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Imagine working with radioactive materials in a secret camp, and the government not telling you that this material is harmful to your body. In the book Plutopia: Nuclear Families, Atomic Cities, and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters by Kate Brown, she takes her readers on a journey to expose what happened in the first two cities that started producing plutonium. Brown is an Associate Professor of History at University of Maryland, Baltimore County. She has won a handful of prizes, such as the American Historical Association’s George Louis Beer Prize for the Best Book in International European History, and was also a 2009 Guggenheim Fellow. Brown wrote this book by looking through hundreds of archives and interviews with people,
The first two cities to build plutonium were Richland, Washington and Ozersk, Russia. To explain how these two cities came about and how it all ended, she divided the book into four parts. The first half of the book brought the readers in two journeys on how the first two cities started; it created a competition between two nations on who can develop better weapons. The first part was called “Incarcerated Space on the Western Nuclear Frontier,” it explains how the plutonium camp started in Richland, Washington. The camp had tight security, “Hanford Camp was cut off from the surrounding area with a system of fences and gatehouse…Workers on one site were restricted from entering other construction sites in order to limit their knowledge of the entirety of the secret project” (Brown 22). The secrecy of the camps was so important because the government did not want their war enemies to know what they were doing. The second part of was called “The Soviet Working Class Atom,” it also talked about how the Russian camp started and how it was also a secret because of the enemies. The camp started because Stalin wanted build something bigger and better than what the United States was building. During this time, the arms race started to progress because of the
Brown took her time to interview people and look through archives to get the raw scenery of what happened behind closed doors. The third part was “The Plutonium Disasters.” She brought light to how dangerous it was to work and live there, and most of the people in the camp did not know how it can affect their body. Dr. Herbert Parker, the head of the Health Physics Division, “estimated there were eight hundred million flakes of [plutonium], which, if sucked into workers’ lungs or [ingested], could lodge in soft organs and remain in the body of years, a tiny time bomb that Parker feared would produce cancer” (Brown 166). This radioactive element that workers are producing is not just affecting the environment, but is also affecting the workers and their families. Brown has given an immense amount of evidence to explain to the readers how it affected so many of the workers’ health; she gives a vivid picture of how the radioactivity and particles of plutonium lingers in the air. The affects to the workers and their family ranges from cancerous cells to organ deterioration, when a pregnant woman is exposed to it, the health of her baby is also at risk. The fourth and last part of the book is “Dismantling the Plutonium Curtain,” this curtain is the curtain of secrecy. Brown interviewed people who lived in the camps as children and also people who worked there. Many of the people she
I am reading Bomb by Steve Sheinkin. At the beginning of the book, Oppenheimer, who is the main chemical scientist in the novel, sees the effects of the Great Depression on his pupils when they cannot buy chemistry textbooks. During Oppenheimer’s time as a professor, the Nazis discovered the splitting of the uranium atom. When Albert Einstein found out that about the discovery the Nazis did, he informs President Roosevelt about how the Nazis plan to develop atomic weapons. Harry Gold who is a Communist spy, starts to work with the KGB. And starts to steal ideas and projects from the American Uranium Committee.
The engineers in Visit Sunny Chernobyl created a new frontier past the safety zone because they want to test the limits of the reactor. What the scientists didn’t account for is that fact that the reactors already had the potential of a dangerous chain reaction. (Blackwell 6) Consequently, their boundary destroying led to catastrophic consequences and the total annihilation of a land area because of massive radiation. Blackwell thought Chernobyl was so horrific he expressed that no one should visit without a “working understanding of radiation and how it’s measured” (Blackwell 7). These are some horrific consequences that followed from surpassing the
In order to better understand the historical context of nuclear development it seems to me as though Iversen dove into a fair amount of investigative journalism. The book focuses primarily on the events of Rocky Flats and her life through a narrative nonfiction interpretation. By providing a journalist approach, Iversen makes it easy for the reader to build a relationship with the characters presented throughout the book. At times I found myself visualizing the intensity of the fires, the whirlwind of emotions from locals, and the lasting environmental impacts that would not only plague Colorado, but taint the reputation of what it means to be human.
The world as we know it was built with events and circumstances that many of us are unaware of. One of the most powerful and deadliest discoveries of the human race in the twentieth century was the development of the atomic bomb. Many are aware that we dropped two atomic bombs on Japan in the end of the Second World War, but what many do not know are the extensive research operations that evaluated the technology to be used in future military operations. In the summer of 1946, American Government and Military forces conducted this research in Operation: Crossroads which was performed in the Bikini Islands. More than 40 years later in 1988 director Robert Stone directed and produced a documentary on these tests which was named Radio Bikini: the most terrifying and unbelievable story of the nuclear age. The film was hailed by critics for the content of the film and its use of newsreels and military film for the movie as one critic said, “Wha...
Gesensway, Deborah and Mindy Roseman. Beyond Words, Images from America’s Concentration Camps. New York: Cornell University Press, 1987. Print.
In 1917 a young female right out of high school started working at a radium factory in Orange, New Jersey. The job was mixing water, glue and radium powder for the task of painting watch dials, aircraft switches, and instrument dials. The paint is newly inventive and cool so without hesitation she paints her nails and lips with her friends all the while not knowing that this paint that is making them radiant, is slowly killing them. This was the life of Grace Fryer. Today there are trepidations on the topic of radiation from fears of nuclear fallout, meltdowns, or acts of terrorism. This uneasiness is a result of events over the past one hundred years showing the dangers of radiation. Although most accidents today leading to death from radiation poisoning occur from human error or faults in equipment, the incident involving the now named "radium girls" transpired from lack of public awareness and safety laws. (introduce topics of the paper)
Sherwin, M. (1973). The atomic bomb and the origins of the cold war. American Historical Review, 78: 1-7.
Americans had knowledge of the events taking place during the war, but Carson shed a light on the ripple effects that the environment was experiencing. Silent Spring brings the focus to different threats that had arisen because of the war. In a way, Carson places the blame for the deterioration of the environment on mankind as a whole. In the past, wars had been fought without any use of nuclear weaponry. Carson’s writing really emphasizes the fault of mankind’s decision to hurt the environment. “Along with the possibility of extinction of mankind by nuclear war, the central problem of our age has therefore become the contamination of man’s total environment with such substances of incredible potential for harm – substances that accumulate in the tissues of plants and animals and even penetrate the germ cells to shatter or alter the very material of heredity upon which the shape of the future depends.” (Carson, 181). The writing technique Carson uses in Silent Spring has a way of making the reader feel guilty, especially considering that at the time of publication there was so much environmental destruction occurring. Carson’s writing helped to educate the American population of the harm to the environment caused by the Cold War. Because the war’s dangerous strategies provided such a strong backbone for Carson’s argument, the American public was very receptive of the content and themes presented in Silent
Many people had their thoughts about why or why not the Hydrogen Bomb should have been built. What this essay will talk about is why the Hydrogen Bomb was built. "The successful explosion of a Teller-inspired thermonuclear device in 1952 gave" the U.S. the go ahead blow against the Soviet Union in the arms race of the fifties (Teller and Ulam). Scientists around the world had been thinking that a thermonuclear bomb, also known as the Hydrogen Bomb, could be developed, but their arms race was completely focused on the atomic bomb. Oppenheimer was a household name because he was the head scientist at Los Alamos while developing the atomic bomb, after that had been completed the tide shifted to a man who’s name is Edward Teller.
...d them to end the war with Japan. But not only did they create bombs, but they also found a new way to power the spreading cities of America. Also, even though many knew the power of a nuclear bomb, they couldn’t have predicted the lasting effects on the land and the people. So within this scientific experiment we have learned that nuclear radiation can cause genetic mutations, the formation of cataracts, leukemia, and a shortened life (Document I).
Despite all of the security used by the officials in charge of the “Manhattan Project,” soviet spies managed to leak information to the Soviet Union that allowed them to create a nuclear bomb of their own. Klaus Fuchs, an important scientist to the “Manhattan Project,” managed to move throughout the project and provide crucial information to the Soviets. David Greenglass also provi...
World War II is an area of history researched by many scholars and amateurs in a variety ways and perspectives. Unfortunately, some aspects of this international event have been widely ignored. Thus, many books on unknown aspects of history have a harder time balancing both informing about the event and creating an argument within its history. The correct balance between these two tasks is something not all history books can accomplish, however, Nebraska POW Camps accomplished this task with only a small error. Using personal accounts, Melissa Amateis Marsh’s book, Nebraska POW Camps: A History of World War II Prisoners in the Heartland, was a refreshing read on a forgotten event close to home for Nebraskans, with a strong argument that only faltered in the organization of her defense of why POWs had positive experiences in the camps.
Radium attacked the skeletal system of the workers because it is an analog of calcium. The calcium in the bones of the workers was essentially replaced with radium, which is highly unstable and radioactive. It emits ionizing alpha particle, and gamma rays radiation which causes damage to the human body. This led to the “honeycombing and cancer (Langer, 1987). The evidence of the damage was apparent when they felled to heal from bone trauma and damage. Without true calcium, the bones could not repair normally. This resulted in the painful death of many of the workers and countless side effects to them and their offspring. All of which could have been avoided if Radium Dial had employed a few safety measures to protect their workers instead of their profits. Despite the suffering of the Radium Girls and their loved ones, many of the safety standards for handling radioactive materials are in direct response to the research conducted on the former workers and their remains. They have been immortalized for their
Smirnov, Yuri, Vladislav Zubok. “Nuclear Weapons after Stalin’s Death: Moscow enters the H-Bomb Age.” Cold War International History Project. March 1994.
One of the short-term effects was that they had so many people injured and people who had passed away in the flames of the furious Atomic Bomb. The amount of people killed during the bomb was the amount of 80,000 people; the amou...