Page 4 - Demo

Nuclear Weapons of the Atomic AgeSurprisingly, the state of Indiana was home to Manhattan Project facilities. Fort Wayne's Joslyn Manufacturing and Supply Co. had the job of turning uranium billets into long rods for atomic-bomb production. The company melted the billets in a furnace, then extruded the metal into rods. As a sign of the cavalier attitude toward safety back then, the workers cleaned up uranium dust with brooms and dustpans.Another Indiana site was in the western part of the state, between Dana and Newport. Known as the Wabash River Ordnance Works, it was built early in World War II by Dupont to manufacture highly explosive RDX. About a year after the plant opened, the Manhattan Project added a facility there to produce heavy water for use in constructing nuclear weapons. The site continued operating into the 1950s. After that, it became known as the Newport Chemical Depot, which manufactured and stored VX nerve agent.Los Alamos, New MexicoOf all the Manhattan Project sites, the Los Alamos National Laboratory was the heart of the operation. Established in 1942, it became the world's foremost facility for atomic-bomb design and construction. Despite its isolated location, it attracted thousands of employees, including some of the world's most famous scientists%u2014many of them Nobel Prize winners. The remoteness of Los Alamos was necessary for safety (in the event of an accident, the public wouldn%u2019t be harmed), and for security (to keep its employees from interacting with the citizenry). The work performed there was entirely top secret, and it had a single, simple mailing address: P.O. Box 1663, Santa Fe, New Mexico. (Later, as the facility expanded, Santa Fe assigned it two additional post-office boxes.) The research complex was officially managed by the University of California, whose president, Robert Sproul, was not told its purpose. He thought it might be developing a death ray.For its exemplary work, the Laboratory was awarded the Army-Navy %u2018E%u2019 Award for Excellence on October 16, 1945. In 1947, the facility's name was officially changed to the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory. Since then, both Los Alamos, and the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Berkeley, California, have worked on hydrogen bombs and variants of nuclear weapons. After the end of the Cold War, both facilities increasingly focused on non-military projects.Despite safety protocols, several nuclear-related accidents occurred at Los Alamos. During the war years, at least 4 people received high, but non-fatal doses of radiation, and three scientists died. Harry Daghlian suffered his fatal radiation poisoning after accidentally dropping a tungsten carbide brick onto a sphere of plutonium, which was nicknamed the %u201cdemon core.%u201d Louis Slotin fatally irradiated himself during a similar incident using the very same demon core. Several years later, in 1958, chemical operator Cecil Kelley was working on plutonium purification when a procedural error caused the plutonium to achieve a chain reaction for about 200 microseconds. Kelly died 35 hours later.Oak Ridge, TennesseeBeginning in October 1942, the United States Army Corps of Engineers began acquiring more than 60,000 acres for the Oak Ridge National J. Robert Oppenheimer and General Leslie R Groves were two of the most important figures involved in the success of the Manhattan Project.