Manhattan Project Scientists & Leaders

On Wednesday afternoon, 12/2/42, Compton took me over to West Stands to see the crucial experiment on Pile #1. When we got there, the control rod had been pulled out to within 3 inch of the point where K would be 1.0. The rod had been pulled out about 12 inch to reach this point. […]

From Fermi’s Own Story by Enrico Fermi The year was 1939. A world war was about to start. The new possibilities appeared likely to be important, not only for peace, but also for war. A group of physicists in the United States—including Leo Szilard, Walter Zinn, now director of Argonne National Laboratory, Herbert Anderson, and myself—agreed […]

From The Uranium People by Leona Marshall Libby In the spring of 1938, Lise Meitner, being a Jew, had to leave Berlin and went to a job offered her by Manne Siegbahn in the Nobel Institute of Stockholm. Being Austrian, she had not up until then been seriously affected by Hitler’s persecution of Jews; however, in the […]

From “Voices of the Manhattan Project,” 2003 Interview with Jay Wechsler The Ws are pretty far down the alphabet, and I became a little concerned that all the good jobs might disappear. But they finally got to me and I went inside. The person who was interviewing me had a pretty heavy Austrian accent. He asked me […]

The attached detailed report concerns the possibility of constructing a “super-bomb” which utilizes the energy stored in atomic nuclei as a source of energy. The energy liberated in the explosion of such a super-bomb is about the same as that produced by the explosion of 1000 tons of dynamite. This energy is liberated in a […]

From Memoirs: A Twentieth-Century Journey in Science and Politics by Edward Teller As 1939 began, I was looking forward to seeing Fermi at the fifth theoretical conference at George Washington University, scheduled for January 19–20. Much to Geo’s [George Gamow’s] and my pleasure, Niels Bohr, who had just arrived from Copenhagen to work for a few weeks […]

OFFICE FOR EMERGENCY MANAGEMENTOFFICE OF SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT1530 P STREET NW.WASHINGTON, D.C. Vannevar BushDirectorMarch 9, 1942 The President,The White House,Washington, D.C. Dear Mr. President: On October 9, 1941, Mr. [Henry] Wallace and I presented to you the status of research in this country and Great Britain on a possible powerful explosive. In accordance with […]

22nd May 1944  The Rt. Hon. Winston S. Churchill, C.H., M.P. Sir, In accordance with your kind permission, I have the honour to send you a brief report about my impressions of the great Anglo-American enterprise, in the scientific aspects of which I have been given the opportunity to participate together with my British colleagues. […]

Albert EinsteinOld Grove Rd.Nassau PointPeconic, Long Island August 2nd, 1939 F.D. Roosevelt,President of the United States,White HouseWashington, D.C. Sir: Some recent work by E. Fermi and L. Szilard, which has been communicated to me in manuscript, leads me to expect that the element uranium may be turned into a new and important source of energy […]