Researched
Manhattan Project
The US-led wartime programme (1942-45) built the first nuclear weapons, tested on 16 July 1945 and used in August on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Open in the interactive tree →At its peak it employed about 125,000 people at Los Alamos, Oak Ridge and Hanford with British and Canadian partners; it was the first giant state-funded science and engineering effort. It shaped postwar science policy, national laboratories, nuclear power and arms control, and left a lasting debate about science and war.
Prerequisites
Unlocks
- Peer Review & Research Bodies1945-1975Wartime science organisation led to Bush's 1945 blueprint for postwar research funding
- Monte Carlo Methods1949
- Nuclear Power1954Civil nuclear power grew from wartime reactors and the reactor know-how of the Project
- Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty1968