Manhattan Project Research Paper

The Manhattan Project

Matt Kensler

Mountain View High School

The Manhattan Project The two main people that helped create the Manhattan Project are Albert Einstein and J. Robert Oppenheimer. Albert Einstein was the first person to get the idea of the Manhattan Project. In 1939, Einstein had found out that Nazi scientists were working on creating a powerful new weapon called an “Atom Bomb”. Right after getting the news, Einstein had a meeting with physicist Leo Szilard and they both helped write a letter to U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt warning him about the “Atom Bomb”. At first President Roosevelt told his team of scientists to slowly start working on the bomb. In 1940 and 1941 two more Nazi nuclear sites were found, which

In December of 1942 Money was distributed to the research more freely once Enrico Fermi and his group of physicists created the first controlled Nuclear Chain Reaction under one of the viewing stands of University of Chicago’s Stagg Field. The Manhattan project was advancing at an extreme speed, so they built more nuclear plants in Tennessee, Washington and New Mexico. J. Robert Oppenheimer Was the lab director at the main nuclear plant in New Mexico, he’s best known as being the “father of the atomic bomb." Secrecy was the most important factor in the Manhattan Project no one from Germany or Japan could find out about this. Over 120,000 Americans were employed to work on the Manhattan project, only a few people who were specially trained knew about the building of the Atomic Bomb, Harry S. Truman who was Vice-President at the time didn’t even know about the project until he became President. A soviet spy Klaus Fuchs was not stopped by their secrecy, he was actually responsible for a lot of important calculated theories that helped with the project until he was later caught sending detailed notes of the Manhattan project to the soviets (UShistory.com,

After these two men died they created very thorough safety policies to keep the employees from getting radiation sickness. On the summer of 1945 the atom bomb was finished being built. At Trinity site in Alamamagorda, New Mexico on July 16, 1945 the first Atom Bomb was dropped. you could see the flash from 200 miles away the mushroom cloud got up to 40,000 feet it also created a half mile wide crater. 100 miles away from the explosion civilians had their home windows blown out, they were fast at creating a cover up story saying that an ammunition dump exploded. America spent nearly 2 billion dollars on researching and developing a weapon of mass destruction.(Atomic Heritage-Atomic Accidents, 2014) The Manhattan project was the model of “Big Science” in America. Since the Manhattan project America has been using “Big Science” to fund science teams to work on government projects and advance technologies. Once the Manhattan project was finished contaminants started coming from the facilities and floated into the streams which caused the fish to be contaminated. It didn’t take long until the Yakimas and the Nez Perce tribes started reporting “glowing fish”. (Atomic Heritage-Environmental Consequences,