2.4 A blast from the past

A discovery by a group of nuclear physicists in a laboratory in Berlin, Germany, in 1938 made the first atomic bomb possible. As with this, and many other inventions, the atomic bomb was not a one-man project but several people developed certain aspects of the bomb and a lot of scientists across the globe were working on nuclear projects at that time.

The American government was afraid that Germany was already working on their own bomb, so they came up with a plan to start The Manhattan Project. Julius Robert Oppenheimer was the leader of the scientific team in the project and a lot of people refer to him as the father of the atomic bomb, although he was not the sole inventor of the bomb. The invention of the bomb was the result of collaboration among his team members, more than a hundred exiles from Europe who had fled from the Nazis. Together they had figured out how to create the bomb. Hundreds of physicists, mathematicians and engineers were on duty to design, build and test the first atomic bomb.

After they had successfully built the bomb, the first of the two atomic bombs was dropped on the Japanese city of Hiroshima on 6th August 1945. The American air force carried out the attack on the city. In the small hours of a warm summer day, the B-29 Enola Gay flew from a US base holding an experimental bomb Little Boy. Forty five seconds after Enola Gay dropped the bomb, the city was destroyed in a blinding instant. Eighty thousand children, women and men were killed instantly and tens of thousands were wounded, poisoned or disfigured by radiation from the bomb. Bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were dropped to force a quick Japanese surrender and brought World War Two to a quick end, but was it a right thing to do or not is still the question.