The Manhattan Project is the largest and most secret nuclear weapons test project in the twentieth century. To this day, it is not known how the experiments were carried out, the experience of which was used for nuclear strikes on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. We tried to collect everything that is known about the project at the moment.
Radioactive coyotes
Los Alamos National Laboratory was established in this locality and county in the state of New Mexico, which does not have the status of a city or town and is a statistically distinct territory. It was the main, but not the only city in which work on the Manhattan Project was carried out. Several classified cities were created throughout the country. One of them, Site W, in Washington state was essentially a giant factory producing the plutonium needed to make bombs.
At that time one could only guess about the environmental consequences of the work carried out and the dangers of radioactive dust. There was only one way to find out how it affects the body - to test it on experimental pigs. Coyotes were chosen as them. Preferring them to other inhabitants, scientists proceeded from the fact that they eat hares, whose diet consists of leaves contaminated with radiation. The soldiers caught the coyotes, pulled out their thyroid glands, and measured their iodine levels.
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Toxic apple
While studying at Cambridge, physicist Robert Oppenheimer decided to commit murder. One of the teachers was chosen as the victim, for whom the physicist prepared a toxic apple. He pumped the fruit with poisonous substances and left among the things of the teacher, hoping that he would have a snack during the break. However, Robert could not complete the plan: before the alleged victim arrived, he returned and took the apple. Despite a dark spot in his biography, Robert Oppenheimer was appointed head of the most expensive and secret project in history at that time - "Manhattan".
Top secret
All life in city X, surrounded by barbed wire, was like under a microscope. Checkpoints, censorship of letters, wiretapping of telephones - literally every step was controlled. People lived in houses with cardboard walls, so everyone knew about each other's life in the smallest details. Work on the project remained within the walls of the "offices", it was strictly forbidden to talk about it outside, and even more so to discuss something with the family. The overwhelming majority of residents did not even know what city X was built for, until in August 1945 they heard on the radio that two cities in Japan were practically wiped off the face of the earth.
Trinity
The world's first test of nuclear weapons technology called Trinity as part of the Manhattan Project was carried out at the Alamogordo test site in New Mexico. Eastman Kodak decided to tell the world about him by filming a documentary. After the release of the film, a flurry of complaints fell upon the studio. The viewers of the film not only learned about how and where the nuclear era began, but also, to some extent, became part of it. As it turned out later, the boxes in which the film was packed were made from the husks of corn grown in Indiana, the fields that were contaminated with radioactive fallout after the Trinity tests.
Mouse bombs
At the time of the attack on Pearl Harbor, Pennsylvania dentist Little S. Adams was in the Carlsbad Caves area. In them, he saw bats, the meeting with which prompted the dentist to an insane idea - to make bombs with bats. His good friend was Eleanor Roosevelt, and despite all the absurdity of the project, through her Adams managed to promote the idea and get financial support. The plan was to arm the mice with clockwork incendiary bombs and drop them in a container over Japanese cities. After a detachment of winged suicide bombers was captured in the caves, the tests began. Some of them were surprisingly successful, and with the participation of mice, several buildings were destroyed, but the project was soon scrapped, relying on a more predictable atomic bomb in action.