Manhattan Project

            It was a day in the eyes of Americans as a day to remember. A day that our country was caught off-guard by the Japanese, in what brought us into the WWII. On December 7, 1941, the U.S. crawled out of isolation and declared war on Japan after it's devastating attack on Pearl Harbor. .
             In 1939, the Nazis were rumored to be developing an atomic bomb. The United States announced its own program under the Army Corps of Engineers in June 1942. The United States needed to build an atomic weapon before Germany or Japan did. It began with a letter to President Roosevelt by Albert Einstein. (Copy of this doc. at end of report). With the help of Leo Szilard, Einstein convinced President Roosevelt that Germany might just be using uranium and fission research to create a new type of super bomb. Einstein helped the United States start the same research of uranium and fission that was taking place in Germany. This new project was called the Manhattan project. It was called this because of the previous research that was done at Columbia University located on the Manhattan Island in New York. But it was not until the day after the Pearl Harbor attack, on December 6, 1941, that the necessary funds were given to begin the project. These funds gave Enrico Fermi the opportunity to achieve the first controllable chain reaction which he successfully did on December 2, 1942. Einstein was never officially part of the Manhattan Project, but he took the important role in getting it started. In the summer of 1942, Oppenhemier a highly renounced physicist put together a conference in Berkeley, California where top physicist discussed the possibility of an atomic bomb. In 1943, Oppenheimer became the scientific director for the Manhattan Project. Oppenheimer was involved through every step of the project. .
             There were two different facilities that were built for the Manhattan Project to produce the needed elements-uranium and plutonium.