The Atomic Bomb - 20 Pages

On July 16, 1945, the United States of America ushered the world into a new era with the successful detonation of an atomic bomb in New Mexico. That era was the nuclear age. Less than a month later, on August 6, 1945, an atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, Japan; the first use of a nuclear weapon against an enemy nation. Most of us know of these basic events, but many do not know of the complicated decisions and scientific breakthroughs that paved the way towards that fateful day in Hiroshima. Every day we are closer to having nuclear arms fall in the hands of someone who wishes to do harm with those weapons. Many question why we think the U.S. is justified in having our own atomic collection. This is why it is important to understand how the atomic bomb came about and why we decided it was necessary to use it.

First reports of the bombs in Japan only reported that a "new type of bomb" had been used. Most had no concept of what an atom bomb was or why it was so powerful. The story of the atomic bomb opens with a series of new discoveries in physics that began near the turn of the century. The term classical is applied to the physics that scientists developed prior to that time (Cohen, 17). Much of it came from the work of the Father of Physics, the great seventeenth-century English scholar, Sir Isaac Newton. Newton was a scientific genius. Today, however, a competent student with a good high school physics course probably has a more accurate knowledge of the physical universe than Newton had. This is especially true concerning the most basic building blocks of matter, atoms. Newton, as did others before him, developed a theory about the structure of atoms. According to Newton's theory, atoms were like marbles. They were solid and hard, but unlike marbles, they could not be further divided. It was not until the latter half of the nineteenth century that scientific experiment began to prove otherwise. Thereafter, knowledge of atomic structure moved ahead very quickly (Cohen, 18). By the mid-1930's, dedicated effort by British and other European scientists had revealed a new world of atomic structure, one filled with incredibly tiny systems of interacting subatomic particles containing electrons, protons, and neutrons.

In 1938, two German physicists, Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassman, were experimenting with uranium. They discovered that bombarding uranium atoms with neutrons didn't create a new element as they had previously assumed. Instead, uranium atoms split into two other elements--barium and krypton. This process was called nuclear "fission" (Batchhelder, 11). These two new atoms weighed less together than a single uranium atom. Therefore, according to Einstein's theory of relativity on mass and energy (E=mc2), the difference in missing mass must be made up in energy (Roleff, 14). Two other scientists had been helping Hahn and Strassman at the time. Their names were Otto Frisch and Lise Meitner. Together they determined that the calculated energy that was released from one single uranium atom would be 200 million electron volts. This energy was roughly 20 million times the energy of an equal portion of TNT. A pound of this matter converted to raw energy would produce more than half the amount of electricity generated in the US (Roleff, 15). Within months scientists from all over the world had repeated and refined the experiment.

At the time of Hahn and Strassman's discovery, very few physicists were still working in Germany. During the 1920's and 1930's, Germany was the center of the scientific world (Roleff, 20). When Hitler began his rise to power in the early 1930's, he also began his persecution of the Jews. As a result of his policies, many scientists left Europe for the safety of the United States. Many of these scientists became political refugees who contributed greatly to the success of the future Manhattan Project (Cohen, 22). This intellectual emigration took place at the same time as physicists on both sides of the Atlantic were discovering the secrets of the atom (Batchhelder, 18). The most famous of these scientists was Albert Einstein, who settled in Princeton University (Batchhelder, 14). Up to this point, the few who had even thought about it at all, regarded theoretical physics as a strange, esoteric practice. It was all very interesting, but highly speculative and not the sort of thing that was going to have any effect on people's lives. The physicists, however, thought differently. They knew that nuclear fission could potentially release enormous amounts of energy. The splitting of one atom would result in its giving off particles that would split two other atoms, and so on. If billions of atoms fissioned in a chain reaction, powerful bombs might be created. In theory at least, this process could be used to create a weapon of almost unimaginable power (Szasz, 14). Since much of the work on nuclear fission had been done in Germany, German scientists certainly knew about this possibility. Yet almost no one in the United States seemed to take the potential development of a nuclear bomb very seriously (Batchhelder, 15).

With increasing developments in the nuclear field, the vision of Hitler in possession of an atomic bomb gave a group of refugee scientists the initiative to try and prevent Hitler's discovery of the bomb. The "Hungarian Conspiracy", as the trio was later called, was made up of three physicists by the names of Leo Szilard, Eugene Wigner, and Edward Teller (Szasz, 15). Szilard attempted to persuade his fellow scientists to refrain from publishing the results of their research in the nuclear field out of fear that the publication of encouraging results might lead to the development of German atomic bombs (Roleff, 59). They decided that the administration of President Franklin D. Roosevelt must be somehow made aware of the danger, and the United States must begin its own atomic research project (Batchhelder, 15).

The task of alerting Roosevelt to the German atomic threat was a hard one. Though the three men, particularly Szilard, were well known in scientific circles, it is doubtful if Present Roosevelt had ever heard of them. The possibility that any of them would ever be able to get a private meeting with the president, much less get him to listen to their suggestions, which to the nonscientist would have sounded quite fantastic, was virtually nil (Batchhelder, 15). They decided to enlist the help of a very well known scientist, one whose words Roosevelt or any other educated person would certain listen to, and that man was Albert Einstein. Szilard was an old friend of Einstein's. He found out that Einstein was spending the summer in a house on Long Island and he made an appointment to see him. Szilard explained to Einstein how a chain reaction might be created. Einstein was quite surprised remarking: "Daran