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The Manhattan Project was a research and development program undertaken during World War II to produce the first nuclear weapons. It was led by the United States in collaboration with the United Kingdom and Canada. From 1942 to 1946, the project was directed by Major General Leslie Groves of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Nuclear physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer was the director of the Los Alamos Laboratory that designed the bombs. The Army program was designated the Manhattan District, as its first headquarters were in Manhattan; the name gradually superseded the official codename, Development of Substitute Materials, for the entire project. The project absorbed its earlier British counterpart, Tube Alloys, and subsumed the program from the American civilian Office of Scientific Research and Development. The Manhattan Project employed nearly 130,000 people at its peak and cost nearly US$2 billion, over 80 percent of which was for building and operating the plants that produced the fissile material. Research and production took place at more than 30 sites across the US, the UK, and Canada.
Val Logsdon Fitch was an American nuclear physicist who, with co-researcher James Cronin, was awarded the 1980 Nobel Prize in Physics for a 1964 experiment using the Alternating Gradient Synchrotron at Brookhaven National Laboratory that proved that certain subatomic reactions do not adhere to fundamental symmetry principles. Specifically, they proved, by examining the decay of K-mesons, that a reaction run in reverse does not retrace the path of the original reaction, which showed that the reactions of subatomic particles are not indifferent to time. Thus the phenomenon of CP violation was discovered. This demolished the faith that physicists had that natural laws were governed by symmetry.
Operation Sandstone was a series of nuclear weapon tests in 1948. It was the third series of American tests, following Trinity in 1945 and Crossroads in 1946, and preceding Ranger. Like the Crossroads tests, the Sandstone tests were carried out at the Pacific Proving Grounds, although at Enewetak Atoll rather than Bikini Atoll. They differed from Crossroads in that they were conducted by the Atomic Energy Commission, with the armed forces having only a supporting role. The purpose of the Sandstone tests was also different: they were primarily tests of new bomb designs rather than of the effects of nuclear weapons. Three tests were carried out in April and May 1948 by Joint Task Force 7, with a work force of 10,366 personnel, of whom 9,890 were military.
Sandia Base was the principal nuclear weapons installation of the United States Department of Defense from 1946 to 1971. It was located on the southeastern edge of Albuquerque, New Mexico. For 25 years, the top-secret Sandia Base and its subsidiary installation, Manzano Base, carried on the atomic weapons research, development, design, testing, and training commenced by the Manhattan Project during World War II. Fabrication, assembly, and storage of nuclear weapons was also done at Sandia Base. The base played a key role in the United States nuclear deterrence capability during the Cold War. In 1971 it was merged into Kirtland Air Force Base.
The Special Forces Tab is a service school qualification tab of the United States Army, awarded to any soldier completing the Special Forces Qualification Course at the U.S. Army John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center and School, Fort Liberty, North Carolina. Soldiers who are awarded the Special Forces Tab are authorized to wear it, as well as the green beret for the remainder of their military careers, even when not serving in a Special Forces command.
Robert Serber was an American physicist who participated in the Manhattan Project. Serber's lectures explaining the basic principles and goals of the project were printed and supplied to all incoming scientific staff, and became known as The Los Alamos Primer. The New York Times called him "the intellectual midwife at the birth of the atomic bomb."
Jack W. Aeby was an American environmental physicist most famous for having taken the only well-exposed color photograph of the first detonation of a nuclear weapon on July 16, 1945, at the Trinity nuclear test site in New Mexico.
Samuel Abraham Goudsmit was a Dutch-American physicist famous for jointly proposing the concept of electron spin with George Eugene Uhlenbeck in 1925.
Project Alberta, also known as Project A, was a section of the Manhattan Project which assisted in delivering the first nuclear weapons in the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki during World War II.
"Thin Man" was the code name for a proposed plutonium-fueled gun-type nuclear bomb that the United States was developing during the Manhattan Project. Its development was abandoned in 1944 after it was discovered that the spontaneous fission rate of nuclear reactor-bred plutonium was too high for use in a gun-type design due to the high concentration of the isotope plutonium-240.
The Dayton Project was a research and development project to produce polonium during World War II, as part of the larger Manhattan Project to build the first atomic bombs. Work took place at several sites in and around Dayton, Ohio. Those working on the project were ultimately responsible for creating the polonium-based modulated neutron initiators that were used to begin the chain reactions in the atomic bombs.
Hugh Bradner was an American physicist at the University of California who is credited with inventing the neoprene wetsuit, which helped to revolutionize scuba diving and surfing.
Los Alamos is a census-designated place in Los Alamos County, New Mexico, United States, that is recognized as one of the development and creation places of the atomic bomb—the primary objective of the Manhattan Project by Los Alamos National Laboratory during World War II. The town is located on four mesas of the Pajarito Plateau, and had a population of about 13,200 as of 2020. It is the county seat and one of two population centers in the county known as census-designated places (CDPs); the other is White Rock.
Alvin Cushman Graves was an American nuclear physicist who served at the Manhattan Project's Metallurgical Laboratory and the Los Alamos Laboratory during World War II. After the war, he became the head of the J (Test) Division at Los Alamos and was director or assistant director of numerous nuclear weapons tests during the 1940s and 1950s. Graves was severely injured in the 1946 laboratory criticality accident in Los Alamos that killed Louis Slotin, but recovered.
No. 5 Airfield Construction Squadron (5ACS) was a Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF) construction squadron. The unit was first formed in July 1942 and served in the New Guinea Campaign and Borneo Campaign during World War II. The squadron was one of only a few RAAF airfield construction units to be retained at the end of the war, and formed part of Australia's contribution to the occupation of Japan from 1945 until it was disbanded in June 1949. 5ACS was re-raised in August 1951 and worked on several RAAF airfields in Australia. It also provided small detachments of engineers to support RAAF deployments to South Vietnam and Thailand during the Vietnam War. The squadron was the RAAF's only airfield construction unit from 1961 onward, and was disbanded in December 1974.
McAllister Hull was a North American theoretical physicist who took part in the creation of the atomic bomb that was dropped over Nagasaki in 1945, ending World War II.
The Los Alamos Laboratory, also known as Project Y, was a secret laboratory established by the Manhattan Project and operated by the University of California during World War II. Its mission was to design and build the first atomic bombs. Robert Oppenheimer was its first director, serving from 1943 to December 1945, when he was succeeded by Norris Bradbury. In order to enable scientists to freely discuss their work while preserving security, the laboratory was located on the isolated Pajarito Plateau in Northern New Mexico. The wartime laboratory occupied buildings that had once been part of the Los Alamos Ranch School.
The Salt Wells Pilot Plant was a facility established by the Manhattan Project at the Naval Ordnance Test Station (NOTS) at Inyokern, California, where non-nuclear explosive components of nuclear weapons were manufactured. The first explosives were melted, mixed and poured on 25 July 1945. Between 1945 and 1954, it manufactured explosive components of the Fat Man, Mark 4, Mark 5 and Mark 12 nuclear bombs. The Salt Wells Pilot Plant also helped design, equip, and train workers for the Burlington AEC Plant in Iowa and the Pantex Plant in Texas. The Salt Wells Pilot Plant closed on 30 June 1954.
Oscar Seborer, codenamed Godsend, was an atomic spy for the Soviet Union who worked at the Clinton Engineer Works in Oak Ridge, Tennessee and the Los Alamos Laboratory, New Mexico.
The Naval Weapons Evaluation Facility (NWEF) operated through the Cold War investigating aircraft-weapon interfaces to provide United States Navy aircraft with nuclear weapons delivery capability.
References
Sources
- Bederson, Benjamin (2004). "SEDs at Los Alamos". In Kelly, Cynthia C. (ed.). Remembering the Manhattan Project: a Personal Memoir. World Scientific Publishing. pp. 81–88. ISBN 9812560408.