Study Group Details
444: The Manhattan Project
Monday11:45 - 1:15
Starting March 03
In-Person
In August 1942, Colonel Kenneth Nichols of the Army Corps of Engineers left his office and walked down Broadway to the last office of a Belgian chemical company that owned a disused uranium mine in Africa. There he obtained the ownership of 1,250 tons of uranium oxide in a warehouse in Staten Island and the rights to reopen the African mine, at that time the only sources of uranium not under Nazi control. These he paid for with a purchase order from the corps' Manhattan Engineer District (MED). Over the next three years, billions of dollars of equipment of every imaginable kind would bear a metal MED tag. This course will discuss what the Manhattan Engineer Division did with that uranium.
This study group is a repeat with revisions
Class Type: Lecture and Discussion
Class Format: In-Person
Hours of Reading: 1-2 hrs/week
Study Group Leader(s):
Jacques Read
Jacques Read has taught at Fairleigh Dickinson and the University of California, performed research at Oak Ridge and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories, and been employed by the Atomic Energy Commission, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and the Department of Energy. He has been a study group leader since 2012.
Reading List
The Manhattan Project: The Birth of the Atomic Bomb in the Words of Its Creators, Eyewitnesses, and Historians (Cynthia Kelley) | 2020: Black Dog & Leventhal | ISBN: 978-0762471270 | Required