The Atomic Bomb 

    The year was 1939; World War II had begun.  By July, four renown scientists, Einstein, Szilard, Wigner and Sachs, met with President Roosevelt to reveal the possibilities for military use of nuclear fission, the atomic bomb.  President Roosevelt awarded a six thousand dollar grant for materials and experimental testing.  By the end of World War II, a total of two billion dollars had been spent on the materialization of an atomic bomb.  On December 7, 1941, the Japanese attacked the United States at Pearl Harbor off the coast of Hawaii.  Consequently, the United States’ involvement was inevitable.  Germany was pursuing world domination and the winning the race for the atomic bomb.  Fortunately, German scientists overestimated the amount of enriched uranium by tons rather than kilograms, concluding that such an amount was not attainable.  The United States Chacago, under the code name, the Manhattan Project, and lead physicist Enrico Fermi, constructed a makeshift nuclear reactor.  On December 2, 1942 nuclear fission materialized into reality.  The reaction was self-sustaining with energy increasing exponentially.  By 1944, in Hanford, Washington, the United States was producing plutonium in kilogram quantities.  On July 16, 1945, the first atomic bomb was tested at Alamogordo, New Mexico, the Trinity test site.  The blast was greater than one hundreds times the blast of one hundred tons of dynamite.  The United States deployed an aircraft carrying the first atomic bomb to be dropped in war; its destination, Hiroshima, Japan on August 6, 1945.  On August 9, 1945, the second atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki, Japan.  These bombs were said to end all wars.  World War II ended on September 2, 1945.  The number of survivors within the blast area was eight, the death count reached an estimated 140,000.  The reason for the survivors is said to be the Rosary Miracle at Hiroshima.  There was a home eight blocks from where the A-Bomb went off in Hiroshima Japan. This home had a church attached to it, which was completely destroyed, but the home survived, and so did the eight German Jesuit missionaries who prayed the rosary in that house faithfully every day.  Not only did they all survive with (at most) relatively minor injuries, but they all lived well past that awful day with no radiation sickness, no loss of hearing, or any other visible long term defects or maladies.              

  Movie Clips of Trinity Test:   Trinty.mpeg     

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