Picture an industrial complex the size of an empire, with over 100,000 Americans working around the clock handling bizarre, highly reactive chemicals, and almost none of them knowing what they are making. This episode explores the staggering logistical, scientific, and human chaos of the Manhattan Project, and how a theoretical physics equation became a two-billion-dollar secret industrial empire almost overnight.

We begin with the panic sparked by the 1938 German discovery of nuclear fission, the Einstein letter that produced a paltry $6,000 in funding, and the British MAUD Committee finding that critical mass was a few kilograms rather than tons. Then we follow General Leslie Groves, fresh from building the Pentagon, as he seized land for Oak Ridge, Hanford, and Los Alamos, hoarded AAA priority materials, and enforced a suffocating need-t ...