"(...) We
burned Tokyo, not just military target, but set out to wipe out the
people indiscriminately. The atomic bomb is the last word in the
direction. All ethical limitations of warfare are gone. Not because
of Means of destruction are more cruel or painful or otherwise
hideous in their effect upon combatants. The fences are gone (...)"
- David Lilienthal; US Atomic Energy Commission.
The
bomb – the idea so far-fetched and incredible, that, in the overall
dream to become true, it became true. The treacherous idea and the end
of humanity came alongside with the Manhattan project. The idea of
the bomb itself has always been an enquiry subject, its force and its
impact to all of us was simply one of its kind. Unspoken.
Overwhelming.
It
all started from the very small particle which is called atom, going
back in time One might say, nothing was so obvious and so right as
dropping the bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, to end the war that
killed hounded of thousands. The bomber called 'Enola Gay' had one
mission to accomplish, to drop the load on a target. It was in
particular the Aivi Brigde which spread alongside Ota River. 'Little
Boy' exploded on altitude of 1.900 feet, the outcome was something no
one has ever seen before. The bomb had changed the image of the war,
it also changed the image of America, the world itself. However, it
must be remembered – the criminality of Japanese policy and its
government was unquestionable, the genocide and the crimes against
humanity committed in China and southeast Asia has been judged till
nowadays. The Pearl Harbor tragedy will never been forgotten, always
remembered and cherished. No one can tell that Japanese deserved
the bomb. It is still a matter of conscience – an open question ...
. An ethical matter each one of us should govern itself. The bomb was
about to show a domination, strength, it was about to show and
underline the fact, 'Yes, its true, the US are the first forerunner
of the nuclear technology. We are starting a new era, the era of
Uranium and atom'. Without a cloud of doubt, the wars has always
been triggered American infrastructure and economy, the wars
developed the country, America knows it, hence, never change its
policy. There's simply too much money to lose. Namely there is
nothing as profitable as war.
Before
the bomb was dropped various, repeatable test had been conducted in
so-called "nuclear resorts". The most well-known was in Los
Alamos in New Mexico. The head of the Manhattan Project was Robert Oppenheimer, with the acknowledgement of the US president, Harry.S.
Trumam, he gave an onset to the development of the technology and the
weapon which with a glimpse of an eye – can destroy all the
mankind.
The
idea of the atom was an intriguing subject all wanted to proceed from
Aristotle to Plato. The true beginning of it started with a
revolutionary theories of Sir, Isaac Newton.
"(...) It seems
probable to me that God in the beginning formed Matter in solid,
massy, hard, impenetrable, movable Particles (...)"
A
century after John Dalton described the existence of atoms as hard
and round billiard balls. In 1895 Ernest Rutherford described the
atom; its color and demeanor. It was red and grey. He had just
stared his work on radio waves. It made him pretty famous at
Cambridge University, UK. One of his mentors; J.J. Thompson found in
a closed glass tube the real evidence of particles with negative
electrical charges – all of them were thinner than atoms themselves
– Thompson called them electrons. The naming was not new, it has
already been heard by the Irish physicist George Johnston Stoney.
Approximately in the same time W.C. Rontgen worked on atoms and
electrons, he managed to produce the electrical discharge which yield
an odd sound, he called a new sensational discovery – the 'X-rays'.
His French counterpart Henri Becquerel discovered that X-rays might be
transmitted into fluorescence and absorb the light from the spectrum
wrapped into photographic plate. The spectrum gives a photo frame and
an image. He described his discovery as follows:
"(...) I saw a
silhouette of the phosphoresce substance in black on the negative
(...)"
In
1919 Rutherford made another great and outstanding discovery, he
proved that nucleus of hydrogen (1st elemental of
periodic table) was a single, positively charged particle - he
called it proton. More complicated elements had more protons –
their numbers gave the element its atomic number. Laura Fermi found
other nuclear particles – neutrons.
Neutrons
lacked electrical charge. Protons and neutrons were commonly called
the nucleons – they were indicated by emitting strong nuclear force
locked inside the atom's nucleus. During neutron strikes a target
nucleus – it breaks apart, yielding two nearly equal parts. This
process was widely described by Bronowski as 'chain reaction'.
"(...) neutrons
fly through the rest of
the material (...)"
These
discoveries were just a beginning, the arms race were about to start.
The gas – was first battlefield weapon – chlorine and phosgene
were the firs ones. Its power was lethal. Witnessed and described as
follows:
"(...) The
victims die from asphyxiation, drowning in the plasma of their own
blood (...).
At
that very particular moment it was the most powerful weapon of early
1900 of the Great War which began in 1914. Tear gas revolutionized
the war. Its discovery cost lives of Otto Sackur, PhD and Fritz
Haber.
They
discovered outstanding elements of science which modernized and
changed our lives and future. Maria Sklodowska- Curie died of
leukemia, for years she had worked with radioactive matter, she
discovered two highly radioactive elements; polonium and radium. Till
the very end of her life she worked with these elements; she was
nearly blind and her fingers twisted and burned from the radiation.
The
future of atom was so vibrant and rich in content, it appeared in
number of books and novels. The most well-known, perhaps, will be
"World Set Free" by H.G.Wells.
" (...) And
with an equal speed atomic engines of various types invaded
industrialism. The railways paid enormous premiums for priority in
the delivery of atomic traction engines, atomic smelting was embarked
upon so eagerly as to lead to a number of disastrous explosions due
to inexperienced handling of the new power, and the revolutionary
cheapening of both materials and electricity made the entire
reconstruction of domestic buildings a matter merely dependent upon a
reorganization of the methods of the builder and the house-furnisher.
Viewed from the side of the new power and from the point of view of
those who financed and manufactured the new engines and material it
required the age of the Leap into the Air was one of astonishing
prosperity. Patent-holding companies were presently paying dividends
of five or six hundred per cent. and enormous fortunes were made and
fantastic wages earned by all who were concerned in the new
developments. This prosperity was not a little enhanced by the fact
that in both the Dass-Tata and Holsten-Roberts engines one of the
recoverable waste products was gold—the former disintegrated dust
of bismuth and the latter dust of lead—and that this new supply of
gold led quite naturally to a rise in prices throughout the world.
(...)" "(...)Already
before the release of atomic energy the tensions between the old way
of living and the new were intense. They were far intenser than they
had been even at the collapse of the Roman imperial system. On the
one hand was the ancient life of the family and the small community
and the petty industry, on the other was a new life on a larger
scale, with remoter horizons and a strange sense of purpose. Already
it was growing clear that men must live on one side or the other. One
could not have little tradespeople and syndicated businesses in the
same market, sleeping carters and motor trolleys on the same road,
bows and arrows and aeroplane sharpshooters in the same army, or
illiterate peasant industries and power-driven factories in the same
world. And still less it was possible that one could have the ideas
and ambitions and greed and jealousy of peasants equipped with the
vast appliances of the new age. If there had been no atomic bombs to
bring together most of the directing intelligence of the world to
that hasty conference at Brissago, there would still have been,
extended over great areas and a considerable space of time perhaps, a
less formal conference of responsible and understanding people upon
the perplexities of this world-wide opposition. If the work of
Holsten had been spread over centuries and imparted to the world by
imperceptible degrees, it would nevertheless have made it necessary
for men to take counsel upon and set a plan for the future. Indeed
already there had been accumulating for a hundred years before the
crisis a literature of foresight; there was a whole mass of 'Modern
State' scheming available for the conference to go upon. These bombs
did but accentuate and dramatize an already developing problem.
(...) And
now under the shock of the atomic bombs, the great masses of
population which had gathered into the enormous dingy town centers of
that period were dispossessed and scattered disastrously over the
surrounding rural areas. It was as if some brutal force, grown
impatient at last at man's blindness, had with the deliberate
intention of a rearrangement of population upon more wholesome lines,
shaken the world. (...)"
Did
the Manhattan project exist due to the novel? - Presumably, yes –
it did. Fiction became non-fiction. The
breakthrough began with the Second World War. Hitler was very
powerful, his advancement huge and seemed so difficult to stop. V1, V2
bombs destroyed France and Great Britain. The world knew, German
Reich must be stopped, by all means. The price didn't matter. Yet,
even though Allies forces were concentrated on Hitler, they started
noticing Japan – it was all beyond their nightmares – how fierce
and endurance enemy Japanese are. They were stopped by two bombs;
Hiroshima and Nagasaki will always be recognized as places of
victimization of what "should never happen
again".
The
idea of the great weapon has been considered since 1918. But the
final steps to stop the war and implementing it began in 1932, in
1939 Otto Hahn said:
"
(...) nuclear explosive would surely be contrary to God's will (...)"
In
1917 not only tear gas but also Gotha bombers triggered the war and
the victory over the skirmishes. The bombardment of London left the
city in ashes.
"(...) The air
was foul as the Black Hole of Calcutta and those people certainly
were scared. We cheered the girls up and drank the whiskey and felt
better... I hadn't realized before how successful the raids were. It
doesn't matter whether they hit any thing as long as they put the
wind up the civilian population so thoroughly. Those people wanted
peace and they wanted it quickly (...)"
It
can be stated – all started in Great Britain. Precisely at
Cambridge University. In 1934 Irene Curie and Frederic Joliot made
radioactive isotopes from ordinary, stable elements by blasting them
with alpha particles. At the same time Enrico Fermi in Rome found out
that a barrier of paraffin placed between neutrons and target nuclei
slows neutrons and made them to hit nuclear targets, hence, producing
great radioactivity. This discovery made Him to add on the periodic
table a new element – it was uranium. It was the first step to
describe a 'nuclear fission' which follows as such:
"(...)
Imagining the nucleus as a drop of liquid (Bohr) – made its
intervention of a neutron projected into a uranium nucleus made the
nucleus split into two roughly equal pieces. Each had about half the
mass of uranium, hence, the surprising production of barium. Along
with the large pieces came some neutrons liberated from the target
nucleus and these might then collide with other uranium nuclei, and
so on, to create a chain reaction. Realizing an enormous quantity of
energy. Proceeding nuclear fission (...)"
The
bomb was sketched. What was need to complete it was due to be
discovered – one element – called – uranium. This 'miracle'
element of a atomic puzzle was discovered by Marie Sklodowska-Curie,
she examined pitchblende. She outsourced it from Czech Republic. The
samples were rich in geological elements. It was brown, grey, black,
what Curie noticed were small elements of radium, the particles
illuminated and exposed radioactivity. Pitchblende was the most
common form of mineral – originated from uraninite, it consisted of
radium, thorium, polonium and uranium oxide.
Pitchblende
was discovered alongside with cobalt, nickel, bismuth, dolomite and
quartz. Another significant progress in obtaining atomic energy made
Bohr, he described the nature of the matter, the substance levels
naming it "quantum mechanics". He made people to look at
atoms in a quite diverse, different way, He helped them to understand
the nature of atoms which were made of particles, electrons spun in
orbit around its nuclei.
"(...) Most of
it will probably be blown into the air and carried away by wind. This
cloud of radioactive material will kill everybody within a strip
estimated to be several miles long. If it rained the danger would
became even worse because active material would be carried down to
the ground and stick to it. Persons entering the contaminated area
would be subjected to dangerous radiations, even after days. If 1% of
the active material sticks to the debris in the vicinity of the
explosion and if the debris is spread over an area of, say, a square
mile, any person entering this area would be in serious danger, even
several days after the explosion (...)".
In
1940 MAULD Committee gathered to discuss, imagine and build the atomic
bomb. A year before the project was welcomed by President Roosevelt
and Alexander Sasch. The bomb creation was possible after the
discovery of nuclear fission. The Pearl Harbor doom and the fierce
resistant from the Japanese side, made the US certain, that not
German Reich Japan will be exposed to the new weapon, nuclear power.
Robert Oppenheimer became a key figure, he grew up in Manhattan, his
father – a German Jew escaped the atrocities if war, made success
in NYC – clothing industry and fashion. Oppenheimer felt guilty
building the bomb, he told president Harry.S. Truman "We hold
blood in Our hands", yet, what Truman answered was shocking and
uncompromising "Never mind, it all come out with a wash".
Both
bombs dropped to Hiroshima and Nagasaki took more than 90.000 lives
at once! It ended the war, made its final, unquestionable end. The
top-secret mission number 13 was 'successfully accomplished'.
"(...) The
appearance of the people was (...) well, they all had their skin
blackened by burns. They had no hair because their hair was burned
and at a glance you couldn't tell whether you were looking at them
from the front or in back. They had their arms bent forward like this
(...) and their skin – not only on their hands, but on their faces
and bodies, too – hung down. I can still picture them in my mind –
like walking ghosts. They didn't look like people of this world. They
had special way of walking – very slowly ... I myself was one of
them (...)" - An X witness.
The
idea of dropping an atomic bomb was hellish – the ground zero area
perished. The bomb brought biological anomaly, the area became a
waste land.
"(...) The had
understood and the sobbing broke out. The knots of people dissolved
in disorder. Something huge had just cracked. The proud dream of
greater Japan. All that was left of it to millions of Japanese was a
true sorrow, simple and pitiable – the bleeding wound of their
vanquished patriotism. The scattered and hid to weep in the seclusion
of their wooden houses (...)"
The
stories and letters of survivirs help us to understand the tragedy,
justify the neccesity. The precise number of people who were killed
will never be known. Those who survived are pronounced as blessed.
They can tell sotry of their life. The overwhwlming hatred towards
the Americans is presumably still somewhere in the air. Grief and
resentment have to be truned into nderstanding and forgiveness. It
will never be forgotten, yet, remebered and tribute.
Bibliography:
- Ghosh, D. C.; Biswas, R. (2002). "Theoretical calculation of Absolute Radii of Atoms and Ions. Part 1. The Atomic Radii
- Andrew G. van Melsen (1952). From Atomos to Atom. Mineola, N.Y.: Dover Publications
- Dalton, John. "On the Absorption of Gases by Water and Other Liquids", in Memoirs of the Literary and Philosophical Society of Manchester. 1803. Retrieved on August 29, 2007.
- Mazo, Robert M. (2002). Brownian Motion: Fluctuations, Dynamics, and Applications. Oxford University Press
Rotter, Andrew J Hiroshima: The World's Bomb (Making of the Modern World)
- Brazhkin, Vadim V. (2006). "Metastable phases, phase transformations, and phase diagrams in physics and chemistry"
- Ponomarev, Leonid Ivanovich (1993). The Quantum Dice.
- "World Set Free" H.G.Wells
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