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At the close of World War II, the Soviet Union had special search teams operating in Austria and Germany, especially in Berlin, to identify and obtain equipment, material, intellectual property, and personnel useful to the Soviet atomic bomb project.
1945 – July 22 – Truman alludes to Stalin about having successfully detonated an atomic bomb at the Potsdam Conference. [18] [6] 1945 – August 6 – "Little Boy", a gun-type uranium-235 weapon, is dropped on Hiroshima, Japan. 1945 – August 9 – "Fat Man", an implosion-type plutonium-239 weapon, is dropped on Nagasaki, Japan.
The discovery of nuclear fission in 1938 made the development of an atomic bomb a theoretical possibility. [52] Fears that a German atomic bomb project would develop atomic weapons first, especially among scientists who were refugees from Nazi Germany and other fascist countries, were expressed in the Einstein–Szilard letter to Roosevelt in 1939.
The first atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August 6 and 9, 1945, respectively, were large, custom-made devices, requiring highly trained personnel for their arming and deployment. They could be dropped only from the largest bomber planes—at the time the B-29 Superfortress —and each plane could only carry a single bomb in ...
On April 30, John Cockcroft and Ernest Walton publish the first disintegration of an atomic nucleus, popularly described as splitting the atom. They report the production of two alpha particles from the bombardment of lithium-7 nuclei by protons, using a Cockcroft–Walton generator at the University of Cambridge 's Cavendish Laboratory . [ 7 ]
The transcripts seem to indicate that the physicists, in particular Heisenberg, had either overestimated the amount of enriched uranium that an atomic bomb would require or consciously overstated it, and that the German project was at best in a very early, theoretical stage of thinking about how atomic bombs would work; in fact, it is estimated ...
The vaporized matter condenses into a radioactive cloud and pressure waves start moving outwards forming the air blast, which, together with the heat wave wipes out everything in the bomb's range.
In total, Germany produced about 78,000 tons of chemical weapons. [5] By 1945 the nation had produced about 12,000 tons of tabun and 1,000 pounds (450 kg) of sarin. [5] Delivery systems for the nerve agents included 105 mm and 150 mm artillery shells, a 250 kg bomb and a 150 mm rocket. [5]