Air Force base at Alamogordo, New Mexico, some 120 miles south of Albuquerque. on July 16, 1945, Los Alamos scientists detonated a plutonium bomb at a test site located on the U.S. Robert Oppenheimer, were responsible for the final construction, testing and delivery of the bombs. This material would be used in the first atomic bomb testing, as well as in “Fat Man,” the atomic bomb dropped over Nagasaki.įinally, The facility at Los Alamos served as the primary “think tank” of the Manhattan Project. Within a year, the world’s first large-scale plutonium reactor was in service at Hanford, and by early 1945 shipments of enriched plutonium from the plant’s three reactors were being sent to Los Alamos every five days. The Oak Ridge facility produced the majority of uranium used to build the “Little Boy” bomb that would be dropped over the Japanese city of Hiroshima in August 1945. How Production WorkedĪ medium-sized reactor built at Oak Ridge produced uranium-235 and plutonium, both of which would be used as vital components in the atomic bomb. All mail and official documents listed the site's location only as P.O. More than 30 laboratories and sites and more than 130,000 people were eventually involved in different facets of nuclear research and development, with three primary locations–in Oak Ridge, Tennessee Richland, Washington and Los Alamos, New Mexico–that became virtual top-secret atomic cities.ĭid you know? The residents of Los Alamos–known as site or project "Y"–lived highly restricted lives: Their mail was censored, their phone calls were monitored and even their interaction with family members was tightly controlled. Much of the initial research had been performed at Columbia University in New York City, and the top-secret research was thereafter known by the code name Manhattan Project.
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