The photo to the left was taken at the Niagara Falls Country Club, on the high ground that rises above Lewiston, not long after the Second World War had ended. The occasion of the banquet was a reunion of industrialists, military men, and scientists instrumental to the Manhattan Project, the success of which had been demonstrated dramatically at Hiroshima and Nagasaki less than a year earlier.

In attendance were Major General Leslie R. Groves (that’s him under the mirror), the military director of the Manhattan Engineer District of the US Army Corps of Engineers—the name Groves gave to the project—and Colonel Kenneth D. Nichols, Groves’s right-hand man.

The others seated at the table with Groves and Nichols were the owners and managers and scientists who guided the region’s leading heavy industries—the people whose expertise and facilities made Niagara Falls, in many ways, ground zero in the effort to build the world’s first atomic bomb. (more…)