THE MANHATTAN PROJECT

Einstein, Oppenheimer and the race to beat Hitler to the bomb. How a science project in the desert helped win a war

On 2 August 1939, Albert Einstein sent US President Franklin D Roosevelt a letter. In it, he warned that the recent discovery of nuclear fission in Nazi Germany could lead to the creation of “extremely powerful bombs of a new type”. The letter, which had actually been written by Hungarian physicist Leo Szilard, then hinted that the Germans were currently trying to develop such a weapon. Szilard believed that the only way to stop Hitler was to beat him in the race to build an atomic bomb. His hope was that by leveraging Einstein’s fame, they could convince Roosevelt to start a US atomic programme. It worked. Roosevelt’s Advisory Committee on Uranium held its first meeting on 21 October 1939, just weeks after the outbreak of the Second World War.

When the US eventually entered the conflict two years later after the attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, it found itself fighting a war on two fronts: one against Nazi Germany in the west, the other against Japan in the east. Roosevelt now prioritised the atomic project and tasked the US Army Corps of Engineers with building a bomb. They set up offices on the 18th floor of a skyscraper on Broadway in New York City and began work on what was to become the largest government-backed science programme in history. To keep the purpose of their work a secret, it was named after the district they looked out over. So, on 13 August 1942, the Manhattan Project was born.