LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Manhattan Project
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The Manhattan Project is Shandor Hassan’s first featured exhibition at the Jersey City Museum. But he’s no stranger to the galleries of Hudson County and the emerging Jersey City art scene. He’s presented his work in more than 20 showings over the past six years —including exhibitions at the C.A.S.E. Museum in Downtown Jersey City, and the John Meagher Rotunda of his adopted home’s City Hall. He has had numerous exhibitions in New York City, including a showing of his American Journey Series at the OK HARRIS Gallery, and the education gallery of the International Center of Photography. His skills as a cabinet maker and sculptor have led him to working with reknowned architect and /artist Lebbeus Woods on many projects —including works exhibited at the 2002 Whitney Biennial, the Cooper Union and the Cartier Foundation in Paris.
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The Manhattan Project was an epic, secret, wartime effort to design and build the world's first nuclear weapon. Commanding the efforts of the world's greatest physicists and mathematicians during World War II, the $20 billion project resulted in the production of the first uranium and plutonium bombs. The American quest for nuclear explosives was driven by the fear that Hitler's Germany would invent them first and thereby gain a decisive military advantage. The monumental project took less than four years, and encompassed construction of vast facilities in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and Hanford, Washington, that were used for the purpose of obtaining sufficient quantities of the isotopes uranium-235 and plutonium-239, necessary to produce the fission chain reaction, which released the bombs' destructive energy. After a successful test in Alamogordo, New Mexico, the United States exploded a nuclear bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima on August 6, 1945. Three days later another bomb was dropped on the Japanese city of Nagasaki, and spurred the Japanese surrender that ended World War II.
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A present day Manhattan Project for energy would have to focus on making any of the variety of alternatives that already exist cost-effective. While that may sound reasonable enough in theory, keep in mind that the government has actually tried this several times before and failed.
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The Manhattan Project began in 1942. It officially ended in 1946 when it became part of the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC). Originally based in Manhattan, a borough of New York City, the project eventually spread across the nation and was concentrated at three main sites located in Oak Ridge, Tennessee; Hanford, Washington; and Los Alamos, New Mexico. Its director was Brigadier General Leslie R. Groves. American physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer was the scientific director at Los Alamos, which attracted some of the most brilliant scientists and mathematicians of the 20th century. Among the scientists and mathematicians who participated in the Manhattan Project were Philip H. Abelson, Hans Bethe, Niels Bohr, Sir James Chadwick, Enrico Fermi, Richard Feynman, Otto Frisch, George Kistiakowsky, Ernest Lawrence, Philip Morrison, Seth Neddermeyer, John von Neumann, Rudolf Peierls, I. I. Rabi, Leo Szilard, Edward Teller, Stanislaw Ulam, Harold Urey, and Victor Weisskopf.
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The secrecy that surrounded the Manhattan Project continued with the start of the Cold War. In 1945 the Allies discovered that the Soviet Union had extensively spied on the project. In late 1949 the British arrested physicist Klaus Fuchs, who had spent time in Los Alamos as part of the British mission. Fuchs eventually confessed to handing over secret data to the Soviets on several occasions, including an exact description of the Trinity Site bomb, as well as early research on the hydrogen bomb. Since Fuchs was then a naturalized British citizen, he was tried in Britain for espionage and in 1950 sentenced to 14 years in prison. Fear that he had assisted a Soviet H-bomb program helped push America to make the political decision to develop hydrogen weapons.
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The irony about The Manhattan Project is that the kid in question, a smugly self-satisfied genius played by Christopher Collet, tucks all ethical concerns away until the last possible moment. Partly out of hubris, partly by acting on a weird Oedipal complex, Collet seeks to be the first private citizen to join the exclusive nuclear club. In an attempt to ingratiate himself with Collet's mother (Jill Eikenberry), government scientist John Lithgow offers to give Collet a look at a high-powered laser, but the kid immediately recognizes that Lithgow and his labmates are working with refined plutonium. For the sake of his new girlfriend (Cynthia Nixon), Collet acts like he's alarmed by the presence of a secret nuclear lab in the neighborhood, but he's really more incensed by Lithgow's condescension. So he sets about stealing some plutonium and building a weapon himself.
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