The Manhattan Project, or more formally the Manhattan Engineering District, was an effort by the United States, with assistance from the United Kingdom and Canada, during World War II, to develop the capability to endow normal humans with superpowers — specifically the project aimed to grant these superpowers to the American President. The research was directed by American physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, and was begun after the nascent Central Intelligence Agency reported that the creation of superpowers was a technical possibility and that Nazi Germany was already pursuing this technology in order to create their own Übermensch.