Manhattan Project
Manhattan Project,the U.S. effort in World War II that developed the atomic bomb. The possibility of developing an atomic bomb became evident late in 1938 when scientists in Germany successfully split a uranium atom by bombarding it with neutrons. In the United States, Leo Szilard, a physicist at the University of Chicago, recognized that as a result of such nuclear fission, a critical mass of uranium could produce enough neutrons to generate a chain reaction of radioactive material culminating in an enormous nuclear explosion. Prodded by Szilard, Albert Einstein, worldârenowned German physicist who had fled to the United States, wrote to President Franklin D. Roosevelt on 2 August 1939 warning that the Nazis might develop an atomic bomb.
Roosevelt formed a committee of scientists headed first by Enrico Fermi and subsequently by Vannevar...
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