Thursday 17 May 2012

Atomic Bomb: the beginning


How the Atomic Bomb came to be:
According to Dictionary.com, an online resource for finding the meanings of words or phrases, defines an atomic bomb as being the following:

Google and Dictionary.com sometimes do funny things!   Just look at
what I discovered while searching for this definition on the net'! 

A nuclear reaction occurs when a nucleus of an atom is altered in some way, either trough fission, fusion, or radioactive decay, that causes it to release its mass-worth in energy as the atom flies itself apart in a massive explosion.

Radiation was first discovered back in 1895 when Antoine Henri Becquerel, the inventor of x-ray technology and the first man to photograph an x-ray image, just so happened to place a packet of photographic plates in with a small amount of the element uranium before closing his office one night.  He had originally believed that a radioactive material’s energy had to come from an alternative source such as the sun.  He felt that this energy was only stored in the material and that the material’s slow release of the energy was what he had first been picking up in his initial tests on fluorescence.  But when he got the photographic plates developed, he was surprised to find that they were showing that they had interacting with radioactive material that had not been out in the sun!  His discovery in the properties of uranium marks the beginning of the nuclear age.

Becquerel’s research later held the interest of German scientists in high regard.  Right before the start of WWII, Germany began looking into the possibilities in the implementations of nuclear energy in warfare.  The information about their theories was kept quiet, only disclosing it to the number of people involved.  However, there were those among the group who feared that the research was too malicious in nature to be kept secret, and thus pasted it on to others in seeking to hear their opinion of it.

Albert Einstein, who had good ties to the United States and their people, was one of the first individuals to relay the message of what the Germans had come across in their research to the continent of North America.  On August 2, 1939 in a letter to the President, who at that time was F.D. Roosevelt, he said…

Einstein had immense knowledge about the make-up of the Universe, so if he was concerned about this new discovery, then so too should the United States.
The USA then went on to undertake what was known as The Manhattan Project, in which their main goal was to produce and test a viable atomic bomb.  On July 16, 1945, the first atomic bomb, whose codenamed was Gadget, was detonated in Northern New Mexico, at a safe distance from any residential homes.  However, the light from the explosion was so large that people in a faraway community swore the sun had risen twice that morning.  It was so intense that even a blind girl who happened to be facing the direction of the explosion said she saw a glimmer of light in her dark field of vision.

After the Manhattan project had been successful, there was nothing to stop the USA in their race to produce more nuclear warfare and as much as possible.
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"The Atomic Bomb of Hiroshima"
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