Project Camel
These activities included the development of detonators and other equipment, testing of bomb shapes dropped from Boeing B-29 Superfortress bombers, and the Salt Wells Pilot Plant, where explosive components of nuclear weapons were manufactured.
In the early 1930s, an emergency landing field was built by the Works Progress Administration in the Mojave Desert near the small town of Inyokern, California.
Opened in 1935, it was acquired by the United States Army Air Forces (USAAF) in 1942, and became part of the Muroc Bombing and Gunnery Range.
In 1943, the Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD) contracted with the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) for the testing and evaluation of rockets for the Navy.
[1] By late 1944, rocket development and testing work began to taper off, and production models started to reach the Navy and USAAF in quantity.
The name is said to have come from a remark by a Los Alamos scientist that once a camel (meaning Caltech) gets its nose under a tent flap it is hard to dislodge.
These were initially conducted with scale models of the bomb dropped from a Grumman TBF Avenger at the US Navy test range at Dahlgren, Virginia starting in August 1943.
[1] Caltech's Gerald Kron developed instrumentation to evaluate the test drops, which were made by aircraft based at NOTS, Muroc and Wendover Army Air Field.
In May 1945, a box of detonators manufactured by Raytheon fell from a truck and tumbled down a mountain side, but were found to still be in working order.
While Site S had sufficient capacity to make explosive components for one or two bombs, it was unlikely that it could meet the expected demand in the months to come.
Groves felt that his fears about excessive safety were realized: reinforced concrete, blast proof doors and electrical shielding drove up costs.
After the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Under Secretary of War, Robert P. Patterson, sent a telegram to "all the men and women employed on the Camel Project":Today the whole world knows the secret which you have helped us keep for many months.
The atomic bomb which you have helped to develop with high devotion to patriotic duty is the most devastating military weapon that any country has ever been able to turn against its enemy.
Work was initially dogged by an unacceptably large number of defects in the form of cracks or imperfections in the explosive blocks.
The core of the problem was that the techniques used at Los Alamos did not scale to a production site, so different methods were required.
[18] The temporary nature of the accommodation was no longer acceptable after the war,[18][19] and the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), which took over from the Manhattan Project on 1 January 1947,[20] spent $3.252 million on 380 sets of family quarters, streets, electricity, sewers, mains water, and a small school, which was named after Groves, and opened in 1948.
