Basic Information
The Manhattan Project was the American project to develop the first nuclear weapon during World War II. It resulted in the A-Bomb.
Broadly, it took the scientific material from the British Tube Alloys project and applied the immense strategic muscle of the US to fixing the huge engineering issues related to turning it into a practical weapon, including identifying an appropriate fissile material, securing a significant supply, developing a reliable method of converting a safe mass of the material into a critical one, and then making the whole thing small enough to fit in a practically deployable bomb case.
Probably the most famous part the project was the Trinity Test - the first detonation of a man made fission device - which confirmed the physics model they were using and allowed them to proceed to prototype bombs.
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Game and Story Use
- The secrecy and other weirdness of the project make for a good model for other, fictional projects involving superweapons. Don't feel constrained to modern-day or science fiction settings, either - in magic-rich fantasy worlds, nations might attempt to create magical superweapons as well.
- In scenarios where the US neglects to intervene in WW2, someone else's project would take this mantle … and the various tests would be displaced from Trinity, Hiroshima and Nagasaki to other places.
