A cloud of dark smoke rises more than 20,000 feet into the air, after the atomic bomb explodes over the Japanese port and town of Nagasaki on August 9, 1945

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Interest in science goes back to the earliest days of the nation. President Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin were famous not only as political leaders but also as inventors and scientists. President Abraham Lincoln and Congress established the National Academy of Sciences during the Civil War in the eighteen sixties. And in the early nineteen hundreds, the nation created scientific offices to study and improve agriculture, public health, even air travel.

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By the start of World War One in nineteen fourteen, the federal government was employing scientists in many areas of work.

President Woodrow Wilson created the National Research Council to organize the work of scientists and engineers to win the war. However, before World War Two, government support for science was generally limited. The government was willing to pay for research only to meet certain clear goals, such as better weapons or military transport systems.

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World War Two greatly changed the traditionally limited relationship between American scientists and the federal government. In the early years of the war, the German forces of Adolf Hitler showed the world the power of their new tanks, guns and other weapons.

President Franklin Roosevelt knew that the United States would need to develop modern weapons of its own if it entered the war.