Zulaikha Ayub

The Manhattan Project is an investigation into the international geopolitical environment of the United States military arm, which has increasingly dominated the world stage in the last century. This study focuses on the creation and deployment of the Atomic Bomb during World War II, a “moment when man first turned on himself the elemental forces of his own universe” (No High Ground,1960), and a defining nexus in the history of human civilization. This thesis attempts to demonstrate the enormous capacity of the natural and physical science disciplines when appropriated by concentrated military power in the form of an alternative archive that contains images, official documents, fabrication diagrams, geographical sites and weaponry that narrate this history from 1939 and into the Cold War. In addition to exposing the empirical processes that led to the bomb’s development, the archive envisions a history of a future that captures man’s altered disposition to his environment in the post- atomic world in the form of a ‘black box’ that represents the associated conditions of disparate scales, invisible systems and pre-figured knowledge.