When offered the position of director of the Laboratory in 1945, Norris Bradbury reluctantly agreed to take the job for six months or until it was filled permanently, whichever came first. He remained for 25 years, overseeing the transition of the Lab from the site of a wartime crash project to one of the nation's premier research facilities.
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Bradbury arrived in Los Alamos in July 1944 to work on the Manhattan Project, the crash program to build the world's first atomic weapons. He was in charge of assembling the nonnuclear components for the world's first nuclear explosion, which occurred at Trinity Site in southern New Mexico on July 16, 1945. Less than a month later, following the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, World War II ended. Many Los Alamos scientists, including Director J. Robert Oppenheimer and Bradbury, planned to return to their pre-war jobs or take advantage of other employment offers. Bradbury took over a research institution that had just completed an immensely successful project, but did not have a compelling mission at that time.