Atomic bomb
The atomic bomb was the name used in the 1950s for the first of what are now called nuclear weapons. It was originally developed out of fear that the Germans were also working on such a weapon (as in fact they were, although they did not get very far with their project.) This development represented the peak of technological development in World War II.
The secret wartime project that developed the bomb was called by the code name the Manhattan project. It had nothing to do with Manhattan. Much the development took place at Los Alamos, New Mexico. The town, laboratories, production and test facilities built there for the Manhattan Project became what is today the Los Alamos National Laboratory.
The United States dropped two atomic bombs named Little Boy and Fat Man on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, bringing World War II to a swift and decisive end. The morality of the use of the bombs is debated, because it caused such huge loss of civilian life (140,000 at Hiroshima, 70,000 at Nagasaki). U. S. officials have said that the entire cities were proper military targets, and that because the bombings ended the war so quickly, fewer Japanese civilians were killed than if the bombs had not been used. After the USA in World War II no other country has used the atomic bomb in war. The bombs and subsequent surrender also prevented the annexation of Japan's northern islands by the Soviet Union [1][2]. The atomic bombs used at Hiroshima and Nagasaki were fission weapons, which detonate with a massive explosion due to the release of the binding energy in within the nucleus of the atom. Specifically, neutrons in a rapid chain reaction split the nuclei of a heavy chemical element, such as plutonium or uranium, to cause the massive release of energy.
