The Manhattan Project: big science and the atom bomb

Abstract

'I am become death, destroyer of worlds.' Robert J. Oppenheimer Established in 1942 at the height of the Second World War, the Manhattan Project was a dramatic quest to beat the Nazis to a deadly goal: the atomic bomb. At Los Alamos and several other sites, American, British, Canadian and refugee European scientists, together with engineers, technicians and many other workers, laboured to design and build nuclear weapons. With their huge experiments, complex organisations and lavish funding, these institutes represented a new form of scientific organisation: 'Big Science'. Their efforts produced 'Little Boy' and 'Fat Man', the bombs that ultimately destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945. In The Manhattan Project, Jeff Hughes offers a lively reinterpretation of the key elements in the history and mythology of twentieth-century science.