An Engineering History of the Manhattan Project

Summary

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.This massive effort was required in part because of the enormous difficulty in producing fissile material, and in part because of the enormous uncertainty facing the project: it wasn’t known what the best method for manufacturing the fissile material needed for the bomb would be, what the design of the bomb should be, or whether a workable bomb could even be built. Developing the bomb required resolving this uncertainty, and the project needed to rapidly push forward knowledge and capabilities in many fields: not merely in the realm of nuclear chain reactions and atomic physics, but also in areas like precision explosives, metallurgy, welding, chemical separation, and electronics.Because of the exigencies of war, this work needed to be done extremely rapidly. There wasn’t time to investigate promising approaches sequentially, or wait for more information before picking a particular course. Thus, multiple possible routes to the bomb — differen...