Word: districting
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Manhattan Engineer District" was the purposely deceptive name given the project. Its centers were full of G-men. Its couriers were Army officers, brief cases chained to their wrists. It rated highest priorities for men and materials. From dozens of universities and industrial plants physicists, chemists and mathematicians vanished into thin air; the Manhattan District had snatched them...
This "chain reaction," which the Manhattan District now had to develop, did not happen naturally, chiefly because only one part in 140 of ordinary uranium is U-235. Most of the rest is another isotope, U-238-which, instead of splitting like U-235, absorbs the newborn neutrons with the result that the atomic flame goes out like a match in wet excelsior...
This last could be done by imbedding small bits of uranium in a "moderator"-a substance which would slow the speed of the neutrons but not absorb them. The Germans may have tried heavy water for this job. The Manhattan District men decided on graphite which was easier to get. If they could produce plutonium at an orderly controlled rate, they would have a charge for the bomb that would change the world...
...Mountains. Like an ever-growing snowball the Manhattan District rolled around the nation, picking up men (125,000), money ($2,000,000,000), mountains of materials, trainloads of equipment. It enlisted famed corporations - Eastman, Dupont, Stone & Webster, Union Carbide and Carbon, and others...
...higher he rose in the Post Office, the larger the districts to which he was assigned (as organizer of mail deliveries); the larger the district, the more avidly he studied it, riding its roads and lanes until he knew its people and its ways by heart...