"We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, a few people cried. Most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad-Gita; Vishnu is trying to persuade the Prince that he should do his duty and, to impress him, takes on his multi-armed form and says, 'Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.' I suppose we all thought that, one way or another."
-Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer
-Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer
Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer |
Los Alamos Laboratory in Los Alamos, New Mexico |
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A map of the Los Alamos Laboratory in Los Alamos, New Mexico.
A History of the Manhattan Project
The Manhattan Project was a covert government program that was designed to create a bomb powerful enough to end WWII. The U.S. Government collected the best scientists in the world to help complete this endeavor. Among the most renowned of the scientists were, Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer, Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr, Enrico Fermi, and Edward Teller. These scientists were collected from around the world to participate in this project. Some of the scientists, such as Einstein were in hostile countries when the team was being created. The scientists who were in hostile territory were collected by the military immediately, because they represented a great part of the war effort. The head scientist on this team was Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer. Oppenheimer personally picked Los Alamos, New Mexico as the spot for the laboratory due to its isolation, which was based on his knowledge of the area. A large part of his life was spent in the wilds of New Mexico. The laboratory base was situated in the middle of nowhere, with no civilization for miles. In the adjacent towns there were military checkpoints set up to protect the extreme secrecy that surrounded the project. Although most of the research and work that went into the bomb happened at Los Alamos, there were other facilities all around the U.S., including labs in Richland and Berkeley that focused on separating the plutonium and uranium. Once the bomb was completed they ran a test on the bomb to see if it worked. This is know as the Trinity Test and is accepted as the first nuclear explosion that the world had seen. The explosion was so powerful it blew soldiers back who were sheltered in the trenches miles away. After the Trinity Test the bomb was ready and all that was left was President Truman's approval. The way that President Truman saw it there were only two options. The first was that the U.S. launch a land invasion which would have cost anywhere from 220,000 to over 500,000 lives. The second was to use the Atomic Bomb which was estimated to cost approximately 200,000 lives. There was also a third option that President Truman did not even consider viable which was to continue air raids and fire bombing. This idea was not heavily considered because it hadn't worked up to that point, and couldn't be seen to work any time soon. There were two atomic bombs dropped on Japan. The first was the "little boy" that they dropped it on Hiroshima. The U.S. Military chose Hiroshima as a target because it was a major urban center and was the main garrison for Japanese troops and weapons. The second bomb "fat man" was originally supposed to be a target on Kokura, however due to the incoming weather the flight was pushed forward two days on Nagasaki. Nagasaki was chosen as a back-up because it was a major port city that was a good source of trade and in-flow of war materials.