Along with towns such as Los Alamos, New Mexico, and the area around the Savannah River in Georgia, Oak Ridge is central to the history of the development of nuclear weapons in the United States. It has also come to represent many of the environmental consequences of nuclear research and weapons production.

Oak Ridge was a small, sleepy town when it was selected as a research site in the 1940s for the development of the atomic bomb. Amidst an atmosphere of intense secrecy, the government built the Oak Ridge National Laboratories within a period of months and assembled a force of 75,000 scientists. These physicists, engineers, and others worked under extreme security to design various components of the hydrogen bomb. Their research was carried out under the auspices of the Manhattan Project, though the tasks were compartmentalized and few scientists are thought to have been...