It will soon be 78 years since the USA, the land of the free, dropped nuclear bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on the 6th and 9th of August and hence, putting an end to World War II. With that said, wouldn’t you like to know who was the person who actually came up with this dangerous, gruesome war machine, and what effects did it have on the world?
Julius Robert Oppenheimer was born on April 22,1904. Since young, he was precocious and at the age of ten, he was already studying physics, chemistry and mineralogy, and at the age of twelve, he was invited to lecture at the New York Mineralogy club.
However, Robert had written extremely advanced letters to the club and hence, the club did not realise that he was only 12 years old. In 1921, when he was 17, he graduated as valedictorian of his high school class but fell ill with dysentery and was forced to postpone his enrollment to Harvard university.
After his recovery, he started Harvard in 1922 and graduated in three years and majored in Chemistry. It was then he discovered his true passion – Physics. At the age of 23, Oppenheimer graduated with a PhD from the University of Göttingen in Germany.
He studied fast neutrons in 1941, which was 1 year before the Manhattan Project took place in 1942. Throughout the past year, he had been conducting research on fast neutrons and calculating the amount of material that would be needed for a bomb, as well as a way to measure a bomb’s efficiency.
Oppenheimer then stated that creating a sound method for implosions and purifying plutonium was on of the greatest challenges of the Manhattan Project and that the chances of pre detonation could be lowered by the purification of fissionable material and that by using an accelerated firing system capable of reaching speeds of 3000 ft per second.
A convenient artillery method of firing a subcritical mass into the other was considered for uranium-235, but this method would work with plutonium only if absolute purification could be achieved. A gun type design of this variety was thus designed for uranium. Unable to solve the purification problem, however, bomb designers feared that they would have to turn to the relatively unknown implosion method for plutonium.
An atomic bomb uses either uranium or plutonium and depends on fission, which is a nuclear reaction in which a nucleus or an atom splits into two parts.
In 1945, the atomic bomb was achieved under the Manhattan Project and Lieutenant General Leslie Groves selected Oppenheimer to lead the Manhattan Project, which was a group of people who were working on creating the atomic bombs.
By March, 1944, they managed to create two bomb models and began testing them with B-29s. The two bomb models consisted of ‘Thin Man’, which was named after president Roosevelt, and ‘Fat Man’, which was named after Winston Churchill.
What do YOU think about the atomic bomb?
By: Chin Cai Yu Jayne
Write and Win: Participate in Creative writing Contest & International Essay Contest and win fabulous prizes.
