Atomic Bomb

Americans were not willing to sacrifice more lives to end this war. They felt that the developed technology should be used. After all, creating the atomic bomb had been a long and hard task. It had taken many years of planning, developing, and testing. The making of the bomb combined theories and ideas from countless chemists and physicists. Most of all it had cost large amounts of money and the project workers feared being investigated by the postwar Congress if it was discovered that funding had gone to a secret project with nothing to show for it.
             The Manhattan Project was the code name for the US Project during World War II to produce the worlds first atomic bomb. It was appropriately named since the Manhattan Engineer District of the US Army Corps of Engineers, was the group that helped spearhead this project. This program was slowly started after the Germans discovered nuclear fission in 1938. Many feared that Hitler would develop the bomb first, so the US was determined to create the bomb before the Germans did. A man by the name of Leo Szilard and other scientists asked Albert Einstein to use his influence and write a letter to plead to President Franklin Roosevelt to support further research on the power of nuclear fission. This letter explained that Nazi scientists were already developing a way to purify Uranium-235 to use in an atomic bomb. Einstein's influence was a success and the Manhattan Project was established. The ultimate goal of this project was to successfully separate Uranium-235 from Uranium-238 and turn this into a usable weapon. In 1942, General Leslie Groves was chosen to lead the project, and he immediately purchased a site in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Groves then chose a scientific director for the bomb project, J. Robert Oppenheimer, who built on an isolated area in Los Alamos, New Mexico. Oppenheimer was the major force behind the project and worked to make sure that all of the great minds working on this project made their visions work and become realities.