The Manhattan Project The Manhattan Project was a research and development program undertaken during World War II to produce the first nuclear weapons. It was led by the United States in collaboration with the United Kingdom and Canada. From 1942 to 1946, the project was directed by Major General Leslie Groves of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Nuclear physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer was the director of the Los Alamos Laboratory that designed the bombs. The Army program was designated the Manhattan District, as its first headquarters were in Manhattan; the name gradually superseded the official codename, Development of Substitute Materials, for the entire project. The project absorbed its earlier British counterpart, Tube Alloys, and subsumed the program from the American civilian Office of Scientific Research and Development. The Manhattan Project employed nearly 130,000 people at its peak and cost nearly US$2 billion (equivalent to about $27 billion in 2023). The project pursued both highly enriched uranium and plutonium as fuel for nuclear weapons. Over 80 percent of project cost was for building and operating the fissile material production plants. Enriched uranium was produced at Clinton Engineer Works in Tennessee. Plutonium was produced in the world's first industrial-scale nuclear reactors at the Hanford Engineer Works in Washington. Each of these sites was supported by dozens of other facilities across the US, the UK, and Canada. Initially, it was assumed that both fuels could be used in a relatively simple atomic bomb design known as the gun-type design. When it was discovered that this design was incompatible for use with plutonium, an intense development program led to the invention of the implosion design. The work on weapons design was performed at the Los Alamos Laboratory in New Mexico, and resulted in two weapons designs that were used during the war: Little Boy (enriched uranium gun-type) and Fat Man (plutonium implosion). The first nuclear device ever detonated was an implosion-type bomb during the Trinity test, conducted at White Sands Proving Ground in New Mexico on 16 July 1945. The project also was responsible for developing the specific means of delivering the weapons onto military targets, and were responsible for the use of the Little Boy and Fat Man bombs in the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945. The project was also charged with gathering intelligence on the German nuclear weapon project. Through Operation Alsos, Manhattan Project personnel served in Europe, sometimes behind enemy lines, where they gathered nuclear materials and documents and rounded up German scientists. Despite the Manhattan Project's own emphasis on security, Soviet atomic spies penetrated the program. In the immediate postwar years, the Manhattan Project conducted weapons testing at Bikini Atoll as part of Operation Crossroads, developed new weapons, promoted the development of the network of national laboratories, supported medical research into radiology, and laid the foundations for the nuclear navy. It maintained control over American atomic weapons research and production until the formation of the United States Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) in January 1947. J. Robert Oppenheimer (born Julius Robert Oppenheimer /ˈɒpənhaɪmər/ OP-ən-hy-mər; April 22, 1904 – February 18, 1967) was an American theoretical physicist who served as the director of the Manhattan Project's Los Alamos Laboratory during World War II. He is often called the "father of the atomic bomb" for his role in overseeing the development of the first nuclear weapons. Born in New York City, Oppenheimer obtained a degree in chemistry from Harvard University in 1925 and a doctorate in physics from the University of Göttingen in Germany in 1927, studying under Max Born. After research at other institutions, he joined the physics faculty at the University of California, Berkeley, where he was made a full professor in 1936. Oppenheimer made significant contributions to physics in the fields of quantum mechanics and nuclear physics, including the Born–Oppenheimer approximation for molecular wave functions; work on the theory of positrons, quantum electrodynamics, and quantum field theory; and the Oppenheimer–Phillips process in nuclear fusion. With his students, he also made major contributions to astrophysics, including the theory of cosmic ray showers, and the theory of neutron stars and black holes. In 1942, Oppenheimer was recruited to work on the Manhattan Project, and in 1943 was appointed director of the project's Los Alamos Laboratory in New Mexico, tasked with developing the first nuclear weapons. His leadership and scientific expertise were instrumental in the project's success, and on July 16, 1945, he was present at the first test of the atomic bomb, Trinity. In August 1945, the weapons were used on Japan in the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, to date the only uses of nuclear weapons in conflict. In 1947, Oppenheimer was appointed director of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, and chairman of the General Advisory Committee of the new United States Atomic Energy Commission (AEC). He lobbied for international control of nuclear power and weapons in order to avert an arms race with the Soviet Union, and later opposed the development of the hydrogen bomb, partly on ethical grounds. During the Second Red Scare, his stances, together with his past associations with the Communist Party USA, led to an AEC security hearing in 1954 and the revocation of his security clearance. He continued to lecture, write, and work in physics, and in 1963 received the Enrico Fermi Award for contributions to theoretical physics. On December 16, 2022, United States Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm vacated the 1954 decision, saying it had been the result of a "flawed process" and affirming that Oppenheimer had been loyal..

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