The Manhattan Project was the official code name for the operation to build the first nuclear bomb. The result of this experiment ended with two nuclear bombs and better knowledge of nuclear science. This will cover the early stages and go through all the progress which was made as the project on.
The Einstein Letter
Albert Einstein wrote a letter addressed to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt in August of 1939. In this letter Einstein wrote about a new study on the chain reactions that took advantage of uranium. He said if done correctly it could produce substantial amounts of power, and if this power was harnessed it would result in a bomb capable of unheard of damage. Einstein also stated that it was believed that the German government
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These were both nuclear bombs but they were powered differently. The first one "Little Boy" was driven by the isotope uranium-235. "Little Boy" was a gun type of bomb. For it to work there must be a sub-critical projectile and a sub-critical target. When they met this would in turn create a critical mass, then the chain reaction starts and then releases high amounts of energy at a extremely fast rate. "Little Boy" weighed 9,700 pounds and was 10 feet in length and 28 inches in diameter. The projectile inside weighed 55 pounds while the target weighed 85 pounds. This bomb was dropped on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945.
The research of isotope separation was a very difficult one. At the size of the isotopes needing to be separated there was only a handful of ways this could be achieved. All the scientist on the project came to the conclusion that enriched samples of uranium-235 were essential for further research. They concluded that this isotope could be used as a fuel source for an explosive device. In order to separate them they would need to be separated by a physical force, a chemical separation could not happen due to the fact that uranium-235 and uranium-238 are so
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The bombs were starting to come together, in July of 1945 the United States was planning the test of the plutonium bomb named “Trinity”. This test was set to be tested sooner but there were complications with the bomb. It was then rescheduled for the 16th of July and was to be tested at the Alamogordo Bombing Range. This was the largest test the United States had conducted since May. On May 7th they had tested a very small amount to test the procedure they were going to use. On the test of Trinity there were three bunkers at 10,000 yards North, South, and West of ground zero. This test was to see the amount of energy that was released during the