An Engineering History of the Manhattan Project

The Manhattan Project, the US program to build an atomic bomb during WWII, is one of the most famous and widely known major government projects: a survey in 1999 ranked the dropping of the atomic bomb as the top news story of the 20th century. Virtually everyone knows that the project built the bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And most of us probably know that the bomb was built by some of the world’s best physicists, working under Robert Oppenheimer at Los Alamos in New Mexico. But the Manhattan Project was far more than just a science project: building the bombs required an enormous industrial effort of unprecedented scale and complexity. Enormous factory complexes were built using hundreds of millions of dollars worth of never-before-constructed equipment. Scores of new machines, analytical techniques, and methods of working with completely novel substances had to be invented. Materials which had never been produced at all, or only produced in tiny amounts, suddenly had to be manufactured in vast quantities.

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