Manhattan Project

The Manhattan Project was the code name given to the American wartime program to build an atomic bomb at the time the project was brought under army control in 1942. Three years later, the United States dropped two atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, with devastating effects. The development and deployment of these weapons permanently altered the dynamics of world politics and shaped the cultural anxieties of the Cold War era. Costing $2 billion and employing hundreds of thousands of workers over the course of the war, the Manhattan Project helped establish Big Science as a dominant form of research and positioned physics as a central component of the military-industrial complex. After briefly outlining the origins and development of the project, ...