Its during the Second World War that the atomic bomb was made; the war accelerated the making of the atomic bomb since there was competition of power between the Germany and the US government as noted by (Herken, 2015). The US government went ahead and completed its Manhattan project and once again when Japan declined their request to surrender, they went ahead and bombed their country. Its only after seeing the massive destruction and loss of lives that Japan gave up.
According to the article published on US History website (2017), Manhattan project was a secret project carried out by the US government during the Second World War in an effort to develop the worlds first nuclear weapon. It resulted into three atomic bombs, two of which were used to fight the Japanese when they refused to surrender. The project started when Albert Einstein wrote a letter to the president alerting him that the Nazi Germany were already at work developing a nuclear weapon, this triggered the start of the Manhattan Project which was based in Manhattan city. US physicist Robert Oppenheimer and General Leslie R. Groves served as directors of this project, which recruited the best US scientists, engineers and mathematicians. The US government initiated the project and provided adequate security to the team involved in the project; it was also their duty to ensure the project was kept secret especially to Germany and Japan. General Leslie Grove was trusted by the government to oversee the project on its behalf.
According to ( Ochiai, 2014) the facilities involved in the Manhattan project included Thex-10 Graphite Reactor, K-25 Gaseous Diffusion process Building, Y-12 Beta-3 Racetracks Reactor and V-Site Assembly Building. The Manhattan facilities were way above special and unique, they were made from the best innovative and radical technologies ever known. The Hanfords B Reactor which created the plutonium for the Trinity device was the worlds first production reactor. The K-25 gaseous diffusion plant was designed by the best scientists and engineers at Oak Ridge to use a totally untested and unproved technology. The Y-12 Beta-3 Racetracks was the only electromagnetic isotope which survived the Second World War and it still has its original features in place. The facilities used for the nuclear weapon were built at Oak Ridge, Tennessee and Hanford, the main assembly was built at Los Alamos in Mexico and the person in charge of the main plain was called Robert Oppenheimer. The Metallurgical Laboratory at the University of Chicago and the Trinity site on the White Sands Missile Range in Mexico are not owned by the department while the rest are owned by the security and defense departments.
The Manhattan project took approximately four years to full completion, and it is during these periods that all the facilities were constructed. The discovery of Neutrons is considered as the beginning of nuclear physics since scientists were able to calculate the binding energy of a nucleus, by comparing the nuclear mass with that of the protons and neutrons which composed it. According to the World Nuclear Association webpage (2014), discovery of neutrons is also a major basis to the nuclear physics since when the nuclear reactions were measured, they were found to tally with Einsteins calculations of the equivalence of mass and energy. After the discovery of neutrons many scientists came up with the urge of testing how neutrons would react with uranium, if the two elements could be separated and their reaction. The tests were later summarized on the uses of Uranium for a bomb or as a source of power. And definitely without the discovery of neutrons there could be no generation of the atomic bomb.
Reference
Herken, G. (2014). The winning weapon: The atomic bomb in the cold war, 1945-1950.Retrieved from http://press.princeton.edu/titles/4258.html
Ochiai, E. (2014). Developing Atomic Bombs: The Manhattan Project. In Hiroshima to Fukushima (pp. 29-33). Springer Berlin Heidelberg. Retrieved from http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-642-38727-2_4#page-2
US History. (2017). The Manhattan Project. Retrieved from http://www.ushistory.org/us/51f.asp
World Nuclear Association. (2014). Outline History of Nuclear Energy. Retrieved from http://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/current-and-future-generation/outline-history-of-nuclear-energy.aspx
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