With such a powerful weapon, she [Germany] would be able to win the war and become the strongest military state in the world" (6). Leo Szilard, Eugene Wigner, and Edward Teller, Hungarian-born physicists in the United States, were frightened by the possibility that Germany might produce the atomic bomb. They insisted that Albert Einstein inform President Roosevelt about the possibility of the Germans making an atomic bomb. On August 2nd, 1939, just before the beginning of World War II, Albert Einstein wrote to President Franklin D. Roosevelt. In a online article, Mary Bellis states that "Einstein and several other scientists told Roosevelt of efforts in Nazi Germany to purify uranium-235, which could be used to build an atomic bomb." Scientists had urged the British and American Governments to speed up their nuclear research and be the first to make the atomic bomb. In late 1939, President Roosevelt ordered an American effort to make an atomic bomb before the Germans. .
The government did not fund the first people who started to research the atomic bomb, so their findings were limited. The U.S. created many places for research that remained secret to U.S. citizens that were not involved with the research. In 1939 U.S. scientists urged President Franklin Roosevelt to establish a program to study the potential military use of fission, and $6,000 was appropriated to conduct research on the issue (Britannica). One of the physicists researching the atomic bomb, J. Robert Oppenheimer, realized that the most efficient way to work more closely and in secret was to set up one single lab with living spaces around it. This is where scientists, physicists and all others involved in the project would live and do research. "Site Y, as the hypothetical laboratory was initially called, needed good transportation, an adequate supply of water, a local labor force and a moderate climate for year-round construction and for experiments conducted outdoors" (Rhodes 449).