From the archives: Nov. 12, 1942, the meeting that picked the Manhattan Project's paths

On Nov. 12, 1942, the Manhattan Project's Military Policy Committee met to settle how the project would make bomb material, a session the Department of Energy's Manhattan Project history calls a decisive meeting.

Acting on recommendations from Gen. Leslie Groves and James Conant, the committee cancelled the centrifuge project. Gaseous diffusion, the pile and the electromagnetic method would go straight to full scale, skipping the pilot-plant stage, and the S-1 Executive Committee ratified the decisions two days later, the history says.

Later that month, on Nov. 25, Groves chose J. Robert Oppenheimer to head the bomb research and design laboratory to be built at Los Alamos.