The Manhattan Project: Changing the World Beyond Warfare

Since its beginning, the Manhattan Project has become synonymous with images and ideas of death, devastation and war. What few people consider though, is that without the United States initial concern in creating weapons of mass destruction, there would be larger changes in society than simply having less bombs. Nuclear energy production was hardly given a thought before scientists saw the awe-inspiring power of nuclear fission. The work going towards the Manhattan Project did more than create destructive weapons of death, it changed the face of the earth, and in more than one way. Everything began back in the late thirties and early forties when the United States learned of the Nazi science program’s attempts to make the world’s most powerful

Currently, plants use fission reactions, which is the bombardment of atoms with neutrons to split atoms into new materials, releasing the energy which we have all come to rely on. Fusion is essentially the opposite of fission. Fusion is the combination of atoms to make new elements, what is happening at the core of our sun currently. When atoms are fused, a massive amount of energy is released, making the cost of producing nearly free once fusion is obtained. One other large advantage of fusion energy is the by-products produced by the chain reaction in fusion. The second most abundantly used power source in fission reactors behind uranium is plutonium. Plutonium could be created by the fusion reactions, giving people not only energy from the initial reaction, but even more fuel to use for fission reactors

Without this simple device, many lives would have been lost to fires. Along with smoke detectors, nuclear technology is also used in the wide world of medicine. Chemotherapy is one of the leading ways to combat cancer growth and is helping to extend the lives, and even curing, patients everywhere. While radiation in food production may at first sound like an off-putting idea, radiation is already being used to better grow the world’s farming capabilities by expanding many countries crop outputs. Nuclear technology is everywhere, and that is not a bad