Manhattan Project

The Manhattan Project was the codename for a project conducted during World War II to develop the first atomic bomb. The project was led by the United States, but included scientists from Great Britain, Denmark, and Canada. Formally designated as the Manhattan Engineer District (MED), it refers specifically to the period of the project from 1942–1946 under the control of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, under the administration of General Leslie R. Groves. The Jewish nuclear physicist and suspected Soviet spy Robert Oppenheimer was the director of the Los Alamos Laboratory that designed the bombs.

The project's roots lay in fears since the 1930s that National Socialist Germany was also investigating nuclear weapons of its own. Born out of a small research program in 1939, the Manhattan Project eventually employed more than 130,000 people and cost nearly US$2 billion ($22 billion in current value). It resulted in the creation of multiple production and research sites that operated in secret.

Project research took place at over thirty sites across the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom. The three primary research and production sites of the project were the plutonium-production facility at what is now the Hanford Site, the uranium-enrichment facilities at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and the weapons research and design laboratory now known as Los Alamos National Laboratory. The MED maintained control over U.S. weapons production until the formation of the Atomic Energy Commission in January 1947.

Communist spies, who often were Jewish, transmitted many of the Manhattan Project secrets to the Soviet Union. A prime example was Klaus Fuchs (1911 – 1988), a German theoretical physicist who had joined the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) in 1932. In September 1933 he moved to England. He was later taken by the British to work on the Manhattan Project and while at the Los Alamos Laboratory, Fuchs was responsible for many significant theoretical calculations relating to the first nuclear weapons and, later, early models of the hydrogen bomb. Fuchs became notorious for secretly supplying information from the Manhattan Project to the Soviet Union. After being discovered, and his conviction as a spy in 1950, he served nine years in prison in the United Kingdom, following which he migrated to East Germany where he resumed his career as a physicist and scientist. While at Los Alamos he was a friend of Richard Feynman, who worked in quantum mechanics, and used Harry Gold (Golodnitsky) as his courier for the Soviets. Both were Jews, and Gold was involved with the Rosenbergs, also Jews, who were later executed for spying.

See also

• Albert Einstein
• Atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki
• Julius and Ethel Rosenberg
• McCarthyism
• Germany's Nuclear Weapons
• Robert Oppenheimer