The Manhattan Project
Leo Szilard, like many other foreign-born physicists in the U.S. who had fled fascism, knew Germany was conducting nuclear research. Having learned the Germans had banned the export of uranium, he believed the Germans were developing an atomic bomb. Fearing what would happen if Germany developed a nuclear weapon, he urged Dr. Albert Einstein to convince the American government to support nuclear research. On August 2, 1939, a month before Germany invaded Poland, Einstein wrote a letter to President Roosevelt, recommending that the U.S. fund nuclear research, stating that it could result in "extremely powerful bombs" made of uranium. Einstein's recommendation was based on the research of physicists Leo Szilard and Enrico Fermi. Szilard had developed the theory of nuclear fission. But it was Fermi who was the first to actually produce nuclear fission in the laboratory, which won him the 1938 Nobel Prize for Physics. Based on Einstein's letter, President Roosevelt authorized a study, but the decision to devote full energy to the production of the bomb was not made until December 6, 1941: the day before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.
osen to make the atomic bomb a reality, code named the Manhattan Project. He named J. Robert Oppenheimer, a brilliant nuclear physicist from the University of California at Berkeley as director. Together they chose Los Alamos, New Mexico, a remote location not far from Santa Fe, as the site for the design and construction of atomic bombs. Oppenheimer gathered scientists, many of them Nobel Prize winners, from the most prestigious universities in the U.S.: University of California at Berkeley, University of Chicago, Columbia University, as well as several British and Canadian scientists. The first atomic bomb tested at Trinity on July 16, 1945 proved that the U.S. was in possession of the most destructive weapon ever devised by man. The bomb was powered by the splitting of all the nuclei in several kilograms of plutonium. A sphere of plutonium the size of a baseball produced an explosion equal to 15,000 to 20,000 tons of TNT. When the bomb exploded at Trinity at 5:30 a.m., it vaporized the tower and turned asphalt around the base of the tower to green sand. Suddenly the sky was brighter than several suns. Seconds after the explosion came a huge blast that sent withering heat across the desert. Nuclear reactors were built to provide the neutrons to
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