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The Discovery Of The Atomic Bomb

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Upon securing victory in Japan, whatever relief the American people felt from winning WWII was tempered by the realization that science had just created a weapon that could wipe nations off the face of the earth. The atomic bomb, if other countries obtained the technology, could bring about a nuclear holocaust. This fear of technology could have stymied scientific progress post WWII. However, going into the Cold War, people once again put their hope in science and looked at scientific progress as a measure of whether they were beating the Soviet Union. This was most evident in the space race, as both countries invested large amounts of resources into their space programs. Somehow, both countries had decided that scientific research for going into space would be the frontier upon which they would fight their indirect war.
Accordingly, it is important to realize that space had already begun to capture the public’s imagination well before the space race began. Though WWII showcased the weaponization of science, science popularizers such as Isaac Asimov wondered how those weapons could be repurposed into tools to help people. In his Foundation series, the first story being published in 1942, Asimov describes mankind thousands of years in the future as a spacefaring people that has expanded their civilization to the far reaches of space. He saw nuclear bombs not as a weapon for destruction, but as a source of energy for powering spaceships that would allow humans to colonize

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