In one incident, a depressed Oppenheimer learned of a friend’s impending marriage and reacted with a jealous rage. He gained a reputation as a diligent and innovative researcher, but also as a volatile and emotional man. Robert Oppenheimer studied and published extensively in Europe as a young man. As a child, he loved exploring Central Park, and developed an interest in the geology of the region that bordered on obsession. Oppenheimer grew up the son of German immigrants who had achieved wealth in the textile industry. The second was a civilian scientist and the project’s technical expert. The first was a military officer renowned for his deft navigation of the Army bureaucracy, Lt. Manhattan Project Sites Throughout the United Statesįor this monumental task, the U.S. The United States needed someone who could supervise and understand the entirety of the project’s scope, which ranged from enrichment of uranium to metallurgy, and for that matter, explosives research. Thanks to commercial air travel, telephones, and airmail, research and manufacture could take place along several lines at once and in locations as distant as Oak Ridge, Los Alamos, Argonne, and Handford (see below). The other critical element that made the Manhattan project possible was improvements in industrial organization. Stainless steel, synthetic rubber, and artificial lubricants were all developed during the First World War. First, the science of synthetic materials had only recently reached a point where artificial materials could handle the radiation and stress of nuclear detonation. The actual science of nuclear fission was only part of the technology needed to create an atomic bomb. Within a year, many of the greatest physicists in the world - Bohr, Fermi, and Leo Szilard, among others - had fled fascism’s advance and were working tirelessly in the United States on understanding and proving the existence of nuclear fission. Niels Bohr and Leon Rosenfeld famously unraveled the explanation for nuclear fission on the boat from Europe to America. By 1938, many of the scientists began to flee Europe for America, as a rising tide of anti-Semitism made academic careers difficult for many. Austrian scientists Hahn and Strassmann discovered that the neutron actually cleaved atoms in half, and the Italian Enrico Fermi was beginning to examine heavy elements such as Uranium.

Of course, the energy required to generate a beam of protons in 1932 was incredibly high, and the experiment consumed far more energy than it released.Īs time went on, understanding of atomic nuclei accelerated, as it was found that neutrons were more effective than protons at colliding with the nucleus. It wasn’t until 1932, when two scientists, Cockcroft and Walton, demonstrated that by firing protons at metals the nuclei would split apart and release tremendous energy. For years however, his findings were regarded as a unique theory among a number of competing models of the relationship between matter and energy. The men, the science, and the drinks, all had to be just right.Įinstein realized in 1903 that matter and energy were equivalent, and that even tiny amounts of matter contained unbelievable potential. There were a number of circumstances that had to align for the United States to become a nuclear power in 1945. By the end of the Second World War, the dawn of the nuclear age was at hand. However, the scientific innovations that took place between the wars produced weapons that were inconceivable in 1914. Like the First World War, belligerents committed the best and brightest of their industrial, organizational, and scientific might to winning the war. World War II marked the second time in the industrial era when the world’s great powers threw the entirety of their military and economic might against one another.

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