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Fat Man and Little Boy

In September 1942, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Colonel Leslie Groves, who oversaw the construction of the Pentagon, is assigned to head the ultra-secret Manhattan Project, to beat the Germans, who have a similar nuclear weapons program.

Groves picks University of California, Berkeley, physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer to head the project team. Oppenheimer was familiar with northern New Mexico from his boyhood days when his family owned a cabin in the area. For the new research facility, he selects a remote location on top of a mesa adjacent to a valley called Los Alamos Canyon, northwest of Santa Fe.

The different personalities of the military man Groves and the scientist Oppenheimer often clash in keeping the project on track. Oppenheimer in turn clashes with the other scientists, who debate whether their personal consciences should enter into the project or whether they should remain purely researchers, with personal feelings set aside.

Nurse Kathleen Robinson and young physicist Michael Merriman question what they are doing. As Michael works with no protection from radiation during an experiment dubbed Tickling the Dragon's Tail, a probe he is holding slips from an apparatus and he is instantly bathed in a blue light, which is a visible result of a lethal dose of radiation. In the base hospital, nurse Kathleen can only watch as he develops massive swelling and deformation before dying a miserable death days later.

While the technical problems are being solved, investigations are undertaken to thwart foreign espionage, especially from communist sympathizers who might be associated with socialist organizations. The snooping reveals that Oppenheimer has had a young mistress, Jean Tatlock, and he is ordered by Groves to stop seeing her. After he breaks off their relationship without being able to reveal the reasons why, she is unable to cope with the heartache and is later found dead, apparently a suicide.

As the project continues in multiple sites across America, technical problems and delays cause tensions and strife. To avoid a single point of failure plan, two separate bomb designs are implemented: a large, heavy plutonium bomb imploded using shaped charges (" Fat Man "), and an alternative design for a thin, less heavy uranium bomb triggered in a shotgun or gun-type design (" Little Boy "). The bomb development culminates in a detonation in south-central New Mexico at the Trinity Site in the Alamogordo Desert (05:29:45 on July 16, 1945), where everyone watches in awe the first mushroom cloud with roaring winds, even miles away. Both bombs, Fat Man and Little Boy, are successful, ushering in the Atomic Age.