. In September 1942, the difficulty involved with conducting preliminary research on nuclear weapons at universities spread across the country signifying the need for a laboratory created for the purpose alone. This need was overshadowed by the factory demand to reproduce uranium-235 and plutonium – fissile materials that provide nuclear explosives.

Vannevar Bush, the civilian head of the Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD), asked President Roosevelt to assign a large-scale operation that was contacted with a growing nuclear weapons project for the military. Roosevelt chose the Army to work with the OSRD in building production plants. Army Corps of Engineers choose Kol. James Marshall oversaw the construction of a plant to separate uranium isotopes and the production of plutonium for the bomb.

OSRD scientists have tried several methods to produce plutonium and separate uranium-235 from uranium, but none of those processes are ready for production – only the microscopic amount has been provided.

Just one way – electromagnetic separation, which has been developed by Ernest Lawrence at the University of California Radiation Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley – looks convincing at the time for large-scale production. But scientists cannot stop studying other potential methods for producing fissile materials, because the process was very expensive and because it could not happen the process could produce enough material before the war ended.

Marshall and his deputy, Kol. Kenneth Nichols, must struggle to understand both the process and also the scientists working with them. Suddenly breaking into the new field of nuclear physics, they felt unable to distinguish between technical and personal desires. Although they decided that a location near Knoxville, Tenn., would be suitable for the first production plant, they had no idea how large the location was and cancelled the take. There's another problem too.

Due to the experimental nature, nuclear weapons work cannot compete with other more important Army tasks. The selection of scientists' work and the construction of factory-production was often delayed due to Marshall's inability to obtain the very important materials, such as steel, that were also needed in other military productions.

Even choosing a name for the AD project is difficult. Name chosen by Jend. Brehon Somerwell, “Development of Replacement Materials”, very inappropriate because it looks reveal too much.