The Los Alamos Laboratory, also known as Project Y, was a secret scientific laboratory established by the Manhattan Project and overseen by the University of California during World War II. It was operated in partnership with the United States Army. Its mission was to design and build the first atomic bombs. J. Robert Oppenheimer was its first director, serving from 1943 to December 1945, when he was succeeded by Norris Bradbury. In order to enable scientists to freely discuss their work while preserving security, the laboratory was located on the isolated Pajarito Plateau in northern New Mexico. The wartime laboratory occupied buildings that had once been part of the Los Alamos Ranch School. The development effort initially focused on a gun-type fission weapon using plutonium called Thin Man. In April 1944, the Los Alamos Laboratory determined that the rate of spontaneous fission in plutonium bred in a nuclear reactor was too great due to the presence of plutonium-240 and would cause a predetonation, a nuclear chain reaction before the core was fully assembled. Oppenheimer then reorganized the laboratory and orchestrated an all-out and ultimately successful effort on an alternative design proposed by John von Neumann, an implosion-type nuclear weapon, which was called Fat Man. A variant of the gun-type design known as Little Boy was developed using uranium-235. Chemists at the Los Alamos Laboratory developed methods of purifying uranium and plutonium, the latter a metal that only existed in microscopic quantities when Project Y began. Its metallurgists found that plutonium had unexpected properties, but were nonetheless able to cast it into metal spheres. The laboratory built the Water Boiler, an aqueous homogeneous reactor that was the third reactor in the world to become operational. It also researched the Super, a hydrogen bomb that would use a fission bomb to ignite a nuclear fusion reaction in deuterium and tritium. The Fat Man design was tested in the Trinity nuclear test in July 1945. Project Y personnel formed pit crews and assembly teams for the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and participated in the bombing as weaponeers and observers. After the war ended, the laboratory supported the Operation Crossroads nuclear tests at Bikini Atoll. A new Z Division was created to control testing, stockpiling and bomb assembly activities, which were concentrated at Sandia Base. The Los Alamos Laboratory became Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory in 1947.
Origins
Nuclear fission and atomic bombs The discovery of the neutron by James Chadwick in 1932, followed by the discovery of nuclear fission by chemists Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann in 1938, and its explanation (and naming) by physicists Lise Meitner and Otto Frisch soon after, opened up the possibility of a controlled nuclear chain reaction using uranium. At the time, few scientists in the United States regarded an atomic bomb as practical, but the possibility that a German atomic bomb project would develop atomic weapons concerned refugee scientists from Nazi Germany and from other fascist countries (Italy or Hungary), leading to the drafting of the Einstein–Szilard letter in August 1939 to warn President Franklin D. Roosevelt. This prompted preliminary research in the United States, beginning in late 1939.
Progress was slow in the United States, but in Britain, Otto Frisch and Rudolf Peierls, two refugee physicists from Germany at the University of Birmingham, examined the theoretical issues involved in developing, producing and using atomic bombs. They considered what would happen to a sphere of pure uranium-235, and found that not only could a chain reaction occur, but that it might require as little as 1 kilogram (2.2 lb) of uranium-235 to unleash the energy of hundreds of tons of TNT. Their superior, Mark Oliphant, took the Frisch–Peierls memorandum to Sir Henry Tizard, the chairman of the Committee for the Scientific Survey of Air Warfare (CSSAW), who in turn passed it on to George Paget Thomson, to whom the CSSAW had delegated responsibility for uranium research. CSSAW set up the MAUD Committee to investigate. In its final report in July 1941, the MAUD Committee concluded that an atomic bomb was not only feasible, but might be produced as early as 1943. In response, the British government created a nuclear-weapons project known as Tube Alloys. There was still little urgency in the United States, which unlike Britain was not yet engaged in World War II, but Oliphant flew there in late August 1941, and spoke to American scientists including his friend Ernest Lawrence at the University of California. He not only managed to convince them that an atomic bomb was feasible, but inspired Lawrence to convert his 37-inch (94 cm) cyclotron into a giant mass spectrometer for isotope separation, a technique Oliphant had pioneered in 1934. In turn, Lawrence brought in his friend and colleague Robert Oppenheimer to double-check the physics of the MAUD Committee report, which was discussed at a meeting at the General Electric Research Laboratory in Schenectady, New York, on 21 October 1941. In December 1941, the S-1 Section of the Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD) placed Arthur H. Compton in charge of overseeing the scientific research for production and design of the bomb. He delegated bomb design and the making of fast neutron calculations—the key to calculations of critical mass and weapon detonation—to Gregory Breit, who was given the title of "Co-ordinator of Rapid Rupture", with Oppenheimer as an assistant. But Breit disagreed with other scientists working at the Metallurgical Laboratory, particularly Enrico Fermi, over the security arrangements, and resigned on 18 May 1942. Compton then appointed Oppenheimer to replace Breit. John H. Manley, a physicist at the Metallurgical Laboratory, was assigned to assist Oppenheimer by contacting and coordinating experimental-physics groups scattered across the country. Oppenheimer and Robert Serber of the University of Illinois examined the problems of neutron diffusion—how neutrons moved in a nuclear chain reaction—and hydrodynamics—how the explosion produced by a chain reaction might behave.
Bomb design concepts
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