Manhattan Project Essays (3447 words) - Manhattan Project

Manhattan Project The Manhattan Project Imagine a weapon so powerful that it could literally destroy the world, a weapon that vaporizes anything living thing within its radius. In an effort by the United States, which also involved the United Kingdom and Canada, was a project to design and build the first atomic bomb, the project was code named the Manhattan Project. The Manhattan Project was one of the most secretive projects in the history of the United States. It took place during World War II and its purpose was to create a bomb by splitting atoms apart. This project was a success and created one of the most devastating bombs ever used by mankind, the atomic bomb. The president at the time, Harry S. Truman, had to face the many factors that were involved in making the decision to drop the bomb. In this paper I will discuss those and the events leading up to The Manhattan Project. The factors in dropping the bomb can be put into three categories: military, moral and political. I will also go into the scientific means of developing such a weapon. Albert Einstein was living in Germany at the time Hitler came into power. Albert Einstein, Edward Teller, Leo Szilard and the rest of his colleagues wrote a letter in August 1939 to warn the United States that Germany was researching and developing nuclear weapons. They were afraid that once Germany finished building the bomb, they would use it on the United States. (Cayton, Perry, Winkler, 1995, pg. 786). When President Franklin Delano Roosevelt received the letter, he was both amazed and scared. He was amazed that science could make such a devastating weapon, a weapon that could destroy an entire city. President Roosevelt then quickly assembled the Manhattan Project so they could build the bomb before Germany. The Manhattan Project started in 1942 in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. The name "Manhattan Project" was secretly coded as a United States effort in an attempt to build an atom bomb during World War II. It was named after the Manhattan Engineer District of the US Army Corps of Engineers, because most of the research was done in New York City. In Oak Ridge there were tests for separating a rare Uranium-235 (U-235) an unstable isotope from Uranium-238 (U-238). General Leslie Groves was chosen by President Roosevelt to lead the project. Grove's major task was to build the huge industrial facilities needed to separate the small amounts of rare uranium-235, uranium-238 and plutonium needed for a bomb. He built the facilities on an isolated mesa at Los Alamos, New Mexico. The project employed nearly 129,000 people. But out of those couple of thousands of scientists, there were six scientists who contributed to the project the most: Neils Bohr, Joseph Carter, Glen Seaborg, Enrico Fermi, Richard Feynman, and Albert Einstein. (Wyden, 1984, pg. 113) Albert Einstein predicted that mass could be converted into energy early in the century. The idea of energy from atoms comes from Einstein's equation: E=mc2. Atoms consist of three sub-atomic particles. The particles are protons, neutrons, and electrons. The neutrons and protons are closely clustered to form the nucleus and the electrons orbit around the nucleus. The actual mass of a nucleus is always less than the sum of the neutrons and protons that make up the nucleus. The difference is the mass equivalent of the energy of formation of the nucleus from its constituents. The conversion of mass to energy follows Einstein's equation, E=mc2, where E is the energy equivalent to a mass, m, and c is the velocity of light. His theory was confirmed experimentally by John D. Cockcroft and Ernest Walton in 1932. In 1939, Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann discovered nuclear fission. (Lanouette, 1992, pg. 82) Fission is a process where certain nuclei of heavy atoms split up into two nearly equal parts when they are bombarded by neutrons. Neutrons are used to split the atom because they have no electrical charge. If scientist used a particle that has a positive charge, the uranium atom would repel the positive charge particle. (Taffel, 1992, pg. 790) Neils Bohr discovered that U-235 had the capability to create fission. To initiate fission, a nucleus from a