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An engineering history of the Manhattan Project

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.

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. A history of Los Alamos notes that in 1942, “the main obstacle to a theoretical understanding of the fission bomb was the uncertainty surrounding existing experimental data, in part the result of inadequate instrumentation and a lack of experience in the new field.” Things were so uncertain that it was not even 100% clear at the beginning of the program that plutonium would produce neutrons. In the last weeks of 1944, James Conant, President of Harvard and chair of the National Research Defense Council which oversaw the Manhattan Project, stated that the “difficulties were still enormous” and “my own bets very much against it.” At that time, the problems of the modulated initiator and of sufficiently precise and accurate detonation still hadn’t been solved.

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