Stories about Breaking Scientific Boundaries

The Calutron Girls operated the arrays, or racetracks, at the Y-12 Electromagnetic Isotope Separation Plant in Oak Ridge during the Manhattan Project. These young women, many of whom were just out of high school, did not know that their work involved separating uranium for use in an atomic bomb.

Dr. Leona Woods Marshall Libby was the only female member of the team that built the world’s first nuclear reactor—the Chicago Pile—and the only woman present when the reactor went critical.

On April 20, 1943, the University of California signed a contract with the United States Army Corps of Engineers to operate a secret laboratory hidden away in the mountains of northern New Mexico. This laboratory soon became home to some of the most revolutionary science in US history. Led by scientist J. Robert Oppenheimer, the staff at this secret Manhattan Project location called Los Alamos was responsible for the development and testing of nuclear weapons.

The plutonium production process at Hanford was developed from what Enrico Fermi and his team proved when they constructed the world’s first, albeit small-scale, nuclear reactor in Chicago in 1942. If a reactor could be built sufficiently large, the intense flow of neutrons within it could, almost magically, change uranium into plutonium. This process of transmutation would not be creating gold from straw or lead but would be creating something much more valuable.

The creation of Oak Ridge, Tennessee, called Kingston Demolition Range and Clinton Engineer Works during the Manhattan Project, centered around one main goal- the development of enriched uranium for atomic weapons. The three facilities that achieved this goal, the Y-12 Electromagnetic Isotope Separation Plant, the K-25 Gaseous Diffusion Plant, and the S-50 Liquid Thermal Diffusion Plant, did so in markedly different ways.

On July 16, 1945, Manhattan Project scientists detonated the world’s first atomic device, known as “the Gadget,” at 5:29 am Mountain War Time. The US Army conducted the test at the Trinity Site in the Jornada del Muerto desert about 210 miles (337 km) south of Los Alamos, New Mexico. Today the Trinity Site is part of the White Sands Missile Range and can only be visited during a Trinity Site Open House, typically hosted twice a year.

The future of White Sands, and for that matter the nation as a whole, reached a watershed in the spring of 1945. The sequence of events in the Tularosa basin from April to August 1945 created the "atomic age" tensions that bedeviled the monument for the next five decades.