On August 5th, 1945 a B-29 bomber nicknamed the Enola Gay dropped an atomic bomb into the Japanese city Hiroshima without any warning. The whole city was leveled and nearly 200,000 people died as of a direct result of the blast or long-term radiation exposure. This author disagrees with a few aspects that Truman was coming from when he made the world-changing decision. But to understand everything, one must study the entire history of the bomb. .
Known studies into atomic matter date back all the way to Sir Isaac Newton. Not to say that all his theories were accurate, but they set in motion an awesome chain of events. The next discovery came from French physicist Antoine Becquerel. He observed that photographic plates get exposed by invisible emanations from the uranium.
Two physicists by the names of Marie and Pierre Curie (yes, they were married) discovered radioactivity. The two of them worked together at Becquerel laboratory. In this, they identified two elements, polonium and radium. Marie stated that the ability to radiate came from the atom itself and not from the arrangement of atoms. For demonstration purposes, Pierre would place radium in a solution to make it glow, and on his arm to create a burn. .
In 1900 the Quantum theory was advanced by one Max Planck, who stated that energy and matter are manifestations of the same thing. In 1905, Albert Einstein .
extended the Quantum Theory and said that the amount of energy of a piece of matter is equal to the mass of that body times the speed of light squared (E=Mc^2). But Ernest Rutherford contributed the most important observations that led to the bomb itself. He was the first to split an atom and concluded that energy was produced. .
During the time leading up to the bombing of Hiroshima, it would be hard to imagine what exactly was going on in President Truman's mind. What led him to his decision to drop the atomic bomb? One must consider all the American lives that were saved, by going this route, instead of an American invasion into Japan.