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
Robert Ferguson (physicist) testing of guided missiles. General Electric at Hanford: Ferguson began his career in the nuclear field when he joined General Electric at the Hanford Site, known as the Hanford Works in 1957. He trained and worked as a reactor physicist and reactor operations supervisor at the historic B Reactor, the first full-scale nuclear reactor in the world. The B Reactor produced the plutonium used in the first nuclear detonation test at Alamogordo, New Mexico, and for “The Fat Man” atomic bomb, which was dropped on Nagasaki to end World War II. Chicago Operations Office at Argonne: In 1961, Ferguson joined