The United States would not have been able to complete the atomic bomb project without its vigorous economy and substantial industrial facilities. However, the scientific resources of the nation were just as important, given the existing gaps in scientific knowledge at the time Los Alamos opened its doors. President Roosevelt's decision to support atomic bomb research preceded the first demonstration of a divergent chain reaction, the development of an industrial-scale method for separating 235U, and determination of plutonium's chemical and physical properties. In organizing the American atomic bomb project, Vannevar Bush drew on a sizable community of well-trained scientists having a wide repertoire of techniques and approaches. In bringing these tools to bear on the wartime problem of building the atomic bomb, the Los Alamos scientists developed a new approach to research.

What were the elements of this approach? First, the research was bound even more tightly than was conventional science to the behavior of artifacts and apparatus. The bombs had to explode, the detonators to fire, and the shape of the gadgets was constrained by that of the B-29 bomb bays. The technology had, in principle, to be totally reliable. Malfunctioning meant failure – it could no longer be construed as but another step in the process of understanding the physical world. In a context in which the lack of funding was not a constraint on research, one result was that solutions were often approached in several ways at once.