A team of all-female high-school graduates known as the “Calutron Girls” at work at a uranium-enrichment facility in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, in 1944.

Manifest Industry

Eighty years after the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, a new book looks back at the American factories that manufactured its crucial minerals on an unprecedented scale

By Garrett M. Graff

Much of the history of the Manhattan Project has been reduced to the romance and drama of J. Robert Oppenheimer and his band of merry physicists high atop an isolated mesa in Los Alamos, New Mexico. But to understand the true wonder of the crash, classified effort to build an atomic bomb is to marvel, instead, at the sheer scale and scope of a project that employed hundreds of thousands of Americans in secret cities carved out of wilderness during the Second World War.

Oppenheimer was a terrific movie—I’ve seen it multiple times—but in writing The Devil Reached Toward the Sky: An Oral History of the Making and Unleashing of the Atomic Bomb, which brings together the first-person voices of nearly 500 participants in that world-changing, atom-smashing event, I was struck by how the success of the Manhattan Project emerged as much from America’s economic might as it did from the minds of the physicists involved. No other country in the world could have pulled off what the U.S. did in the midst of World War II, industry-wise and ambition-wise.