The US Army general in charge of the Manhattan Project Leslie Groves warned his soldiers: "Make no mistake about it gentlemen, we have gathered the largest collection of crackpots ever seen."
Therein stems my interest in this subject. What happens if you gather some of the greatest minds in history into a remote secret place, provided protection by the US military and given unlimited budget, for an urgent national priority project?
The "crackpots" were led by J. Robert Oppenheimer but the real brains were émigré scientists from Europe, including the Hungarians Edward Teller (co-father of the H-bomb), Eugene Wigner, Leo Szilard (theorized chain reaction, co-inventor of the nuclear reactor), and John Von Neumann (certified Math genius, conceived ENIAC, the first computer). Pre-war conditions in Hungary somehow aligned perfectly to produce an unprecedented batch of genius scientists, known as the "men from Mars".
There are the Italians Enrico Fermi (co-inventor and builder of the first nuclear reactor) and Emilio Segre, the Germans Rudolf Peierls, Otto Frisch (Austian actually), Hans Bethe, and Klaus Fuchs. The latter fed the Soviets the design of Fatman, the implosion bomb, saving the Russians years of research and enabling them to explode their first A-bomb, an exact copy of Fatman, by 1949.
There are lots of others, mostly present and future Nobel Prize laureates.