Over the course of six years (1939-1945) more than 2 billion dollars were spent on the Manhattan Project. The formulas for refining Uranium and putting together a working bomb were created and seen to their logical ends by some of the greatest minds of our time. One of the main people who was working on the Atom Bomb was J. Robert Oppenheimer. Oppenheimer was the major force behind the Manhattan Project. He literally ran the show and saw to it that all of the great minds working on this project made their brainstorms work. He watched the entire project from the beginning to the end being the leader of it.
At 5:29 (Mountain War-Time) on July 16th, 1945, in a white blaze that stretched from the basin of the Jemez Mountains in northern New Mexico to the skies, the Atom Bomb blew up. The light of the explosion then turned orange as the atomic fireball began shooting upwards at 360 feet per second. The mushroom cloud of radioactive vapor went as high as 30,000 feet. Beneath the cloud, all that remained of the soil at the blast site were fragments of jade green radioactive glass... All of this caused by the heat of the reaction
As many know, atomic bombs have been used only twice in warfare. The first and foremost blast site of the atomic bomb is Hiroshima. A Uranium bomb (which weighed in at over 4 1/2 tons) nicknamed "Little Boy" was dropped on Hiroshima August 6th, 1945. The Aioi Bridge was the target for the bomb. On that day it was dropped by the Enola Gay. It missed by only 800 feet. The bomb ended up killing 66,000 people and 69,000 people were injured by a 10 kiloton atomic explosion.
On August 9th 1945, Nagasaki fell to the same treatment as Hiroshima. Only this time, a Plutonium bomb nicknamed "Fat Man" was dropped on the city. Even though the "Fat Man" missed by over a mile and a half, it still leveled nearly half the city. Nagasaki's population dropped in one split-second from 422,000 to 383,000. Over 39,000 were killed while over 25,000 were injured. That blast was less than 10 kilotons as well. |
