The First Atomic Bomb Of The United States - 1249 Words

On December 7, 1941, Japanese forces attacked an American naval base, Pearl Harbor, in Honolulu, Hawaii. Twenty naval vessels and 200 airplanes were destroyed during the attack. 2000 soldiers were killed and 1000 were injured. The following day, December 8, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt asked the United States congress to declare war on Japan. Three days later, after the United States turned its attention to Germany and Italy, the two countries declared war on the United States, which the President and Congress freely agreed to. After two years of continuous fighting in the second World War, America had finally joined (â€Å"Pearl Harbor†). Two years before America even joined World War II, Albert Einstein, a German physicist,†¦show more content†¦All worked in the fear of what might happen if Hitler were to create the atomic bomb before they did. However, by November of 1944, it became quite clear that Germany had never intended to create the bomb in the first place. Einstein and Szilard sent yet another warning to the United States, though this time, for a completely different purpose: to warn President Roosevelt of the dangerous effects that the atomic bomb could have on the post-war world. They thought that the project should be abandoned, and that they should find peaceful ways to use nuclear energy. Many people who had worked on the project began to agree with Einstein and Szilard, and after a poll of these scientists was taken, only fifteen percent favored the use of the bomb against Japan. Nonetheless, work on the atomic bomb continued with insistence (â€Å"The First Atomic Bomb†). The creation of the atomic bomb starts first with a complicated background in physics. When neutron combines with the nucleus of an atom of the isotopes uranium 235 or plutonium-239, it causes the nucleus to split into two fragments. In the process of splitting, a great amount of thermal energy, plus gamma rays and neutrons, are released. The escaping neutrons strike and then divide more of the surrounding uranium nuclei, which then discharge more neutrons that still split more nuclei. This series of rapidly multiplying divisions culminates in a chain