Manhattan Project

Nearly all of the world powers now days have a stock pile of nuclear weapons. The United States of America has approximately 8,500 warheads, while Russia has around 11,000 nuclear warheads. Still, the road to the very first atomic bomb was fogy, unclear, doubtful. We all know now that it was a success, but few people know the story behind its creation, “The Manhattan Project”. It all started with a war, a warning, and a person of influence.

It was the middle of World War II. America had begun a race against Nazi Germany in order to obtain, or create the very first atomic bomb. The top-secret task took nearly 4 years, and 2 billion dollars to complete. Code named “The Manhattan Project”, its initial research took place all around the United States, but was later moved to a solitary area near Los Alamos, New Mexico. This project was classified, not even vice president Truman knew about this, and Stalin was also kept in the dark. It is not far off to believe that Stalin did have some information on the project, but he decided not to meddle with it. Perhaps he thought it would be a failure like some scientist thought at the very beginning of the project. If that would be the case, getting involved in the investigation would do nothing but harm his people by contributing precious supplies to the cause.

In 1938, German scientist discovered fission, the process where the atom breaks into two equal fragments. Leo Szilard had knowledge of this scientific breakthrough, and fearing a new weapon for the Axis, he decides to warn the U.S. Unable to obtain a response from the government on his own he contacts Albert Einstein, a pacifist, to warn President Franklin D. Roosevelt about the possibilities of an atomic weapon. He exhorts the President to begin research immediately, not because Einstein wanted to see the weapon come to life, but rather because he did not wanted such destructive power to be granted only to the Germans.

It was only until 1942, after both the incident on Pearl Harbor and the entry of the U.S. on the war that America decided to fully fund the project. Before this, progress was made in very small quantities. The United States realized that they were four years behind Nazi Germany, and they could still not replicate fission. It was only until December 2, 1942, when Enrico Fermi was able to create the very first successful chain reaction of atoms. Because it took four years for the Americans to simply replicate what the Germans had done a long time ago, they could only guess how far ahead they were in research, and how much knowledge they had accumulated.

The Russians, as stated before, had no knowledge about this so called “atomic bomb”. But even allies keep watchful eyes on each other. It is revealed to us, thanks to two meticulous and hard worked minutes of searching on Google, that Russia did send a spy into the U.S. His name was Klaus Fuchs. The man was kind of a triple spy. He was a

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