History of the United States 6–3 decision in Korematsu v. United States Supreme Court case. Research and development took flight as well, best seen in the Manhattan Project, a secret effort to harness nuclear fission to produce highly destructive atomic bombs. From 1942 to 1946, the project was under the direction of Major General Leslie Groves of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Nuclear physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer was the director of the Los Alamos Laboratory that designed the actual bombs. The first nuclear device ever detonated was an implosion-type bomb at the Trinity test, conducted at New Mexico's Alamogordo Bombing and Gunnery Range on
Meson bomb however, the Soviet Union became convinced that the United States had already developed the meson bomb, and devoted considerable resources to developing its own. In 1994, Russian physicist and chief constructor of nuclear weapons bureau KB-11 (Design Bureau No. 11, set up in 1946) Arkadiy Brish stated that their work on the meson bomb was prompted by intelligence. Even though physicists Yuliy Borisovich Khariton and Yakov Borisovich Zel'dovich agreed that the reports were nonsensical, the directors of the Soviet atomic bomb project decided to pursue this line of research, which resulted in several years of fruitless labor. Brish attributed this