The Atomic Bomb

On July 16, 1945, the United States of America ushered the world into a new era with the successful detonation of an atomic bomb in New Mexico. That era was the nuclear age. Less than a month later, on August 6, 1945, an atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, Japan; the first use of a nuclear weapon against an enemy nation. Most of us know of these basic events, but many do not know of the complicated decisions and scientific breakthroughs that paved the way towards that fateful day in Hiroshima. Every day we are closer to having nuclear arms fall in the hands of someone who wishes to do harm with those weapons. Many question why we think the U.S. is justified in having our own atomic collection. This is why it is important to understand how the atomic bomb came about and why we decided it was necessary to use it.

First reports of the bombs in Japan only reported that a “new type of bomb” had been used. Most had no concept of what an atom bomb was or why it was so powerful. The story of the atomic bomb opens with a series of new discoveries in physics that began near the turn of the century. The term classical is applied to the physics that scientists developed prior to that time (Cohen, 17). Much of it came from the work of the Father of Physics, the great seventeenth-century English scholar, Sir Isaac Newton. Newton was a scientific genius. Today, however, a competent student with a good high school physics course probably has a more accurate knowledge of the physical universe than Newton had. This