After the Trinity test, Los Alamos could complete its “delivery” program to provide combat weapons – the program code-named Project Alberta (or Project A). The engineering tasks of the program had included choosing suitable airplanes, training the crew, designing a ballistically stable outer shell and tail, ensuring the bomb's safety from electronic interference by the enemy, and evaluating fuzes. The last phase of the program was bombing Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Delivery Activities in 1943

The delivery program began in October 1943 with the establishment in the Ordnance Division of group E-7, “integration of design and delivery,” made up of Norman F. Ramsey, Jr., the group leader, Sheldon Dike, and Bernard Waldman. Personable and outgoing, Ramsey was the son of an army general and trained as a molecular beams physicist at Columbia University, who had worked under I. I. Rabi. As a consultant in the field of microwave radar for the secretary of war, Ramsey was highly valued by Stimson's assistant, Edward Bowles. To bring Ramsey to Los Alamos, Groves arranged a compromise in which Ramsey officially remained on Bowles's staff while he served on permanent loan to Los Alamos.

Ramsey's first tasks were to survey the Army Air Forces' stock of airplanes and determine the sizes and shapes of bombs they could carry. To drop the long plutonium gun weapon, Project Y needed an airplane with a bomb bay at least 17 feet long and 23 inches in diameter.