Nagasaki Bomb

Nagasaki Bomb

In October 1939, FDR set up a Uranium Committee. This awarded government grants to leading universities for atomic research.

In June 1941, FDR’s administration created the Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD). This expanded to include teams working at Columbia, Princeton, the University of California, and the University of Chicago.

By June 1942, Dr Vannevar Bush, former dean of engineering at the MIT, chief of OSRD, reported to FDR that the bomb was feasible, though the demands in scientific manpower, engineering, money, and other resources would be immense. FDR felt that the risk of the Nazis getting a bomb first was so real that he had no alternative but to accord top priority to its manufacture. Accordingly, the Manhattan District within the Army Corps of Engineers was established to coordinate resources and production, and the scheme was henceforth named the Manhattan Project. The first actual chain-reaction was produced by Dr Arthur Compton’s team in Chicago in December 1942. A new laboratory for the purpose of building the bomb was established early in 1942 at Los Alamos, New Mexico, under the direction of Dr J. Robert Oppenheimer. Insofar as any one man ‘invented’ the A-bomb, it was Oppenheimer, though General Leslie R. Groves was almost equally important in supervising Manhattan, establishing vast new plants in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and Hanford, Washington State, to produce the new materials required. This enormous project, working on the frontiers of technology in half a dozen directions, employed 125,000 people. The first explosion took place on July 16, 1945 and the bomb was ready for delivery the next month. Only the American system could have produced it within such a time-scale.

Nuclear weapons were thus the product of American morality as well as of its productive skill.

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