A vast state within a state, the Manhattan Project employed 130,000 people and cost the United States and its allies two billion dollars, but its contribution to science as a prestigious investment was invaluable. After the bombs were dropped, states began allocating unprecedented funds for scientific research, leading to the establishment of many of the twentieth century’s major research institutions. Yet the union of science, industry, and the military did not start with the development of the atomic bomb; World War II only deepened the relationship. This absorbing history revisits the interactions among science, the national interest, and public and private funding that began in World War I and flourished during World War II. It then follows the Manhattan Project from inception to dissolution, describing the influences that helped execute the world’s first successful plan for nuclear research and tracing the lineages of modern national nuclear agencies back to their source.
Jeff Hughes is a senior lecturer in the history of science and technology at the University of Manchester. His research concerns the social history of the physical and chemical sciences in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and the institutional history of twentieth-century British science.
the manhattan Project
Launched in 1942, the Manhattan Project was a well-funded, secret effort by the United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada to develop an atomic bomb before the Nazis. The results—the bombs named “Little Boy” and “Fat Man”—were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August of 1945.
Hughes
Winner of the History of Science Society Watson Davis and Helen Miles Davis Prize
Jeff Hughes
Revolutions in Science ISBN: 978-0-231-13153-7
9 780231 131537 Printed in the U.S.A.
columbia university press New York cup.columbia.edu
COLUMBIA
Cover design: Magic 8 Design Cover image: © Jack Aeby, 1998–2003, The Regents of the University of California. Background photo, courtesy The High Energy Weapons Archive.
the manhattan Project
Big Science and the Atom Bomb