For over a decade, the Atomic Heritage Foundation has led the charge to establish a Manhattan Project National Historical Park which may soon become a reality. Equally important, we are creating a repository of hundreds of Manhattan Project interviews online. Please help us continue our efforts with a generous contribution.
Over the past year, we have rescued three outstanding collections of interviews for our “Voices of the Manhattan Project” website that were languishing in private archives. Many of these interviews are with leading scientists and military leaders. For example, now you can listen to J. Robert Oppenheimer describe his first meeting with General Leslie Groves: “After lunch, I said, ‘This thing will never get on the rails unless there is a place where people can talk to each other and work together on the problems of the bomb.’ And that made an impression on him.”
In addition, we have recorded dozens of interviews in the last decade, and continue to travel around the country recording veterans’ stories. With your help, we can make more of these interviews available online. We also plan to expand our Manhattan Project Veterans Database, which includes profiles of hundreds of veterans.
Our new "Ranger in Your Pocket" series allows you to take self-guided tours on your smartphone or “virtual” tours online. As part of the B Reactor tour, Leona Woods Marshall describes the physicists’ shock when it failed during startup, “The reactor was dead, just plain dead! Everybody stood around and stared.” With your support, we can produce other programs for Hanford, Los Alamos, and Oak Ridge laced with first-hand accounts. In addition, we plan to produce cross-cutting programs on espionage, innovations, and women.
Please donate generously to support our efforts to preserve the Manhattan Project and showcase the sites, words and experiences of this important part of our collective history.
For more information about the Atomic Heritage Foundation's work watch this video with AHF President Cindy Kelly and Richard Rhodes, Pulitzer Prize-winning author and member of AHF's Board of Directors.