A mushroom cloud is seen over Nagasaki, Japan, after the United States dropped an atomic bomb on the city on Aug. 9, 1945. It came three days after a bomb was dropped over Hiroshima, Japan. Photo retrieved from the Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/item/98506956/. Bottom: From left, Iowa State College chemistry professors Frank Spedding and Harley Wilhelm, and Iowa State College President Charles E. Friley. All three men were instrumental in the creation and success of the Ames Project, which was part of the Manhattan Project.
July/Aug 2025 (Volume 17, Issue 4)
By Jerry Harrington
As the world stood on the brink of global war in August 1939, U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt received a letter from renowned physicist Albert Einstein warning of a grave threat to humanity.
Scientific breakthroughs in the early-20th century, wrote Einstein, made technology possible that could split the atom and unleash untold amounts of energy. It was possible, he continued, that German scientists could use this advancing knowledge to build an atomic bomb. Armed with such a weapon, Nazi Germany could threaten its enemies and gain world conquest. Einstein recommended swift and immediate action by the U.S. to counter this possible menace.
Responding to the warning, Roosevelt directed the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to initiate a crash program to construct a nuclear weapon. Since the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers was based in the New York Manhattan borough, this became known as the Manhattan Project—and it changed forever the world as we know it.
The Manhattan Project faced the challenge of initiating a national research and development project on technology that did not yet exist. Given the range of possibilities in this developing science, more than 30 university and private sites sprang up throughout the U.S., directed toward one goal—beating the Nazis to the creation of an atomic bomb.
One such site was Ames, on the Iowa State College (later Iowa State University) campus. The work done in secret by a small group of dedicated scientists—dubbed the Ames Project—played a fundamental role in the development of the atom bomb.
The Ames Project produced two million pounds of purified uranium for the Manhattan Project during World War II. Here, Ames Project employee Irwin Jensen examines uranium billets post production in 1943. Photo courtesy of Ames National Laboratory
Specifically, the group developed a technique to extract pure uranium from compounds found in nature. This uranium, in theory, would then be bombarded by neutrons to trigger a chain reaction, releasing the powerful explosion. Using pure uranium was key because scientists believed that impurities within uranium compounds would absorb neutrons needed for the reaction, cancelling the energy release. It would become known as the Ames Process.
With this advancement from the Ames Project, all other research in this area stopped and the mission then turned to delivering uranium to scientists through this process. This contributed to the successful atomic bomb test at Los Alamos, N.M., in July 1945 and the bomb’s subsequent use in August 1945 over the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, ending World War II and marking the dawn of the nuclear age.
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