What Are the Positive and Negative Effects of the Manhattan Project?

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As long as there is love, there will be hatred; as long as there is peace, there will be war, and as long as there is a positive side, there is a negative side. During the Second World War, the Nazis were very powerful. Due to the fear of the Nazis, Americans started a project called “The Manhattan Project" in order to build a very deadly weapon that could even blow cities apart. The allied powers were so concerned with Nazi domination, that they never considered the outcomes of creating an atomic bomb which are also positive and negative.
The development of atomic bomb boosted the level of understanding in terms of physics and chemistry of that particular time period. Physicists started to realize that stable nuclei can be converted to unstable nuclei. Through such process, they discovered that heavy nuclei can undergo nuclear fission. While testing, they added a neutron to an isotope of Uranium 235. This resulted Uranium 235 to become unstable and break down into Barium and Krypton, releasing two to three more neutrons. The breakdown of Uranium 235 is called “fission”. When the released neutrons attach to other isotopes of Uranium 235, this can result in a chain reaction of fission. For every generation of fission, the amount of fission is doubled, and this resulted in an extreme outburst of energy. The amount of energy released by this process is related to Einstein’s famous equation “E=mc^2” (Wolf).
Einstein's equation "E=mc^2" has two sides which is constructive and destructive. The constructive side is when energy is converted into mass and the destructive side is when a small amount of mass is converted into energy. According to Einstein’s equation, the physicists of the Manhattan project hypothesized that a minute mass ...

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... pleasant side and an unpleasant side; one just have to be optimistic when one thinks about the results.

Works Cited

“German Nuclear Energy Project” Wikipedia. 2nd Mar, 2013. Wikipedia Foundation. 5th Feb, 2014
Harris, William. “How Nuclear Bombs Work”. How Stuff Works. How-StuffWork.com. 6th Feb, 2014
“Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and Subsequence Weapons Testing”. Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and Subsequence Weapons Testing. 15th Mar, 2013. World Nuclear Association. 6th Feb, 2014
Markus, Possel. “From E=mc^2 to the Atomic Bomb” Einstein Online. 4th Oct, 2010. Max Planck Institute of Gravitational Physics. 5th Feb, 2014.
Wolf, Johnathan. AP Physics B. Barron’s: Baron’s U. Press, 2011.

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