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Why Did The American Effort To Build The Atomic Bomb

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Early in 1939, the scientific community discovered that German physicists had learned the secrets to splitting a uranium atom. The fears of Nazi scientists using that energy to produce a bomb soon spread all over the United States. Scientist Albert Einstein wrote a letter to President Franklin D. Roosevelt urging him to fund research for building the first atomic bomb. Roosevelt saw the project as unnecessary, but agreed to proceed slowly. In late 1941, the American effort to build the atomic bomb received its code name of the Manhattan Project.

A breakthrough occurred in December of 1942 when Enrico Fermi led a group of physicists to produce the first controlled nuclear chain reaction under the grandstands of Stagg Field at the University of Chicago. The main assembly plant of the project was built at Los Alamos, New …show more content…

Only a small circle of scientists and officials knew about the development of the atomic bomb. On July 16, 1945, at Trinity Site near Alamogordo, New Mexico, scientists of the Manhattan Project readied themselves to watch the detonation of the first atomic bomb. No one was ready for the result. A mushroom cloud reached 40,000 feet, blowing out windows of civilian homes up to 100 miles away. When the cloud returned to earth it created a crater half a mile wide. A cover-up story was released, explaining that a huge ammunition dump had just exploded in the desert. The Manhattan Project was a success, “a [success] beyond the most optimistic expectations of anyone”, and the United States now had the ultimate advantage. According to General L. R. Groves, “the successful development of the Atomic Fission Bomb [would] provide the United States with a weapon of tremendous power [that would] be a decisive factor in winning the present war more quickly with a saving in American lives and treasure.” The world had now entered the nuclear

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