Why The First Atomic Bomb Invented

Conner Savage
English 11 Period 6
4/28/17
The Gadget of World War II The building the first atomic bomb was an extremely high stakes race. It involved many of the top scientists and military personnel from the United States, Russia, Great Britain, and Germany. The stakes could not have been higher, whoever controlled the bomb controlled the outcome of the second world war. The history behind it is genuinely riveting, full of experimentation, espionage, and settling with final designs. To start, let us answer the question what is fission and how was it discovered.To put it simply fission is the splitting of an atom. A man by the name of “Otto Hahn set up a new experiment”(S. 15). This new experiment was the first time an atom had been split. This ended up getting the ball rolling and the idea of the atomic bomb was born. Since radioactive elements, such as uranium, are unstable by nature some people realized that it could be harnessed into a bomb. Thus making the larges and most powerful weapon that has ever been created

The design for the uranium bomb was simply to use a gun assembly method. This meant that a piece of critical mass uranium was shot at a a cylinder to create a fission chain reaction. This was done to several pieces of uranium. The assembly its self was divided into two parts the target and the projectile. Oddly enough the projectile contained the uranium. There were nine uranium discs staked around a hollow tube, Gosling. This was then fired toward another set of six rings. Thus creating a chain reaction of fission. All the uranium combined weighted a total of about one hundred and forty-one pounds or about sixty four kilograms. With this added to the weight of the whole bomb, it weighted an astounding nine thousand seven hundred pounds or four thousand four hundred kilograms and was ten feet long. This bomb design was dropped on Hiroshima and was code named little