The Manhattan Project was the code name of a scientific project carried out during the Second World War by the United States with the help of the United Kingdom and Canada. The ultimate goal of the project was the development of the first atomic bomb before Nazi Germany got it. The scientific investigation was directed by the physicist Julius Robert Oppenheimer while security and military operations were carried out by General Leslie Richard Groves. The project was carried out in numerous research centers, the most important being the Manhattan Engineering District located in the place currently known as the Los Alamos National Laboratory.
The project brought together a large number of scientific eminences such as Robert Oppenheimer, Niels Böhr, Enrico Fermi, Ernest Lawrence, Luis Walter Álvarez, etc. Given that, after the experiments in Germany prior to the war, it was known that the fission of the atom was possible and that the Nazis were already working on their own nuclear program, several brilliant minds came together. Exiled Jews many of them, made common cause of the fight against fascism contributing its grain of sand to the cause: get the bomb before the Germans.
The first successful atomic test occurred in the Alamogordo desert in New Mexico on July 16, 1945. The test was called Trinity and the detonated device was codenamed Gadget. It was a bomb-A of plutonium of the Fat Man type, the same type of bomb that would be launched on Nagasaki days later, on August 9, 1945. At present, this place is marked by a monolith conical black silicon resulting from the melting of the sand under the effect of heat.
In the race for the nuclear bomb, the Germans had the Uranium Project and the Soviets the Operation Borodino.
History
Nuclear scientists Leó Szilárd, Edward Teller and Eugene Wigner, Jewish refugees from Hungary believed that the energy released by nuclear fission could be used for the bombs by the Germans, so they persuaded Albert Einstein, the most famous physicist in United States, to warn President Franklin D. Roosevelt of this danger by means of a letter that Szilárd wrote and was sent on August 2, 1939. In response to the warning, Roosevelt increased the investigations about the implications in the security National nuclear fission. After the detonation on Hiroshima, Einstein would comment: "I should burn the fingers with which I wrote that first letter to Roosevelt."
Scientists from the manhattan project
Robert Oppenheimer: Director of the project, opposed the military use of nuclear energy once the war was over.
Enrico Fermi: Fled from his native Italy, he was the creator of the first atomic pile at the University of Chicago.
Edward Teller: One of the many Jews who fled the Nazi regime. One of the most fervent supporters of the US nuclear weapons program.
Hans Bethe: Important theoretician of the project, director of the technical division.
Richard Feynman: Responsible for the theoretical division and computer calculations. In his biography he tells many anecdotes about his time in the Manhattan Project and his feeling of guilt when exploding the first bomb.
John von Neumann: expert in the field of explosives, among other skills, he was entrusted with the mission of helping in the design of contact explosives for the compression of the plutonium core of the device used in the Trinity trial and the Fat Man bomb launched on Nagasaki . He was also in charge of calculating how high the bombs should explode before touching the ground so that its effect would be more devastating. He was also on the committee commissioned to select potential Japanese targets (cities), where to drop the atomic bombs.(
Source
https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proyecto_Manhattan
https://hipertextual.com/2014/09/historia-proyecto-manhattan