Robert Oppenheimer's The Manhattan Project

Many refugees that were scientist were already concerned about nuclear weapon research that was being conducted by the Nazi’s in Germany, before the outbreak of war in 1939. After the United States entered into World War II they began funding their own atomic weapons development program. The Office of Scientific Research and Development and the War Department shared joint responsibility of the program. Huge facilities were required to conduct this top secret program that was codenamed “The Manhattan Project”, which the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers constructed for it. The first proposed name for the project was the Laboratory for the Development of Substitute Materials, however General Groves did not want to draw unneeded attention to the project. So he decided to go with the Corps normal procedure for naming new regional organizations, which was simply the unit’s geographical area. The name was the Manhattan Engineer District which was shortened to “The Manhattan Project”. …show more content…
Once they produced these materials they were sent to Los Alamos, New Mexico. Under guidance of J. Robert Oppenheimer and his team they worked to turn these rare materials into a workable atomic bomb. On July 16, 1945 the Manhattan Project conducted the first test of an atomic device at their Trinity site in Alamogordo, New Mexico. The light from the bomb was seen all over the state of New Mexico and parts of Texas, Arizona, and Mexico, and created a blast brighter than a dozen suns. The heat from the explosion was 10,000 times hotter than the surface of the sun, and caused a mushroom cloud to raise over 38,000 feet in minutes. The bomb was estimated to be equal to 20,000 tons of TNT, or equal to 2,000 B-29 bomb loads. Everything within a mile of the bomb was completely obliterated, and so the Atomic Age was