The year was 1942 when the work to produce an atomic bomb was initiated by American authorities. The project, which would go by the name “Manhattan Project”, was started during World War II as a result of an order from the US President Franklin D. Roosevelt.
The underlying reason was the fear that Nazi Germany’s nuclear program would succeed in producing nuclear weapons, and that in that case they wanted to be the first. The project, which had a modest start, was to be over by the end of the war 130,000 employeesincluding one numerous German-born researchers in exile.
The name “The Manhattan Project”
The project got its name from the fact that the project’s first headquarters were located in Manhattan in New York. In addition to the headquarters in Manhattan, parts of the project were conducted in about 30 different locations scattered in different parts of the United States, Canada and Great Britain. One of the most famous research sites would be “Los Alamos Labratory”, also known as “Site Y”. Located in Texas where the designs for “Little boy” and “Fat man”, the bombs that would eventually be dropped on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, were created.
Robert Oppenheimer – who was he?
Robert Oppenheimer born in 1904 in New York, was an American physicist and professor of physics at the University of California, Berkeley. In 1942 he became director of the “Los Alamos Labratory”. He would become known as the “Father of the Atomic Bomb” due to his contributions to the development of the first nuclear weapon.
“I have become death, the destroyer of worlds”
Or “I have become death, the destroyer of worlds”, a quote from the Hindu poem Bhagavadgita that Oppenheimer is said to have thought to himself during world history’s first test explosion of nuclear weapons, the Trinity test, in New Mexico, according to an interview with him on NBC in 1965.
The atomic bomb cloud over Hiroshima in 1945. Photo: TTOppenheimer – the film
In this year’s blockbuster, which has its theatrical premiere on Friday, July 21 in Sweden, we can do more Cillian Murphy starring Robert Oppenheimer also see Robert Downey Jr in the role of Lewis Strauss and Matt Damon in the role of Leslie Groves, the military leader of the Manhattan Project. The film has been reported to have a budget of approx 100 million dollars.
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