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The United States nuclear program since its inception has experienced accidents of varying forms, ranging from single-casualty research experiments (such as that of Louis Slotin during the Manhattan Project), to the nuclear fallout dispersion of the Castle Bravo shot in 1954, to accidents such as crashes of aircraft carrying nuclear weapons ...
Building on major scientific breakthroughs made during the 1930s, the United Kingdom began the world's first nuclear weapons research project, codenamed Tube Alloys, in 1941, during World War II. The United States, in collaboration with the United Kingdom, initiated the Manhattan Project the following year to build a weapon using nuclear fission.
President Jimmy Carter leaving Three Mile Island Nuclear Generating Station for Middletown, Pennsylvania, April 1, 1979. Unexpectedly high costs in the nuclear weapons program, along with competition with the Soviet Union and a desire to spread democracy through the world, created "...pressure on federal officials to develop a civilian nuclear power industry that could help justify the ...
The United States is known to have possessed three types of weapons of mass destruction: nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons.As the country that invented nuclear weapons, the U.S. is the only country to have used nuclear weapons on another country, when it detonated two atomic bombs over two Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki during World War II.
1998 – May – India tests five more nuclear weapons as part of Operation Shakti at the Pokhran test site. This was India's second round of nuclear weapons testing. 1998 – May – Pakistan detonates five high-enriched uranium nuclear weapons in the Chagai Hills. A sixth nuclear test, at Kharan, was a plutonium device.
Two types of atomic bombs were developed during the war. A relatively simple gun-type fission weapon was made using uranium-235, an isotope that makes up only 0.7 percent of natural uranium. Since it is chemically identical to the most common isotope, uranium-238, and has almost the same mass, it proved difficult to separate.
First nuclear weapons test, conducted as part of the Manhattan Project. Tested the Mark 3 Fat Man design. Crossroads: 1946 2: 2: 2: 21 42: First postwar test series. Sandstone: 1948 3: 3: 3: 18 to 49 104: The first use of "levitated" cores made of oralloy. Tested components for Mark 4 design. Ranger: 1951 5: 5: 5: 1 to 22 40: First tests at the ...
It was the second of the only two nuclear weapons ever used in warfare, the first being Little Boy, and its detonation marked the third nuclear explosion in history. The first one was built by scientists and engineers at Los Alamos Laboratory using plutonium manufactured at the Hanford Site and was dropped from the Boeing B-29 Superfortress ...