Einstein's Letter To The Manhattan Project

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On August 2, 1939, President Roosevelt received a letter from Albert Einstein. It was about six months after the discovery of uranium fission by Hahn and Frits Strassmann. American news openly debated the prospect of atomic energy, however, most Americans physicists doubted that atomic energy or atomic bombs were a realistic possibilities. Einstein and a few other scientists thought it important that the get the ear of the president so that they could issue at warnings. The letter warned Roosevelt that Germany was acquiring resources to produce an atomic bomb. Germany had learned that Uranium-235 could be turned into a new energy source that was capable of generating an explosion that could lead to mass destruction. Einstein proposed that Roosevelt should start building nuclear research centers and begin mining uranium in the United States. He described how a single atomic bomb could destroy the entire port and even neighboring territories. This gave the United States a urgency priority that had to be completed. Mining soon began in Oakridge, Tennessee and Hanford, Washington for Uranium and Plutonium to created…show more content…
With the project the United States developed the first atomic bombs from 1939 to 1945. The first nuclear explosion was the Trinity Test conducted by the United States Army on July 16, 1945. Trinity was conducted in Socorro, New Mexico, in the Jornada del Muerto desert on the Alamogordo Bombing and Gunnery Range. The actual first atomic bomb, named Little Boy, was a uranium-powered bomb that exploded with a force of 15 kilotons, which was approximately equal to 30 million sticks of dynamite. The Fat Man, the second atomic bomb, was a plutonium-powered bomb that imploded when activated. It had a force of 21 kilotons, and when it imploded on its self, it caused an effect that was like a black hole (was also equivalent to almost 42 million sticks of
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