Atomic bombing of hiroshima and nagesaki.

On the morning of August 6, 1945, a B-29 bomber named Enola Gay flew over the industrial city of Hiroshima, Japan and dropped the first atomic bomb ever. The city went up in flames caused by the immense power equal to about 20,000 tons of TNT. The project was a

success. They were an unprecedented assemblage of civilian, and military scientific brain power--brilliant, intense, and young, the

people that helped develop the bomb. Unknowingly they came to an

isolated mountain setting, known as Los Alamos, New Mexico, to design

and build the bomb that would end World War 2, but begin serious

controversies concerning its sheer power and destruction. I became

interested in this topic because of my interest in science and

history. It seemed an appropriate topic because I am presently

studying World War 2 in my Social Studies Class. The Hiroshima and

Nagasaki bombings were always taught to me with some opinion, and I

always wanted to know the bomb itself and the unbiased effects that it

This image was selected as a picture of the week o...

English: Official portrait of J. Robert Oppenheime...

Gen. Leslie Groves and physicist Robert Oppenheime...

had. This I-search was a great opportunity for me to actually fulfill

my interest.

The Manhattan Project was the code name for the US effort

during World War II to produce the atomic bomb. It was appropriately

named for the Manhattan Engineer District of the US Army Corps of

Engineers, because much of the early research was done in New York

City (Badash 238). Sparked by refugee physicists in the United

States, the program was slowly organized after nuclear fission was

discovered by German scientists in 1938, and many US scientists

expressed the fear that Hitler would attempt to build a fission bomb.

Frustrated with the idea that Germany might produce an atomic bomb

first, Leo Szilard and other scientists asked Albert Einstein, a

famous scientist during that time, to use...