* The Manhattan Project had its roots in a single letter sent from a group of Hungarian scientists to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt with the help of world-renowned physicist [[Albert Einstein]]. This letter outlines what they saw as a very real and very pressing problem confronting the U.S. and the world—that Hitler and Germany might develop a weapon based on nuclear fission. This letter led to the development of a small research team to begin a United States effort to build the bomb first ... [https://www.cbsnews.com/8301-505125_162-30940115/lessons-from-the-manhattan-project/?tag=bnetdomain]
The general in charge of the project recruited the finest best known scientific minds of the time: [[Robert Oppenheimer]], [[Niels Bohr]], [[Enrico Fermi]], [[Edward Teller]] and [[Richard Feynman]].
The term ''Manhattan Project'' was the code word for the project that developed the first nuclear weapons - "atomic bombs" as they were then called - in history. The formal code name was "Manhattan Engineering District," named after the Manhattan Engineer District of the [[United States Army Corps of Engineers]]. Manhattan borough had at least 10 sites that supported the project, including the project's first headquarters located in a skyscraper across from City Hall.<ref>Robert S. Norris, "The Manhattan Project" (Black Dog & Leventhal). The book claims that spies stole some of the project's top secrets from Manhattan.</ref>
Groves was bold and willing to spend money. When scientists and engineers were unable to decide which of three approaches to producing the fissile material needed to build the bomb, he decided that if nobody could tell which was best, the thing to do was try all three methods. Huge manufacturing facilities were built at Oak Ridge, Tennessee and Hanford, Washington. Assuming that fissile material would be ready, a full-scale effort to design and build the bombs themselves was begun in spring 1943 at the remote desert location of Los Alamos. The scientific and engineering efforts at Los Alamos were managed by [[J. Robert Oppenheimer]].
The first completed bomb was tested on July 16, 1945 at a location code-named "[[Trinity]]." <ref>https://www.losalamoshistory.org/trinitytest.html</ref> The other two bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki Japan, and ended [[World War II]].
Despite tight security, Communist spies leaked information to the [[Soviet Union]] who soon started a similar project.
* [[Fat Man]] - [[Trinity (atomic explosion)]] and [[Nagasaki]]
* [[Little Boy]] - [[Hiroshima]]
* [[Robert C. Snyder]]
*[[Venona project]]
'''Sources:''' <references/>
*[[Pavel Sudoplatov]], Anatoli Sudoplatov, Jerrold L. Schecter, Leona P. Schecter, ''Special Tasks: The Memoirs of an Unwanted Witness -- A Soviet Spymaster'' (Little Brown, Boston, 1994).
==See also==