B Reactor National Historic Landmark
The Manhattan Project Machine
The Engines of Secrecy, Science and Scale
The Hanford Site became one of the Manhattan Project's most important and secretive facilities during WWII.
Behind barbed wire and guarded gates, on land once home to indigenous communities, farms and small towns, the U.S. government built one of the most ambitious and secretive industrial complexes in human history: the Hanford Site.
At its peak, Hanford employed more than 50,000 workers, most unaware of what they were building. Massive reactors, like the groundbreaking B Reactor, were constructed in record time. Entire towns, including White Bluffs and Hanford, were vacated and demolished to make way for this wartime effort. The people who once called this land home were displaced, while thousands of others arrived by train from around the country, then bused in to live and work in remote desert conditions with little more than a promise of a good paying job that supported the ear effort.
This was the industrial backbone of the Manhattan Project, the place where plutonium was produced for the world’s first atomic test device, known as “the Gadget,” tested at the Trinity Site New Mexico, and for the Fat Man atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki, Japan, on August 9, 1945 during the waning days of World War II.
What remains today are not just ruins or relics, they’re testaments to the scale and urgency of the war effort. From the preserved control room of the B Reactor to the footprints of once-thriving communities, these places give voice to the people and machinery that powered a hidden war within our own borders.
