On this day, August 9, 1945, the Americans load their bomber
the second atomic bomb.
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this time the fissile material was not uranium as in Hiroshima but plutonium.
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at 11.02pm and after failing to drop the “Fat Man” (as they had named the second bomb)
in the town of Kokura on the island of Kyushu, because it was foggy,
the head of the expedition, Major Swaney,
goes to plan B and gives the order to drop the bomb on Nagasaki City
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the explosion is even worse than Hiroshima.
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the mushroom cloud that was created was 18 kilometres high
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you guess the rest....
was about the same as the aftermath of Hiroshima that I wrote about a few days ago
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however
somewhere here I would like to write about nuclear bombs and atomic fission
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the discovery of atomic fission,
is what changed forever the global balance and the history of nations
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«fission» is the splitting of the nucleus of the atom of an element
which results in two nuclei of lighter elements.
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at the same time as the nucleus decays, a huge amount of energy and radiation (radioactivity) is released
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during the interwar era scientists began to psychoanalyze that
if they manage this fission,
then
will gain unlimited energy magnitudes
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and of course this extended to the war industry
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so
in 1938 the first experimental discovery was made
of the fission of atomic nuclei by German scientists
Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann
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in 1939 the theoretical explanation of fission was given by the Austrian physicist of Jewish origin Lise Meitner and her nephew Otto Frisch, based on an equation of Einstein
(I'm very bad at physics and I don't get into these fields at all)
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after Hitler's rise to power and the anti-Semitism that developed, Lise Meitner had caught up and left Austria
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in 1939 the Danish physicist, Niels Bohr,
one of the greatest theoretical physics researchers of all time
left his country and fled to the USA to escape the Nazis.
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In the same year, in collaboration with John Wheeler, they theoretically explained the way the uranium nucleus decays and the possibility of starting a chain reaction in uranium-235.
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in 1942 Enrico Fermi and his colleagues carried out a controlled nuclear reaction in the laboratory
Enrico Fermi had emigrated to the US from Italy in 1938 because of Mussolini's fascist regime.
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but the US got serious about the discovery of the nuclear bomb after Pearl Harbor when they officially entered the war
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so in August 1942, the secret military program for the construction of the atomic bomb, code-named the «Manhattan Project», began.»
(The Manhattan Project).
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had gathered the best scientists of the time, most of them Nobel Prize winners...
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The result of the Manhattan Project was the construction of three atomic bombs almost 3 years later
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The first was test-fired on 16 July 1945 in a deserted area of New Mexico.
It was a plutonium bomb.
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The second, codenamed «Little Boy», was the uranium bomb dropped on Hiroshima on 6 August 1945.
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and the third, named «Fat Man», was the plutonium bomb that destroyed Nagasaki on 9 August
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and the Soviets were fighting for the nuclear bomb.
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the first Soviet atomic bomb, originally a faithful copy of the American one and largely the product of espionage,
was built and successfully tested in August 1949...
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it was this successful test by the Russians that kept the global balance on a wooden spike for almost 40 years...
