Lat Late 1941: The Nuclear Project

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In late 1942, the US decided it was time for them to take action in the war and do something to stop it. Three years prior the scientific community some how discovered that the German scientists learned how to split an uranium atom. Everyone was soon scared at the possibility of German scientists using that huge amount of energy to produce a bomb capable of massive destruction. Our well known scientists Albert Einstein and Enrico Fermi escaped from nazis. They both agreed that the president of the United States needed to know about the dangers that the Germans could cause. Einstein wrote a letter to President Roosevelt saying that they needed to develop an atomic research program later in the year. Roosevelt didn 't see the reason nor the urgency for the project but agreed to proceed slowly. …show more content…

In the beginning the research was based at a few colleges. A breakthrough happened in December of 1942 when Dr. Fermi led physicists to develop the first controlled nuclear chain reaction under the grandstands of Stagg Field at the University of Chicago. After that one milestone, all the money that was going to the research were used more freely, while the project was moved up to maximum speed. The two major nuclear factories were built in Oak Ridge, Tennessee and Hanford, Washington. The main assembly plant was in Los Alamos, New Mexico. A man named Robert Oppenheimer was in charge of putting the pieces together at Los Alamos.After the bill for research and the discovery were made the total added up to nearly $2 billion dollars! The Manhattan Project ended up employing over one hundred twenty thousand