Manhattan Project and Trinity Test

The Manhattan Project was the Allied programme, led by the United States, to develop atomic weapons during the Second World War. From 1942 it combined secret scientific laboratories with enormous uranium-enrichment and plutonium-production facilities, while strict compartmentalisation attempted to keep the programme hidden from enemy intelligence and from much of the American government.

At Los Alamos in New Mexico, J. Robert Oppenheimer directed the laboratory responsible for weapon design under the military authority of General Leslie Groves. Scientists, engineers, soldiers and their families lived in an isolated community whose work culminated in the Trinity test in the New Mexico desert on 16 July 1945, the first detonation of a nuclear device.