The Manhattan Project
On the morning of August 6, 1945, a B-29 bomber named Enola Gay
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 about 20,000 tons of TNT. The project was a success. They were
an unprecedented assemblage of civilian, and military scientific brain
power—brilliant, intense, and young, the people that helped develop the
bomb. Unknowingly they came to an isolated mountain setting, known 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.
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appropriately named for
the Manhattan Engineer District of the US Army 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 after 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. Frustrated 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 president FDR, pleading for support to further research
the power of nuclear fission (Badash 237). His letters were a success,
and President Roosevelt established the Manhattan Project.
Physicists from 1939 onward conducted much research to find answers
to such questions as how many neutrons were emitted in each fission, which
elements would not capture the ...
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2). Finally, Groves gambled on Oppenheimer, a theoretical
mathematician, as director of the weapons laboratory, built on an isolated
mesa (flat land area) at Los Alamos, New Mexico.
After much difficulty, an absorbent barrier suitable for separating
isotopes of uranium was developed and installed in the Oak Ridge gaseous
diffusion plant. Finally, in 1945, uranium-235 of bomb purity was shipped
to Los Alamos, where it was fashioned into a gun-type weapon. In a barrel,
one piece of uranium was fired at another, together forming a supercritical,
explosive mass. To achieve chain-reaction fission, a certain amount of
fissile material, called critical mass, is ...
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"The Manhattan Project." Essayworld.com. Essayworld.com, 29 Nov. 2007. Web. 23 Dec. 2024. <http://www.essayworld.com/essays/The-Manhattan-Project/75057>
"The Manhattan Project." Essayworld.com. November 29, 2007. Accessed December 23, 2024. http://www.essayworld.com/essays/The-Manhattan-Project/75057.
"The Manhattan Project." Essayworld.com. November 29, 2007. Accessed December 23, 2024. http://www.essayworld.com/essays/The-Manhattan-Project/75057.
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