The Atomic Bomb Essays - Atomic Bombings Of Hiroshima And Nagasaki

The Atomic Bomb The atomic bomb has been a major turning point in history. It started out when Roosevelt signed a document for a group of scientists to start creating the bomb. The scientists thought they could purify uranium 235 to be used as a form of nuclear warfare. The name of the top secret project was The Manhattan Project named after the Manhattan Engineer District of the US Army Corps of Engineers due to the great amount of early research done in New York. Scientists working on the atomic bomb needed to separate uranium 235 from the common uranium 238. The scientists worked six days a week, 18 hours a day. By 1945 the project had 40 labs and factories and employed 200,000 people, more than the automobile industry that year. The project spent $2 billion which is equivalent to $26 billion today. After much research I decided that it was better to bomb Nagasaki and Hiroshima than the US to loose many more of its soldiers. The US probably dropped the bomb because the Japanese would not have surrendered unless. There would have been thousands of US casualties by fighting Japan with ground troops. The atomic bomb was a very costly project and wouldnt have gone well if millions was spent making a bomb and it was never used. Other reasons are the Japanese were abusive to US prisoners of War and to show the US technology was superior to that of the USSR. On August 6th, 1945 the first atomic bomb was dropped on the city of Hiroshima. The explosion killed 90,000 to 140,000 people. The bomb devastated 4 sq. miles of land and damaged outside areas severely.