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Definition: Manhattan Project from Philip's Encyclopedia

Code name given to the development of the US atomic bomb during World War 2. Work on the bomb was carried out in great secrecy by a team including US physicists Enrico Fermi and J. Robert Oppenheimer. The first test took place on July 16, 1945, near Alamogordo, New Mexico, and the next month the US Air Force dropped bombs on Japan.

Manhattan Project

From The Columbia Encyclopedia
the wartime effort to design and build the first nuclear weapons ( atomic bombs ). With the discovery of fission in 1939, it became clear to scientists that certain radioactive materials could be used to make a bomb of unprecented power. U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt responded by creating the Uranium Committee to investigate this possibility. Progress was slow until Aug., 1942, when the project was placed under U.S. Army control and reorganized. The Manhattan Engineer District (MED) was the official name of the project. The MED's commanding officer, Gen. Leslie R. Groves , was given almost unlimited powers to call upon the military, industrial, and scientific resources of the nation. A $2-billion effort was required to obtain sufficient amounts of the two necessary isotopes, uranium-235 and plutonium-239. At Oak Ridge, Tenn., the desired uranium-235 was separated from the much more abundant uranium-238 by a laborious process called gaseous diffusion. At the Hanford…
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Full text Article MANHATTAN PROJECT

From The Oxford Encyclopedia of American Military and Diplomatic History
During World War II, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt authorized the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to develop the atomic bomb. Officially codenamed “Development of Substitute Materials,” the project came to be known by its nickname: the “Manhattan” Project. Late in 1938, scientists in Germany…
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Full text Article Manhattan Project

From Britannica Concise Encyclopedia
(1942–45) U.S. government research project that produced the first atomic bomb . In 1939 U.S. scientists urged Pres. Franklin D. Roosevelt to establish a program to study the potential military use of fission, and $6,000 was appropriated. By 1942 the project was code-named Manhattan, after the site…
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Full text Article Manhattan Project

From Encyclopedia of the American Presidency
Dramatic scientific breakthroughs in the 1930s led to the belief that nuclear energy could be used to develop a weapon of mass destruction. As World War II began, fears that the Germans were developing such a weapon led Albert Einstein to encourage the U.S. development of such a weapon. President…
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Full text Article Manhattan Project

From The Oxford Encyclopedia of the History of American Science, Medicine, and Technology
The Manhattan Project refers to the Army Corps of Engineers's “Manhattan Engineer District,” the code name of the military project established in June 1942 for atomic-bomb research and development. In the years leading up to World War II, many scientists pondered building nuclear weapons, …
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The Manhattan Project was a secret U.S. weapons program that applied nuclear technology to create the first atomic bombs. Although other nations, including Great Britain, Germany, the Soviet Union, and Japan, had modest nuclear research programs during World War II, only the United States had the…
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Full text Article MANHATTAN PROJECT

From The Reader's Companion to American History
America's development of the atomic bomb was called the Manhattan Project because it was administered after 1942 by a section of the army code-named the Manhattan District. Pressure for the project began in 1939, when two scientists in Berlin accomplished atomic fission in uranium. Believing that…
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Full text Article Manhattan Project

From The Columbia Encyclopedia
the wartime effort to design and build the first nuclear weapons ( atomic bombs ). With the discovery of fission in 1939, it became clear to scientists that certain radioactive materials could be used to make a bomb of unprecented power. U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt responded by creating…
| 406 words
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Full text Article Manhattan Project

From Brewer's Dictionary of Modern Phrase and Fable
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Full text Article Manhattan Project

From Collins English Dictionary
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Full text Article Manhattan Project

From Dictionary of Energy
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