The Manhattan Project

There were serious issues of security of documents, due to failure to lock up (Wood 4). <br><br>The one serious incident was the hiring of Klaus Fuchs. He was later found, and convicted of obtaining secret documents and sending them to the Soviet Union. A competent and hardworking scientist himself, Fuchs enabled the Soviet Union to create their own atomic bomb (Beyer 45). <br><br>Names were not allowed to be mentioned outside of the laboratory. Everybody was a "sir" or "mister" instead of their own name (Wood 4). Unless they worked at the lab themselves, wives knew nothing of their husbands' research (Wood 4).<br><br>Decisions to drop the atomic bomb went through several personalities, yet ultimately rested upon president Truman. The man whose decisions created the Manhattan Project, never lived to see the results of his labor. FDR died on April 12, three months before the first successful Trinity test (Beyer 56). The responsibilities were soon placed upon Truman, the next president. Truman knew nothing about the bomb and its effects yet hastily decided that the bomb be used on Japan, considering Germany was no longer a target with the war in Europe over. Initiated by Szilard, a petition was made to offer the opinion that the bomb should be used only if Japan refused to surrender, even after being informed of the bomb's destructive capabilities

The results of these two bombs were awful. The Soviet Union then created a nuclear bomb. The first testing of this newly created bomb was tested in Kazakhstan on August 29, 1949. On September 3, 1949 a US plane came to check if the air in the area was contaminated in the area of Kamchatka. Based on these tests, the US found out that the Soviet Union had also created a nuclear weapon. Due to this, a new time in humanity occurred.

When President Truman authorized the use of two nuclear weapons in 1945 against the Japanese in the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to end World War II, the nature of international security was changed irreversibly. At that time, the United States had what was said to have a monopoly of atomic bombs. Soon thereafter, the Soviet Union began working on atomic weaponry. In 1949, it had already detonated it first atomic bomb and tensions began to heat up between the two countries. With the information that the Soviets had tested their first bomb, the United States began work on more powerful weapons1, and a fight for nuclear superiority had begun.

When the Soviet Union came into possession of a nuclear bomb, the realization that the horrific aftermath, much like the one in Hiroshima, could happen in America struck fear into Americans.

During the cold war, both nations built up massive stockpiles of nuclear weapons to achieve nuclear supremacy over the other. Both the soviets and the US hoped to use nuclear weapons as leverage against each other by assuring Mutually Assured Destruction, or MAD.

The research for the first Atomic bomb took place in the United States, by a group of nuclear engineers; the name of this research was called, “The Manhattan Project”. On July 16, 1945, the detonation of the first atomic bomb was tested near Los Alamos, New Mexico. As the atomic bomb was detonated, it sent shock-waves across the globe, which demonstrated that nuclear power would forever change the meaning of war.

In the summer of 1945 Robert Oppenheimer was prepared to test the first atomic bomb. Which was July 16, 1945 the bomb was tested. The bomb was tested at the

Nuclear fear affected the Cold War because it increased conflict between the U. S and Soviet. Many feared

In 1939, the United States started funding the Manhattan Project. A project which goal was to make a bomb using the power of nuclear energy. There were a few problems with making the bomb. One the resources needed to make the bomb were expensive and hard to find. And, by 1945, the budget for the Manhattan Project be around Two billion dollars.

The second reason that could be understood as a major fire that started the Cold War was the Soviet Union’s success in activating its first atomic bomb in Kazakhstan. An along test was then shortly made by the Soviet physicists, in order to measure the effect of atomic bomb’s blast. Many buildings were constructed around testing area to serve for that purpose. Experiment animals were also being used to test the level of radiation and the hidden consequences which would eventually affected human. The United States immediately felt threatened, as its spy plane recorded the trace of explosion on September 3rd . Later on, they found out that a German physicist named Klaus Fuchs, had betrayed America and given USSR the blueprint of the “Fat Man”, while working at U.S Main Headquarter of Atomic Development. He was arrested and went on trials. The government soon fast forward a plan to reassure safety for citizens .

As a result, the valuable things that might be lost of the Cold War were dangerously high. The First hydrogen bomb test, in the Eniwetok ring of little islands in the Marshall Islands, showed just how scary the nuclear age could be(Unit 7 Lesson 7 “The Bay of Pigs and the Cuban Missile Crisis”). It created a twenty five square-mile fireball that vaporized an island, blew a huge hole in the ocean floor and had the power to destroy half of Manhattan. Later American and Soviet tests spit out poisonous radioactive waste into the atmosphere. The current threat of nuclear destruction affected a lot of American domestic life also.

While nuclear fission was believed to be possible in Germany since 1938 it was not put into actionin the United States until 1943. That year Allied scientists created a plan to use the fission to build an atomic bomb before the Germans could. In early 1939 word spread like wildfire that Germany had learned hot to split an atom. The fears this struck in the scientific community encouraged scientist, like Albert Einstein, who fled Nazi persecution, and Enrico Fermi, who escaped Fascist Italy, to approach the President. They wanted to express the dangers of the technology and to urge him to start an atomic research program in the United States. Fermi decided to travel to Washington only to be faced with the fact that no one else felt the

The first use of nuclear weaponry in warfare occurred on the morning of August 6, 1945 when the United States dropped the atomic bomb known as “Little Boy” on Hiroshima, Japan. The result was devastating, demonstrating the true power of nuclear warfare. Since the incident, the world has been left fearing the possible calamity of another nuclear war. Joseph Siracusa’s Nuclear Weapons: A Very Short Introduction explains aspects of nuclear weaponry from simply what a nuclear weapon is, to the growing fear from nuclear warfare advancements in an age of terrorism. The book furthered my education on nuclear weapons and the effect they place on society, physically and mentally.

Scientists were horrified with their work and in a last ditch effort, a third Einstein letter was written to plead for the bomb never to be used, but it was too late. On July 16, 1945, the US was successful in detonating a nuclear weapon in the New Mexico desert—it was a transformative moment both for science and war

The Nuclear Arms Race is one of the many historical events that relates to the topic “don’t hit people.” Once these nuclear weapons were created by both countries, there become a period in time where many citizens were scared for their lives, considering that they could terminated at any moment in time. Both countries knew that if one nuclear missile was launched, then the other country would launch theirs, which would essentially be like committing suicide to their own country. This was one of the most frightening times for our country due to the fact that if one country “hit” another with a nuclear weapon, it could mean world