The Manhattan Project: The World's First Atomic Bomb

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Secrecy was critical. Both the Germans and the Japanese could not learn of the project or of the US’s capabilities. In a secret meeting, both Roosevelt and Churchill agreed to not inform Stalin of the project. In fact, only an extremely small group of inner scientists and officials knew about the atomic bomb's development. When Vice-President Harry S. Truman became president he was finally told about the project. On July 16, 1945, at Trinity site near Alamogordo, New Mexico, scientists of the Manhattan Project prepared the detonation of the world's first atomic bomb (Gosling, "The Manhattan Project."). The device nicknamed, “The Gadget”, was mounted to a 100-foot tower and blown just before dawn. No one knew what the result would be. Image: Successful detonation of Trinity bomb http://learn.fi.edu/guide/wester/history.html …show more content…
A mushroom cloud reached 40,000 feet, the blast blew out windows of homes over a 100 miles away (Gosling, "The Manhattan Project."). When the dust had settled, the bomb had created a crater a half-mile wide and turned the sand into glass. A fake cover-up story was quickly released, explaining that a huge army ammunition dump had exploded in the desert. Soon word reached President Truman that the test was successful. Quietly, the world had officially entered the nuclear age. “I feel the most intense relief that these weapons have not been used since World War II, mixed with the horror that tens of thousands of such weapons have been built since that time—one hundred times more than any of us at Los Alamos could ever have imagined.”- Hans Albrecht Bethe, German-American Physicist (Cellania. “Nuclear