The Atomic Bomb

The Atomic Bomb

"Then a tremendous flash of light cut across the sky . Mr. Tanimoto has a distinct recollection that it traveled from east to west, from the city toward the hills. It seemed like a sheet of sun. John Hersey, from Hiroshima, pp8 On August 6, 1945, the world changed forever. On that day the United States of America detonated an atomic bomb over the city of Hiroshima. Never before had mankind seen anything like. Here was something that was slightly bigger than an ordinary bomb, yet could cause infinitely more destruction. It could rip through walls and tear down houses like the devils wrecking ball. In Hiroshima it killed 100,000 people, most non-military civilians. Three days later in Nagasaki it killed roughly 40,000 . The immediate effects of these bombings were simple. The Japanese government surrendered, unconditionally, to the United States. The rest of the world rejoiced as the most destructive war in the history of mankind came to an end . All while the survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki tried to piece together what was left of their lives, families and homes. Over the course of the next forty years, these two bombings, and the nuclear arms race that followed them, would come to have a direct or indirect effect on almost every man, woman and child on this Earth, including people in the United States. The atomic bomb would penetrate every fabric of American existence. From our politics to our educational system. Our industry and our art. Historians have gone so far as to call this period in our history the Òatomic ageÓ for the way it has shaped and guided world politics, relations and culture.

The entire history behind the bomb itself is rooted in Twentieth Century physics. At the time of the bombing the science of physics had been undergoing a revolution for the past thirty-odd years. Scientists now had a clear picture of what the atomic world was like.

They new the structure and particle makeup of atoms, as well as how they behaved. During the 1930Õs it became apparent that there was a immense amount of energy that would be released atoms of Gioielli 2certain elements were split, or taken apart. Scientists began to realize that if harnessed, this energy could be something of a magnitude not before seen to human eyes. They also saw that this energy could possibly be harnessed into a weapon of amazing power. And with the adven...

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...ink about our place in the universe, and what it all means.

Works Cited

Bartter, Martha A. The Way to Ground Zero. New York: Greenwood Press, 1988.

Dewey, Joseph. In a Dark Time. West Lafayette: Purdue University Press, 1990.

Dr. Strangelove. Dir. Stanley Kubrick. With Peter Sellers, George C. Scott and Slim

Pickens. Highland Films Ltd., 1966.(This is a novelization of the movie. All qoutations

from the movie were transribed form this book)

Einstein, Albert. ÒSirÓ (a letter to President Franklin D. Roosevelt) Einstein: The Life and Times. Ronald W. Clark. New York: World Publishing, 1971. 556-557.

George, Peter. Dr. Strangelove. Boston: Gregg Press, 1979.

Ginsberg, Allen. ÒNagasaki DaysÓ and ÒPlutonium Ode.Ó Collected Poems: 1947Ð1980. Ed. Allen Ginsberg. New York: Harper and Row, 1984. 699-705.

Gleick, James. Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman. New York :Vintage Books,

1992.

Hersey, John. Hiroshima. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1985.

Miles, Barry. Ginsberg: A Biography. New York: Harper Perennial, 1989.Stone, Albert E. Literary Aftershocks: American Writers, Readers and the Bomb. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1994.Vonnegut, Kurt.