O Manhattan Project was the project developed by the United States of America with the purpose of building the firstatomic bombsof history. Scientists, engineers, military personnel and several other professionals were mobilized around this undertaking from August 13, 1942 to August 15, 1947. The first atomic bomb built was named trinity, and was tested on July 16, 1945, in the desert of Los Alamos, New Mexico – where the secret base of the Manhattan Project was located. A month later, two more bombs similar to the first were dropped on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, victimizing more than 240 thousand people.
Read too: Einstein and the atomic bomb
Nuclear energy as a weapon of war
The Manhattan Project was born out of a concern raised by the nuclear physicist Leo Szilard, in August 1939. This Hungarian scientist, based in the US, convinced another scientist, AlbertEinstein, also based in the USA (being German by birth), to jointly sign a letter addressed to the then US president,
Franklin D. roosevelt. In that letter, Szilard warned the president about the possibility of Nazi Germany building nuclear weapons, since they were scientists from that country, notably Otto Hahn, Fritz Strassman and Lise Meitner, who discovered the fissionnuclear (more details about this can be read on here), physical reaction that would allow the explosion of an atomic bomb.Started to Second World War, by Nazi initiative, in September of the same year, Roosevelt took care to accept Szilard's warning and, together with other US politicians, military and scientists, decided to develop the Project Manhattan. Project leadership was then entrusted to two prominent characters: the American physicist Robert Oppenheimer it's the General Leslie Groves. The most obvious objective was to anticipate the probable German atomic bomb. Szilard and other scientists believed that if the US had such an artifact, before enemy countries, not just the World War II would end, but another war of the same magnitude would not be possible, given the possibility of self-destruction of humanity as one all. As the historian P. D. Smith, in his work The men of the end of the world: the real dr. Fantastic and the dream of the total weapon:
For Oppenheimer and Weisskopf, as well as for many other scientists, including Leo Szilard, although the bomb atomic was a definitive instrument of destruction, it also contained the possibility of creating peace lasting. They hoped that the atomic superweapon would be so terrible that countries would renounce war and embrace peace. But was the atomic bomb the necessary size? – Niels Bohr asked Oppenheimer when he arrived in Los Alamos. The visionary scientist expected the weapon to be so destructive that the war would be meaningless and simply an act of mutual suicide. [1]
Do not stop now... There's more after the advertising ;)
trinity: the first atomic bomb
With the material and human resources applied to the Manhattan Project, the United States managed to build the first nuclear reactor of history, completed in 1942, in the Met Lab, in Chicago. In addition to this headquarters in Chicago, the project also had three more: the oakRidge, in Tennessee, wave was made the separation of uranium-235 from uranium 238, that of Hanford, in the state of Washington, where plutonium was produced, and the aforementioned Los Alamos base, where bombs were designed and built.
The first result of the project was the bomb trinity, which was detonated on July 16, 1945, in the Los Alamos Desert. The explosion had the power of 20 kilotons, that is, 20 kilotons of TNT (trinitrotoluene), conventional dynamite. The test was recorded at the time, and can be seen in the video below:
Carrying out the test with the trinity divided the scientists' opinion. One of them, Joseph Rotblat, involved in the project, left his post after the war was over, realizing that Germany was in no condition to build a nuclear weapon. As researcher Fernando de Souza Barros recounts:
Joseph Rotblat was the only scientist who left the Manhattan Project for moral reasons. This happened when he learned, at the end of World War II, that Nazi Germany was no longer able to manufacture atomic bombs. Faced with official reaction against his decision, Rotblat returned to England, where he had worked before the beginning of the war, and began his campaign against atomic weapons, founding the Association of Atomic Scientists (ASA, in English). [2]
On August 6 and 9, 1945, two more Manhattan Project bombs were dropped by the B-29 bomber plane, enola gay, about the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Respectively, the names given to the dropped bombs were little boy and fat man – being the first with uranium content and the second with polonium.
GRADES
[1]SMITH, P.D.. The men of the end of the world: the real dr. Fantastic and the dream of the total weapon. (trans. José Viegas Filho). São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2008. P. 344.
[2] BARROS, Fernando de Souza. “The Russell-Einstein Manifesto and the Pugwash Conferences”. Physics at School, v. 6, no. 1. 2005. P. 16.
By Me. Cláudio Fernandes
