Why We Dropped The Atomic Bomb

“Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds”- J. Robert Oppenheimer. That quote is a reference to a line from the Bhagavad-Gita. In Bhagavad-Gita the ultimate weapon called the Brahmastra was used to slay what was for all intents and purposes a god. The weapon was developed as the ultimate trump card to stop Germany, Italy, and Japan in World War 2. The Atomic bomb has history including its research and production in the Manhattan Project, the dropping of the bombs in World War 2, and Its effects lasting into the Cold War. The Manhattan project is the most important covert operation our government has ever performed, and it all started with a letter. Albert Einstein wrote a letter to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt in collaboration with Leo Szilard to try and convince him to start a nuclear research program (DoE). This is letter is probably one of the most influential and potentially destructive things ever. The Germans had been conducting their own experiments on Uranium before we had even started. The United States was behind

President Truman decided to drop the “Little Boy” on Hiroshima on the 6 August 1945, and he dropped “Fat Man” on the 9 August 1945 (History-B). The dropping of the bombs was a last ditch effort to avoid the estimated one million casualties. We knew that Japan was going to go down fighting unless we made a display of power so big that would show them they couldn’t win. President Truman used the bombs even though he faced opposition from the Secretary of War Henry Stimson, General Dwight D. Eisenhower, and the actual scientists that made the bombs in question. In total around ninety thousand died from the bombs in Hiroshima alone. After the war was over the alliance between the United States and the Soviet Union was hanging on by a thread, and led to the period of building arms known as the Cold