The Atomic Bomb Essay Research Paper Background free essay sample

The Atomic Bomb Essay, Research Paper Background of the Atomic BombIt was during the Second World War that the United States became a universe power, thanks in a big portion to its monopoly on atomic arms. The atomic bomb is a arm with great explosive power that consequences form the sudden release of energy upon the splitting, or fission of the karyon of such heavy elements as Pu or U. This new destructive force wrecked mayhem on two Nipponese metropoliss and caused the terminal of World War II. It besides saved 1000s of American lives because a land invasion of Japan was no longer necessary. The determination to make the bombs was that of United States President Franklin D. Roosevelt under a secret military undertaking that was called The Manhattan Project. The Beginnings of the Manhattan ProjectIn 1939, after German dictator Adolf Hitler invaded Poland, German scientists shocked the scientific universe when they announced that they had split uranium atoms by semisynthetic agencies for the first clip. Upon hearing this intelligence, a atomic physicist, Leo Szilard, was convinced that a concatenation reaction of this procedure could be used as a arm to let go of an amazing explosion of power. Szilard knew that this cognition was now in the incorrect custodies of the enemy Germans. On a July twenty-four hours in 1939 Szilard and his associate, Edward Teller, drove to the Long Island place of Albert Einstein to alarm him of their findings. Einstein used his political influence by instantly composing a missive to President Roosevelt explicating the effects of the Germans making an atomic bomb. His missive read, # 8220 ; I believe, hence, that is my responsibility to convey to your attending that it may go possible to put up a atomic concatenation reaction in a big mass of U by which huge sums of power and big measures of new-like elements would be generated. A individual bomb of this type, carried by a boat and exploded in a port, might really good destruct the whole port, together with some of the environing territory. # 8221 ; Two months passed before Roosevelt eventually read the missive. He ordered a commission of scientists and military officers to run into Szilard and Teller to find whether America was capable of constructing a atomic bomb. In 1940, Szilard and Teller were granted a mere $ 6,000 to get down experiments in atomic fission. The couple enlisted the aid of the victor of the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1938, Enrico Fermi.Since much of the United States early atomic research been conducted at New York # 8217 ; s Columbia University, the federal authorities assigned the Manhattan District of the Army Corps of Engineers to build the primary research and production installations for the undertaking. Hence the # 8220 ; Manhattan Project # 8221 ; became the codification name for the atomic-bomb development plan. Success under the StandsIn early 1942, the Manhattan Project moved its central offices to Chicago. There the scientists set up a researc h lab under the bases of the University of Chicago football bowl. It was there that the turning point of the undertaking occurred ; the first atomic concatenation reaction was created. On December 2, 1942, to carry on the trial, the three superb work forces built a graphite atomic reactor the size of a house. By the pulling of a rod attached to the reactor the experiment began. The metre on the numeration machine ascended to the highest point and stayed at that place. # 8220 ; Gentlemen, the heap has gone critical, # 8221 ; Fermi announced, signaling that it was a success. Fermi so ordered the control rod to be pushed back before the reactor exploded and possibly taking a big portion of Chicago with it. The concatenation reaction was the grounds that proved that an atom bomb could be made. Most of the scientists were overjoyed, but Szilard said to Fermi, # 8220 ; This is a black twenty-four hours for mankind. # 8221 ; Confidence in the projectThe success in Chicago prompted Roos evelt to give top precedence to the creative activity of a atomic bomb. The focal point of the undertaking shifted from research to the existent production of the bomb. More than $ 2,000,000,000 was now being pumped into the undertaking. The Manhattan Project # 8217 ; s squad was allowed to use the state # 8217 ; s brightest mathematicians and its most extremely trained proficient people. Twelve Nobel Prize victors were besides enlisted in the project. Highly skilled work forces and adult females were in short supply in wartime, but they were routinely snatched off their occupations and set to work constructing the bomb. Roosevelt believed he was in a race with Hitler to develop this ultimate arm. In the early 1940 # 8217 ; s rumours has gotten to Washington that Germany was constructing its ain atomic arm. The Germans had taken over a heavy H2O works in Norway. Heavy H2O is H2O that contains heavy hydrogen, a important ingredient in doing the atomic bomb. American undercover age nts reported that Germans were mining U in occupied Czechoslovakia. All this grounds added up to a incubus scenario. No 1 wanted to conceive of what might go on of an atomic bomb fell into the custodies of a lunatic such as Hitler. The Manhattan Project was the most ambitious scientific project of all time launched in American History. Rare U had to be processed. Elephantine machinery demand for the bomb # 8217 ; s development was designed and built on a piece-by-piece footing. Work on the undertaking was conducted in 37 installings spread over 13 different provinces. Two new towns, Hanford, Washington ; and Oak Ridge, Tennessee were created merely to bring forth the stuff that would fuel the bomb. By 1945 Oak Ridge had been transformed from an stray vale keeping a few farms into the 5th largest metropolis in Tennessee. The existent design and building of the bomb was carried out at another new town: Los Alamos, New Mexico. Before the war Los Alamos had been a bantam spread used as a male child # 8217 ; s school. With breathtaking velocity, houses and edifices were erected at Los Alamos. Soon the town had its ain newspaper, schools and a population of four 1000. Most Los Alamos occupants were scientists and their households. The caput of the Los Alamos undertaking was the brilliant but austere J. Robert Oppenheimer. After Oppenheimer worked on some atomic research at Berkley he was assigned to direct Project Y, the existent Delaware signers of the bomb inside the Manhattan Project. It was his idea for the Los Alamos location as the design laboratory. During this time General Leslie Groves had taken over general military command of the Manhattan Project. Keeping the project’s work a secret was an obsession with him. A small army of security guards stood watch over all the plants and laboratories. Although more than a hundred thousand men and women took part in the project, only a handful of them knew they were making an atomic bomb. The few who did know the goal of the project were careful to call the bomb a â€Å"gadget† or a â€Å"gizmo† in casual conversation. The war in Europe took a dramatic turn in June 1944, when allied armies stormed the beaches of France and began a long march to Germany. Traveling with the frontline forces was a top-secret unit code named ALSOS. The ALSOS team investigated research sites in Europe where American scientists believed Germans were making nuclear weap ons. The ALSOS investigation discovered shocking evidence that Germany was not actively working on a bomb at all. Early in the war Germany had shown interest in nuclear bombs, but it later shifted its goals toward making rockets and jet aircraft. Hitler himself led his country away from atomic weaponry by denouncing nuclear physics as a â€Å"Jewish Science.†Germany surrendered to the Allies on May 8, 1945. A week earlier, Hitler had committed suicide in a Berlin bunker. With the war in Europe over, Japan stood as America’s only enemy. Since Japan was a nation near defeat in 1945 many Manhattan Project scientists thought it would be inhumane to drop the bomb on a helpless nation. Leo Szilard wrote a letter to now president Truman, begging him not to use the weapon he helped create on Japan. Truman rejected his pleas by pointing out that the battle at Okinawa cost the U.S. fifty thousand men killed or wounded. Military experts estimated that an invasion of Japan would r esult in a million United States casualties. Dropping the bomb would most likely force a Japanese surrender and prevent such an invasion. The Desert TestBy July, 1945 the Manhattan Project work was almost completed; they had developed a working nuclear bomb. The only obstacle that stood in their way is the actual testing of the bomb. The test, code name â€Å"Trinity† occurred on July 16, 1945 in the New Mexico desert town of Alamogordo. In a concrete bunker, a group of scientists and high-ranking military officials waited tensely. Many of them glanced at the clock, which was almost toward five in the morning. It was still to dark to see the hundred foot tall steel tower that housed the world’s first atomic bomb nicknamed â€Å"Fat Man.†Scientist Isidor Rabi wrote as the countdown came to a close and the bomb exploded. â€Å"[It was] the brightest light I have ever seen or that I think anyone has ever seen. It blasted; it pounced; it bored its way right through you. It was a vision, which was seen with more than the eye. It was seen to last forever. You wished it would stop†¦. There was an enormous ball of fire, which grew, and it rolled as it grew: it went up in the air in yellow flashes and into scarlet green. It looked menacing. I seemed to come toward me.† Finally, the tremendous ball of fire reached its height and diminished to reveal a mushroom-shaped cloud rising from the desert floor. In the bunker the men displayed mixed reactions. Some congratulated each other with slaps on the back and others sat in silence. Robert Oppenheimer spoke a passage from the Bhagavad-Gita an ancient book of Hindu scripture: â€Å"Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds†After receiving a full report of the test, President Truman decided that dropping the bomb would be the only way to save American blood. Although some historians believe that an ulterior motive was to impress the Soviets; Truman claimed he was looking out for th e future of the United States.The BombingBefore dawn on August 6, 1945, a single B-29 named Enola Gay took off from Tinian Island, about fifteen hundred miles south of Japan. The bomber was loaded with one whale-shaped bomb that weighed about nine-thousand pounds and nicknamed â€Å"little boy.† Far ahead of the Enola Gay, a scout plane reported that there was little cloud cover over the primary target, the Japanese city of Hiroshima. In the city men and women jammed the streets for work and school children scampered to school. At precisely 8:15 A.M. the B-29 dropped its bomb. Seven hundred yards above Hiroshima, the bomb exploded like a huge flashlight. The blast killed seventy thousand residents, many of whom were instantly incinerated. Three days later, a second atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki, killing forty thousand more people. In the months following the deaths tolls from the two cities continued to climb. The bombs released poisonous radiation that caused leukemia and other diseases. Not even the Manhattan Project scientists could have foreseen that their creation would have deadly- long-term effects. Even today Hiroshima and Nagasaki residents are dying of sickness caused from the blasts of 1945. On August 14, 1945, just five days after the Nagasaki blast, Japan agrees to American terms of surrender. The atomic bombs manufactured by the crash program called the Manhattan Project had helped to win World War II. However, the bombs ushered the world into a nuclear age. Since the first test millions of people have wondered whether nuclear weapons will spell the end of life on our planet. That question was first raised on the New Mexico desert in 1945 when a scientist remarked, † Am sure that at the end of the world- at the last millisecond of the world’s existence-the last man will see something very familiar to what we have seen today.†BibliographyGiovannitti, Len The Decision To Drop The Bomb, 1956, Coward-McCann, Inc. New Y ork, New York.Herken, Gregg, The Winning Weapon, 1980, Alfred A. Knoff, Inc. New York, New York.Stein, R. Conrad, Cornerstones of Freedom: The Manhattan Project, 1993, Children Press, Chicago Illinois.Wyden, Peter, Day One: Before Hiroshima and After, 1984, Simon and Schuster, New York, New York.