Thrilling Birth of the Nuclear Bomb !!

Thrilling Birth of the Nuclear Bomb !!

 

Hello, in today's world of mankind, whoever holds a nuclear weapon, that person is the hegemon. Thanks to nuclear weapons, North Korea is just a small, poor country but no one dares to touch it, thanks to nuclear weapons Russia can fight the whole of Europe, thanks to nuclear weapons the US can arrange the world order. In general, nuclear weapons are the scariest thing to date, but have you ever wondered under what circumstances nuclear weapons were invented? Then let's watch this video to learn the extremely bizarre birth of this world's most powerful weapon.

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The idea of nuclear weapons came from Leo Szilard, a Hungarian Jew who fled Germany to the United Kingdom, two months after Adolf Hitler became chancellor and carried out the Holocaust. Szilard came to a country at the time which was at the forefront of nuclear physics with extremely important achievements including: James Chadwick, just discovered the neutron and Cambridge University physicists soon split the atom. They broke a Lithium nucleus in two by bombarding it with protons, verifying Albert Einstein's understanding that "mass and energy are one and the same", expressed by the equation E = MC squared.

 

And Szilard's idea was born based on this groundbreaking experiment, he reasoned: "if we can find an atom split by a neutron and the process emits two or more neutrons then the mass of this element will give off a large amount of energy and if a chain reaction occurs it will generates a huge amount of energy", and that thing is the atomic bomb we know today, Szilard tried to pursue this idea but failed.

 

It was not until 1938 that a breakthrough occurred in the Nazi capital Berlin, where German physicists Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann bombarded uranium atoms with neutrons. When they analyzed the fragments, they were shocked to find traces of the new lighter element. After clarifying, scientists understood that: "after bombardment, the uranium nucleus was split into two equal parts and called it fission".

 

The next piece of the puzzle was when Italian physicist Enrico Fermi, who had also fled Nazi Germany and was working at Colombia University in New Work, discovered: "Uranium fission has liberated secondary neutrons needed to carry out a chain reaction", just as Szilard had in mind. And then Fermi and Szilard worked together on research, they calculated that 1 kg of uranium would produce the same energy as 20,000 tons of TNT, which made Szilard see the prospect of nuclear war, he said. "There's no doubt in my mind that the world is moving toward grief".

 

However, others were skeptical. It was in 1939 that Danish physicist Niels Bohr, who was actively helping German scientists escape the Nazis, threw a bucket of cold water on Szilard's head, he pointed out: "uranium 238, isotope that makes up 99.3% of uranium in nature will not be able to emit secondary neutrons, only a very rare isotope of uranium, uranium 235, can split this way, so there won't be enough uranium 235 to bomb-making".

 

However, Szilard still believed that a chain reaction was possible and feared that the Nazis would know it too. He consulted with Hungarian leaders, they agreed that "Einstein would be the best person to alert US President Franklin Roosevelt to the danger". Einstein's famous letter was sent shortly after the outbreak of war in Europe, but the president was not interested.

 

Everything really started in 1940, when two German physicists proved that: "Bohr was wrong". Specifically, they have found a way to produce uranium 235 in large quantities, so that there will be enough and excess uranium 235 to produce bombs. The two scientists were terrified at the prospect of the Nazis dropping destructive bombs on the densely populated city, so they wrote to the British government demanding swift action. Their memo on the properties of a "super radioactive bomb" was more successful than Einstein's letter to Roosevelt, which led to the start of a British bomb project called the Tube Alloys.

 

The United States saw this and immediately began to act. In April 1940, the US government started the Manhattan project with the goal of fission chain reaction, at that time, the US was suddenly attacked by the Japanese at Pearl Harbor, making the Manhattan project even more urgent. A year later, the Manhattan project was ready to try a chain reaction in the piles of uranium and graphite they had assembled at a University of Chicago football field. It was Wednesday, December 2, 1942, the reaction was really successful, the atomic bomb was really born.

 

After the reaction was confirmed, Szilard shook hands with Fermi and said: "This will be a dark day in the history of mankind". For the next four years, the United States, Great Britain, and Canada poured great resources into the Manhattan project, Tube Alloys continued for a while but was eventually incorporated into the American project, and Nazi Germany also initiated a nuclear weapons program but made little progress.

 

On July 16, 1945, the United States detonated the world's first nuclear bomb in the New Mexico desert, the test being the last gruesome proof that nuclear power can be destructive beyond imagination, it reminded scientist Robert Oppenheimer of a passage in the hindu bible: "I became the god of death, the destroyer of the world".

 

The attacks on Japan started a worldwide arms race. In 1945, the US developed a hydrogen bomb of mass destruction, exploiting nuclear fusion rather than fission, the Soviet Union developed and tested their own bomb in 1949, the nuclear arsenal the world's largest has about 27,000 bombs.

 

And from then until now, nuclear weapons have been the thing that helps to arrange the global order and its introduction can destroy the whole earth in the future, thank you for watching the video, goodbye and see you again.