The Manhattan Project Nuclear Science and Technology Developments at Los Alamos: A Special Issue of Nuclear Technology

The year 2020 marked the 75th anniversary of the Trinity experiment, the world’s first nuclear explosion, on July 16, 1945, near Alamogordo, New Mexico. Trinity was a vital proof step toward the culmination of the Manhattan Project and the end of World War II. The technical accomplishments made by scientists and engineers from the United States, United Kingdom, and Canada (some originating in Germany, Hungary, Italy, France, and other countries) were recognized by many events in 2020, including a visit to New Mexico’s Los Alamos National Laboratory by U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) dignitaries; historical documentaries; and the publication of an excellent book, Trinity, by Oxford physicist Frank Close. The importance of Trinity as a foundational accomplishment for the broad nuclear science and engineering community is clear; indeed, New Mexico’s chapter of the American Nuclear Society (ANS) is referred to as the Trinity Section. The events surrounding Trinity have even entered into high culture with recent performances of John Adams’s opera Doctor Atomic in San Francisco, Amsterdam, Chicago, New York, and Santa Fe. At a high-powered meeting in May 1945, with Vannevar Bush, Gen. George Marshall, Gen. Leslie Groves, Arthur Compton, James Conant, Robert Oppenheimer, Enrico Fermi, and Ernest Lawrence in attendance, Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson spoke the prescient (if somewhat grandiose) words: “This project [the Manhattan Project] should not be considered simply in terms of military weapons, but as a new relationship of man to the universe. This discovery might be compared to the discoveries of the Copernican theory and of the laws of gravity, but far more important than these in its effect on the lives of men. While the advances in the field to date had been fostered by the needs of war, it was important to realize that the implications of the project went far beyond the needs of the present war. It must be controlled if possible to make it an assurance of future peace rather than menace to civilization.” Our universities’ science and engineering luminaries, along with their best graduate students, came together at various Manhattan Project locations across the country under intense pressure and worked at a frenetic wartime pace to successfully develop a workable atomic bomb. This gathering of scientific and technical excellence was a unique event in our history. Their collective effort led to a remarkable outpouring of scientific creativity in nuclear and material sciences and in hydrodynamics and neutronics computations and led to the creation of what would become today’s DOE national laboratories. The historic effort was facilitated in large part by Oppenheimer’s superb (and, at the time, unproven) leadership. The Manhattan Project, together with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Radiation Laboratory’s wartime work on radar and E. O. Lawrence’s accelerator research, represents the beginnings of big science, bringing thousands of researchers together to solve problems—a model that has since proved so effective for the scientific community in endeavors such as the field of particle physics, the sequencing of the human genome, and the discovery of gravitational waves. To recognize the Trinity anniversary, this special issue of Nuclear Technology focuses on aspects of the science and engineering breakthroughs made during the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos (then called Project Y), *E-mail: mbchadwick@lanl.gov This material is published by permission of Los Alamos National Laboratory, for the U.S. Department of Energy under Contract No. 89233218CNA000001. The US Government retains for itself, and others acting on its behalf, a paid-up, non-exclusive, and irrevocable worldwide license in said article to reproduce, prepare derivative works, distribute copies to the public, and perform publicly and display publicly, by or on behalf of the Government. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way. a The Interim Committee was chartered on May 4, 1945, by President Truman after he learned of the Manhattan Project following Roosevelt’s death, to advise the government on future directions and controls of nuclear technology. NUCLEAR TECHNOLOGY · VOLUME 207 · iii–viii · SUPPLEMENT 1 · 2021 DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2021.1903301