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
Soviet atomic bomb project (including those now in Kazakhstan). The uranium for the Soviet nuclear weapons program came from mine production in the following countries, RDS-1, the first Soviet atomic test was internally code-named "First Lightning" ("Первая молния", or Pervaya Molniya) August 29, 1949, and was code-named by the Americans as "Joe 1". The design was very similar to the first US "Fat Man" plutonium bomb, using a TNT/hexogen implosion lens design. On September 24, 1951, the 38.3 kiloton device RDS-2 was tested based on a tritium "boosted" uranium implosion device with a levitated core. This test was code named "Joe 2" by the