The Atom Bomb
By Rachel Stroder
At 8:15 a.m., on August 6, 1945, the American B-29 plane, the Enola Gay, opened its cargo doors and the first ever atomic bomb, "Little Boy," dropped on to the Japanese city of Hiroshima. A great cloud of gas rose up on impact, forming the famous fiery "mushroom cloud," that is a trademark of the atomic bomb. From that nuclear explosion, 70,000 people died and the city was in ruins. Another 130,000 people would die in the next five years.
Later, another bomb was dropped on the seaside town of Nagasaki. It was called "Fat Man," and the death toll was slightly less than the first nuclear attack- 40,000 immediate deaths and 80,000 total. Worst of all, a great percentage and vast majority of the deaths for both bombings was made of civilians.
The construction of the world's first atom bomb began on August 2, 1939, when Albert Einstein, Leo Szilard, and Eugene Wigner, three Jewish scientists who had left Nazi Germany, wrote to American President Franklin Roosevelt. They said that they and several fellow scientists had found a way to purify the isotope uranium-235. They had been working on this during the Holocaust as the Nazis became the first to attempt to build a nuclear weapon. The U.S. would be the first to succeed, when the scientists also said that it could be used to build an atom bomb. Albert Einstein and his colleagues urged the President to take action and start his own nuclear program, before Germany gained the upper hand.
The United States then began Project Manhattan, the 2 billion dollar project (the equivalent of 23 billion dollars now) employing over 130,000 scientists and people. It was the project in which they tried to create the first nuclear weapon- the atom bomb. It all started with nuclear fission, or "splitting the atom." That's how the atom bomb works.
Imagine for an instant a ping-pong table in front of you. In the center, there is a single mousetrap. Now imagine a ping-pong ball is dropped on the mousetrap. The explosion is equivalent to the explosion of a normal bomb (for the time.)
Now imagine that the same ping-pong table covered with mousetraps. If you drop the ping-pong ball on one mousetrap, it triggers all the mousetraps around it, which trigger all those around it, until every mousetrap has snapped. That's the way an atom bomb works. Each splitting atom splits all those around it in a chain reaction. Each split atom of unranium-235, (used in "Little Boy") if it is enriched the right way, releases radiation. The scientists discovered that plutonium-239 (a decayed and slightly more stable version of uranium-238 used in "Fat Man") works even better and faster. The radiation from these types of bomb causes damage in addition to the damage caused by the explosions themselves.
After the nuclear attack on Hiroshima, over 130,000 people died after the explosion. This occurred as a result of the radiation nuclear waste released by fission. Some people died from injuries, but most of them died from cancer or DNA deformations caused by the bomb's radiation.
As Project Manhattan was sparked because of a letter, it grew very rapidly. The United States began to recuriut famous scientists from around the globe to join Project Manhattan. Some influential scientists involved in the project were Niels Bohr, from Denmark, Eugene Wigner, Leo Szilard, and Edward Teller from Hungary, James Chadwick from Britain, Rudolf Peierls, Otto Frisch, Albert Einstein, and James Franck from Germany. Also, there was Felix Bloch from Switzerland, Robert Oppenheimer and David Bohm from the U.S., and Emilio Segre and Enrico Fermi from Italy.The chief of all these people was Robert Oppenheimer. He oversaw the Manhattan Project from start to finish.
There were three major work sites for Project Manhattan,as well as many sub-sites. The three most important were in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, Los Alamos, New Mexico, and Richland, Washington. Though Oak Ridge was the official headquarters, The New Mexico site is the most famous, because the first three bombs were tested there, to make sure they would actually work if they were released.
The first success of the atomic age was "The Gadget," or the very first prototype nuclear weapon. It was set off at the Project Manhattan New Mexico site, which is remembered especially for this very reason. The employees of the project were very careful to keep quiet about the testing of the "Gadget," fearing that people would object to the moral issues surrounding the use of atomics, hence the many layers of code-names. Those who knew about the project knew the minimum that was required for them to do thier part. Very few knew the entirety of what was happening through the secrecy surrounding Project Manhattan, The Gadget, and Little Boy and Fat Man.
When these bombs were finally created, President Harry S. Truman had a difficult decision to face. To use, or not to use the atom bomb technology his successful Project Manhattan had brought him. If he used it, it would undoubtedly, as history has proved, kill hundreds of thousands of civilians, not soldiers. However, if he proceeded with Operation Downfall, or the American attack on the Japanese if they did not use the bombs, many lives would be lost- both American and Japanese lives. This was the main argument behind his decision and those supporting his choice to use the nuclear technology. Plus, there was an additional incentive. The Potsdam ultimatum, an American attempt to get the Japanese to surrender on their terms, was sent back by the Japanese leader, saying it was just restating what had been said at the Cairo ultimatum. Japan would fight until she was utterly crushed. The U.S. thought they could win, but it would be a costly war, not to mention destroying Japan entirely. The atomic bomb was one way to solve that problem. End the Japanese defense with a single blow, the very first atom bomb, and Japan wouldn't need to be entirely destroyed. Just enough to ensure that they surrendered.
Those opposing the decision protested that it was unfair, it did not follow the mutually accepted laws of war, and that it was morally incorrect to destroy hundreds of thousands of innocent Japanese citizens. The soldiers were fighting the war, not the civilians, therefore the civilians shouldn't be killed. They thought the U.S. and Japan should finish the war the regular, traditional way, even if it cost them a lot. Because the atom bomb would cost even more, in human lives and morality. Einstein, Szilard, and many of the other original staff were horrified at how their research was being used and did not want the bomb to be dropped. They had warned the U.S. to begin Project Manhattan to keep the Germans from using their bombs, if they developed them, and now the U.S. was doing the same thing. Szilard commented-
-"Let me say only this much to the moral issue involved: Suppose Germany had developed two bombs before we had any bombs. And suppose Germany had dropped one bomb, say, on Rochester and the other on Buffalo, and then having run out of bombs she would have lost the war. Can anyone doubt that we would then have defined the dropping of atomic bombs on cities as a war crime, and that we would have sentenced the Germans who were guilty of this crime to death at Nuremberg and hanged them?"-
Nevertheless, President Truman decided to drop the bombs. The Japanese did not surrender after the primary bombing of Hiroshima, so three days later, the U.S. dropped the second atom bomb on the port of Nagasaki. Both cities were devastated, and Japan's surrender was finally announced on what was called Victory Over Japan (V-J) day, August 15, 1945 (August 14th in North America) and the official end of World War II.
To the Japanese citizens in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the atom bomb seemed like a flash on the horizon. There was no sound until the bomb's radiation blasted apart everything in and around the center of explosion. Tens of thousands of people died from the explosion and some were trapped beneath the rubble. The cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were completely destroyed by the blast of the first two atomic bombs. Though the cities have made recoveries, the success of the atomic age haunts their pasts.
Resources on the Atom Bomb-
http://www.lancs.ac.uk/ug/eardley/atom_bomb_2.jpg
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manhattan_Project
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_bombing_of_Hiroshima_and_Nagasaki
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_nuclear_weapons
http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/2WWatom.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Manhattan_Project_US_Map.png
http://inventors.about.com/od/astartinventions/a/atomic_bomb.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victory_over_Japan_Day
Hersey, John. Hiroshima. 1st edition. New York City: Random House, 1985.
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