Hiroshima and nagasaki bombing

  1. The atomic bomb & The Manhattan Project (article)


Download: Hiroshima and nagasaki bombing
Size: 27.20 MB

The atomic bomb & The Manhattan Project (article)

The Manhattan Project was the codename for the secret US government research and engineering project during the Albert Einstein in October 1939. In his letter, Einstein warned the president that Nazi Germany was likely already at work on developing a nuclear weapon. By August 1942, the Manhattan Project was underway. 1 ^1 1 start superscript, 1, end superscript By 1944, six thousand scientists and engineers from leading universities and industrial research labs were at work on the development of the world’s first-ever nuclear weapon. Robert Oppenheimer, a physicist, headed the Los Alamos National Laboratory, the Manhattan Project’s principal research and development facility. For security reasons, the facility was located in the desert near Los Alamos, New Mexico. Major General Leslie Groves oversaw the Manhattan Project for the US government. Private corporations, foremost among them DuPont, helped prepare weapons-grade uranium and other components needed to make the bombs. Nuclear materials were processed in reactors located in Oak Ridge, Tennessee and Hanford, Washington. At its peak, the Manhattan Project employed 130,000 Americans at thirty-seven facilities across the country. On July 16, 1945 the first nuclear bomb was detonated in the early morning darkness at a military test-facility at Alamogordo, New Mexico. The intense brightness of the explosion’s flash was followed by the rise of a large mushroom cloud from the desert floor. House windows more than fifty miles...