"A six kilogram sphere of plutonium, compressed to super criticality by explosive lenses, exploded over the New Mexico desert with a force equal to approximately 20,000 tons of TNT"(Gene). The heat generated at the center of the explosion rose to four times the hottest temperature of the sun. The huge mushroom-shaped radioactive cloud climbed forty two thousand feet into the New Mexico sky. At ground zero it vaporized the steel and concrete tower that had held the bomb and created a crater one thousand two hundred feet across (Walker). .
President Roosevelt died of a stroke before he could see the success of the Trinity in July 1945. Vice President Harry S Truman became the thirty-third president of the United States. At the time, Truman didn't know anything about the Manhattan Project, but he sought to carry out Roosevelt's plans. Roosevelt's thought went beyond the use of the atomic bomb as a weapon of war. He saw it also as a powerful tool of diplomacy, which could be used to influence postwar relationships among other nations (American). He also thought it could have an impact on both former enemies and uncooperative allies such as the USSR. .
In the last fifty-two years there has been enough nuclear warheads made to destroy every city in the world and still have thousands left over. This all happened during the Cold War, a period of forty-five years (1947-1991), between mainly the two superpowers (United States and the Soviet Union). Albert Einstein thought up the first atomic bomb in the late thirties. In 1942 Enrico Fermi came up with the first nuclear reaction with isotope Uranium 235. The triumph of scientific creativity and genius entered us into the new Nuclear Age (Church). .
"Little Boy" is the nickname given to the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima and on August 6, 1945, three weeks after the initial test of the nuclear bomb, "Little Boy" hit Hiroshima and had the force of twelve thousand five hundred pounds of TNT.
