The use of obtaining energy from atoms with the use of fission would start the development of the nuclear age.
During the 1920's and early 30's, scientists from around the world worked to render the abstruseness of the atom. These scientists included Ernest Rutherford and James Chadwick in England. Niels Bohr who made several contributions to the understanding of atomic structure and quantum mechanics, Edward Teller, Otto Frisch and others in Copenhagen. Enrico Fermi who discovered radioactivity induced by slow neutrons and Emilio Segre in Italy. Hans Bethe, Ernest O. Lawrence, Robert Oppenheimer, Arthur Compton, and John Dunning in the United States, Frederic Joliot and Irene Curie-Joliot in France, and Otto Hahn, Lise Meitner, and Franz Strassman in Germany. (1) Each of these scientists raced to explain the conflicting results compiled from ingenious experimentation. .
The reign of Adolph Hitler and his first anti-Jewish law stripped all "non-Aryan" of their teaching position in April of 1933. His new law brutally expunged a quarter of the physicists in Germany, including eleven who had earned or would earn Nobel Prizes. The only solution for the professors was emigration. Thirty scientists and scholars arrived in the U. S. in 1933, thirty-two in 1934, only fifteen in 1935; but forty-three came in 1938, ninety-seven in 1939, fifty-nine in 1940, and fifty in 1941. Of these, approximately 100 were physicists. (2) The mass departure of these savants brought forth the rise in research of nuclear weapons in the U.S. .
The first nuclear weapon was built and tested in the United States. This research project was called the Manhattan Project. The goal of this project was to produce an atomic bomb before Germany did. The new weapon had two purposes. First, it could be used to coerce Japan to capitulate. Second, appurtenance of the bomb would empower the United States, and not the USSR, to control postwar policy.
