Road to Los Alamos

By 1939, the world had become a very dangerous place. The Axis powers had launched wars in Europe and Asia. Though hailed as a great scientific achievement, the discovery of fission also added to the growing concern about the fate of the world. Prominent physicists, such as J. Robert Oppenheimer, knew that the energy released by nuclear fission could be transformed into an extraordinarily powerful bomb. Scientists and political leaders in America grew increasingly anxious as Hitler's armies marched into the Rhineland, Austria, and Czechoslovakia. If German scientists built an atomic bomb, the United States and her allies faced almost certain defeat. America's response was the creation of the Manhattan Project and the Los Alamos Laboratory, Project Y.