Manhattan Project

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Revision as of 17:21, 6 July 2011 by imported>Milton Beychok (Added a "See also" pointer to Los Alamos National Laboratory and to Nuclear attacks against Japan. Deleted empty section headers as not really oertinent to the Manhattan project.)
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See also: Los Alamos National Laboratory and Nuclear attacks against Japan for more details.

The Manhattan Project was the United States project, conducted primarily during World War II, to develop a nuclear weapon. It was commanded by Major General Leslie Groves, with J. Robert Oppenheimer as technical director. Set up in 1942, the project came to a head with the detonation of the first fission device, the Trinity test, in 1945 at White Sands, New Mexico.

It then built the Little Boy used at Hiroshima and the Fat Man bombs used on Nagasaki, on, respectively, August 6 and August 9, 1945.

Major facilities included: