B320thand21st


 * The Manhattan Project**

The Manhattan Project was a top secret Anglo-American effort to create the atomic bomb during the second World War. The possibility of an atomic bomb first came in 1938, when German scientists first split an atom. Then in 1939, world renowned German-Jewish physicist Albert Einstein fled to America and warned President Franklin D. Roosevelt that there was a real chance Germany might develop an atomic bomb (McKay et al 1006). After years of intense research and tight secrecy, the 125,000 scientists working on the Manhattan Project (the vast majority of whom did not know what was being developed) created the first atomic bomb in 1945. However, Britain and the United learned when they dropped their atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki that very year that its might was beyond their wildest imagination. The Allies soon realized that they had caused immeasurable damage, had killed hundreds of thousands of people, and had left future generations the curse of radiation poisoning. In the end, the biggest consequence of the Manhattan Project was a discovery that with power comes responsibility, and because the power is too tempting and the responsibility too great, nuclear weapons were almost universally denounced.