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In 1939, two years before America's entrance into World War II, the physicists Albert Einstein, Leo Szilard, and Eugene Wigner wrote a letter to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, warning of the danger of "a nuclear chain reaction in a large mass of uranium" that could lead to "extremely powerful bombs of a new type." The letter strongly recommended that the United States acquire uranium ore. In response, Roosevelt set up a secret commission to investigate possible military uses of these scientific developments.
On December 6, 1941, the day before Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt ordered the establishment of an atomic bomb project. The physicist Enrico Fermi set up a group at the University of Chicago to create a controlled nuclear chain reaction. On December 2, 1942, Fermi's group succeeded in their attempt to induce a chain reaction, completing the critical first stage of the project.
Meanwhile the bomb-building phase, using the code name Manhattan Project, had begun under the direction of General Leslie Groves, with Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer as scientific director. The site chosen for the project was Los Alamos, an area in the New Mexican desert, about 40 miles north of Santa Fe. The property contained a former boys' boarding school, which provided housing for the first group of scientists. As the program expanded, additional housing had to be built, along with laboratories, offices, and storage spaces. Working under strict security, impelled by the strong sense that they were in a race with German scientists, the physicists, engineers, and technical support staff worked feverishly to complete the task. Finally, on July 16, 1945, Oppenheimer's group, using the code name Trinity, exploded a plutonium bomb in the desert near Alamagordo. The effect on the observers was overwhelming. General Thomas Farrell wrote: "The whole country was lighted with a searing light . . . golden, purple, violet, gray, and blue. It lighted every peak, crevasse, and ridge of the nearby mountain range."
Three weeks later, on August 6, an American bomber, the Enola Gay, dropped a uranium bomb on Hiroshima, followed, on August 9, by a plutonium bomb dropped on Nagasaki. On August 15, Japan ordered the cessation of hostilities, and it formally surrendered on September 2. On November 1, 1952, the United States exploded a hydrogen bomb on Eniwietok atoll in the Pacific, which was a thousand times more powerful than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima.
An underlying concern during the Manhattan Project's existence was the maintenance of secrecy and security. There were thousands of people involved in the project and leaks were perhaps inevitable. The most important of these emanated from Klaus Fuchs, a refugee German physicist at Los Alamos, who transmitted secrets to the Soviet Union through a courier, Harry Gold. The arrest of Fuchs and Gold in 1950 and the subsequent arrest of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg led to the attempt to discredit Oppenheimer, particularly when Oppenheimer spoke out in opposition to the development of the hydrogen bomb.
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