President Franklin Roosevelt's Letter To The Manhattan Project

It was August, 1939. United States President Franklin Roosevelt was handed a letter addressed from Albert Einstein. The purpose of this letter was to inform the President that the Germans supposedly discovered the secrets to developing nuclear weaponry and to urge the President to do the same (1). This letter changed the history of our world, because from this letter, the Manhattan Project was born. The Manhattan Project was the code-name given to the American research and development of an atomic bomb. The high-stakes chess game of World War Two was in full swing, and every move each side played sent a wave of reaction throughout the world. Even though the United States would not officially enter the war until 1941, they were believed to

In order for research to take place there, a town was built from the farmland, with forty-five thousand workers needing the site to be a home. After the town was complete in the fall of 1942 (8), work on the Manhattan Project began, and it wasn’t before long that the X-10 Graphite Reactor was built from the models created at the University of Chicago (6). Studies on the separation of uranium isotopes, thermal diffusions, and how to enrich uranium-235 were all conducted at Oak Ridge, with the enrichment of plutonium and uranium perhaps being the most notable accomplishments (6). Incredibly, all of this was kept secret from the outside world. Citizens were urged to keep quite on their research. As atomicheritage.org explains, “At all the sites, signs and billboards admonished workers to protect the project's secrets: “What you see here, what you do here, what you hear here, when you leave here, let it stay here!’” (7). In fact, plenty of people working on the project were uninformed on the true purpose of their research, since information was passed down on a strictly “need-to-know” basis. (7). The people of Oak Ridge successfully kept quiet during their research, and they had a significant contribution to the Manhattan Project with their development and enrichment of Uranium-235, a vital piece of the atomic bomb.