Michael Joseloff

“General Groves contracted with dozens of companies to build the facilities at Oak Ridge and Hanford, imposing impossible deadlines that forced them to design and build simultaneously, and then begin operations even before construction was completed. General Groves would later admit, “Never in history has anyone embarking on an important undertaking had so little certainty about how to proceed as we had then.”
― Michael Joseloff, Chasing Heisenberg: The Race for the Atom Bomb

“President Truman called the development of the atom bomb, “the greatest achievement of organized science in history.”248 The Manhattan Project scientists, engineers and private contractors had done what few believed possible: they had built three new towns—Oak Ridge, Hanford and Los Alamos—and a behemoth industrial plant as large as that of all of America’s automobile manufacturers put together.249 They had transformed Fermi’s historic nuclear chain reaction, a reaction yielding only enough energy to light a flashlight bulb, into the most powerful weapon mankind had ever known. And they had done it in just over a thousand days.”
― Michael Joseloff, Chasing Heisenberg: The Race for the Atom Bomb