In 1939 Germany, Britain, and the U.S. began a race to build an atomic bomb. Albert Einstein had a theory of relativity and an idea that matter could be converted into a tremendous force of energy. Enrico Fermi, who discovered uranium, emigrated to the U.S. in 1938 from Italy. He achieved the first controlled fission chain reaaction in December of 1942. The army took control of the research and appointed General Leslie Groves to reorganize the project. That is how it became known as the Manhattan Project because it was devised in the Manhattan Project District Office of the Army Corps of Engineers.
Over the next few years the government secretly spent almost $2 billion on the Manhattan Project. The sites were the secret operations took place were Oak Ridge, Tennessee; Los Almos, New Mexico; and Hanford, Washington. July 16, 1945 in the desert near Alamogordo, New Mexico, scientists gathered to witness the first atomic explosion in history. The bomb was named Trinity and it was just the beginning of a new dawn of warfare.
