Atomic Bomb

6 Pages 1462 Words

In 1945, the United States made a decision that forever changed the face of warfare on this planet. That decision was to drop a brand new invention, the atomic bomb, on Japan. The atomic bomb was, and still is, the most feared weapon any nation could possess. This bomb took years to evolve into a useful weapon, and in this paper the timeline will unfold. Although the attack took place in 1945, the years of development are just as important.
In all reality, Hitler played a major role in the development of the atomic bomb. It was his belief that Germans were better than Jews. This provoked one of the greatest minds in our history, Albert Einstein, to leave Germany. Einstein, who was a Jew, had enough money to flee Germany and settle in America. When Albert Einstein published his theory of relativity, Einstein asserted that matter (mass) and energy were two forms of the same thing. According to Einstein, if somehow we could transform mass into energy, it would be possible to "liberate" huge amounts of energy.
However, a theory is only a theory until it is proven. During the next decade, a major step was taken in proving the theory of relativity when Ernest Rutherford and Niels Bohr described the structure of an atom more precisely. They said an atom consists of a positively charged core, the nucleus, and negatively charged electrons that revolve around the nucleus. It was the nucleus, scientists concluded, that had to be broken or "exploded" if atomic energy was to be liberated.
In 1939, prior to the beginning of World War II, Albert Einstein wrote to U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Einstein and several other scientists told Roosevelt of efforts in Nazi Germany to purify Uranium-235 which might in turn be used to build an atomic bomb. The letter, which bore only Einstein's signature, helped lend urgency to efforts in the U.S. to build the atomic bomb, even though Einstein himself played no role in the work and knew nothin...