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Breakthrough!
In the 1930's a group of scientists the from the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom developed "Project Manhattan" to counter the Nazi's atomic bomb project -
Creation
On the 25th of Janurary, 1939 an experimental team at Columbia University conducted the first nuclear fission experiment in the United States in the basement of a place called Pupin Hall. -
Fat Man, Thin Man
In early 1943 Julius Robert Oppenheimer decided that two projects should go forward, project "Fat Man" (A plutonium implosion) and project "Thin Man" (A plutonium gun). -
Project "Fat Man"
It was later decided that project "Thin Man" would de-prioritized in favour of project "Fat Man", as it was discovered that the weapon would was likely to explode before it had any great effect, this is called a "fizzel". -
Problems
Although project "Fat Man" has less problems than it's counterpart it still had some, it was hard to get all of the chemicals to activate at the same time, thus causing it to fizzle. -
Nuclear
Because of the difficulties using plutonium, in a post-war conference it was decided to go nuclear. It was code-named project "Trinity" and the device was called "Gadget". Gadget released the equivelent of 19 kilotons of TNT -
Hiroshima
A uranium based bomb code named "Little Boy" was detonated above the Japanses city, most of the victims were civilians and suffered from severe burns, radiation and blast effects -
Nagasaki
Three days after the Hiroshima bombing thay released a "Fat Man" bomb over Nagasaki killing over 100,000 civilians, tens of thousnads of people died later because of radiation sickness -
Soviet bombs
Russia had developed their own nuclear weapon as they had spies in project Manhattan who were feeding them information on what the U.S. had been up to. The result of this was a nuclear fission bomb called "Joe-1". -
Hydrogen bomb
As a result of Russia's bomb the U.S. strated work on a hydrogen bomb, which has a 1000 times more power than a fission bomb which emitts 100 million to several hundred million volts of energy -
Disagreement
There was much disagreement towards developing a hydrogen bomb, as a bomb that was so powerful could only be used for genocide. -
Decision
President Trumandecided to let the project go ahead -
Operation Ivy
The first hydrogen bomb was set off the on the Marshal Islands code named "Mike" it was set off by a large fission bomb, .It weighed 64 tons and was 6m high, so it could not be dropped off a plane. The entire island was gone leaving a 2km wide creater that was 50m deep. -
Shrimp
On another island in the Marshal Islands was used to test out another bomb, code named "Shrimp". It's blast was far bigger than expected, infact it was 3 times bigger then expected, covering in 18,000km2, it contaminated all of the islands and they were all evacuated. -
Tsar Bomba
The Soviet Tsar Bomba was the largest nuclear bomb ever made delivering 50 megatons which was half of what they originally wanted but due to the fact it would kill the person in the plane that was dropping the bomb they were forced to half it. -
Treaty
In 1963, all nuclear and many non-nuclear states signed the Limited Test Ban Treaty, pledging to refrain from testing nuclear weapons in the atmosphere, underwater, or in outer space.
