Jewish culture and many Jewish scientists had a significant role in the project. The theoretical physicist Robert Oppenheimer, often considered as the ""father of the atomic bomb"", was chosen to direct the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos National Laboratory in 1942. The physicist Leó Szilárd, that conceived the nuclear chain reaction; Edward Teller, ""the father of the hydrogen bomb"" and Stanislaw Ulam; Eugene Wigner contributed to theory of Atomic nucleus and Elementary particle; Hans Bethe whose work included Stellar nucleosynthesis and was head of the Theoretical Division at the secret Los Alamos laboratory; Richard Feynman, Niels Bohr, Victor Weisskopf and Joseph Rotblat.
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