Atomic Bomb: Development and Deployment

The atomic bomb is the world’s most deadly and destructive weapon of all time. First developed by the United States of America, the technology quickly spread throughout the world’s most powerful countries. The atomic bomb was developed as the ultimate war weapon with the hopes that such a destructive weapon would discourage any country without the bomb from waging war.

The bomb was originally developed for use in World War II by America for fear that the German Nazis would acquire it first. The Germans did have plans to build an atomic bomb, however, due to poor organization, their bomb never made it past the planning stages. The atomic bomb works by using a technology, which, at the time, was revolutionary: nuclear fission. Nuclear fission, through the use of Uranium (U-235 or U-238) or the more-effective Plutonium (P-239), creates a chain reaction so powerful that it was unfathomable at the time of its conception. Physicists had been theorizing about nuclear reactions years before the bomb came to fruition, however no one could have predicted the explosive power a bomb as powerful as this would exert.

Robert Oppenheimer via Wikipedia

The development of the atomic bomb in the United States took place under the military codename of “The Manhattan Project.” The “Manhattan Project” was headed by Julius Robert Oppenheimer (nicknamed Oppie by his colleagues), a young Harvard graduate with vast amounts of knowledge in physics specifically related to nuclear technology. He, along with the United States Army, recruited the best scientists to a secret location in Los Alamos, New Mexico. This secret location would be where the first atomic bomb would eventually be created. The United States army commanded this location with Major General Leslie R. Groves who would run the schedules of the scientists and military personnel stationed there.

A site separate from the Los Alamos location was chosen as the test site for the first atomic bomb. Robert Oppenheimer chose the Jornada del Meurto (literally translated as “Journey of Death”) desert in New Mexico as the test site. Oppenheimer would name this location “Trinity.”

Among the great scientists recruited by Oppenheimer was Albert Einstein. Einstein was the greatest physicist of his day. Einstein was a quiet elderly man; however, he had great knowledge, which he clearly demonstrated. Einstein had great knowledge and expertise of the intricacies behind building an atomic bomb and put this knowledge to great use for the United States. Albert Einstein was one of the main developers behind the bomb and keeper of its secrets, which lied within its core. The core contained the “initiator,” which released neutrons to initiate the nuclear reaction, and the sub-critical Uranium or Plutonium hemispheres.

The development of the first atomic bomb concluded on July 13, 1945 as the scientists unloaded it onto the one hundred-foot steel tower, which would be used to drop the bomb onto the “Trinity” test site’s hard, desert ground. Three days later, on July 16, 1945 at 5:29:45 Mountain War Time, the Earth would see its first atomic bomb detonation and subsequent explosion. Six miles away from the bomb’s “ground zero” the scientists who created this magnificent bomb stood in awe at what would come to be known as the world’s most destructive weapon of all time.

Image via Wikipedia

The deployment of the atomic bomb was almost as hectic as the development of it. President Harry S. Truman debated whether it was a smart idea to kill hundreds of thousands of innocent Japanese civilians, but eventually decided it was a better alternative than sending in American troops to fight a ground war on Japanese soil. Without President Truman’s decision, the United States would have been forced to deploy troops into Japan and fight a costly land battle against the Japanese, which would create many more American casualties and create a battle which the United States may not have been able to win. With this uncertainty looming in the distance, President Truman made a tough, but necessary, decision to use the atomic bomb on civilian targets.

The first atomic bomb was set to be deployed on Hiroshima, Japan. The plane chosen for this fateful journey was the “Enola Gay,” which was commanded by commander Colonel Paul Tibbets. The bomb used here was nicknamed “Little Boy” and was a bomb created using an isotope of Uranium, U-235. The bombing took place on the morning of August 6, 1945. The bomb used had a blast equivalent to thirteen kilotons of TNT. Estimates of seventy to eighty-thousand Japanese civilians perished during the initial blast of the atomic bomb and the mushroom cloud could be seen from many miles away. Hiroshima would go down in history as the first civilian target to be attacked with an atomic bomb. The knowledge gained from this deployment about the after-effects of the bomb would greatly help in discouraging future use of the bomb.

The second atomic bombing was on a smaller Japanese city, Nagasaki. This bombing took place on August 9, 1945. The bomb used here was a more powerful Plutonium-based bomb nicknamed “Fat Man” (after Winston Churchill). The bombing of Nagasaki killed as many as 80,000 people. Some historians have seen this attack as an unnecessary display of power; however, the United States saw it as the proverbial “one-two punch” needed to cause Japan to surrender their war efforts. Many people today view this bombing as overkill due to the fact that the first bombing at Hiroshima displayed tremendous amounts of power which some see would have likely caused Japan to surrender by itself. The United States thought the second bombing was necessary so that Japan would not think the first atomic bomb was a test bomb, and therefore the only one the United States had.

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The bombing of these two Japanese cities have led to new discoveries about how atomic bomb radiation affects the people exposed to it. This new information would discourage countries in the future from waging nuclear war for fear that their own people would be attacked with this horrendous weapon. Those people who did not die initially from the bombing most likely perished from radiation poisoning later.

The aftermath of the bombing was horrible. Two hundred twenty thousand people had died by then end of 1945. The world reacted to the bomb with great fear, surprise, and disillusion. The bombings still have an effect on our world today. In fact, just recently President Barack Obama has called for all nations to begin nuclear disarmament in hopes that the world can be free of nuclear proliferation someday.

Eventually, spies passed on the secrets of the workings of the bomb to Russia. A physicist close to the development of the bomb, Klaus Fuchs, was a communist sympathizer who had had meeting with Russian contact for many years. Klaus passed on vital secrets to the inner workings of the bomb to Russian spies. Russia had built its own atomic bomb by 1948 with use of this knowledge. Russia’s development of the bomb led to the cold war stalemate between the United States and Russia for the next forty-five years.

Overall, the atomic bomb is the greatest weapon of mass destruction of all time. The bomb is the most deadly and destructive weapon ever used against another country and looks to remain as such, hopefully, for a very long time.

Sources:

Day of Trinity by Lansing Lamont (1965, 1985)

The Manhattan Project: The Birth of the Atomic Bomb in the Words of Its Creators, Eyewitnesses, and Historians by Cynthia C. Kelly (2009)

TIME Magazine, Monday, June 10, 1946, “Atomic Dust Storm”