UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY

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Even though none of the major facilities of the Manhattan Project were based in California, the University of California at Berkeley had a significant role in the management of the bomb project. Berkeley was home to several of the leading American physicists, such as J. Robert Oppenheimer and Ernest Lawrence, and to chemists such as Glenn Seaborg.

The Berkeley campus was the original University of California, founded in 1868 as the state's land-grant university. The university grew over the next fifty years, but it only became a leading research university during the presidency of Robert Sproul, from 1930 to 1958. Sproul expanded the University of California system throughout the state, creating campuses to perform various educational functions. Berkeley, the original campus, became one of the country's foremost research universities during his tenure. The strong physics department at the university contributed scientists and administrators to the Manhattan Project.

Plutonium was first identified at Berkeley, by a young physicist named Edwin McMillan. McMillan studied the fission products of uranium, and in 1940 he recognized an unknown substance which he identified as element 93, which he named "neptunium," after the planet Neptune. He suspected that this element decayed into element 94, plutonium. The actual identification of plutonium was left to Seaborg when McMillan went east to work on radar at MIT. Seaborg was responsible for identifying the basic chemical and nuclear properties of plutonium, including its high potential for fission. As the acknowledged expert on the properties of plutonium, Seaborg later led the effort to chemically separate plutonium from uranium and other reactor products.

Lawrence's research group worked on the cyclotrons at the Rad Lab. In 1940 the 60-inch cyclotron was devoted to bombarding uranium with neutrons to produce plutonium for analysis. By 1941 Lawrence realized that he could also use his cyclotrons as mass spectrometers. In this way he could separate atoms of uranium-235 from uranium-238. This technique was eventually applied on an industrial scale at the Y-12 Separation Plant at Oak Ridge. Lawrence named the modified cyclotrons "Calutrons" after the University of California.

Berkeley was also home to Oppenheimer before he led the research program at Los Alamos. Even after his move to Los Alamos, Oppenheimer maintained the ties between the university and the project. In order to add another level of secrecy to the activities on the mesa in New Mexico, the University of California bore the responsibility for managing the operations at the lab. However, these operations were secret, so the university managed these operations without knowing what was going on. The university opened an office in Los Angeles which received materials for the lab and shipped them to Los Alamos. To this day the laboratory at Los Alamos is managed by the University of California.

Sources and notes for this page

The text for this page is original to the Department of Energy's History Program. Major sources consulted include the following .Richard G. Hewlett and Oscar E. Anderson, Jr., The New World, 1939-1946: Volume I, A History of the United States Atomic Energy Commission (Washington: U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, 1972); Manhattan District History, Book V - Electromagnetic Project; Gregg Herken, Brotherhood of the Bomb: The Tangled Lives and Loyalties of Robert Oppenheimer, Ernest Lawrence, and Edward Teller (New York: Henry Holt, 2002); Lillian Hoddeson, et. al., Critical Assembly: A Technical History of Los Alamos during the Oppenheimer Years, 1943-1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); and Peter J. Westwick, The National Labs: Science in an American System, 1947-1974 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000). See also the Web Exhibit from the American Institute of Physics, "Ernest Lawrence and the Cyclotron," at https://history.aip.org/exhibits/lawrence/index.htm The portrait of Robert G. Sproul appears courtesy of the Los Alamos National Laboratory. The photograph of Ernest Lawrence (and others) in front of a cyclotron is courtesy the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.