The Atomic Bomb And The Manhatten Project

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The Atomic Bomb and the Manhattan Project

It was December 7, 1942 a beautiful mourning in Pearl Harbor. When out of the blue, hundreds of Japanese planes bomb and either sunk or severely damaged eight battle ships and at least thirteen other naval ships that were docked on the shore. This spark is what involved the United States the forest fire known as World War II. My paper is not on the war itself, but is on the atomic bomb, and what was known as the Manhattan project. In my report I will talk about the many reasons, the atomic bomb had to be created and used.
The atomic warfare capabilities of the United States were brought about in a letter from Mr. Albert Einstein to Franklin D. Roosevelt, our current president at the time. “It may be possible to set up a nuclear chain reaction in a large mass of uranium, by which vast amounts of power and large quantities of new radium-like elements would be generated…. It is conceivable, though much less certain, that extremely powerful bombs of a new type may thus be constructed.” His letter was the inspiration for the atomic bomb. Although it took a while for Roosevelt to realize what we had stumbled upon, his close friend Alexander Sachs helped him realize the possibilities. Two years later in November Roosevelt appointed a committee to advise him on nuclear fission and the capabilities of the concept in war. At the head of this committee was Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson. About a month later, an event happened that would change the history books forever. The Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, Hawaii at about 7:50 in the mourning. This brought America into the war and the Manhattan Project was on its way. The Manhattan Project included the designing and construction of the atomic bomb, and the execution of dropping the bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. There were three major research and production sites for the project. The first was Los Alamos, near Alamogordo, New Mexico. This is where the actual weapon would be designed. The head of this site was Julius Robert Oppenheimer; this caused a small uproar because of past involvement in pro communist’s activities. The second site for the Manhattan Project was in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. At this site, scientist and laborers were separating U-235 from U-238. Here the Hiroshima bomb was built in huge buildings and the locals could only imagine...

... middle of paper ...

...s. On April 6, 1945 at about 8:15 AM, before air raid alarms could go off, little boy exploded. The temperature was estimated to reach over 1,000,000 degrees Celsius. This bomb initially killed about a hundred thousand people, then injured about the same amount, and that does not include how many it killed after the blast from exposure to the radiation. Two days after the first bomb was dropped the U.S.S.R declared war on Japan. On August 9, we dropped the bomb on Nagasaki at about 10:58 AM. The results were slightly greater than the Hiroshima bomb. This bomb caused these cities to turn into complete rubble, there was nothing left standing with in a four square mile radius of where the bomb hit. So on September 2, 1945; General MacArthur accepts Japans formal surrender aboard battleship Missouri in Tokyo Bay. Therefore, the tragic war ends quicker than anyone could have ever imagined. The US now has a new weapon to use in warfare and have set up bases in Japan. So I ask you was the atomic bomb a god thing or a bad thing for our society. It helped us win a world war and helped us become a super-power of the world but it also is now one of the great dangers of the world. You decide…

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