The Manhattan Project

                                The Manhattan Project            

     The Manhattan Project was the project to develop the first atomic bomb during World War II by the United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada. The project succeeded in developing and detonating three nuclear weapons in 1945. Born out of a small research program in 1939, the Manhattan Project eventually employed more than 130,000 people and cost nearly $7 million. It resulted in the creation of multiple production and research sites that operated in secret. The three primary research and production sites of the project were the plutonium-production facility at what is now the Hanford Site, the uranium-enrichment facilities at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and the weapons research and design laboratory, now known as Los Alamos National Laboratory.           

     Ernest Rutherford, Robert Oppenheimer, and Robert Serber were some of the main people involved in the Manhattan Project. They worked on uranium research and nuclear fission to create an atomic bomb. The conferences in the summer of 1942 provided the detailed theoretical basis for the design of the atomic bomb, and convinced Oppenheimer of the benefits of having a single centralized laboratory to manage the research for the bomb project, rather than having specialists spread out at different sites across the United States. The bombs that were created were used against Japan in 1945. As a result, World War II ended.