Los Alamos

Los Alamos was a secret lab in New Mexico where a "dream team" of physicists and engineers came together to build the first atomic bomb. The scientists lived in an isolated compound and neighbors never realized what was happening. Unfortunately, however, communist Soviet Union received two separate leaks of the atomic secrets from spies.

Enrico Fermi, perhaps the greatest physicist of the time, did the foundational work at the University of Chicago before Los Alamos began. Others, such as the mathematician Paul Erdos, declined to join the Los Alamos project.