The Manhattan Project: The World's First Atomic Bomb

There was a flash of light so powerful it could be called a sun. An explosion so powerful it turned sand into glass. A sound so loud that it was heard 100 miles away. The world’s first atomic bomb had just exploded. The Manhattan Project was the code name for the United States nuclear development project. It was lead by Major General Leslie Groves of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, who was the director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory. The program was hurried along after the United States government saw the importance and possibilities of the atomic bomb. The usage
Fear spread through the scientific community and the public that the Nazis were creating a super weapon; a bomb never before seen on earth that had unprecedented power and destruction. This caused a stir in the scientific community and caused many scientist to study uranium. Albert Einstein and Enrico Fermi, both escaping Nazi oppression, fled to the United States to warn the government of the powers of the atomic bomb. In June 1939 Otto Frisch and Rudolf Peierls at the University of Birmingham had made a breakthrough investigating the critical mass of uranium-235. They conclude that to reach critical mass and explode the uranium core must be at least 22 pounds, small enough to be carried by a bomber of that era. President Roosevelt, Vannevar Bush, and Vice President Henry A. Wallaceon attended a meeting on October 9th 1941, and the President okay’d the atomic
The test of the bomb was code named “Trinity”. Since the implosion type bomb was far more complex, the scientist wanted to test it before usage. The bomb was code named “ Gadget “ and was detonated on July 16 1945 with the force of 20 kilotons of TNT. Even though the bomb was detonated 100 feet off the ground using a tower, it still dug a crater 250 deep, and turned the sand into a radioactive glass called Trinitite. The blast created a mushroom cloud 7.5 miles high and the shock wave it created was felt over 100 miles away. A cover storied had to be created that an ammunition magazine exploded at Alamogordo Field. With the successful test of Gadget, the United States started preparing to use it as a