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Atomic Bomb

How the U.S. Changed the World

With the Atomic Bomb

Stephen Gayton

History 102

Professor Dr. Weathers

January 10, 2009

With War continuing to rage in the Pacific, the United States was tirelessly looking for way to victory with minimal casualties on the Allied troops. Their answer came with the accidental creation of a relatively new device, the atomic bomb. The dropping of two atomic bombs on Japan was successful at ending the war, but left the world with many questions. How did such a devastating weapon get developed? What brought the United States to make the decision to use such a device? What was the outcome of the use of a nuclear weapon? What measures needed to be taken to insure control of such a destructive weapon? These are the questions that we will be discussing, and will come to see that the United States made the right decision, even with the devastating consequences to which it led.

How did the Atomic Bomb get developed?

Before we can understand the development of the actual atomic bomb, we must first understand how nuclear fission, the splitting of the atom to create the explosive energy, was discovered. One of the founding scientists, German Otto Hahn said “It is possible that a number of rare accidents may have fooled us into making erroneous observations.”[i] The discovery of an atomic weapon being possible was made during an experiment a 1938 experiment in Germany. Otto Hahn and fellow German scientist Fritz Strassman were trying to construct new elements when, by accident, they split the nucleus of an atom. After the discovery of the Hahn-Strassman experiment, another scientist Otto Frisch decided to research if indeed the uranium nucleus split into two equal parts or if it just chipped away a small section. Frisch concluded the uranium nucleus did split into two parts and created an incredible amount of energy in the process. The energy created in the splitting of a single uranium atom was twenty million times than...