The Birth of the Atomic Bomb History Documentary
Δημοσιεύτηκε στις 21 Ιαν 2016
Human
Civilization was forevermore changed when scientists managed to release
the power of nuclear energy, the energy humankind had only before
witnessed from the stars. It is story of almost unimaginable leaps
forward in science and technology with consequences we are still in the
aftershocks of since the Second World War.
The scientific
achievements made in the first half of the 20th century were so great
that our modern world is merely the product of what happened in largely
wartime institutions. From fertilizer to semiconductor technologies.
Radar to rocketry.
Before, the Earth had in many ways been
before been a place contained, and somewhat innocent, in the realms of
the inward and the outward. After the war, everything changed.
Humanity's inner world was expanded by the powers of quantum mechanics
and atomic physics, whereas our outward world was greatly expanded by
relativity and advances in electromagnetism. Nowhere have these advances
been so violent and extreme than in the Manhattan Project, which was
truly a unique watershed moment for all peoples of the world.
The
Manhattan Project was a research and development program, led by the
United States with participation from the United Kingdom and Canada,
that produced the first atomic bomb during World War II. From 1942 to
1946, the project was under the direction of Major General Leslie Groves
of the US Army Corps of Engineers.
The Manhattan Project began
modestly in 1939, but grew to employ more than 130,000 people and cost
nearly US$2 billion (roughly equivalent to $25.8 billion as of 2012).
Over 90% of the cost was for building factories and producing the
fissionable materials, with less than 10% for development and production
of the weapons. The ultimate goal of the Manhattan Project was to
create a chain reaction on an atomic level and harness the released
energy to produce a viable weapon.
General Leslie Grove was
chosen to lead the project in 1942. Robert Oppenheimer was appointed to
lead the day-to-day running of the operation at the weapons laboratory
located at Los Alamos, NM. By 1945 the project had nearly 40
laboratories and factories spread throughout the country. The total cost
of the Manhattan Project was two billion dollars, which is the
approximate equivalent of twenty-six billion dollars today. Enrico Fermi
built a reactor in Chicago during the early 1940's.
Before
1943, work on the design and functioning of the bomb itself was largely
theoretical, based on fundamental experiments carried out at a number of
different locations. In that year a laboratory directed by J. Robert
Oppenheimer was created on an isolated mesa at Los Alamos, New Mexico,
34 miles (55 km) north of Santa Fe. This laboratory had to develop
methods of reducing the fissionable products of the production plants to
pure metal and fabricating the metal to required shapes. Methods of
rapidly bringing together amounts of fissionable material to achieve a
supercritical mass (and thus a nuclear explosion) had to be devised,
along with the actual construction of a deliverable weapon that would be
dropped from a plane and fused to detonate at the proper moment in the
air above the target. Most of these problems had to be solved before any
appreciable amount of fissionable material could be produced, so that
the first adequate amounts could be used at the fighting front with
minimum delay.
By the summer of 1945, amounts of plutonium-239
sufficient to produce a nuclear explosion had become available from the
Hanford Works, and weapon development and design were sufficiently far
advanced so that an actual field test of a nuclear explosive could be
scheduled. Such a test was no simple affair. Elaborate and complex
equipment had to be assembled so that a complete diagnosis of success or
failure could be had.
The result of all the nuclear reasearch
was the successful first detonation of an atomic bomb, code named
"Gadget," at Alamogordo, NM on July 16, 1945 at 5:29:45
Mountain War Time. It was detonated on top of a steel tower surrounded
by scientific equipment, with remote monitoring taking place in bunkers
occupied by scientists and a few dignitaries 10,000 yards (9 km) away.
The explosion came as an intense light flash, a sudden wave of heat, and
later a tremendous roar as the shock wave passed and echoed in the
valley. A ball of fire rose rapidly, followed by a mushroom cloud
extending to 40,000 feet (12,200 metres). The bomb generated an
explosive power equivalent to 15,000 to 20,000 tons of trinitrotoluene
(TNT); the tower was completely vaporized and the surrounding desert
surface fused to glass for a radius of 800 yards (730 metres). The
following month, two other atomic bombs produced by the project, the
first using uranium-235 and the second using plutonium, were dropped on
Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan. The world would never be the same again.
Civilization was forevermore changed when scientists managed to release
the power of nuclear energy, the energy humankind had only before
witnessed from the stars. It is story of almost unimaginable leaps
forward in science and technology with consequences we are still in the
aftershocks of since the Second World War.
The scientific
achievements made in the first half of the 20th century were so great
that our modern world is merely the product of what happened in largely
wartime institutions. From fertilizer to semiconductor technologies.
Radar to rocketry.
Before, the Earth had in many ways been
before been a place contained, and somewhat innocent, in the realms of
the inward and the outward. After the war, everything changed.
Humanity's inner world was expanded by the powers of quantum mechanics
and atomic physics, whereas our outward world was greatly expanded by
relativity and advances in electromagnetism. Nowhere have these advances
been so violent and extreme than in the Manhattan Project, which was
truly a unique watershed moment for all peoples of the world.
The
Manhattan Project was a research and development program, led by the
United States with participation from the United Kingdom and Canada,
that produced the first atomic bomb during World War II. From 1942 to
1946, the project was under the direction of Major General Leslie Groves
of the US Army Corps of Engineers.
The Manhattan Project began
modestly in 1939, but grew to employ more than 130,000 people and cost
nearly US$2 billion (roughly equivalent to $25.8 billion as of 2012).
Over 90% of the cost was for building factories and producing the
fissionable materials, with less than 10% for development and production
of the weapons. The ultimate goal of the Manhattan Project was to
create a chain reaction on an atomic level and harness the released
energy to produce a viable weapon.
General Leslie Grove was
chosen to lead the project in 1942. Robert Oppenheimer was appointed to
lead the day-to-day running of the operation at the weapons laboratory
located at Los Alamos, NM. By 1945 the project had nearly 40
laboratories and factories spread throughout the country. The total cost
of the Manhattan Project was two billion dollars, which is the
approximate equivalent of twenty-six billion dollars today. Enrico Fermi
built a reactor in Chicago during the early 1940's.
Before
1943, work on the design and functioning of the bomb itself was largely
theoretical, based on fundamental experiments carried out at a number of
different locations. In that year a laboratory directed by J. Robert
Oppenheimer was created on an isolated mesa at Los Alamos, New Mexico,
34 miles (55 km) north of Santa Fe. This laboratory had to develop
methods of reducing the fissionable products of the production plants to
pure metal and fabricating the metal to required shapes. Methods of
rapidly bringing together amounts of fissionable material to achieve a
supercritical mass (and thus a nuclear explosion) had to be devised,
along with the actual construction of a deliverable weapon that would be
dropped from a plane and fused to detonate at the proper moment in the
air above the target. Most of these problems had to be solved before any
appreciable amount of fissionable material could be produced, so that
the first adequate amounts could be used at the fighting front with
minimum delay.
By the summer of 1945, amounts of plutonium-239
sufficient to produce a nuclear explosion had become available from the
Hanford Works, and weapon development and design were sufficiently far
advanced so that an actual field test of a nuclear explosive could be
scheduled. Such a test was no simple affair. Elaborate and complex
equipment had to be assembled so that a complete diagnosis of success or
failure could be had.
The result of all the nuclear reasearch
was the successful first detonation of an atomic bomb, code named
"Gadget," at Alamogordo, NM on July 16, 1945 at 5:29:45
Mountain War Time. It was detonated on top of a steel tower surrounded
by scientific equipment, with remote monitoring taking place in bunkers
occupied by scientists and a few dignitaries 10,000 yards (9 km) away.
The explosion came as an intense light flash, a sudden wave of heat, and
later a tremendous roar as the shock wave passed and echoed in the
valley. A ball of fire rose rapidly, followed by a mushroom cloud
extending to 40,000 feet (12,200 metres). The bomb generated an
explosive power equivalent to 15,000 to 20,000 tons of trinitrotoluene
(TNT); the tower was completely vaporized and the surrounding desert
surface fused to glass for a radius of 800 yards (730 metres). The
following month, two other atomic bombs produced by the project, the
first using uranium-235 and the second using plutonium, were dropped on
Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan. The world would never be the same again.
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