The Manhattan Project was a World War II-era US-led research and development project to produce the world's first nuclear weapons. Directed by Major General Leslie Groves and physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, the project eventually employed more than 130,000 people and cost two billion dollars.
An important early step in the project was the creation of the world's first self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction, Chicago Pile 1. The research was carried out by Enrico Fermi's team at the University of Chicago's Metallurgical Laboratory. Because of the dangerous nature of the experiments, the work was moved to a facility outside Chicago named Argonne, after the forest that surrounded it. In 1946 Argonne National Laboratory was chartered to continue research into nuclear energy.
