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.
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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.
