Manhattan Project Case

The Manhattan project was a project funded by the government during the second World War to produce the first atomic bomb of that time period. The Army Corps of Engineers, a part of the National Defennse Research Committee, or the NDRC, assigned Major General Leslie Groves to take charge of the project, a project that grew very slowly at first, with funding starting at $167,000. As the idea picked up momentum, though, the Manhattan Project came to cost $2 billion and employed more than 130,000 people. The project was originally decided on because Franklin D. Roosevelt received a letter from two prominent physicists that was signed by Albert Einstein. After approving the program to start building the bomb, the president contacted Prime Minister Winston Churchill to suggest working as allies on this situation.

Funding was divided into many different sectors. Money went into buying materials and recreating them so they were chemically prepared for developing the atom. The funding also contributed to building factories for experimentation and research. The actual production and research was divided into sites across the nation, the United Kingdom, and Canada, and focused mainly on understanding the uranium-235 isotope and plutonium, which had just been discovered.

In 1945, the first atomic bomb was created. The problem had not been how to explode the bomb, but rather how to contain the power of the fission of the atom. By 1945, however, the first test bomb was exploded in a desert in New Mexico. The test, named Trinity, was the start of the Atomic age. The success of this test led to the constructions of two more bombs that would eventually be used in the World War.