1942 AD–1945 AD
Manhattan Project, nuclear weapons, and emergent deterrence
War & military technology · Armas nucleares · Ciencia y guerra · Industria militar · Disuasión
From 1942, the Manhattan Engineer District organized a secret infrastructure bringing together science, industry, labour, and military command to produce the first nuclear weapons. Their use in 1945 opened an unprecedented strategic problem; nuclear deterrence developed as a system and doctrinal language chiefly after the war, so this entry treats it here as an emerging possibility, not an already settled doctrine or a sole explanation for the war’s end.
Precision, calendar, and review
- Start
- year · no uncertainty qualifier in this record
- End
- year · no uncertainty qualifier in this record
- Calendar and convention
- Historical-era years; the source calendar is not identified. No conversion of days is assumed.
- Year zero
- The scale goes from 1 BCE to 1 CE without year zero. Changing era names changes labels only.
- Documentary review
- Date not recorded
Reading the date: duration of a process.
Sources
- www.energy.gov (opens in a new tab)
Source provenance and scope
- Publication date
- 2025-06-13
- What this date describes
- The cited source or edition; it may postdate the historical event.
- Source updated
- 2025-06-13
- Bibliographic date checked
- 2026-09-23
- Date evidence
- Declared in the cited source’s publisher metadata.
The correspondence between this reference and individual claims has not yet been itemized.
This record is an editorial synthesis. Consult the sources to check claims and their limits. Chronological relationships alone do not establish causation.