Development and Usage of the Atomic Bomb.
Logically, there is no obstacle for a nuclear or atomic bomb and right now there are no secrets in Nuclear Science. Anyone with a reasonable physics degree and access to a good technical library could design a workable atomic bomb in less than six months but in the 1940's, designing and making an atomic bomb was a race against time. Many countries tried to develop a weapon that would be a "weapon of mass destruction." .
Atomic bombs were the first nuclear weapons to be developed, tested, and used. In the late 1930s physicists in Europe and the United States realized that the fission of uranium could be used to create an extremely powerful explosive weapon. In August 1939, German American physicist Albert Einstein sent a letter to U.S. president Franklin D. Roosevelt that described this discovery and warned of its potential development by other nations (Tibbets). The U.S. government established the top secret Manhattan Project in 1942 to develop an atomic device. The leader of the Manhattan Project was U.S. Army Brigadier General Leslie R. Groves. His team, working in several locations but in large part at Los Alamos, New Mexico, under the direction of American physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, designed and built the first atomic bombs (Atomic). .
The United States set out on the development because of fear that Nazi Germany would develop the bomb first which would then use it against the Unites States. In fact, the Germans had a head start because two Germans discovered the underlying scientific fact, the fission of uranium. The effort to develop an atomic bomb was code-named the "Manhattan Project." On July 16, 1945, Oppenheimer and Groves' units conducted a firing test of the lethal weapon in the New Mexico desert (Oppenheimer). No one was prepared for the awesome power the weapon actually possessed. The bomb was code-named "Fat Man." The Trinity test (the code name for the test of the first atomic bomb), on July 16, 1945, was an amazing success (Kimball).
