Berkeley, California

Scientists meet at UC-Berkeley in 1940. L to R, Ernest Lawrence, Arthur Compton, Vannevar Bush, James Conant, Karl Compton, Alfred Loomis.

US Department of Energy/Public Domain

The campus of the University of California, Berkeley played a major role in the success of the Manhattan Project. It was here that scientists, including J. Robert Oppenheimer, Glenn Seaborg, and Ernest Lawrence taught and conducted research that contributed to the development of the world’s first atomic bombs.

One key faculty member was physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, who would soon become director of the top-secret Los Alamos Laboratory. Two others, chemists Glenn Seaborg and Edwin McMillan, discovered plutonium, which fueled the Fat Man atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki, Japan, on August 9, 1945.

Physicist Ernest Orlando Lawrence headed Berkeley’s Radiation Laboratory (Rad Lab), where he and his team developed the cyclotron, a vacuum tank with a strong magnetic field that could separate uranium atoms into two paths as they revolved. His invention, named Calutron—a combination of California and cyclotron—was used in Oak Ridge by young women hired by the thousands to enrich uranium for use in Little Boy, the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, Japan on August 6, 1945. These workers are known as Calutron Girls.

The Rad Lab, still in operation today, was renamed the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory after Lawrence’s death in 1958.

Bibliography

University of California, Berkely, Manhattan Project: Places > Other Places > UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY, accessed November 26, 2025.