Manhattan Project Essay

The initial formation of the Manhattan Project in June 1942 during World War II led to the intensive wartime research in the United States that produced the first atomic bombs in the world, ushering in a nuclear arms race between the United States and Soviet Union. Research and funding to develop nuclear weapons eventually became the top-secret Manhattan Project wartime program. With over $2 billion authorized for the project, the United States emerged successful in creating the first atomic bomb, tested in July 1945 at Alamogordo, New Mexico. Just one month later, the United States dropped an atomic bomb on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, killing over a hundred thousand people in total.

Although the United States

Even though Germany would brandish its possession of nuclear weapon developments, it would not drop any atomic bombs in Allied territory like how the United States bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The German nuclear research program lacked the centralization necessary to create a functional atomic bomb; even if Germany had access to Manhattan Project secrets, it would not be able to build a functioning atomic

General Dwight D. Eisenhower, Supreme Allied Commander of Operation Overlord, would have hesitated partly due to Germany’s nuclear threat. Thanks to the establishment of the United States Office of Strategic Services (OSS) to conduct espionage inside of enemy nations, however, the United States would have known about Germany’s internal disorganization. The more prominent reason that Eisenhower would have pulled back from Operation Overlord would be the effect of a D-Day invasion on the morale of the American public; American families would have been highly concerned about fathers and husbands risking death by nuclear bomb. If D-Day never happened, the Allies would resort to an invasion of Germany through the eastern Soviet front. World War II would have ravaged Germany’s economy and industry, so the Allied Powers would still have won, although it would have taken a longer time to do so. Due to increased Soviet participation, the final peace agreement between the Allies and the Third Reich would have favored Soviet interests far more than American or British interests, giving Berlin and a larger portion of Germany to the Soviet Union. In the Pacific theatre of the war, the United States would still have dropped nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, since