In 1939, Albert Einstein warned President Franklin Delano Roosevelt that the Germans were hoarding uranium, implying they were ahead of the United States in nuclear bomb-making.  He urged the President to quickly increase government funded experimental work.  After the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the U.S. could no longer avoid the war. The Manhattan Project was started in 1942 and Hanford opened shortly thereafter to produce plutonium.  The Germans surrendered before the bomb was finished, but the work was not in vain.  Hanford's plutonium would eventually be used in the bombs "Fat Man" and "Little Boy" which were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, forcing the Japanese to surrender and effectively ending World War II.