World War II · Series · 2014–2015
Manhattan
Scientists and their families live behind the fences of a secret town in the New Mexico desert, racing to build the atomic bomb while hiding the truth from each other.
Where it happened
Follow the story across 1 places.
Stop 1: Los Alamos, New Mexico
Key location
Frank Winter's overlooked team fights for its implosion idea against the favoured Thin Man group, while wives and children cope with a town that officially does not exist.
What really happened
Project Y, the Los Alamos Laboratory, opened in 1943 on a remote mesa in northern New Mexico. Its existence was secret: residents used a post-office box in Santa Fe as their address, and by 1945 some 6,000 scientists, soldiers, workers and family members lived there.
In 1944 the laboratory learned that the simple gun-type design, code-named Thin Man, would not work with reactor-made plutonium, and shifted its effort to the harder implosion design that was tested at Trinity in July 1945. The series' characters are fictional, loosely based on figures such as Seth Neddermeyer, who championed implosion, and the Soviet spy Klaus Fuchs.
Where to watch
Checking streaming services…
Full details
- Original title
- Manhattan
- Created by
- Sam Shaw
- Countries
- United States
- Languages
- English
- Seasons
- 2 seasons
- Released
- 2014–2015
- Period
- –
- Theaters of war
- The Americas
- Themes
- Home front
- Espionage
