The Manhattan Project: (1942-46)
The major project sites in the US
Major General Leslie R. Groves Jr of the US Army Corps of Engineers was in command of the Manhattan project. This was a top secret project from 1942 to 1946 led by the united states with the assistance of the United kingdom and Canada to create the first atomic bomb. The Manhattan project began when President Roosevelt received the Einstein – Szlilard letter, in 1938, informing the United States that Nazi Germany might develop nuclear weapons. At first it just started out as a research project and it expanded to employ more that 130,000 people at a cost of nearly $2 billion. Research took place in more that 30 sites including universities across the United states and Canada. The the University of Chicago Erico Fermi, a physicist successfully controlled a nuclear reaction in 1942. The most complicated issue to be addressed in the making of the atomic bomb was the production of ample amounts of enriched uranium to sustain a chain reaction. A massive enrichment plant was constructed at Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Harold Urey and his colleagues at Columbia University were expected to devise an extraction system that was successful. The First Atomic bomb was successfully tested on July 6, 1945 at a site in Los Alamos, New Mexico. A month after the first bomb was tested, two nuclear weapons were exploded over Japan at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
http://library.thinkquest.org/17940/texts/timeline/manhattan.html
http://inventors.about.com/od/astartinventions/a/atomic_bomb.htm
http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Manhattan_Project
http://inventors.about.com/od/astartinventions/a/atomic_bomb.htm
http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Manhattan_Project