This week I watched an episode of Modern Marvels that talked about the Manhattan Project. The whole idea behind the atomic bomb started when some people in Germany learned how to release energy from splitting a uranium atom. Jewish physicists that fled from Germany knew about this. One of the physicists got Albert Einstein to write to FDR and tell him about the danger at hand. The United States didn’t start looking into the atomic bomb until 1941. FDR put Robert Oppenheimer in charge of the atomic bomb work. Many people were worried because he didn’t handle stress very well. They thought he would crumble under pressure, however he didn’t.
To make the bomb, they needed a very specific uranium isotope, U235. To get this isotope, FDR had a site built in Oak Ridge, Tennessee that could do this. They people that went to work there could not tell their family what they were doing. They were told to say things like, “I am putting the hole in the donut.” This plant could separate the rare U235 from the more common U238. The site went from a desolate place to the 5th largest city in Tennessee, once people started to come and helped with the atomic bomb. It used 1/5 of the electricity used in the United States at the time.
FDR had another site at Hanford, Washington that worked with the idea of using plutonium in the atomic bomb. The atomic bombs were being built and eventually tested at Los Alamos, New Mexico. The U.S chose this place because it was remote and far enough away from the ocean that no-one would think they were doing atomic bomb research. The plutonium bomb was tested on July 16, 1945. The test was called Trinity. It was held up by a metal structure and after the bomb the metal was completely dismantled. The U.S never tested the U235 bomb because of a lack of supplies.
Little Boy (U235) and Fat Man (plutonium) were dropped on Japan and caused a lot of damage. Paul Tibbets was the pilot of the Enola Gay. He didn’t want anyone to name their plane the same as his so his used his mother’s name. Before he actually dropped the bombs on Japan he and his crew practiced with life size orange dummies.
I thought that this episode of Modern Marvels was very good. It had a lot of good information from the start of the project to the devastating end. It was kind of confusing when it was getting all scientific, when it talked about the atoms splitting and creating energy. I thought that watching this TV show was better than reading a text book and learning about the undertaking of the atomic bomb.
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