Atomic Bomb: The Oak Ridge Tennessee Site

Most people know the story of Atomic Bomb, on August 6, 1945, during World War II an American B-29 bomber the Enola Gay dropped the world’s first deployed atomic bomb over the Japanese city of Hiroshima killing 60,000 people instantly. Three days later, a second B-29 dropped a plutonium bomb on Nagasaki, killing or injure ding more than 65,000 people. Shortly thereafter Japan’s Emperor Hirohito announced his country’s unconditional surrender in World War II. The part of the story that is left untold is the how the atomic bomb came to be.

In 1939, President Franklin D. Roosevelt received a letter warning of the plausibility of nuclear weapons, and of German experimentation with uranium and fission. President Roosevelt took the warning seriously,

The project grew into three primary locations which where Hanford Washington, Los Alamos New Mexico, and Oak Ridge Tennessee. Each location was chosen for a specific purpose. The Oak Ridge Tennessee site mainly produced uranium-235 and was chosen because it had large quantities of cheap hydroelectric power which would be necessary to produce uranium-235. The site was large and covered more than 60,000 acres. Hanford Washington was the plutonium production center. The site was chosen because it was near a river and that was essential for cooling the reactors responsible for producing the plutonium. Hanford Site grew to almost 1000 square miles. The Los Alamos National Laboratory site Y of the Manhattan Project site was chosen primarily for its remoteness. Los Alamos was responsible for final assembly of the bombs. Many communities were built around these location to help ensure the security the facilities and personnel. The residents of Los Alamos lived very restricted lives. As their mail was censored, phone calls monitored and their interaction with family members was tightly

Groves in managing the Manhattan Project. General Groves was the only person that had knowledge of the entire project and he took security measures to new heights. He managed to convinced Congressional leaders to sign a secret budget processes with no legislative oversight. He also created separate organizations to carry out intelligence, counterintelligence, and surveillance programs. Each site had multiple security checkpoints and were guarded twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Potential employees underwent a rigorous background check conducted by the FBI ensuring they had no criminal history or suspicious connections with Axis sympathizers and also had to sign a form pledging silence about the Manhattan Project. Officials took extraordinary measures to ensure that no one without the proper clearance was allowed access to site buildings or facilities. Employees maintained security badge’s that displayed their picture, their job position, and their level of clearance. No one could travel from one site to another without Gen. Groves