The Manhattan Project: James Chadwick And The Atomic Bomb

As flapper girls with chic haircuts kicked off their dancing shoes, the night and the roaring twenties coming to an end, a tall, slender Englishman by the name of James Chadwick sat hunched over in his lab, working to find a particle that no one, not even the world’s most brilliant minds of his time, was sure existed. His name was James Chadwick and for nearly a decade, he had been trying to prove the existence of neutral particles in the nucleus of the atom, neutrons. As the new decade began, Chadwick still had no tangible evidence proving his neutrons, and maybe he never would have if not for the work of Irene and Frederic Juliot-Curie. The two scientists had performed an experiment where they bombarded alpha particles at beryllium, producing

The British and American governments did not fail to notice the nuclear potential that Chadwick had spoken of. In the midst of World War 2 during the 1940s, the British and the Americans began to covertly work on building the atomic model. However, it quickly became clear that the Americans were making more progress than the British. Chadwick expressed the need for full cooperation between both countries and so in 1943, several British scientists and himself were sent down to America to help build the atomic bomb, a secret operation otherwise known as the Manhattan Project. The Manhattan Project and the atomic bomb were so underground that the American public did not even know the U.S. bombed Japan until the President gave a speech after it happened. The moral implications of the atomic bomb are large-scale. They had successfully created a weapon that won the allies World War 2, but had completely decimated two of Japan’s cities, killed hundreds of thousands of people, and caused severe radiation poisoning. The consequences of the atomic bomb extend beyond World War 2. It led to a nuclear arms race between the Soviet Union and the U.S as the two tried to produce better and more powerful nuclear warfare. The two nations were stuck in a stalemate for 45 years in the Cold War where little to no fighting occurred save for the fact that both sides had nuclear weapons aimed at each other. The effects of an atomic bomb were so devastating that it was enough to just threaten one another with nuclear