Brice Johnson
Hour 6
1/6/14
Manhattan Project

All nuclear research started when the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor, and when the USA had entered World War II. The Americans began to concentrate more on making a nuclear bomb. The Manhattan Project, which included some of the top Scientist. The American’s and British had put their minds and resources together to develop the bomb, plus they needed to create working factories to manufacture the buildings of the bombs. The plants helped create the plutonium and uranium needed to manufacture the atomic bombs. The Manhattan Project was essential in order to develop the atomic bombs to end World War II faster.
The United States and Great Britain kept the Atomic bomb a secret. In order to keep a secret Groves spread the work out between laboratories so people working on the bomb would not know what they were manufacturing. While working on the bomb, most of the employees worked on tasks that had nothing to do with what the others around them were doing. Even the officials on the War Production Board had remained unaware of the bomb.
As with working on any project, you always run into problems. The Plutonium needed for the bomb was only in microscopic sizes. These small sizes were very hard to handle. The plants where the bomb was being tested and worked on needed to be run by machinery because the materials were too “radioactive”, poisonous, violently corrosive, or all three for scientist to be touching and messing with. If anything would ever go wrong in the labs everyone would need to be evacuated. Being a scientist during this time period and being the best at what you did could be extremely scary, because you did know what you were working on.
President Franklin D. Roosevelt died on April 12, 1945, and Vice President Harry S. Truman took office. When Truman took office, he didn’t know anything about the Manhattan Project, which shows just how secret the project was. Truman, one week after taking the place of the President, finally found out about the Project. On April 25, 1945, the Secretary of War Henry Stimson and General Leslie Groves informed Truman of the bomb that had been created. Franklin D. Roosevelt left Truman with a significant amount of duties for him to work on to achieve. Truman had to make an extremely tough decision about the use of these bombs. Truman’s decision to use the bomb was justified by his thought that the war could finally come to an end, and that many lives would be saved if they would use the atomic bomb.
The first time they had tested the bomb was on July 16, 1945. The testing had taken place in Los Alamos, New Mexico. Scientists did not test the uranium bomb because of their great confidence in its abilities. The Plutonium bomb was more powerful than the uranium bomb. The scientist had no idea what they were witnessing when the test bomb was being dropped .After the perfection of the bombs, the scientist wanted them dropped as soon as possible. The cost of the entire project was about $2 billion dollars. The Manhattan Project is said to be the “product of the greatest research and development project of all US history”.
At the Potsdam Conference on July of 1945, the United States told Japan to surrender or they would face the consequences. After Japanese refused to surrender, the United States established a committee to determine the places of where to drop the bombs. The committee searched for an important military site, as this would affect the Japanese ability to continue fighting. The United Sates had decided on Nagasaki and Hiroshima. Hiroshima was chose as the first location where they would drop the Uranium bomb. On August 6, 1945, a B-29 Bomber known as “Enola Gay” flew from Tinian Island, an American airfield, and then continued to fly over Hiroshima. The Bomb which consisted of 20,000 tons of trinitrotoluene, killed 50,000 people and demolished over four square