Monday, March 5, 2012

History

The United States began the Manhattan Project before World War 2 even began, other allied forces including the Soviet Union were all desiring to have the superiority in nuclear warfare. There was a race to create the first atomic bomb. 


Germany was beginning to be defeated so the war with them was slowly coming to an end. The United States was still at war with Japan. The Allied forces discussed how to win the ongoing war in the pacific, they decided that they could drop the atomic bomb on japan in order to make them surrender. 


The Battle of Okinawa was a huge turning point in the decision whether to drop the atomic on japan or not, this battle was named Operation Iceberg. It took place from April to June of 1945, and To those Japanese who thought the war was winnable, Okinawa was the last chance. The Japanese felt so much shame from the thought of loosing these attacks that they had large amounts of suicide and kamikaze attacks. Since the United States knew that the Japanese would rather commit suicide then face defeat the U.S. thought that they needed to do even more damage. The Japanese already suffered over 100,000 casualties from the battle of Okinawa, so why did we need to kill even more Japanese civilians? Let alone killing hundreds of thousands of innocent Japanese citizens the dropping of the first atomic bomb changed the world of warfare negatively forever. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were chosen as the targets of the two atomic bombs not only because of their population but because they had high military strategic value and they had never before been bombed. 

The two bombs that were dropped were known as "little boy" and "fat man". "little boy" is the bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima on August 6th. The Army Air force Colonel Paul W.Tibbets flew the B-29 bomber nicknamed Enola Gay that dropped "little boy" over Hiroshima. Only three days later the second bomb "fat man" was dropped over Nagasaki by Major Charles W. Sweeny. Then on September 2nd Japan unconditionally surrendered. 

"little boy"

Enola Gay

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