The history of the human being, at least the one we have written so far, is full of positive inventions as well as others that, in view of their results, should never have existed. Among the latter we can quickly mention a few, including the atomic bomb .
However, in reality most people do not know much about it, beyond the incontestable evidence that, dropped by the United States, they destroyed the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.
But who invented the atomic bomb and in what year?
Well, to find out we have to focus on that context, not so much towards the end of World War II, but rather time before war breaks out, more precisely while the United States themselves and the Germany of a fledgling leader Adolf Hitler, they competed in an unbridled arms race planning the next battle.
In Berlin, the German capital, scientists Otto Hans and Lise Meitner had already detected what were the necessary conditions for neutron bombardment on a uranium nucleus . It wouldn’t be long until the first of them, and Fritz Strassmann, discovered nuclear fission.
But it would not be the Europeans who would take their trials with the weapon of mass destruction to the last stages. In parallel, on September 12, 1933, Leó Szilárd had the idea of building such a device after having read the novel by HG Wells, “The World Set Free”.
In fact, Szilárd came to patent that concept, the nuclear chain reaction, and in 1936 he handed it over to the British Admiralty so that no one else, above all Germans, would know the secret. But this one had been leaked, and it was subpoenaed by Columbia University and the Manhattan Project.
This initiative, under the direction of Robert Oppenheimer, had the participation of great scientific personalities of the time , such as Luis Walter Álvarez, Ernest Lawrence, Enrico Fermi or Niels Böhr, to name a few. Even Albert Einstein had his input at the beginning of the program.
Under the tutelage of then President Roosevelt, these brilliant minds were asked to work on the Manhattan Project, the first formal atomic bomb test being conducted on July 16, 1945 , when a specimen was dropped in the Alamogordo desert. in New Mexico. That time, the bomb was called “Gadget”, and the staging “Trinity.”
What would happen, a month later, write the saddest pages of humanity.
