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The work of the Manhattan Project was focused at four primary locations: the Met Lab, Oak Ridge, Hanford, and Los Alamos, Hanford. The endeavor nonetheless was truly national, even international, in scope, relying on scientists, engineers, and craft and industrial workers from all over the country, as well as Canada and the United Kingdom, and with specialized parts of the project done in diverse and dispersed locations.

The earliest research work took place at academic institutions. Following the discovery of fission in late 1938, important theoretical work on fission chain reactions was done at Princeton University and Columbia University. Research on uranium enrichment was done at a number of universities. Scientists at the University of Virginia and Columbia University took the lead on centrifuge research. Columbia also was the center for gaseous diffusion research and development. The Radiation Laboratory at the University of California at Berkeley pioneered the electromagnetic method and was a center for nuclear research of all sorts. Experiments at Columbia University and the University of Minnesota quickly established that thermal diffusion was impractical for large-scale separation, but Philip Abelson proposed instead using liquid thermal diffusion and, with support from the Navy, began experimentation first at the Carnegie Institution, then at the Bureau of Standards, and finally at the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, D.C. Participation by scientists working at academic institutions diminished considerably with the focus of much of the research at the Met Lab at the University of Chicago and the relocation there by many scientists and then with the takeover of the project by the Army and the creation of the Los Alamos laboratory.

With Army involvement and the launch of a full-scale effort in late 1942, scores of engineering and industrial firms with plants and factories at locations across the country and beyond were contracted with to provide goods and services. Uranium had to be procured, either from existing stocks or from uranium mines, and then milled and refined in a multi-step process. Most of the uranium used in the project came from Canada and the Congo, but not insignificant amounts came from the Colorado Plateau in the western United States. For milling and refining, the Army instituted three parallel production lines with three different contractors. Except for mills in Colorado close to the ore supply, most facilities in the U.S. were in the Midwest and Northeast.

Many specialized activities took place at existing contractor facilities or at new facilities specifically constructed for the Manhattan Project. With a possible need for heavy water, for example, the Army contracted with the DuPont Company to construct heavy-water plants in connection with ordnance works that the company was building near Morgantown, West Virginia; Montgomery, Alabama; and Dana, Indiana. These would supplement supplies from an existing plant in Trail, British Columbia.

Unplanned or unexpected requirements sometimes resulted in new processes and new facilities. Early in 1943, radiochemists at Los Alamos working on the initiator for the gun assembly found that polonium would be the best material to use. At the time, however, polonium existed only in theory, and it was unclear if sufficiently pure polonium could be manufactured. The Monsanto Chemical Company, in close cooperation with Los Alamos, was contracted to solve the twin problems of polonium production and purification. Properties rented by Monsanto in Dayton, Ohio, became the primary laboratories working on this task, and, as the Dayton Project, succeeded in developing manufacturing processes for polonium.

The Army did much of the research, proving, testing, and training directly related to delivery and use of the bomb at various military installations. Initial bomb casing test drops were done at Dahlgren Naval Proving Ground on the Potomac River in Virginia. Later tests using full-scale dummy bombs and B-29 delivery aircraft were conducted at Muroc Army Air Base—now Edwards Air Force Base—in the California desert north of Los Angeles. Training of the bomb combat unit was conducted at Wendover Army Air Field, an isolated air base in western Utah. The Trinity test of the plutonium device was conducted at the Alamogordo Bombing Range in New Mexico. Final training runs and bomb assembly were done at Tinian Island in the western Pacific. The Tinian airfield was the base for the atomic bomb missions against Japan.

The Manhattan Project—the research, development, production, and testing—culminated in the bombings of the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the only two uses of atomic bombs in combat to date.

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. 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). The map of Manhattan Project facilities in North America is reproduced from Vincent C. Jones, Manhattan: The Army and the Atomic Bomb, United States Army in World War II (Washington: Center of Military History, United States Army, 1988), 463. The photograph of the tank Enrico Fermi used at ground zero soon after the test are courtesy of the Los Alamos National Laboratory.