The Manhattan Project: The Creation Of The Atomic Bomb

In 1942 the U.S. government started the Manhattan Project, which was the secret effort to make a bomb based on nuclear fission (Levine 269). The project’s name originated because it was initially located in the Manhattan district of the Army Corps of Engineers (Schlager 408). Frist, the initiative was put into motion because of the growing fear that Nazi Germany might be developing an atomic bomb following a number of their advances in science (Kraft). President Roosevelt eventually started the project after Einstein sent a letter to him, urging the development (Manhattan). When the atomic bomb was successfully created, the reasons for detonation in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan included “ending the war as quickly as possible (to save millions
During the war many scientists came to America and prompted several of the advances in science. Among those were Albert Einstein, who fled Nazi persecution, and Enrico Fermi, who escaped Fascist Italy (“Manhattan”). The scientist brought new and innovative thinking from their experiences in former countries. One obvious example is the new ability to produce successful nuclear chain reactions. The most immediate impact of Fermi’s nuclear reactor was the ability to create a weapon of mass destruction, the atomic bomb. It also made the plutonium production reactors possible and verified the bomb designers’ physics calculations (Schlager 436). In the early 1900s, scientists only knew ninety-two natural elements. Research later revealed that bombarding an atom of one element with protons can produce a different element (Levine 269). The U.S. physicist Ernest Orlando Lawrence built the first cyclotron, or atom smasher, that allowed scientists to carry out this process. Therefore, cyclotrons “became the basic tool in an international effort to produce new chemical elements” (Levine 269). One of the most influential elements, plutonium, “which proved to be a better nuclear-weapons material than uranium, was discovered in 1940” using a cyclotron (Levine 269). By the end of the century, the research in the United States, Germany, and the former Soviet Union expanded the periodic table to 112
Despite the fact that the public overwhelmingly approved of the atomic bomb, America’s religious leaders responded to the bomb less enthusiastically. The doubts and misgivings about living in an atomic world soon became part of American popular culture (Bondi 463). Some religious observers thought the atomic bomb was foreshadowing the end of the world because they interpreted the destructive power as making the apocalypse prophesied in the Bible possible (Bondi 463). While the project’s success relieved and pleased many, some of the scientists were uneasy about the power that had been unleashed (Bondi 489). The bomb acquired some support because of the fact that it ended the war, but even months after “the bomb also began to effect an extraordinary philosophical reassessment, and generate a penetrating level of guilt and fear” (Jennings 291). The atomic bombs’ massive destruction left people with many mixed emotions about the new power existing in the