The Manhattan Project :: History

The Manhattan ProjectOn the morning of August 6, 1945, a B-29 bomber named Enola mirthful flew over the industrial city of Hiroshima, Japan and dropped the first atomic bomb ever. The city went up in flames caused by the immense power equal to round 20,000 tons of TNT. The project was a success. They were an unprecedented assemblage of civilian, and military scientific brain powerbrilliant, intense, and young, the people that helped develop the bomb. Unknowingly they came to an isolated mountain setting, know as Los Alamos, New Mexico, to design and build the bomb that would end World War 2, but begin serious controversies concerning its sheer power and destruction. I became arouse in this topic because of my interest in science and history. It seemed an appropriate topic because I am presently studying World War 2 in my Social Studies Class. The Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings were always taught to me with some opinion, and I always wanted to know the bomb itself and the unbiased effects that it had. This I-search was a great opportunity for me to actually satiate my interest. The Manhattan Project was the code name for the US effort during World War II to produce the atomic bomb. It was appropriately named for the Manhattan Engineer District of the US soldiery Corps of Engineers, because much of the early research was done in New York City (Badash 238). Sparked by refugee physicists in the United States, the program was slowly organized afterwards nuclear fission was discovered by German scientists in 1938, and many US scientists expressed the fear that Hitler would attempt to build a fission bomb. thwart with the idea that Germany might produce an atomic bomb first, Leo Szilard and other scientists asked Albert Einstein, a famous scientist during that time, to use his influence and write a letter to electric chair FDR, pleading for support to further research the power of nuclear fission (Badash 237). His letters were a success, and President Rooseve lt established the Manhattan Project. Physicists from 1939 onward conducted much research to give away answers to such questions as how many neutrons were emitted in each fission, which elements would not capture the neutrons but would moderate or reduce their velocity , and whether only the lighter and scarcer isotope of uracil (U-235) fissioned or the common isotope (U-238) could be used. They learned that each fission releases a few neutrons.