Officially begun in 1942, the Manhattan Project was the largest wartime scientific and industrial project ever undertaken by the United States. Its object was to create and produce a practical atomic weapon.

The origin of the project may be traced to 1939, when a group of American scientists, including recent refugees from European fascist and Nazi regimes, became alarmed by what they knew to be work ongoing in Germany (led primarily by Werner Heisenberg) into nuclear fission, a process by which the energy of the binding force within the nucleus of the uranium or plutonium atom might be liberated to produce an explosion of unprecedented magnitude. These scientists decided to prevail upon the U.S. government to launch a project to develop fission for military purposes--before the German researchers could do so.

G. B. Pegram, a Columbia University physicist, brokered a meeting between the eminent Italian expatriate physicist Enrico Fermi and the U.S. Department of the Navy in March 1939. Leo Szilard, a Hungarian expatriate physicist, and other scientists prevailed on the nation's most celebrated refugee scientist, Albert Einstein, to write a letter to Franklin D. Roosevelt on August 2, 1939, advising the president of the urgent necessity of beginning work on a military fission project in light of the dangers posed by Germany. FDR responded, and in February 1940, the modest sum of $6,000 was authorized to begin research directed by a committee under the chairmanship of L. J. Briggs, head of the National Bureau of Standards. Direction of the research project was transferred on December 6, 1941, to the Office of Scientific Research and Development, headed by Vannevar Bush, another prominent scientist. The next day, the Battle of Pearl Harbor thrust the United States into World War II, and shortly after this, the War Department was given joint responsibility for the project. By the middle of 1942, project researchers had concluded that the military application of fission was feasible, but that many facilities, including laboratories and industrial plants, would be required; therefore, the War Department assigned the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to manage the necessary construction work on an accelerated basis. Because most of the early research was being conducted at Columbia University, in Manhattan, responsibility was assigned to the Corps's Manhattan Engineer District in June 1942. The army's direction quickly expanded beyond construction, and in September 1942 Brigadier General Leslie R. Groves, an army engineer who had directed design and construction of the brand-new Pentagon outside of Washington, D.C., was put in charge of all military and engineering aspects of what was now being called, after the Manhattan Engineer District, the Manhattan Project. Work and facilities would extend across the country, yet the project would remain top secret until the end of the war.

Beginning in autumn 1941 Pegram and fellow physicist Harold C. Urey were authorized by the U.S. government to travel to Britain, where fission research was ongoing, to establish cooperation between scientists in the two countries. By 1943, the United States established a joint policy committee with Great Britain and Canada, and a number of leading British and Canadian nuclear researchers came to the United States to work on the Manhattan Project. Thus, the work became an international effort among allies.

The Manhattan Project was a unique, super-accelerated program of scientific, military, and industrial collaboration and coordination on a vast scale. An entirely new and hitherto theoretical field had to be researched, the research rapidly transformed into practical demonstrations, and those demonstrations quickly prototyped into a workable fission weapon. The unknowns were staggering, and success was far from assured. Moreover, because of the necessity for speed, various research programs had to be conducted simultaneously in the full knowledge that some might prove costly dead ends. Even before research was completed, design and construction of critical production plants would have to get under way.

The first problem to be solved was how to separate uranium 235, the fissionable material that would be the heart of the bomb, from its companion isotope, uranium 238. A massive amount of U238 was required to obtain a minute amount of U235, which, however, could not even be separated from U238 by any known chemical means. An entirely novel physical process had to be invented. Two major processes were identified: an electromagnetic process developed at the University of California, Berkeley, under Ernest Lawrence, and the diffusion process Urey developed at Columbia University. Both processes required huge, highly complex plants with access to very large amounts of electric power. Under normal circumstances, pilot plants would have been developed to determine which process was superior, after which major facilities would be constructed. Groves decided to save time by taking the bold--and costly--step of creating production facilities to implement both methods. Construction was begun at Oak Ridge, a 70-square-mile tract near Knoxville, Tennessee. Additionally, a third method, thermal diffusion, was employed to produce initial separation. . .

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