The Atomic Bomb :: essays research papers fc

The Atomic BombOn July 16, 1945, the United States of America ushered the world into a new geological era with the successful detonation of an atomic flunk in New Mexico. That era was the nuclear age. Less than a month later, on August 6, 1945, an atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, Japan the first use of a nuclear weapon against an enemy nation. Most of us know of these basic events, but many do not know of the complicated decisions and scientific breakthroughs that paved the way towards that fateful day in Hiroshima. Every day we are closer to having nuclear munition fall in the hands of someone who wishes to do harm with those weapons. Many question why we think the U.S. is justified in having our own atomic collection. This is why it is important to understand how the atomic bomb came about and why we decided it was necessary to use it.First reports of the bombs in Japan only reported that a new type of bomb had been used. Most had no concept of what an atom bomb was or why it was so powerful. The story of the atomic bomb opens with a series of new discoveries in physics that began near the turn of the century. The term classical is applied to the physics that scientists developed prior to that time (Cohen, 17). Much of it came from the operation of the Father of Physics, the great seventeenth-century English scholar, Sir Isaac Newton. Newton was a scientific genius. Today, however, a competent student with a good high school physics bunk probably has a more accurate knowledge of the physical universe than Newton had. This is especially true concerning the most basic building blocks of matter, atoms. Newton, as did others in advance him, developed a theory about the structure of atoms. According to Newtons theory, atoms were like marbles. They were solid and hard, but unlike marbles, they could not be gain ground divided. It was not until the latter half of the nineteenth century that scientific experiment began to prove otherwise. Thereafter, know ledge of atomic structure moved ahead very apace (Cohen, 18). By the mid-1930s, dedicated effort by British and other European scientists had revealed a new world of atomic structure, one filled with incredibly fine systems of interacting subatomic particles containing electrons, protons, and neutrons.In 1938, two German physicists, Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassman, were experimenting with uranium.