It was first called the “Laboratory for the Development of Substitute Materials,” then the “Manhattan Engineer District,” after the location of offices in New York City near the Army Corps of Engineers offices. The project was very secret – the small committee running it included Vice President Henry Wallace, Secretary of War Henry Stimson, Army […]
On August 2, 1939, Albert Einstein wrote a letter to President Franklin D. Roosevelt to notify him of recent developments in nuclear physics that suggested the element uranium could be turned into a new and important source of energy. Einstein warned that the energy could be used to create extremely powerful bombs that could destroy […]
Several years ago the Marshall Foundation hosted a talk by Dr. Frank Settle that examined the role played by General Marshall in the Manhattan Project. Dr. Settle’s talk, as part of the Weapons of War sequence of the Marshall Legacy Series, built upon his book that sheds new light on the Manhattan Project itself but […]
The book, General George C. Marshall and the Atomic Bomb, looks at events of the first nuclear decade from General Marshall’s perspective. Marshall had the unique position of being the only high-level government official who participated in or witnessed the decisions regarding the production, use, and post-war management of the atomic bomb from 1942 to […]
The recent death of Theodore VanKirk, the navigator of the Enola Gay, which dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, as well as a new television series about the building of the bomb, has put the August 6th and 9th anniversaries of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki back into the spotlight. Key documents relating to […]