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THE MANHATTAN PROJECT AND THE SECOND WORLD WAR (1939-1945)
Events >
Dawn of the Atomic Era, 1945
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The War Enters Its Final Phase, 1945
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Debate Over How to Use the Bomb, Late Spring
1945
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The Trinity Test, July 16, 1945
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Safety and the Trinity Test, July 1945
-
Evaluations of Trinity, July 1945
-
Potsdam and the Final Decision to Bomb, July
1945
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The Atomic Bombing of Hiroshima, August 6, 1945
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The Atomic Bombing of Nagasaki, August 9, 1945
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Japan Surrenders, August 10-15, 1945
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The Manhattan Project and the Second World War,
1939-1945
The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the
surrender of Japan
were the last acts of the Second World War. The most
destructive weapon in the history of combat had helped bring
an end to the most destructive conflict in human
history.
The Manhattan Project and the devastation that its successful
outcome wrought are inexplicable outside the context of the
Second World War. The project began as a race to acquire
the bomb
before Nazi Germany did, and the prospects of an atomic bomb in the hands of one of
the world's most oppressive and murderous regimes were
chilling indeed. In a war initiated
by German aggression and dreams of conquest, tens of millions
died. Few European nations escaped grievous injury, but
nowhere was the suffering worse than in Poland, where six
million or more lost their lives, and in the Soviet Union,
where more than 25 million may have died. Other Allies
suffered terribly as well, including about 600,000 deaths in
France and 400,000 dead Britons (including many in the Pacific
Theater). Approximately six million Jews of all nations
died during the Holocaust. Even small and too often
forgotten nations suffered horribly. In Yugoslavia, for
example, as many as two million people may have died during
the war. Germany itself lost over four
million. The stakes in the race for the bomb were
thus very high. Tens of million more might have died --
and Western civilization itself might have been eclipsed -- if
Germany had proven the victor.
The loss of life in the Pacific war was equally
horrific. Victims of Japanese aggression suffered
terribly, from Korea to the Philippines to Southeast Asia to
the islands of the Pacific. The nation hardest hit,
however, was probably China. Beginning with the invasion
by Japan in 1931, perhaps 15 million Chinese died at the hands
of the Japanese Army or from the war's attendant starvation
and disease. The toll on Asia and the Pacific was
psychological as well as physical; controversy still rages
over the numerous war crimes committed by the Japanese Army,
including biological warfare experiments conducted on
civilians, the execution of prisoners of war, and wholesale
rape and murder committed against entire cities, such as
happened in 1937 in the Chinese city of Nanking where 200,000
or more Chinese civilians may have died. Well over two
million Japanese soldiers and civilians lost their lives
during the war, of which perhaps as many as 300,000, or even
more, were as a result of the two atomic bombings. About
300,000 Americans died during the wars against Germany and
Japan. Though no one will ever know for certain, the
worldwide death toll for the war from 1931 to 1945 probably
reached 60 million.
The atomic bomb was the scientific and technological
exclamation point at the end of this worst-of-all wars that
was won by technologically-advanced industrial might.
That the bomb was completed by the United States in time to
help finish the conflict is remarkable. Most of the
theoretical breakthroughs in nuclear physics that made it
possible dated back less than twenty-five years, and, with new
findings occurring faster than they could be absorbed by
practitioners in the field, many fundamental concepts in
nuclear physics and chemistry had yet to be
confirmed by laboratory experimentation. Nor was there
any conception initially of the design and engineering
difficulties that would be involved in translating what was
known theoretically into working devices capable of releasing
the enormous energy of the atomic nucleus in a predictable
fashion. The industrial base created in a handful of
years to transform these theories into reality was, by 1945,
comparable in size to the American automobile industry.
Approximately 130,000 people were employed by the project at
its peak, from laborers to Nobel Prize winners. The
Manhattan Project was as much a triumph of engineering and
industry as of science.
Without the leadership of Leslie Groves and
Robert Oppenheimer, as well as that of
Crawford Greenewalt of DuPont and other contractors, the
revolutionary breakthroughs in nuclear science achieved by
Enrico Fermi, Niels Bohr,
Ernest Lawrence, and their colleagues would
not have produced the atomic bomb during World War II.
Despite numerous obstacles, the United States was able to
combine the forces of science, government, academia, the
military, and industry into an organization that took nuclear
physics from the laboratory and on to the battlefield with a
weapon of awesome destructive capability, making clear the
importance of basic scientific research to national
defense. The Manhattan Project became the organizational
model behind the remarkable achievements of American "big
science" during the second half of the twentieth
century. When President John F. Kennedy announced his
goal of putting a man on the moon by the end of the 1960s, it
was the Manhattan Project that he invoked for its spirit of
commitment and patriotism.
To view the next "event" of the Manhattan Project, proceed to
"1945-present: Postscript -- The Nuclear Age."
-
The War Enters Its Final Phase, 1945
-
Debate Over How to Use the Bomb, Late Spring
1945
-
The Trinity Test, July 16, 1945
-
Safety and the Trinity Test, July 1945
-
Evaluations of Trinity, July 1945
-
Potsdam and the Final Decision to Bomb, July
1945
-
The Atomic Bombing of Hiroshima, August 6, 1945
-
The Atomic Bombing of Nagasaki, August 9, 1945
-
Japan Surrenders, August 10-15, 1945
-
The Manhattan Project and the Second World War,
1939-1945
Previous Next
Sources and notes for this page.
Portions of the text for this page were adapted from, and
portions were taken directly from
Office of History and Heritage Resources
publications:
F. G. Gosling,
The Manhattan Project: Making the Atomic Bomb
(DOE/MA-0001; Washington: History Division, Department of
Energy, January 1999), 54, and
The Signature Facilities of the Manhattan Project
(Washington: History Division, Department of Energy, 2001),
1. The estimates of deaths from the war are from Gerhard L.
Weinberg,
A World at Arms: A Global History of World War II
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 322 and
894-895, and Chapter 1, "Rubble: The World in 1945," in
Thomas G. Paterson,
On Every Front: The Making and Unmaking of the Cold
War, Revised Edition (New York: W. W. Norton and Company,
1992), 3-20. The photograph of the post-war celebration is
courtesy the
Oak Ridge National Laboratory. The photograph of the Frenchman watching German troops
enter Paris, and of the baby in Shanghai, 1937, are both
courtesy the
National Archives. The
map of the MED facilities in North America is reproduced
from Vincent C. Jones,
Manhattan: The Army and the Atomic Bomb, United
States Army in World War II (Washington: Center of Military
History, United States Army, 1988), 63. Click
here for more information on the comic book
image.
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