FRONT PAGE

LOCAL NEWS:
   BALKAN
   SEAMANS
   DRUG POLICY
   JELL-O JAM
   FINAL GAME
   V. MONOLOGUES

FEATURES:
   KELLY
   MILK
  
    
NATIONAL:
   MARINE DROWNS
   RECRUITMENT

INTERNATIONAL:
   UK ROBBERY
   RISING CRIME

BLOGS:
   JAKE
   STEPHEN
   TOM
   SEAN
   LISA
BLACK HISTORY:
   WILLIE MAYS
   CARVER

PROFS AS
        PEOPLE

READERS' RIDES

CALENDAR

HISTORY LINK

WORLD AT
        A CLICK

CONTACT US
 

The Atomic Age: World War II and the birth of the nuclear century

by Nicholas White
Exchange History Writer

    The first man-made sustainable nuclear reaction was created December 2^nd 1942, at the University of Chicago, under the direction of Enrico Fermi.  This event plunged the world into a new era and gave mankind a technology that we were not entirely ready for.

     Atomic research was undertaken during World War II with the goal of producing a weapon of unprecedented power and destructive capability.  The government had this plan already in place before United States’ involvement in the war - a letter signed by Albert Einstein in 1939 recommended to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt that nuclear weapons be explored as an option against the expanding and increasingly hostile Germany.  Einstein is reported to have called this “the biggest mistake of my life” in later years.  United States officials also feared that Germany might develop nuclear weapons first and would not hesitate to use them.

      Einstein’s letter caused the United States to take action: Fermi’s reactor work received $6000 of federal funding.  When Fermi succeeded in creating a sustained nuclear reaction, the news was reported to the leaders of the Manhattan Project (the codename for the nuclear program).  Fermi’s success was important because to make a nuclear bomb, you need a nuclear reactor first.  The two elements that can be used in nuclear weapons are uranium 235 and plutonium 239.  Unfortunately, these isotopes are uncommon to vanishingly rare in their natural occurrences, and need to be separated from (in the case of U235) or created from (as with Pu239) the more common U238.  This requires a functioning reactor.

     The United States built “fast” reactors to make plutonium and enrich uranium, based on Fermi’s discoveries.  It turned out to be easier and take fewer resources to create plutonium than enriched uranium.  However, the detonation methods for a plutonium bomb are different.  A  uranium bomb is easier to explode, relying on an explosive to slam two pieces of U235 together.  Plutonium detonation requires spherical compression of the bomb core, which is somewhat more complex.  Despite this, the Manhattan project focused on plutonium weapons.

     In the end, three bombs were made.  Two plutonium-based, one uranium-based.  One of the plutonium bombs was detonated as a test at the “Trinity” test site in New Mexico in July of 1945, and managed to spread radioactive fallout over one-fifth of the state.  Less than a month later, the uranium bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, Japan, and the third and last bomb on Nagasaki 3 days later.

      In 2 months, the United States had exhausted its nuclear arsenal.  While the destruction wrought by the weapons was horrifying, many thought that the “power of the atom” was a good thing, and United States military supremacy was assured.  Four years after the United States had done so, in 1949, the Soviet Union detonated their first atomic weapon.  In 1952, the US exploded a new kind of bomb, the hydrogen bomb, which had 450 times the power of the Nagasaki bomb.  A year later, the Soviets exploded one of their own.  The nuclear arms race had begun.