Last updated: April 4, 2023
Article
Manhattan Project Science at Los Alamos

US DEPARTMENT OF ENERGY

US DEPARTMENT OF ENERGY
Oppenheimer recruited the majority of the Los Alamos staff personally, traveling to universities throughout the country including Cornell, Princeton, MIT, the University of Chicago, and Berkeley. The majority of scientists that Oppenheimer contacted were willing and eager to join the new project. By spring of 1943, most of the Los Alamos staff had arrived at the isolated location on a mesa in New Mexico, the former site of an all-boys preparatory school.
While Los Alamos was under construction, Oppenheimer developed four different divisions within the new laboratory, with each one having a specific purpose. Hans Bethe, a Cornell professor, was tasked to lead the Theoretical Division. Robert Bacher, also a Cornell professor, was assigned the head of the Experimental Physics Division. Joseph Kennedy from Berkeley led the Chemical Division, and Navy Captain William S. Parsons was assigned to lead the Ordinance Division. The majority of research equipment used at Los Alamos either arrived with or was shipped to Los Alamos by the scientists themselves.

US DEPARTMENT OF ENERGY
The Gadget, an implosion-type nuclear weapon, held a core of subcritical plutonium which would reach criticality when high explosives surrounding the core detonated causing the core to compress instantly. Selected in September 1944, the test location for the Gadget was located in New Mexico’s Alamogordo Bombing and Gunnery Range, a flat, calm desert area approximately 200 miles southeast of the Los Alamos Laboratory. Construction at the Trinity site, the name given to both the test location and overall development program, began that fall, with over 250 workers transporting materials to construct three observation shelters, run electricity, provide over 50 cameras to record the test, and construct a 100-foot-tall steel tower to attach the Gadget.

US DEPARTMENT OF ENERGY

US DEPARTMENT OF ENERGY
- Kelly, Cynthia C., ed., The Manhattan Project. New York: Black Dog & Leventhal Publishers, 2007.
- Rhodes, Richard. The Making of the Atomic Bomb. New York: Simon and Schuster Paperbacks, 1986.