THE MANHATTAN PROJECT
For my formal research essay I decided to do the Manhattan project. In my essay I will cover the WHAT, WHO, WHERE, and WHEN. What was the Manhattan project? The Manhattan project was a research and development program from 1942 - 1946 to produce the world’s first atomic bomb. The project grew to employed about 130,000 people and cost $2 billion dollars (roughly $25.8 billion today). This money was used for building factories, producing fissionable materials, and weapon development. The development of the atomic bomb took place in over 30 sites across the U.S, Canada, and the U.K and 2 types of atomic bomb were eventually created. The first one was a more gun type weapon using uranium and then the second was the bomb used on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The second weapon was created using plutonium which proved ineffective when used with the gun type weapon. The second bomb was an implosion type bomb which was called Fat Man.
Where was all of this done? Well the top secret facility (code name project Y) was in Los Alamos, New Mexico. Patterson approved the purchase of the area on the 25th of November of 1942 and gave $440,000 for the purchase of 54,000 acres. There was $300,000 originally allocated to the building of this top secret facility which was 3 times the original estimate. The total cost of construction was around $7 million. There was also the Oak Ridge, Tennessee facility which was where the Corps of engineers set up shop. The land for the facility was 56,000 acres at a cost of $3.5 million and affected almost 1000 families. Several families were given 2 weeks to leave their farms which had been in their family for generations. Many people protested against the building of the facility but with little results. There was another $2.6 million dollars to but the farms from these families bringing total land area costs too $7.1 million. In 1943, when Nicholas replaced Marshal as the head of the facility, Oak Ridge was named the district Head Quarters of the project and eventually employed 75,000 people. There were also a couple Canadian sites on the project as well. Despite not playing a huge role in developing or building the bomb we shipped in many materials that were need for them. We also shipped in water and food as one of the plants was near the great lakes and the railroads into the states. The ZEEP (zero energy experimental pipe) was the first reactor to be constructed and finished outside the states. However ZEEP went critical in 1945 and a larger 10 MW reactor replaced it shortly thereafter.
Some of the most brilliant scientists were working together on the Manhattan project. One of many was Albert Einstein (1879 - 1955). While Albert Einstein was Germany was visiting the U.S when Adolf Hitler rose to power in Germany and never returned. He alerted the president that