The Manhattan Project: Building the Atomic Bomb

Deep in the New Mexico desert, a group of scientists changed the world. They didn't know it at the time, not really. They were racing against the Germans. The fear that Hitler would get the bomb first drove them. Robert Oppenheimer, the theoretical physicist who led the project, assembled the greatest collection of scientific minds ever gathered. They worked in secret, thousands of people, at Los Alamos, Oak Ridge, Hanford. They built factories to produce materials that had never existed before. On July 16, 1945, they tested it. Trinity, they called it. The explosion was brighter than the sun. A mushroom cloud rose into the sky. Oppenheimer later said he thought of a line from the Bhagavad Gita. Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds. The bomb was ready. The war in Europe was already over. But Japan still fought on. The decision to use the bomb is still debated. Hiroshima, August 6, 1945. Nagasaki, August 9. Japan surrendered days later. The atomic age had begun. We've lived with that shadow ever since.