"It was a paradise for scientists. In Los Alamos, whatever you wanted, you got."
Joseph Rotblat, physicist
During World War II the United States used an unprecedented $2 billion to feed an ultra-secret research and development program, the outcome of which would alter, the relationships of nations forever. Known as the Manhattan Project, it was the search by the United States and her closest allies to create a practical atomic bomb: a single device capable of mass destruction, the threat of which alone could be powerful enough to end the war.
The motivation was simple. Scientists escaping the Nazi regime'-had revealed that research in Germany had confirmed the theoretical viability of atomic bombs.' In 1939, in support of their fears that the Nazis might now be developing such a weapon, Albert Einstein and .others wrote to President Franklin D. Roosevelt (FDR) warning of the need for atomic research. By 1941 FDR had authorized formal, coordinated scientific research into such a. device. Among those whose efforts would ultimately unleash the power of the atom was Robert Oppenheimer (1904-1967), who was appointed the project's scientific director in 1942. Under his direction the famous laboratories at Los Alamos would be constructed and the scientific team assembled.
An atomic bomb initiates a nuclear chain reaction, thereby releasing truly vast amounts of energy. An initial problem was the production of enough "enriched" uranium to sustain such a reaction. Instrumental in the solution was Italian physicist Enrico Fermi. In a former squash court under Chicago University, he and other scientists created the first ever controlled, self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction. The project ultimately created the first, man-made nuclear explosion, which Oppenheimer called "Trinity," at Alamagordo, New Mexico, on July 16,1945.
