(WXYZ) — Detroit was known as the "Arsenal of Democracy" for its role in helping the U.S. create weapons, vehicles, planes and more during World War II, but the city also played a role in the secretive Manhattan Project to create the atomic bomb.
With the highly-anticipated film "Oppenheimer" set to be released on Friday, we're looking back at Detroit's role in the project to build the atomic bomb.
According to The National Museum of Nuclear History, The Chrysler Corporation had a little-known site for the Manhattan Project.
The museum said General Leslie Groves, who was the director of the Manhattan Project, awarded Chrysler a $75 million contract in 1943. Chrysler reportedly established offices at 1525 Woodward Ave. in Downtown Detroit to oversee the top-secret Project X-100.
According to the museum, Chrysler revamped its Lynch Road Assembly Plant on the city's east side, to create thousands of large, cylindrical metal containers – called diffusers. They had to install special air-conditioning and air-filtration systems.
Those diffusers were used to enclose the barrier material that separated the uranium isotopes and were to be used at the Oak Ridge, Tennessee plant which was producing enriched uranium using diffusion.
The museum said the plans had to be switched after Chrysler proposed using thin, electroplated nickel on steel, because using nickel alone would have used up the entire country's supply.
Chrysler ended up producing the items within two months.
“Take the raw cylinders, machine them, plate them, put in the heads, put in the barrier tubes, seal them tight on the ends, put in the end pieces, weld it all together, test it for leaks," former Chrysler President K.T. Keller said, according to the museum's oral history.
By the end of World War II, the museum said Chrysler produced and delivered more than 3,500 diffusers to the plant, which would keep the K-25 operating until the 1980s.
The museum said Groves wrote a letter to Keller saying, “No one outside the K-25 portion of the project can ever know how much we depended on you and how well you performed. Those of us who do know will never forget how important your work was and how well you did it.”
