Ignorance Of Nuclear Weapons

2 Pages 546 Words

Ignorance of Nuclear Weapons
By Mark Schells

Have you ever seen a kid with a bunch of fire crackers? They are amazed at the power of them and at how they can blow up there toys. Then it happens, it only takes once, without even knowing it the child closes its hand around one. Then they loose a thumb or a finger, and have learned a lesson they will remember for the rest of there lives. All we have to be concerned about is what country is going to be the hand that wraps around the fire cracker, and will we learn our lesson to late? We face this decision because of the sheer ignorance that the world and especially the US has presented in result to the production of Nuclear Weapons.

Nuclear explosives, on the other hand, involve energy sources within the core, or nucleus, of the atom. The A-bomb gained its power from the splitting, or fission, of all the atomic nuclei in several kilograms of plutonium. A sphere about the size of a baseball produced an explosion equal to 20,000 tons of TNT. The A-bomb was developed, constructed, and tested by the Manhattan Project, a massive United States enterprise that was established in August 1942, during World War II. Many prominent American scientists including the physicists Enrico Fermi and J. Robert Oppenheimer, and the chemist Harold Urey, were associated with the project, which was headed by a U.S. Army engineer, Major General Leslie Groves.

After the war, the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission became responsible for the oversight of all nuclear matters, including weapons research. Other types of bombs were developed to tap the energy of light elements, such as hydrogen. In these bombs the source of energy is the fusion process, in which nuclei of the isotopes of hydrogen combine to form a heavier helium nucleus. This weapons research has resulted in the production of bombs that range in power from a fraction of a kiloton (1000 tons of TNT equivalent) to many megatons (1 million t...