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The Army program was designated the Manhattan District, as its first headquarters were in Manhattan; the name gradually superseded the official codename, Development of Substitute Materials, for the entire project.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.
The Alsos Mission was an organized effort by a team of British and United States military, scientific, and intelligence personnel to discover enemy scientific developments during World War II. Its chief focus to investigate the progress that Nazi Germany was making in the area of nuclear technology, and to seize any German nuclear resources that would either be of use to the Manhattan Project or worth denying to the Soviet Union. It also investigated German chemical and biological weapon development and the means to deliver them, and any other advanced Axis technology it was able to get information about in the course of the other investigations.
Harold Clayton Urey was an American physical chemist whose pioneering work on isotopes earned him the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1934 for the discovery of deuterium. He played a significant role in the development of the atom bomb, as well as contributing to theories on the development of organic life from non-living matter.
George Braxton Pegram was an American physicist who played a key role in the technical administration of the Manhattan Project. He graduated from Trinity College in 1895, and taught high school before becoming a teaching assistant in physics at Columbia University in 1900. He was to spend the rest of his working life at Columbia, taking his doctorate there in 1903 and becoming a full professor in 1918. His administrative career began as early as 1913 when he became the department's executive officer. By 1918, he was Dean of the Faculty of Applied Sciences but he resigned in 1930 to relaunch his research activities, performing many meticulous measurements on the properties of neutrons with John R. Dunning. He was also chairman of Columbia's physics department from 1913 to 1945.
Sir Rudolf Ernst Peierls, was a German-born British physicist who played a major role in Tube Alloys, Britain's nuclear weapon programme, as well as the subsequent Manhattan Project, the combined Allied nuclear bomb programme. His 1996 obituary in Physics Today described him as "a major player in the drama of the eruption of nuclear physics into world affairs".
Erich Rudolf Bagge was a German scientist. Bagge, a student of Werner Heisenberg for his doctorate and Habilitation, was engaged in German Atomic Energy research and the German nuclear energy project during the Second World War. He worked as an Assistant at the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Institut für Physik in Berlin. Bagge, who became associated professor at the University of Hamburg in 1948, was in particular involved in the usage of nuclear power for trading vessels, and he was one of the founders of the Society for the Usage of Nuclear Energy in Ship-Building and Seafare.
K-25 was the codename given by the Manhattan Project to the program to produce enriched uranium for atomic bombs using the gaseous diffusion method. Originally the codename for the product, over time it came to refer to the project, the production facility located at the Clinton Engineer Works in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, the main gaseous diffusion building, and ultimately the site. When it was built in 1944, the four-story K-25 gaseous diffusion plant was the world's largest building, comprising over 5,264,000 square feet (489,000 m2) of floor space and a volume of 97,500,000 cubic feet (2,760,000 m3).
Nazi Germany undertook several research programs relating to nuclear technology, including nuclear weapons and nuclear reactors, before and during World War II. These were variously called Uranverein or Uranprojekt. The first effort started in April 1939, just months after the discovery of nuclear fission in Berlin in December 1938, but ended only a few months later, shortly ahead of the September 1939 German invasion of Poland, for which many notable German physicists were drafted into the Wehrmacht. A second effort under the administrative purview of the Wehrmacht's Heereswaffenamt began on September 1, 1939, the day of the invasion of Poland. The program eventually expanded into three main efforts: Uranmaschine development, uranium and heavy water production, and uranium isotope separation. Eventually, the German military determined that nuclear fission would not contribute significantly to the war, and in January 1942 the Heereswaffenamt turned the program over to the Reich Research Council while continuing to fund the activity.
"Solution Unsatisfactory" is a 1941 science fiction alternate history short story by American writer Robert A. Heinlein. It describes the US effort to build a nuclear weapon in order to end the ongoing World War II, and its dystopian consequences to the nation and the world.
The Iron Dream is a metafictional 1972 alternate history novel by American author Norman Spinrad. The book has a nested narrative that tells a story within a story. On the surface, the novel presents a post-apocalyptic adventure tale entitled Lord of the Swastika, written by an alternate-history Adolf Hitler shortly before his death in 1953. In this timeline, Hitler emigrated from Germany to the United States in 1919 after the Great War, and used his modest artistic skills to become first a pulp science fiction illustrator and later a successful writer, telling lurid, purple-prosed, pro-fascism stories under a thin science fiction veneer. The nested narrative is followed by a faux scholarly analysis by a fictional literary critic, Homer Whipple, which is said to have been written in 1959.
The S-1 Executive Committee laid the groundwork for the Manhattan Project by initiating and coordinating the early research efforts in the United States, and liaising with the Tube Alloys Project in Britain.
Erich Schumann was a German physicist who specialized in acoustics and explosives, and had a penchant for music. He was a general officer in the army and a professor at the University of Berlin and the Technische Hochschule Berlin. When Adolf Hitler came to power he joined the Nazi Party. During World War II, his positions in the Army Ordnance Office and the Army High Command made him one of the most powerful and influential physicists in Germany. He ran the German nuclear energy program from 1939 to 1942, when the army relinquished control to the Reich Research Council. His role in the project was obfuscated after the war by the German physics community's defense of its conduct during the war. The publication of his book on the military's role in the project was not allowed by the British occupation authorities. He was director of the Helmholtz Institute of Sound Psychology and Medical Acoustics.
Operation Epsilon was the codename of a program in which Allied forces near the end of World War II detained ten German scientists who were thought to have worked on Nazi Germany's nuclear program. The scientists were captured between May 1 and June 30, 1945, as part of the Allied Alsos Mission, mainly as part of its Operation Big sweep through southwestern Germany.
1945 is an alternate history written by Newt Gingrich and William R. Forstchen in 1995 that described the period immediately after World War II in which the United States had fought only against Japan, which allowed Nazi Germany to force a truce with the Soviet Union, and the two victors confront each other in a Cold War, which swiftly turns hot.
Jesse Wakefield Beams was an American physicist at the University of Virginia.
The National Museum of Nuclear Science & History is a national repository of nuclear science information chartered by the 102nd United States Congress under Public Law 102-190, and located in unincorporated Bernalillo County, New Mexico, with an Albuquerque postal address. It is adjacent to both the Albuquerque city limits and Kirtland Air Force Base.
The bismuth-phosphate process was used to extract plutonium from irradiated uranium taken from nuclear reactors. It was developed during World War II by Stanley G. Thompson, a chemist working for the Manhattan Project at the University of California, Berkeley. This process was used to produce plutonium at the Hanford Site. Plutonium was used in the atomic bomb that was used in the atomic bombing of Nagasaki in August 1945. The process was superseded in the 1950s by the REDOX and PUREX processes.
Alternate Heroes is an anthology of alternate history science fiction short stories edited by Gregory Benford and Martin H. Greenberg as the second volume in their What Might Have Been series. It was first published in paperback by Bantam Spectra in January 1990, and in trade paperback by BP Books in June 2004. It was also gathered together with Alternate Empires into the omnibus anthology What Might Have Been: Volumes 1 & 2: Alternate Empires / Alternate Heroes.
The Leipzig L-IV experiment accident was the first nuclear accident in history. It occurred on 23 June 1942 in a laboratory at the Physical Institute of the Leipzig University in Leipzig, Germany. There was a steam explosion and a reactor fire in the "uranium machine", a primitive form of research reactor.
Karl Paley Cohen was a physical chemist who became a mathematical physicist and helped usher in the age of nuclear energy and reactor development. He began his career in 1937 making scientific advances in uranium enrichment as research assistant to Harold Urey, who discovered deuterium–the heavy isotope of hydrogen. Cohen worked within the Columbia group of physicists that included Harold Urey, Enrico Fermi, Leo Szilard, Isidor Isaac Rabi, John R. Dunning, Eugene T. Booth, A. Von Gross and others)–all pioneers of nuclear energy.
