Project Camel Project Camel was the codename given to work performed by the California Institute of Technology ( Caltech ) in support of the Manhattan Project during World War II . These activities included the development of detonators and other equipment , testing of bomb shapes dropped from Boeing B - 29 Superfortress bomber s , and the Salt Wells Pilot Plant , where explosive components of nuclear weapons were manufactured . Background . 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 . A suitable test area was required for this near Pasadena , California , so the area was transferred from the Army to the Navy in October 1943 , and commissioned as the Naval Ordnance Test Station ( NOTS ) in December 1943 . Workshops , laboratories and facilities were constructed for over 600 men . During 1944 , NOTS worked on the development and testing of the 3 . 5 - inch , 5 - inch , HVAR and 11 . 75 - inch ( Tiny Tim ) rockets . 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 director of the OSRD , Vannevar Bush saw an opportunity to use some of the expertise at Caltech on another secret wartime project he was involved with , the Manhattan Project . Bush arranged for Charles C . Lauritsen , the head of the rocket team at Caltech , to visit the Los Alamos Laboratory , and meet with the project director , Major General Leslie R . Groves , Jr . , the laboratory director , Robert Oppenheimer , and senior scientists at the Los Alamos laboratory . Oppenheimer and Lauritsen knew each other well , as Oppenheimer had worked at Caltech before the war . In addition to its scientists , Caltech also possessed an experienced procurement team , headed by Trevor Gardner . This group worked closely with its counterpart at Los Alamos , which was headed by Lieutenant Colonel Robert W . Lockridge . Codename . All the work done at NOTS on behalf of the Manhattan Project came under the codename Project " Camel " . 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 . Manhattan Project . Drop testing . The Manhattan Project conducted an extensive series of drop tests to evaluate various bomb shapes . These were initially conducted with scale models of the bomb dropped from a TBF Avenger at the US Navy test range at Dahlgren , Virginia starting in August 1943 . A new airfield was constructed at NOTS , using Manhattan Project funding , with three runways , , and long , and wide to accommodate the Boeing B - 29 Superfortress . Fuel storage for of gasoline and of oil . It was opened on 1 June 1945 , and named Armitage Field after Navy Lieutenant John Armitage , who was killed while testing a Tiny Tim rocket at NOTS in August 1944 . Three B - 29s were based at Armitage for drop testing . 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 . Getting the Fat Man to fall properly was quite difficult . One officer described it as : The resolution of the problem involved extensive testing with various fin configurations . Commander Chick Hayward initially thought that test bombs dropped at NOTS would be easier to recover than those dropped on the sands at Wendover , but they proved to have considerable ability to penetrate the desert floor , and required no less digging out . The commander of Project Alberta , Captain Deak Parsons , had four bomb assembly kits produced . These kits were fully contained facilities , which included a number of Quonset hut s with air conditioning . Two were shipped to the Pacific island of Tinian , where the atomic bombs were assembled . One was kept as a spare at Wendover , and one was erected at Inyokern , where it was used to assemble the explosive but non - nuclear pumpkin bomb s for testing . Detonators . The design of the Fat Man required that a number of explosive lens es had to be detonated simultaneously . After learning from Luis Alvarez that the Los Alamos Laboratory had encountered problems with the supply of the exploding bridgewire detonator s required for this , Lauritsen found manufacturers in the Los Angeles area that could produce them . Alvarez ordered the detonators by the thousand . They were used in the bomb , but most were expended in various diagnostic tests required to verify that the detonators and the lenses worked perfectly . Responsibility for the development and testing of the critical detonators was shared between Lauritsen ' s group at Caltech and Robert Henderson ' s group at Los Alamos . By mid - 1945 , the object was to produce 1 , 000 detonators each week . Meeting this target proved challenging . Reliability was the key problem , with initial batches containing unacceptably high numbers of failures . 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 . Pilot plant . The explosive lenses required by the Fat Man had to be fabricated . A small explosive plant was established at Los Alamos known as Site S , as it was a former sawmill . Groves was appalled at the work practices and safety at Site S , and considered it only a matter of time before it blew up . On Parson ' s recommendation , Groves decided to establish a pilot plant at NOTS , because Caltech had experience in building and operating pilot ordnance plants . He had some misgivings about this , because he thought that the Navy might err too far on the side of workplace safety . Groves and Parsons met with Lauritsen and Bruce Sage , who had built the China Lake Pilot Plant where the rockets were made , and it was agreed that Caltech would build and operate the plant . A site was chosen in the Salt Wells Valley and work commenced on 80 buildings , 52 of them permanent , at a cost of $ 13 million . Groves wanted the plant working within 100 days . 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 . Complicating the construction program was the fact that Los Alamos had not finalized what processes would be used . Equipping the plants involved its own challenges . Some facilities had to be fabricated for the purpose . Some items were hard to locate , while others were in short supply in the wartime economy . The Manhattan Project ' s overriding priority overcame this problem . In some cases , the Army had representatives at the factories where items were made who designated them for use by Project Camel . Groves felt that his fears about excessive safety were realized : reinforced concrete , blast proof doors and electrical shielding drove up costs . In the end , after 115 days , the first explosives were melted , mixed and poured on 25 July 1945 . After the war . 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 " : Production at Site S ceased in late 1945 due to the cold weather . All work was then done at Salt Wells . The plant was completed in January 1946 , and all equipment was installed and working by May 1946 . 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 . Special instrumentation was devised by Caltech ' s Ira Bowen to assess the quality of the explosive blocks . The temporary nature of the accommodation was no longer acceptable after the war , and the Atomic Energy Commission ( AEC ) , which took over from the Manhattan Project on 1 January 1947 , 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 . Improved techniques and facilities allowed the plant to treble its output in 1947 . By 1949 , the pilot plant employed over 700 people . The pilot plant helped design and equip and train workers for the new Burlington AEC Plant , which took over responsibility for manufacturing the explosive lenses . The Salt Wells Pilot Plant was closed in 1954 .