Chapter One

The Manhattan Project is a secret codename given to the work that created
the first functional nuclear bombs that shook the world with both their power and
their potential dangers.

It took place in the first half of the 20th century. It started sometime in 1939,
and was completed on 31st December 1946, only a year after the dramatic ending
of the World War II. It is publicly known to be one of the biggest secret projects of
the time, and in fact a very demanding one in terms of resources. About 130000
people took part in this project and the final costs were around $2.2 billion,
although others suggest a value up to $3 billion. This is only a glimpse on how
much resources were spent as it is worth to take into consideration the fact that
the war happened only shortly after the great recession of 1929.

The Black Tuesday- the greatest drop in the stock market that had ever
happened and also one of the indirect causes of the following war. After the
drastic fall which stroke the US, all the major commercial partnerships had
incredible backlashes. The GDP (Gross Domestic Product) in Western Europe
became 80% of the one from the Roaring Twenties, thus countries that had
been the most affected by economic crisis such as Germany or Italy were driven to
choose people with strong ideals, powerful impact on the audience, but at the
same time political extremists such as Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini.

Apart from the grim connotations of the three major wars, the World War I,
the World War II and the Cold War, the 20th century also represents the golden
age of physics, with many major breakthroughs concerning many sizes, from the
Universal matrix, to the subatomic particles. The atom representation of
Rutherford, depicting the atoms around us as mini solar systems, the Relativism
Theory of Albert Einstein are numbered among such significant discoveries that
more-or-less drove to the completion of the Manhattan Project.

The Rutherford model of the atom changed the perspective from which the
atom was first seen. The first model inaccurately depicts the atom and its
components as a dense dough, while in reality it has many similarities with our
solar system. The nucleus is big and dense, placed in the center like the Sun, and
the electons are little particles spinning around the nucleus the same way planets
spin around the Sun.

Albert Einstein was the first to solve the mass deficiency issue. In nuclear
reaction the mass of the products is smaller than the mass of the reactants, thing
that was unseen everywhere else. It was proven that mass was convertible in
energy. The mass deficiency was actually mass that was turned into energy. It was
calculated with his most renowned formulae : E=mc2.

Shortly after this discovery people began to wonder whether this energy
could be harnessed or not. Not long before the start of the World War II, there
had been a group of scientists who thought they could succeed, but in order to be
able to complete such a project they would need funds so they asked for financial
and resource support to the president Roosevelt. He refused, thinking it had no
use, however his decision was changed by a letter written by Albert Einstein who
warned them that the Nazi party was researching a way they could turn nuclear
resources into weapons of mass-destruction. President Roosevelt then employed
them and funded the project which was code-named The Manhattan Project.
https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/ap-us-history/period-7/apush-us-
wwii/a/the-manhattan-project-and-the-atomic-bomb

https://energy.gov/management/office-management/operational-
management/history/manhattan-project