Nagasaki

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August 6th and 9th of the year 1945 would change the human race forever. These were the dates on which the United States dropped the first and as of now only atomic bombs on an enemy country during wartime. The orders to start the research of nuclear weapons came from President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The Manhattan Project did not start until seven days after Pearl Harbor. The name came from where the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers were assigned to work in the Engineering District of Manhattan (Miscamble 8). The test site where the majority of the testing took place was out in Alamogordo, New Mexico. This site was called the Trinity Test Site and was headed by Nuclear Physicist Robert Oppenheimer (Miscamble 60).
There are two types of atom bombs: fission and fusion. Fusion bombs are also called implosion bombs. Fusion works because it combines two smaller atoms, which releases massive amounts of energy. The downside of fusion is that it is hard to control. Fission works by splitting a large unstable atom with a particle. This particle strikes the nuclei of the atom and causes it to break apart and start a chain reaction. One can control fission by selecting the number of neutrons the atom has (atomicarchive.com).
Dr. Robert Oppenheimer was born in New York City on April 22, 1904. His father was a German textile merchant and his mother was an artist. At an early age, he knew he wanted to be a chemist. He attended Harvard and graduated in 1922. When he was twenty-two, he got his Ph.D. while studding under Max Born at the University of Göttingen. Oppenheimer later became a professor at the University of California at Berkley. When World War II began, he enthusiastically became involved with development of the atomi...

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...but the second bomb drop location was up in the air. The locations for the second bomb were Kokura, Kyoto, and Niigata. The bomb detonated over Nagasaki was a implosion device that was tested in the first nuclear detonation at Alamogordo, New Mexico in 1945. The radiochemical reaserch of the nuclear fallout and fireball formation measurements of the test was used to establish the yield of the Nagasaki bomb as twenty kilotons). The Hiroshima bomb was a gun-type device in which two sub-critical pieces of enriched uranium were propelled together to create the explosion. The Hiroshima bomb was the only one of its design ever detonated. The determination of the yield for the Hiroshima explosion depends on theoretical calculations and measurements of effects of the explosion at Hiroshima. The calculated yield for the Hiroshima device is currently 16 ± 2 kt (Chapter 2).

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