Manhattan Project: Race To Build Atomic Weapons Before Germany And The Soviet Union

The Manhattan Project

Ashten Jampayas 8A ELA April 15, 2024 The Manhattan Project was a US government program that was a race to build atomic weapons before Germany and the Soviet Union could. President Franklin Roosevelt initiated the project after being notified about the potential power and danger of such a bomb which Germany and the Soviet Union could build before the US. Led by General Leslie Groves, the workers of the Manhattan Project started work in 1942. The Manhattan Project brought about the end of World War II and helped the US win the atomic arms race. It had many complexities such as the spies and security, after effects of the bombings, and the ethics of making and using such a destructive weapon. The start of the project

Most of the low-level workers, like construction workers, didn’t know that the eventual goal was to make an atomic bomb. “...mail coming in and going out of Los Alamos was meticulously censored. Security officials would inspect each and every individual piece of mail,” said the Atomic Heritage Foundation. Mail censoring helped keep the project a secret, but it didn’t prevent all information from leaving Los Alamos. The Soviet Union devised an elaborate spy system with hundreds of American and British spies (Unknown D 1). One of the most important spies was Klaus Fuchs, who passed pivotal information about the construction of the US atomic bomb to the Soviet Union (Unknown D 2). Fuchs often split his brain into two compartments, one where he could contribute to the project fully and another where he could pass information to the Soviets (Sheinkin 137). Theodore Hall, another high level Los Alamos worker, sent information about the US design for the atomic bomb to the Soviets because he wanted to prevent a US monopoly on atomic weapons (Sheinkin 132). After the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Hall and Fuchs sent nearly identical bomb designs to the Soviets,