Manhattan Project

Forming the Manhattan Project The Manhattan Project was officially created on August 13, 1942. The name itself, “Manhattan Project,” is commonly thought to be a misnomer, but its first offices were actually in Manhattan, at 270 Broadway. General Leslie R. Groves, who was appointed to head the project, decided to follow the custom of naming Corps of Engineers districts for the city in which they are located. The atomic bomb project thus became known as the Manhattan Engineer District (MED), or Manhattan Project for short. Its first major funding came in December, when President Roosevelt ordered an initial allotment of $500 million. The headquarters of the project would soon be moved to Washington, D.C., while numerous project sites were scattered across the country. Project Sites Los Alamos, NM The Manhattan Project’s weapons research laboratory was located at Los Alamos, New Mexico. Under the direction of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the Los Alamos laboratory would conduct the bulk of the remaining research and construction of the bomb. Physicists, chemists, metallurgists, explosive experts, and military personnel converged in the secret town, which grew to be the home of thousands of project workers. Meanwhile, the Army was charged with supplying, supporting, and guarding the top-secret work being done at Los Alamos. Another important Manhattan Project site was located at Oak Ridge, Tennessee. By this time, the Manhattan Project was pursuing both a uranium and a plutonium based atomic bomb. Oak Ridge was thus the home of the uranium enrichment plants, K-25, Y-12, and S-50, and the pilot plutonium production reactor, the X-10 Graphite Reactor. Equally important was the site at Hanford, Washington, where the full-scale plutonium production plant, the B Reactor, was constructed, and was eventually joined by other reactors. Dozens of other sites were also involved with the Manhattan Project. In Cambridge, Massachusetts, scientists conducted further research at Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In Dayton, Ohio, the Manhattan Project tasked the Monsanto Chemical Company with separating and purifying the radioactive element polonium (Po-210), which was to be used as the initiator for the atomic bombs. Even in Canada, the Manhattan Project coordinated its efforts with the Montreal Laboratory and the Chalk River Nuclear Laboratories in Ontario, the site for one of the world’s first heavy water nuclear reactors. Meanwhile, the 509th Composite Group of the Army Air Forces, which would drop the atomic bombs on Japan, trained at Wendover Airfield in Utah and in Cuba before shipping out to the launching point for the atomic bomb attacks at Tinian Island in the Pacific. It is estimated that more than 600,000 people worked on the project. For a list of more Manhattan Project sites, please click here.