20 Billion For Development And The Bomb example essay topic

The Manhattan Project Winston Churchill, in 1949, was quoted to say that "the advent of the atomic bomb might prove to be the most beneficent development in history precisely because it will make war intolerable". The interesting thing about nuclear war is that it is not merely a question of science, but one of morals and of the ethics of war. Surely, with a result so potentially catastrophic, no one within ethical boundaries could use it. I'm not sure whether Mr. Churchill had it right or if he underestimated the inherently wicked nature of human beings, but a question of equal importance must be posed first: where did it all start? To answer this question, we must predetermine what exactly it is. Let's assume for the sake of study that it is the first atomic bomb and from that draw a conclusion that possesses a slightly better perspective.

So, where did it all start? It started with a group of scientists and engineers that formed an organization called the Manhattan Project. The Manhattan Project was given almost unlimited funding by President Roosevelt and was really only a rented out school in Los Alamos, New Mexico where scientists began working on what was to be the first atomic bomb. Given it was a large camp with 6,000 sets of ears (that's one set per person), security was obsessively tight. The General in charge of this project (General Leslie R. Groves) was very secretive and most of the scientists, technicians, and their families had no idea what it was they were working on.

Perhaps the most intriguing thing was that there were 200,000 people nation wide working on some piece of this without a clue they were aiding the extermination of over 300,000 people. Over $2 billion was hidden from the public and stuck into the funding by President Roosevelt which could not have hurt the cause. This kind of spending is the reason why Germany and Japan never came close to developing the bomb. What would any study be without a dry outline of the costs involved? The total cost for WWII in the U.S. was approximately $3.3 trillion, and about $20 billion of that was purely spent on the A-bomb (about $5 billion per bomb). It is worth noting that that cost only includes raw materials and not the cost for all of the scientists and technicians designing it.

I find those figures to be the only losses, as far as the wealth of our country is concerned, worth mentioning. That cost pales in comparison to the 55,000,000 lives that were lost in WWII (over 300,000 of those as a result of atomic warfare). The cost for the war was great and I would like to think that the cause was equally great, but I will ask you to look at that number one more time and draw your own conclusion. 55,000,000 souls.

The science of the bomb itself is also important. An atomic bomb contains two radioactive isotopes (constantly emitting subatomic particles and radio-waves): Uranium-235 (which can only be mechanically, and not naturally, removed from U-238), and Plutonium-239 (Plutonium, atomic number 94, is a radioactive element formed in the decay of neptunium). A microscopic speck of either of these in any part of your body will most likely lead to cancer. To cause fission (the chain reaction necessary in a nuclear explosion), these isotopes must reach critical mass (the point where neutrons shoot out of the radioactive atoms and collide with and split other atoms, then doing likewise to other atoms). To reach critical mass, the bomb must literally implode before it explodes.

There are strategically placed explosives all around the bomb so that they, when detonated, will collapse on the bomb itself causing critical mass milliseconds before the chain reaction begins. Einstein's equation, E = mc^2, tells us that matter that is transformed into energy may yield a total energy equivalent to the mass multiplied by the square of the velocity of light. This significance of this can be seen when it is considered that the velocity of light is 186,000 miles per second. The energy from one pound of TNT could evenly raise the temperature of about 36 pounds of water from freezing to boiling, whereas the energy produced in the explosion of a pound of uranium could raise the temperature of 200 million pounds of water from freezing to boiling.

The bomb that landed in hiroshima (little boy) was a gun-assembly type bomb which shoots a bullet of fuel into the center of the bomb, detonating it from the center (this method is slIt is ea sightly less efficient). Little boy was 3 meters in diameter and weighed 4 tons, equivalent to 12.5 tons of TNT. y to see that TNT and atomic bombs are hardly to be considered comparable. It is possible that Churchill was right about the bomb, and also possible he wasn't. It is also possible Roosevelt made the right decision in bombing Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and still very possible that he didn't. I have learned that the Manhattan Project was aided by over 200,000 people, the tangible cost of the bombs was about $20 billion for development, and the bomb itself was created using mechanically extrapolated isotopes. The hard facts aside, I learned that science and the ethics of war as we know them are not the only factors that must be taken account when considering the development and usage of nuclear weapons.

I have learned that we have come so far in the field of science, and in the prosperity of our great country. But at what cost?