| Term Paper Title | The Manhattan Project |
| # of Words | 805 |
| # of Pages (250 words per page double spaced) | 3.22 |
The Manhattan Project
Jayson from Dallas, Texas.
The Manhattan Project was the code name for the US effort during World War II
to produce the atomic bomb. It was named for the Manhattan Engineer District
of the US Army Corps of Engineers, since much of the early research was done
in New York City. It was top-secret engineering and industrial project in
the United States during World War II, started by refugee physicists in the
United States, the program was slowly organized after nuclear fission was
discovered by German scientists in 1938, and many US scientists were scared
that Hitler would attempt to build a fission bomb.
Szilard, a nuclear scientist then living in England, was the first idealize a
realistic modern atomic bomb and came up with the basis to the project. He
was obsessed with the fear that the Nazis would build the atom bomb first.
He got together with some of his friends including Einstein who talked to
Roosevelt. Roosevelt approved the project in 1939
Physicists from 1939 onward conducted much research to find answers to such
questions as how many neutrons were emitted in each fission, which elements
would not capture the neutrons, would they moderate or reduce their velocity,
and whether only the lighter and more rare isotope of uranium (U-235) or the
common isotope (U-238) could be used. They learned that each fission releases
a few neutrons. A chain reaction, therefore, was theoretically possible, if
not too many neutrons escaped from the mass or were captured by impurities.
In 1942 General Leslie Groves was chosen to lead the project, and he
immediately purchased a site at Oak Ridge, Tennessee for facilities to
separate the necessary uranium-235 from the much more common uranium-238. He
also appointed theoretical physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer as director of the
weapons laboratory, who ordered the construction of the headquarters on an
isolated mesa at Los Alamos, New Mexico.
After much difficulty an absorbent barrier suitable for separating isotopes
of uranium was developed and installed in the Oak Ridge gaseous diffusion
plant. Finally, in 1945, a uranium-235 of bomb purity was shipped to Los
Alamos, where it was fashioned into a gun-type weapon. In a barrel, one piece
of uranium was fired at another, together forming a supercritical, explosive
mass.
Estimating the explosive power required knowledge of many other nuclear
properties, including the cross-section (a measure of the probability of an
encounter between particles that result in a specified effect) for nuclear
processes of neutrons in uranium and other elements. Fast neutrons could only
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