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
Emergency Committee of Atomic Scientists Emergency Committee of Atomic Scientists The Emergency Committee of Atomic Scientists (ECAS) was founded by Albert Einstein and Leó Szilárd in 1946. Its aims were to warn the public of the dangers associated with the development of nuclear weapons, promote the peaceful use of nuclear energy, and ultimately work towards world peace, which was seen as the only way that nuclear weapons would not be used again. The Committee was established in the wake of the "Szilárd petition" (July 1945) to United States president Harry S. Truman opposing the use of the atomic bomb on moral grounds, which was signed