and global impact of atomic power because my grandfather was J . Robert Oppenheimer , director of the Manhattan Project in Los Alamos , NM from 1942-1945 . I first approached this paper by considering my own history in relation to the Manhattan Project ( the Project herein ) and observing how small events in the Project have affected major elements of my own life . Although this paper is not the venue to lay bare my life story , it is an opportunity to analyze a select few popular representations of the Project and to consider its influence on the interconnection of seemingly disparate images .
The Manhattan Project continues to iterate in patterns that disrupt any chronological explanation of it as an historical event occurring on a timeline of controlled forward movement ; instead it represents an inherently unpredictable system in which initial conditions are highly sensitive to small changes in their cycles . The Project , from inception to execution , was dependent on initial conditions of military and scientific leadership , personality , intelligence , secrecy , and , ultimately , weather conditions in Alamogordo , New Mexico on July 16 , 1945 .
While the Manhattan Project occurred in controlled response to the turbulence of World War II atrocities , it only appears to have been a one-time project with a discrete beginning , middle , and end ; in reality , it is a Scheherazadian story that continues every day that people avoid atomic death . The Project is not a predictable system in a closed loop of history — its characters continue to live and affect popular perception of its power . It reaches fractal-like into time simultaneously behind and ahead of itself , birthing fractals of itself in popular imagery . The Project as a whole , and the work at Los Alamos National Laboratories in New Mexico in particular , brought
25