User: what was the manhattan project during world war 2?
Assistant: The Manhattan Project was a research and development started by the US military during the second world war to produce the first nuclear weapons. Nuclear physicist Robert Oppenheimer was the director of the Los Alamos Laboratory that designed the actual bombs. Leslie Groves was initially not convinced that Oppenheimer could lead other scientists, but he was impressed that Oppenheimer had such a full grasp of the subject to lead this into an actual materialized atomic bomb. Because of the interdisciplinary nature of the subject, Oppenheimer also had an extreme drive to see the project to completion.