The Atomic Bomb
On August 2, 1939, just before the beginning of World War II, Albert Einstein wrote to Franklin D. Roosevelt that he and other scientists, after all their effort, found out how to purify uranium-235, which could be used to build a very explosive bomb known as the "Atomic Bomb". It was shortly thereafter that the United States Government began the serious undertaking known as "The Manhattan Project". This project was made to research the production of the atomic bomb. There is more to the atomic bomb then just Einstein telling the President his idea, America recreating his idea, and finally blowing up Japan to end the war. There are many technical factors in creating the bomb, which will be reviewed in the next paragraph.
The most complicated issue in creating the atomic bomb was the production of enriched uranium to sustain a chain reaction. During the 1940's, uranium-235 was very difficult to extract. So difficult that the ratio in actually converting uranium ore to a uranium was a 500:1 chance of actually happening. So most of the time, when the uranium was finally created into a metal, it most likely became uranium-238, which was useless in creating the atomic bomb. What they needed was uranium-235. To make the task even more difficult, the U-235 (uranium) and U-238 are both isotopes, which are nearly identical in their chemical makeup. No ordinary chemical extraction method could separate them; only mechanical methods could work. This led to the creation of a massive enrichment laboratory constructed in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. The scientists working there devised an extraction system that worked on the principle of gaseous diffusion. This process involved magnetic separation of the two isotopes. Next, a gas centrifuge was used to further separate the lighter U-235 from the heavier, non-fissionable U-238. Once all of these procedures had been completed, all that needed to be done was to put to the test the entire concept behind atomic fission (which is splitting the atom). Over the course of six years, from 1939 to 1945, more than $2 billion was spent during the history of the Manhattan Project. The formulas for refining uranium and putting together a working atomic bomb were created and seen to their logical ends by some of the greatest minds of our time.
Once the day has finally come when all at Los Alamos would find out if "The Gadget" (code-named as such during its development) was going to be the colossal dud of the century or perhaps an end to the war. It all came down to a fateful morning in midsummer, 1945. July 16, 1945, in a white blaze that stretched from the basin of the Jemez Mountains in northern New Mexico to the still-dark skies, "The Gadget" ushered in the Atomic Age. The light of the explosion then turned orange as the atomic fireball began shooting upwards at 360 feet per second, reddening and pulsing as it cooled. The characteristic mushroom cloud of radioactive vapor materialized at 30,000 feet. Beneath the cloud, all that remained of the soil at the blast site were fragments of jade green radioactive glass created by the heat of the reaction. The brilliant light from the detonation pierced the early morning skies with such intensity that residents from a faraway neighboring community would swear that the sun came up twice that day. Even more astonishing is that a blind girl saw the flash 120 miles away. After viewing the results several participants signed petitions against loosing the monster they had created, but their protests fell on deaf ears. The Jornada del Muerto of New Mexico would not be the last site on planet Earth to experience an atomic explosion.