United States Army Corps Of Engineers Manhattan District Popular Books

United States Army Corps Of Engineers Manhattan District Biography & Facts

The Manhattan Project was a program of research and development 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 under the direction of 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The Army program was designated the Manhattan District, as its first headquarters were in Manhattan; the name gradually superseded the official codename, Development of Substitute Materials, for the entire project.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. The Manhattan Project employed nearly 130,000 people at its peak and cost nearly US$2 billion (equivalent to about $27 billion in 2023), over 80 percent of which was for building and operating the plants that produced the fissile material. Research and production took place at more than 30 sites across the US, the UK, and Canada. The project resulted in two types of atomic bombs, developed concurrently during the war: a relatively simple gun-type fission weapon and a more complex implosion-type nuclear weapon. The Thin Man gun-type design proved impractical to use with plutonium, so a simpler gun-type design called Little Boy was developed that used uranium-235. Three methods were employed for uranium enrichment: electromagnetic, gaseous, and thermal. In parallel with the work on uranium was an effort to produce plutonium. After the feasibility of the world's first artificial nuclear reactor, the Chicago Pile-1, was demonstrated in 1942 at the Metallurgical Laboratory in the University of Chicago, the project designed the X-10 Graphite Reactor and the production reactors at the Hanford Site, in which uranium was irradiated and transmuted into plutonium. The Fat Man plutonium implosion-type weapon was developed in a concerted design and development effort by the Los Alamos Laboratory. 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 emphasis on security, Soviet atomic spies penetrated the program. The first nuclear device ever detonated was an implosion-type bomb during the Trinity test, conducted at New Mexico's Alamogordo Bombing and Gunnery Range on 16 July 1945. Little Boy and Fat Man bombs were used a month later in the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. 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 (UNAEC) in January 1947. Origins The discovery of nuclear fission by German chemists Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann in 1938, and its theoretical explanation by Lise Meitner and Otto Frisch, made the development of an atomic bomb a theoretical possibility. There were fears that a German atomic bomb project would develop one first, especially among scientists who were refugees from Nazi Germany and other fascist countries. In August 1939, Hungarian-born physicists Leo Szilard and Eugene Wigner drafted the Einstein–Szilard letter, which warned of the potential development of "extremely powerful bombs of a new type". It urged the United States to acquire stockpiles of uranium ore and accelerate the research of Enrico Fermi and others into nuclear chain reactions. They had it signed by Albert Einstein and delivered to President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Roosevelt called on Lyman Briggs of the National Bureau of Standards to head the Advisory Committee on Uranium to investigate the issues; Briggs met with Szilárd, Wigner and Edward Teller in October 1939. The committee reported back to Roosevelt in November that uranium "would provide a possible source of bombs with a destructiveness vastly greater than anything now known." In February 1940, the U.S. Navy awarded Columbia University $6,000 in funding, most of which Fermi and Szilard spent on graphite. A team of Columbia professors including Fermi, Szilard, Eugene T. Booth and John Dunning created the first nuclear fission reaction in the Americas, verifying the work of Hahn and Strassmann. The same team subsequently built a series of prototype nuclear reactors (or "piles" as Fermi called them) in Pupin Hall at Columbia but were not yet able to achieve a chain reaction. The Advisory Committee on Uranium became the National Defense Research Committee (NDRC) on Uranium when that organization was formed on 27 June 1940. Briggs proposed spending $167,000 on research into uranium, particularly the uranium-235 isotope, and plutonium, which was discovered in 1940 at the University of California. On 28 June 1941, Roosevelt signed Executive Order 8807, which created the Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD), with Vannevar Bush as its director. The office was empowered to engage in large engineering projects in addition to research. The NDRC Committee on Uranium became the S-1 Section of the OSRD; the word "uranium" was dropped for security reasons. In Britain, Frisch and Rudolf Peierls at the University of Birmingham had made a breakthrough investigating the critical mass of uranium-235 in June 1939. Their calculations indicated that it was within an order of magnitude of 10 kilograms (22 lb), which was small enough to be carried by a bomber of the day. Their March 1940 Frisch–Peierls memorandum initiated the British atomic bomb project and its MAUD Committee, which unanimously recommended pursuing the development of an atomic bomb. In July 1940, Britain had offered to give the United States access to its research, and the Tizard Mission's John Cockcroft briefed American scientists on British developments. He discovered that the American project was smaller than the British, and not as advanced. As part of the scientific exchange, the MAUD Committee's findings were conveyed to the United States. One of its members, the Australian physicist Mark Oliphant, flew to the US in late August 1941 and discovered that data provided by the MAUD Committee had not reached key American physicists. Oliphant set out to find out why the committee's findings were apparently being ignored. He met with the Uranium Committee and visited Berkeley, California, where he spoke persuasively to Ernest O. Lawrence. Lawrence was sufficiently impressed to commence his own research into uranium. He in turn spoke to James B. Conant, Arthur H. Compton and Georg.... Discover the United States Army Corps Of Engineers Manhattan District popular books. Find the top 100 most popular United States Army Corps Of Engineers Manhattan District books.