I found this online and thought it was interesting. The effort was so highly classified that even the people working there were not told what they were doing. And it took took two years, doing something that had never been done before, with technology we would consider primitive today.
Almost ten thousand girls right out of high school were hired in Oakridge Tennessee in 1943, to operate mass spectrometers called Calutrons. They weren't even told what they were doing. They were only told to turn this knob, flip this switch, make this meter read a certain level. But they were enriching Uranium and it took them two years to make enough material for one bomb, the one dropped on Hiroshima. My mother-in-law was one of these "Calutron Girls". Whenever I asked what she did at Oakridge she would say, "if I told you, I would have to kill you! It was something for the war effort". I assumed she was a secretary.
Then in the 90's, after things were declassified, I printed this picture from the internet and showed it to her, asking if this is what she did. She said, "Yeah! That's where I worked!! In building Y-12! I'm not sure she ever knew what those machines did.
There were a lot of things that happened in the War that those involved at the time did not fully understand. I suspect a lot of families know things today that those who are no longer with us either didn’t tell us about, or only had a vague idea about themselves.
Very interesting!! Workers at Hanford, WA, also labored without knowing what they were doing. There were about 80,000 workers there; 40,000 in onsite barracks. Only about 1% knew what the project was about.
That site manufactured plutonium in a reactor and then chemically separated it for a bomb. The total was about 6kg lbs per implosion detonation device. It took a year to build the first reactor, and several more months to generate and isolate the plutonium. Two plutonium bombs were made; one for the Trinity test and one for "fat man."
If you haven't read it I urge you to read The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes. It won the Pulitzer for nonfiction in I believe 1988. It leaves no stone unturned. If I made a list of my best reads of all time in would be in the top 10.
A quick story from The Making of the Atomic bomb: In 1942 a group of scientist and engineers met with the president to ask for the silver that was going to be needed for the project. The president asked: "how much do you need". The scientists replied: "all of it".
In fact over 14,000 tons of silver was used for the Manhattan Project. After the project wound down eventually all of it was returned except a couple of hundred pounds.
At the time, land was appropriate in record time, for the war effort and a new city was built. Two cities in reality, because the Southern Congressmen only voted for the money, if the effort was segregated. This plant produced U-235. It's a miracle the bomb did not explode when it was getting loaded, due to the gun-type firing mechanism.
The Plutonium for the Nagasaki bomb came from Hanford, Washington. That plant was "easier" to construct. The Wanapum Band of the Yakama Nation, who lived permanently on the land where Hanford was built, were told to relocate to Priest Rapids. The relocation was a forced displacement, and the tribes were not offered relocation compensation.
