In the months following the bombing of Pearl Harbor the Manhattan Project--the name given to the atomic bomb program because its original offices were in Manhattan--grew very quickly. And although the Army had been involved since June of 1942, it was just beginning to realize that someone was...

THE HISTORICAL CONTEXT WHICH CONTRIBUTED TO THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE ATOMIC BOMB THE CHAIN REACTION BOMB Atomic bomb imagined The New York Press reports: "New hope for releasing the enormous stores of energy within the atom has arisen from German scientists". World famous Niels Bohr of Cop...

Date: 15 May 1945 To: President Harry S. Truman From: James Wheeler Re: Manhattan Project Briefing President Truman, You have asked me to provide you with a summary/ analysis of the government project nicknamed the Manhattan Project. I have reviewed thoroughly all of the pertinent...

In the 1930s, some scientists theorized that bombarding an atom's nucleus with a neutron from another atom would cause the first atom to split in two. The splitting atom would release another neutron, which would then strike a neighboring atom, causing it to split, and so on. It was thought that ea...

The Manhattan Project did more than allow the United States to knock Japan out of World War II: it allowed the United States to lead the way into the Nuclear Age. The United States needed a way to end the war quickly without losing many of its own lives, so the president ordered scientists...