The Manhattan Project aimed to build the first atomic bomb during World War II after the discovery of nuclear fission in 1939. The project involved over 30 research and development sites and employed 125,000 people with an average age of 25 years old.
“Because of the strict security procedures, the vast majority of Manhattan Project employees did not know the big picture of what it is they were working on and only learned after the first bomb was dropped on Aug. 6, 1945,” Kathy Svec, the daughter of a Manhattan Project employee, said at her lecture at the Ames Public Library at 7 p.m. Wednesday.
At Iowa State College, presently Iowa State University, in 1942, Frank Spedding developed the chemical research and development program as part of the Manhattan Project.
Within the Manhattan Project, chemist Harley Wilhelm led the Ames Project and created a process to produce pure uranium.
The Ames Project produced two million pounds of pure uranium for the Manhattan Project in, at the time, an old wooden building on the east side of campus.
Given the necessity of the project, Spedding held men back from the draft to work on research.
“I’d been drafted and had gone down to Des Moines, had my physical, and was all set to go. Dr. Spedding called me ‘What are you doing? Trying to get away from me?’ and I said no, they’ve drafted me,” Ray Fisher, an employee of the Manhattan Project, said.
Fisher returned to Ames under the direction of Spedding.
To protect the security of the project, employees were threatened with the draft should they release confidential information.
“One of the ways of making sure that people were minding their P’s and Q’s with regard to security was that all of us that were of draft age were told that if we violated any of the regulations with regard to secrecy and security we’d be drafted and sent overseas to the front lines,” David Peterson, an employee of the Manhattan Project, said.
Regardless of security efforts, Ames residents grew suspicious of the train, protected by armed guards, transporting old whiskey barrels filled with slugs of uranium waste. In addition to the fires that fire fighters weren’t allowed to put out.
Immediately following the bombing of Hiroshima, the United States Secretary of War Henry Stimson announced the involvement of Iowa State College in the research process of developing the nuclear bomb.
In honor of the work done at Iowa State College, the Ames Project received the Army-Navy “E” Flag, and remains the only academic institution to have received that award.
