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By 1944, six thousand scientists and engineers from leading universities and industrial research labs were at work on the development of the world’s first-ever nuclear weapon.
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Albert Einstein warned the USA that the Germans were developing an atomic bomb, so they should too.
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World War II begins.
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The Advisory Committee on Uranium’s name was changed in 1940 to the National Defense Research Committee, before finally being renamed the Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD) in 1941 and adding Fermi to its list of members.
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Plutonium is discovered by Glenn Seaborg.
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FDR gives the go-ahead to make an atomic weapon.
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FDR authorizes the Manhattan Project.
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On July 16, 1945 the first nuclear bomb was detonated in the early morning darkness at a military test-facility at Alamogordo, New Mexico. The intense brightness of the explosion’s flash was followed by the rise of a large mushroom cloud from the desert floor. House windows more than fifty miles away shattered.
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The United States detonated a atomic bombs over the Japanese cities of Hiroshima in August 1945, killing 30,000 people—children, women, and men.
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On August 9, about 80,000 people died after the United States dropped a second bomb on the Japanese city of Nagasaki.
