Holland 1 Adelyn Holland Mrs.Cowles English course 9 17, April, 2024 The History Behind the Atomic Bomb The atomic bomb has power. Those words should strike fear into anyone who hears them. The development of the atomic bomb, also known as the nuclear bomb, was approved by President Franklin D. Roosevelt on October 9th, 1941. It was invented by Robert Openhemier and Leslie Groves. It was also used as a weapon of war in an effort to get the Nazis to surrender in World War II, and was successful in doing so. Seeing as the atomic bomb is the most powerful weapon the world has ever known, it is important to understand the danger it imposes, its range, and when it was first made and detonated. First, it is important to realize that the atomic …show more content…
The article “The First Nuclear Test in New Mexico” states, “For a brief period there was a lighting effect within a radius of 20 miles equal to several suns at midday...” Nobody could have guessed that this bomb would have had such a mighty and catastrophic power. The force of the atomic bomb was far greater than the expectations of most scientists. The text also states, “Radioactive material in small quantities was located as much as 120 miles away.” This shows that even though the range of the obvious destructive damage had only been twenty miles, the blast of the bomb had been so forceful that traces of the radioactive material had been found one hundred miles away from the more noticeable damage. It was a dreadful and desperate period in history when the atomic bomb was first created and exploded. "At 0530, 16 July 1945, in a remote section of the Alamogordo Air Base, New Mexico, the first full-scale test was made of the implosion type atomic fission bomb," according to the article "The First Nuclear Test in New Mexico." Since this was the first atomic bomb test conducted on a large scale, the only ways to foresee or speculate on the result were through interpretation and prediction. The explosion from the bomb was far greater than what could have been shown in any graph or chart, even though it was detonated in a remote location. “The two atomic