”Enough was never enough.”Īs additional countries gained nuclear capacity and the Cold War reached a fever pitch in the late 1950s and early 1960s, an anti-nuclear movement grew in response to a variety of nuclear accidents and weapons tests with environmental and human tolls. “No matter how many bombs they had or how big their explosions grew, they needed more and bigger,” writes historian Craig Nelson. In 1961, the Soviet Union tested the “ Tsar Bomba,” a powerful weapon yielding the equivalent of 50 megatons of TNT and producing a mushroom cloud as high as Mount Everest. began investing in thermonuclear weapons with hundreds of times the firepower of the bombs it used to end World War II, the Soviets followed on its heels. could crush the U.S.S.R., should it invade Western Europe. Ironically, the United States leadership believed that building a robust nuclear arsenal would act as a deterrent, helping prevent a third world war by showing that the U.S. tested “First Lightening,” its first nuclear device. Soviet leader Joseph Stalin had already green-lit a nuclear program in 1943, and a year and a half after the bombings in Japan, the Soviet Union achieved its first nuclear chain reaction. Without a doubt, the blasts kicked off the Cold War. Some historians argue the nuclear blasts had an additional purpose: to intimidate the Soviet Union. ( For those who survived, memories of the bomb are impossible to forget.) The attacks decimated both cities and killed or wounded at least 200,000 civilians. dropped a plutonium bomb, identical to the Trinity test bomb, over Nagasaki. On August 6, 1945, a B-29 “superbomber” dropped a uranium bomb over Hiroshima in an attempt to force Japan’s unconditional surrender. But his pleas, which were accompanied by the signatures of scores of Manhattan Project scientists, went unheard. Truman (who had succeeded Roosevelt as president) not to use it in war. Leo Szilard, a physicist who discovered the nuclear chain reaction, petitioned the administration of Harry S. Despite the obvious potential of these weapons to end or alter the course of the ongoing World War II, many of the scientists who helped develop nuclear technology opposed its use in warfare. had also developed an untested uranium bomb. Researchers pursued two paths toward a nuclear weapon: one that relied on uranium and another, more complex path, that relied on plutonium.Īfter years of research, the Manhattan Project made history in 1945 when the test of “the gadget,” one of three plutonium bombs produced before the end of the war, succeeded. Although it employed an estimated 600,000 people over the life of the project, its purpose was so secret that many of the people who contributed to it had no sense of how their efforts contributed to the larger, coordinated goal. The project was carried out at dozens of sites, from Los Alamos, New Mexico, to Oak Ridge, Tennessee. It launched a secret atomic research project, code-named the Manhattan Project, bringing together the nation’s most eminent physicists with exiled scientists from Germany and other Nazi-occupied countries. In 1941, after emigre physicist Albert Einstein warned President Franklin Delano Roosevelt that Germany might be trying to develop a fission bomb, the United States joined the first nuclear arms race. Nazi Germany was first to try to weaponize such energy, and word of its efforts leaked out of the country along with political dissidents and exiled scientists, many of them German Jews. Scientists had been trying to figure out how to produce nuclear fission-a reaction that happens when atomic nuclei are split, producing a massive amount of power-since the phenomenon’s discovery in the 1930s.
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