Site Y was a town built from scratch to build the atomic bomb at Los Alamos, New Mexico. The team is working with academics from different backgrounds who have been engaged in projects aimed at tackling societal and scientific challenges. The Insights team generates long-form journalism derived from interdisciplinary research. This article is part of Conversation Insights More than a purely scientific endeavour, it was an engineering and industrial enterprise on a massive scale, employing about 130,000 people at its peak, and perhaps half a million cumulatively. The Manhattan Project absorbed the British and Canadian “Tube Alloys” atomic programme, and drew on a dazzling array of scientific talent. It includes a 1939 letter, signed by Albert Einstein, alerting President Roosevelt to the dangers of a German atomic bomb programme, and tells how, following the United States’ entry into the second world war after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the programme accelerated rapidly under the control of General Leslie Groves. It begins with the realisation that atomic weapons, releasing vast amounts of energy via a nuclear chain reaction, were possible. The extraordinary story of the Manhattan Project, which led to this point, has been told many times. The following half century was one of intense nuclear testing, the residue of which might be the signature for the proposed new epoch of the Anthropocene. Casualty estimates vary widely, but perhaps as many as 150-250,000 people died as a direct result of these two events. Within a month two bombs were dropped on Japan: the first, “Little Boy”, a uranium weapon, at Hiroshima the second, “Fat Man”, a plutonium weapon of the implosion design tested at Trinity, on Nagasaki. This strange, early daybreak was the Trinity Test: humanity’s first encounter with the atomic bomb. Fifteen seconds before 5.30am on July 16 1945, above an area of New Mexico desert so unforgivingly dry that earlier travellers christened it the Jornada del Muerto (Journey of the Dead Man), a new sun flashed into existence and rose rapidly into the sky.
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