Robert Oppenheimer: The Atomic Bomb

The atom bomb created a very dangerous, powerful weapon for the United States. Robert Oppenheimer was the lead scientist of the Manhattan Project, which was code name for the A-bomb. It took well over six years to develop such a weapon of mass destruction, costing over two billion U.S. Dollars at the time. According to the Historian, Mary Bellis, making enriched uranium is a very complicated task. Uranium 235 is very hard to extract, one part of uranium that is refined from the ore is over 99% Uranium 238 on the Periodic Table, which is useless for the A-bomb due to there being little to no radioactivity. An enrichment laboratory was constructed at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, where the Columbia University came up with an extraction system that

According to him, the U.S. had tried the separation of Uranium in many ways, including: Isotope Separation, The Electromagnetic Method, Gaseous Diffusion, Centrifuge, and Liquid Thermal Diffusion. It wasn’t until 1940 that the government had started a limited fund on the research of radioactive uranium, thinking that this might be useful for a weapon of powerful mass destruction. Once they figured out a successful way of the separation of isotopes, on December 9th of 1942, the President made the final decisions on the funding of the project, and there was no turning back after that point. The building of the prototype had begun. On December 28th of 1942, Roosevelt approved the funding for the project to be in full swing, which was just in excess of two billion U.S. dollars. The plant that the testing and producing the uranium was known as Y-2, which had many design changes before the final design was approved. Even after the final design of the plant was approved, the design was changed quite a few times along the way of building. After the finishing of the plant, Oppenheimer feared that they would need to find an alternate source of radioactive material, due to not being able to separate enough Uranium 235 in time. They attempted to use plutonium which is nearly, if not more radioactive than Uranium, but they quickly depleted most of their Plutonium deposits, and in turn had to switch back to refining and separating Uranium. There was also another plant for producing radioactive materials, known as K-25. K-25 is mostly forgotten about due to them not producing nearly as much as Y-12. The final construction of the last plant, was Oak Ridge in Tennessee. According to Rhodes, the outcome of dropping the prototype bomb was the same as