The Manhattan Project Machine

Behind barbed wire and guarded gates, on land once home to 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 were bused in to live and work in remote desert conditions with little explanation.

This was the industrial backbone of the Manhattan Project, the place where plutonium was produced for the world’s first atomic bomb, tested in New Mexico, and for the bomb that helped bring World War II to a close.

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.