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MANHATTAN PROJECT
The atomic bombs consttute one of the most important memories left
behind by the second world war. The construction of the atomic bomb was a
very painful process involving many famous scientists.
Germany is one of the most powerful countries of the Second World War ,
while continuing the occupation had a hand in the effort to uce weapons.
Nazis were level nuclear activities will be anxious scientists.
1938 and 1939 , those years were years of great up to the climax that
improvements.n those years , They discovered the nuclear fusion and they
understood It can produce very large amounts of energy.As a result of Nazi
Leo Szilard and Edward Teller as asylum , they believed that nobody be
careful to the foreign warnings of scientists.Therefore they wanted support
from the most famous scientist of the ABD who was Albert Einstein.On 2
August, 1939 , Albert Einstein wrote a letter to president Roosevelt and this
letter , pushed to ABD to start to develop bomb.Einstein's letter to Roosevelt
bore a warning but it leads to a conclusion that even Einstein's thinking.
President Roosevelt said that if Nazi Germany developed such a weapons and
he decided if ABD acts early it would be wiser in doing so.
Even before the United States entered the war in 1941, US government
has started work to uncover the military potential of uranium .Initially ,
research was conducted in piecemeal institutions in various parts of the
country. There are two main branches of the study. Studies on the first
theories being passed to the bomb in life.
What is nukleer fusion physics ? and How was working on chain reactions
and how could start?
Danes physicist Neils Bohr proposed to use uranium -235 which was the
elements of a uranium isotope much more common to be separated from the
uranium but nobody was not sure how to do it. Americans physicist Glenn
Seaborg produced another idea and he discovered uranium -238 could
achieve to distinguish neutrons in a nuclear reactor , with this action he found
plutonium -239 and he suggested to use plutonium -239.This also has not
been done before
While scientists were producing formulas and theories , the official status
of the project has ranged. The initial research permission came from the Navy
and other research is conducted under the supervision of the National
Institute of Standards.
In 1940, President Roosevelt and Vannevar Bush who was the most
powerful men in science and research during the war.These two important
human came together and they established the office of scientific research
for to advance scientific research.
the same time , project had to fight to demand war material. the name of the
project was criticized on the grounds that even include extreme softness.
.
The new one was elected head of the project. Colonel Leslie Groves was
promoted to brigadier-general without losing time because he want to
impress scientists which he will manage.Leslie Groves equipped with full
authority to break the world 's largest office building. Although he not want to
go to war scene, He had found himself the beginning of a full project with
crises at home. The first step , they are following the tradition of Cooperation
projects of engineering project took the name of the center. and was named
project the Manhattan Project.But in some important statements , After the
Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor realize that this program has been touted as
the Manhattan Project ..Groves , resolving disputes and he he immediatly
gave a fillip to Manhattan Project with taking bold decisions.Attack and a
strong management style would be the key to the surprising success of the
project. Groves and Tennesse, bought a place called later in Knoxville Oak
Ridge and although not finalized designs and he ordered the start of work on
uranium separation.
The 70th anniversary this week of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and
Nagasaki reminds us that even after seven decades, the social political, and
moral implications of the birth of the nuclear age still are the subjects of an
unresolved perhaps unresolvable debate.
It may help to bring some clarity to the issues by examining their component
parts through the eyes of the people who lived through the development of
these horrific weapons. As I concluded from researching my book "Big
Science," which is devoted in part to the role of a new breed of physicists in
that work, the decision to build and deploy the atomic bomb is very different
from the decision to move ahead with its successor, the hydrogen, or
thermonuclear, bomb. Seen through their eyes, the first is arguably
defensible, in the context of war; the second is very different. That's not to
say they're unrelated: The uranium and plutonium fission bombs dropped on
two Japanese cities 70 years ago turned out to be merely the precursors of
technology that even many of the atomic bomb's creators considered truly
genocidal the hydrogen bomb.
American physicists emerged from World War II torn between two
contradictory sensations. In the aftermath of Hiroshima and Nagasaki they
were hailed as heroes, even portrayed as bearing the "tunic of Superman" (in
the words of Life magazine).
But many felt burdened by the consequences of their work. "In the past,
scientists could disclaim direct responsibility for the use to which mankind
had put their disinterested discoveries," wrote James Franck, a German
migr and Manhattan Project physicist who raised the earliest cautions
about the social consequences of nuclear research. "We cannot take the
same attitude now because the success which we have achieved in the
development of nuclear power is fraught with infinitely greater dangers than
were all the inventions of the past."
During the following few years, those contradictions would sharpen, splitting
the physics community in two. The cause was not the decision to build and
deploy the atomic bomb itself, but what came next: the debate over whether
to carry research into nuclear weaponry to another level, to the hydrogen
bomb.
One finds very little dissent among physicists in the United States and Great
Britain over the necessity of developing the fission bomb during World War II.
This was understandable, for they felt that the scientists who had stayed
behind in the Third Reich were intellectually capable of developing a fission
bomb themselves, and should such a weapon fall into Hitler's hands, as
Lawrence said, he would "have in his hands the control of the world."
Germany's surrender in 1945 changed the calculus, but not the momentum of
this effort. Unlike Germany, Japan was not regarded as a potential nuclear
threat and its regime was not seen as fixed on world domination. But by then,
the bombs were nearly complete, and the impulse to use them to bring a
quick end to the war was strong. Historians have debated ever since then
whether the bombing of Japan was truly necessary to secure surrender, but
there can be no question that most of the people directly involved in the
decision accepted the conclusion that it was.
The so-called "Super" raised very different issues. Its leading proponent was
the brilliant but obstreperous Hungarian physicist Edward Teller, who had
been thinking and talking about a fusion bomb even before the Manhattan
Project's fission bombs were complete. But he would have several powerful
partners in his campaign. Chief among them was the Nobel laureate Ernest
Lawrence, whose unassailable public stature as a scientific leader derived
from his invention of the atom-smashing cyclotron in 1931. Lawrence had
played a key role in the Manhattan Project, inventing the process that
produced enriched uranium for the Hiroshima bomb; overseeing the isolation
of plutonium, which became the core of the Nagasaki bomb; and nominating
his close friend and Berkeley colleague J. Robert Oppenheimer to run the lab
that became Los Alamos.
What put Lawrence on Teller's side in the quest for the Super was a news
flash on September 23, 1949: President Truman's announcement that an
"atomic explosion" had been detected in the Soviet Union. It had taken
Stalin's physicists just four years to reach nuclear parity with the United
States. Plainly, nuclear research had to continue, and the only option was to
build the Super. Within days of Truman's announcement, Lawrence was in
Washington, meeting with worried congressmen and Lewis Strauss, an
irredeemably hawkish member of the Atomic Energy Commission, which
oversaw U.S. government nuclear research, filling the lawmakers' heads with
a calculatedly terrifying vision of Russia's quest to rule the world by
thermonuclear terror. Teller, meanwhile, began polling his fellow physicists on
their willingness to sign up for a Manhattan Project-style program for the
Super.
What they discovered was that, among scientists and many policy-makers,
the Super would be a hard sell. The most prominent opponent of the weapon
was the man given the greatest public credit for building the atomic bomb:
Oppenheimer. "This thing appears to have caught the imagination, both of
the congressional and of military people, as the answer to the problem posed
by the Russian advance," he would write Harvard President James Conant in
1949.
Later that year the high-level panel Oppenheimer chaired, the AEC's General
Advisory Committee, came to a firmly negative conclusion about the Super.
Deploying the weapon, the committee reported, "would involve a decision to
slaughter a vast number of civilians ... A super bomb might become a weapon
of genocide." The campaign for the Super placed the nation at a crossroads,
the committee said whether to build a weapon merely because it could be
done, or to call a stop to the march of the technology of mass destruction. "In
determining not to proceed to develop the super bomb, we see a unique
opportunity of providing by example some limitations on the totality of war
and thus of limiting the fear and arousing the hopes of mankind." Even the
Pentagon, it was observed, doubted the Super's effectiveness as a military
weapon. The revered Gen. Omar Bradley, newly appointed chairman of the
Joint Chiefs of Staff, declared that its only value would be "psychological."
Yet it would prove almost impossible to stem the momentum driving the
Super ahead just as the development of the atomic bomb at Los Alamos
created its own momentum to use it on Japan. Fears of a Soviet bomb drove
the campaign to develop the Super, just as fears of a Nazi bomb had driven
the Manhattan Project with the difference that while it turned out that the
Nazis never did have an atomic bomb program, the Soviets certainly did.
Lawrence and Teller were openly calling for a revival of the "spirit" of the
Manhattan Project.
On January 31, 1950, a three-man committee comprising AEC Chairman
David Lilienthal, Secretary of State Dean Acheson and Secretary of Defense
Louis Johnson gave Truman its recommendation that the U.S. proceed with
the Super. The White House meeting that formally inaugurated the
thermonuclear age took all of seven minutes, and it lasted that long only
because Lilienthal asked permission to express his dissenting view. He got out
only a few words before the president cut him short. "What the hell are we
waiting for?" Truman barked. "Let's get on with it."
Later the same day Truman announced in a nationwide radio address that he
had instructed the AEC to "continue its work on all forms of atomic weapons,
including the so-called hydrogen or super-bomb." That night Lilienthal
confided to his diary: "There is nothing but pain for the decision made today."
The small personal satisfaction he felt came from his having passed one of
the most grueling tests of his career by showing the courage "to 'stand up in
meeting' and say 'No' to a steamroller. ... Whether time proves me right and
the E.O. Lawrences wrong, I suppose no one will ever know."
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