Inside the Tech Area
The Manhattan Project had three primary sites: Los Alamos, NM; Oak Ridge, TN; and Hanford, WA. The laboratory at Los Alamos, headed by Oppenheimer and staffed by American and refugee physicists, was the scientific center of the project.
Los Alamos was home to the design work on the bomb mechanisms. Oak Ridge and Hanford, by contrast, were devoted to engineering and industrial processes. Speed was of the essence for the Manhattan Project, so rather than try to find the most efficient method to produce an atomic bomb, Groves ordered that all possible methods should be pursued simultaneously.
The Los Alamos technical area was unique. General Leslie Groves, military director of the Manhattan Project, was at first very against anything but a need-to-know system of information. But thanks to the persuasion of J. Robert Oppenheimer, top level scientists were allowed to discuss their work with each other, thus expediting the advancement of the project.
Manhattan Project Slang
"Site Y"-was the code name for the Los Alamos laboratory
"Gadget"- was the nickname of the first atomic bomb which was detonated at the Trinity test site outside Alamagordo, New Mexico on July 16, 1945. This plutonium implosion-type bomb was similar to the "Fat Man" bomb dropped on the Japanese city of Nagasaki.
"Jumbo"- was the name given to the large steel vessel which was originally designed to contain the first atomic explosion, but was never used.
"Tickling the dragon's tail"-was a coined term for the criticality experiments to determine the amount of fissionable material needed for a sustained chain reaction. There was always an element of danger involved. Two Los Alamos physicists lost their lives while conducting the experiment: Harry Daghlian and Louis Slotin, Jr.
"Met Lab"- was short for the Metallurgical Laboratory at the University of Chicago. Much of the theoretical and experimental work on uranium and plutonium took place here. Directed by Nobel laureate Arthur Holly Compton, it was home to many of the foremost physicists and chemists of the time. It was here that Nobel laureate Enrico Fermi first achieved a sustained chain reaction on December 2, 1942.
"Oralloy"- was the code name often used for the enriched uranium being produced at Oak Ridge.
"Rad Lab" - was the short name for the Radiological Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley. Its director was Nobel laureate Ernest O. Lawrence. He gained recognition for his 60" cyclotron and was the driving force behind the electromagnetic separation of uranium that formed the basis for the Y-12 complex at Oak Ridge. In addition, Berkeley was the center for theoretical physics in the United States and spawned such notables as J. Robert Oppenheimer, Glenn Seaborg, and Emilio Segrè.
About the selection of members of the project