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BRINGING IT ALL TOGETHER (1942-1945)
Events
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Bringing It All Together, 1942-1945
No matter how much enriched uranium and plutonium might
be produced at Oak Ridge and Hanford, it would all come to
nothing if workable weapon designs could not be developed
in time. To this end, in late 1942 Leslie Groves
established a
bomb research and development laboratory at Los Alamos in the remote mountains
of northern New Mexico. The
early work at Los Alamos
concentrated primarily on defining the problems that
needed to be solved.
Basic research on a variety of theoretical
issues
continued throughout 1943. By 1944, it had
become clear that, while a simple and reliable
"gun-type" design could be used for a uranium
bomb, the considerably more complicated
implosion method
would be required to produce a plutonium weapon.
With the successful
Allied landings in France on "D-Day," June 6,
1944, the war in Europe appeared to be entering its final
phase. Germany ceased to be the primary intended
target. General Groves and his advisers turned their
sights on Japan, and the rush was on to complete the
atomic bomb in time to end the war in the Pacific.
Everything began to come together in the first months of
1945.
Oak Ridge and Hanford produced enough enriched
uranium and enough plutonium
for at least one bomb using each. At Los Alamos
bomb designs were finalized, and by the spring preparations had begun for the
testing and use of the world's first nuclear
weapons. Meanwhile, word reached the Manhattan
Project from the
ALSOS mission
that Germany was not close to completing an atomic
bomb. At the same time,
espionage at Los Alamos
was delivering critical weapon design information to the
Soviet Union.
To learn more about any of these events associated with
bringing together all the various aspects of nuclear
weapons development, choose a web page from the menu
below. To continue with a quick overview of the
Manhattan Project, jump ahead to the description of the
"Dawn of the Atomic Era, 1945."
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Sources and notes for this page.
The text for this page is original to the Department of
Energy's
Office of History and Heritage Resources. The photograph of the "Tech Area" at Los Alamos is courtesy the
Los Alamos National Laboratory. The photograph of Eric Jette, Charles
Critchfield, and Robert Oppenheimer is
reprinted in
Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory,
Los Alamos: Beginning of an Era, 1943-1945
(Los Alamos: Public Relations Office, Los Alamos
Scientific Laboratory, ca. 1967-1971), 20. The photograph of
Leslie Groves and Oppenheimer is
courtesy the
Department of Energy.
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