May 3, 2018 – July 28, 2019
In the fall of 1942, less than a year after the United States was drawn into World War II by the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers quietly began acquiring vast tracts of land in remote areas of three states. The few residents of these areas were summarily evicted and their houses demolished. Soon, thousands of young workers arrived from far and wide, initially occupying tents and other makeshift shelters within the newly designated military reservations.
Shielded from public view by natural barriers and security fences, the workers quickly erected hundreds of buildings, ranging from prefabricated houses to industrial structures of unprecedented scale.
As they did so, thousands more residents arrived in a near-continuous stream. By the end of the war, a total of more than 125,000 people lived in the three cities that had been built from scratch on these sites. Yet these cities appeared on no maps, and the federal government did not acknowledge their existence. Unfathomable quantities of supplies were delivered, but very little seemed to come out, adding to the air of mystery surrounding these “Secret Cities.”
Manhattan Project Sites
That mystery unraveled on August 6, 1945, when the U.S. dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan, and President Harry S. Truman publicly revealed the purpose of the sites now known as Oak Ridge, Tennessee; Los Alamos, New Mexico; and Hanford/Richland, Washington. In roughly two and a half years, the Manhattan Project—so named because it was managed by the Army Corps’s Manhattan Engineer District in New York—had produced a weapon of previously inconceivable destructive force. While the ethics and strategic necessity of the decision to use such a weapon in combat are still fiercely debated, there is no question that this initiative was one of the most significant milestones in the history of scientific ...More...
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