How Do Groves Use Oak Ridge

The day that Groves had been appointed the new project leader he took an overnight train to Knoxville, Tennessee. After driving around the area for a few hours Groves finally selected Oak Ridge, Tennessee as the first site and was code-named Site X. Oak Ridge would be the home of three plants code-named Y-12, K-25, and S-50. Their purpose was to produce uranium with a high concentration of U-235 or enriched uranium. These three plants had a different function to preform, but that still resulted in producing enriched uranium. “The Y-12 plant used an electromagnetic separation process, the K-25 plant used gaseous diffusion, and the S-50 plant used thermal diffusion (Loeber 22).” With these plants also came economic opportunity for the state and its residents. Tennessee had been broke and sitting out the Great Depression for the past

With this still being a top secret project, also came with Groves’ policy of “compartmentalization” and this required that people be told only what they needed to know to do their job (Rhodes 16). Some of these machines were very elaborate and had to keep the needles on the gauges within certain limits. “Tennessee country women quickly learned to control the skittish machines more efficiently than the Berkeley physicists who designed them (Rhodes 16).”
The second site that was chosen was Site Y or Los Alamos Laboratory in November 1942 by Oppenheimer and was approved by General Groves. General Groves had selected Oppenheimer to be the new director of a bomb-design laboratory on October 15, 1942. Oppenheimer owned a summer home near Santa Fe and had discovered the area a few years earlier while on a pack trip (Loeber