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Founding the Manhattan Project

The United States’ entry into World War II in December 1941 was decisive in providing funds for a massive research and production effort for obtaining fissionable materials, and in May 1942 the momentous decision was made to proceed simultaneously on all promising production methods. Vannevar Bush decided that the army should be brought into the production plant construction activities. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers was given the job in mid-June, and Col. James C. Marshall was selected to head the project. Soon an office in New York City was opened, and in August the project was officially given the name Manhattan Engineer District—hence Manhattan Project, the name by which this effort would be known ever afterward. Over the summer, Bush and others felt that progress was not proceeding quickly enough, and the army was pressured to find another officer that would take more decisive action. Col. Leslie R. Groves replaced Marshall on September 17 and immediately began making major decisions from his headquarters office in Washington, D.C. After his first week a workable oversight arrangement was achieved with the formation of a three-man military policy committee chaired by Bush (with chemist James B. Conant as his alternate) along with representatives from the army and the navy.

Throughout the next few months, Groves (by then a brigadier general) chose the three key sites—Oak Ridge, Tennessee; Los Alamos, New Mexico; and Hanford, Washington—and selected the large corporations to build and operate the atomic factories. In December contracts were signed with the DuPont Company to design, construct, and operate the plutonium production reactors and to develop the plutonium separation facilities. Two types of factories to enrich uranium were built at Oak Ridge.

On November 16 Groves and physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer visited the Los Alamos Ranch School, some 100 km (60 miles) north of Albuquerque, New Mexico, and on November 25 Groves approved it as the site for the main scientific laboratory, often referred to by its code name Project Y. The previous month, Groves had decided to choose Oppenheimer to be the scientific director of the laboratory where the design, development, and final manufacture of the weapon would take place. By July 1943 two essential and encouraging pieces of experimental data had been obtained—plutonium did give off neutrons in fission, more than uranium-235; and the neutrons were emitted in a short time compared to that needed to bring the weapon materials into a supercritical assembly. The theorists working on the project contributed one discouraging note, however, as their estimate of the critical mass for uranium-235 had risen more than threefold, to something between 23 and 45 kg (50 and 100 pounds).

Selecting a weapon design

The emphasis during the summer and fall of 1943 was on the gun method of assembly, in which the projectile, a subcritical piece of uranium-235 (or plutonium-239), would be placed in a gun barrel and fired into the target, another subcritical piece. After the mass was joined (and now supercritical), a neutron source would be used to start the chain reaction. A problem developed with applying the gun method to plutonium, however. In manufacturing plutonium-239 from uranium-238 in a reactor, some of the plutonium-239 absorbed a neutron and became plutonium-240. This material underwent spontaneous fission, producing neutrons. Some neutrons would always be present in a plutonium assembly and would cause it to begin multiplying as soon as it “went critical” but before it reached supercriticality; the assembly would then explode prematurely and produce comparatively little energy. The gun designers tried to overcome this problem by achieving higher projectile speeds, but they lost out in the end to a better idea—the implosion method.

In late April 1943 a Project Y physicist, Seth Neddermeyer, proposed the first serious theoretical analysis of implosion. His arguments showed that it would be feasible to compress a solid sphere of plutonium by surrounding it with high explosives and that this method would be superior to the gun method both in its higher velocity and in its shorter path of assembly. John von Neumann, a mathematician who had experience in working on shaped-charge, armour-piercing projectiles, supported the implosion method enthusiastically and went on to be a major contributor to the design of the high-explosive “lenses” that would focus the compression inward. Physicist Edward Teller suggested that because the material was compressed, less of it would be needed. By late 1943 the implosion method was being given a higher priority, and by July 1944 it had become clear that an efficient gun-assembly device could not be built with plutonium. Los Alamos’ central research mission rapidly shifted to solve the new challenge. Refinements in design eventually resulted in a solid 6-kg (13-pound) sphere of plutonium, with a small hole in the centre for the neutron initiator, that would be compressed by imploding lenses of high explosive.