The Manhattan Project was launched in 1942 as a secret, multi-site scientific and industrial programme bringing together the United States, United Kingdom, and Canada to develop nuclear weapons before Nazi Germany could do so. Led by General Leslie Groves and physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, it employed over 130,000 people at its peak. The project's culmination in the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki permanently altered humanity's sense of what science and technology could unleash.

The Manhattan Project, which began in 1942, not only marked the dawn of the nuclear age but also instigated profound anxieties about science and ethics. This tension permeated late modernist poetry, with writers like Robert Lowell grappling with the implications of destruction and the moral dilemmas posed by technological advancement.