Why Did We Make The Atomic Bomb

Uranium (Nuclear Minerals) / Nuclear Power - Economics, Design, & Industry

Date posted: 12/07/13

Dr. Conca reports that Richard Rhodes recently gave an insightful lecture at the Hanford site in Washington State for the 70th Anniversary of the Manhattan Project that provides a glimpse of what emotions, paradigms, and philosophies motivated people during the world-changing event of developing the atomic bomb. Reprinted here, the reader will be amazed at the amount of information that is essentially unknown to the public, and even many of us in the field, and that adds another layer of insight into our present nuclear challenges in Iran, Pakistan and North Korea. Nuclear fission was discovered accidentally in Nazi Germany on December 21st, 1938, nine months before the beginning of the Second World War. It was a discovery that in the long run would sharply limit national sovereignty and change forever the relationship between nation-states, and it came as a complete surprise. Word spread quickly across the small world community of physicists. Hahn and Strassmann published their results in the German science journal Naturwissenschaften, as scientists do. Frisch and Meitner told Niels Bohr, the great Danish physicist, and followed up with confirming physical experiments published in the British journal Nature.