Nuclear Weapons: Decoding Hiroshima and Nagasaki

Little Boy and Fat Man

The year was 1945, Hitler had died, the remaining German forces have surrendered and Europe had begun to rebuild the damages caused by World War II. However, not all was well, in the Far East the Japanese forces have refused to end their attempts at world domination. No amount of bargaining, threatening, or strategic bombing of military buildings had convinced Emperor Hiroshito to surrender and the Allied forces are scrambling to find any action they may take to avoid an invasion of Japan. This would result in massive casualties on both sides and poses a huge threat on the Japanese civilian’s way of life. The nuclear projects, like the Manhattan Project, were well underway already in an attempt to beat Hitler to

Physicist Seth Neddermeyer was credited with making the implosion assembly method (see figure #2). A plutonium-240 core is surrounded with conventional explosives, when detonated; the force from the explosives increases the pressure around the core considerably. This increases the density of the core until the plutonium-240 reaches its critical mass, allowing a fission chain reaction to occur and the bomb to detonate. Because this A-Bomb was using plutonium-240, measures had to be taken to ensure the package would make it to the detonation zone mostly intact. Plutonium-240 has a much higher fission rate than plutonium-239 (the desired isotope) so Neddermeyer’s implosion assembly method was used. (Science Behind the Atom Bomb,

Some have seen the usage of two atomic on Japan as a racist act because no atomic bombings were conducted on any European nations. According to Ghosh, a writer for the International Business Times, “About 120,000 Japanese-Americans were rounded up into internment camps during the war, while propaganda (see figure #3) was mass- produced that depicted the Japanese as subhuman and extremely cruel and depraved.” (2011) Plus, the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor, the only attack to occur on America during World War II. It wouldn’t be unlikely that the people within the United States had poor ideas about the Japanese and were possibly more accepting of the usage of this unknown