When America developed the atomic bomb that would eventually bring an end to World War II, a secret city in Tennessee was vital for the uranium enrichment that powered the Manhattan Project. Now, that once-secret city is the hub of a new arms race, and The Daily Wire got an exclusive, inside look.
The Manhattan Project 2.0 follows Daily Wire senior reporter Cabot Phillips as he heads to Oak Ridge, Tennessee, which has been reborn as the front line of a global competition against China that the United States cannot afford to lose. Inside the halls of Oak Ridge National Laboratory, President Trump’s Energy Secretary Chris Wright delivers an unmistakable warning: If America throttles its own energy supply and innovation, China will seize the lead in artificial intelligence.
“AI has been around for a long time, but it’s hitting critical mass now. In the next few years, AI is going to change our world, not just economically, but in science and also in national defense,” Wright says. “China is working aggressively in AI. If they get a meaningful lead on us on AI, it will be a different world in the future.”
WATCH: Manhattan Project 2.0 On DailyWire+
To understand what’s at stake, Phillips was given rare access to Frontier, the world’s leading supercomputer driving a modern scientific sprint toward the future. Here, America’s top researchers, led by OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman, use AI to accelerate nuclear fusion breakthroughs, model entire reactor cores before they’re built, design next-generation aircraft engines, and rebuild America’s manufacturing edge atom by atom. Frontier isn’t just running calculations, it is collapsing years of research into days, giving the United States a chance to outpace China’s rapidly expanding digital warfare capabilities.
But the story doesn’t end with the future. Phillips was escorted into the X-10 Graphite Reactor, a sealed historic site where workers once loaded uranium into a massive graphite cube without knowing they were launching the nuclear age. Standing before the original channels and concrete shielding, he learns how that dangerous experiment birthed nuclear engineering itself and paved the way for the Navy’s first nuclear submarines — proof that breakthroughs at Oak Ridge have shifted global power before.
The Manhattan Project 2.0 reveals a nation at another historic crossroads, where nuclear energy, supercomputing, and artificial intelligence converge into a single generational test. It asks whether America will once again accept the risk and responsibility of leading the world into a new age of power, or watch China define that future instead.
.png)
.png)
