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Manhattan District The Trinity test of the Manhattan Project on 16 July 1945 was the first detonation of a nuclear weapon. Active 1942–1946 Disbanded 15 August 1947 Country United States United Kingdom Canada Branch U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Garrison/HQ Oak Ridge, Tennessee, U.S. Anniversaries 13 August 1942 Engagements Allied invasion of Italy Allied invasion of France Allied invasion of ...
The Joe-1 atomic bomb test by the Soviet Union that took place in August 1949 came earlier than expected by Americans, and over the next several months there was an intense debate within the U.S. government, military, and scientific communities regarding whether to proceed with development of the far more powerful Super. [50]
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.
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 ...
March 2: John R. Dunning's team at Columbia University verifies Niels Bohr's hypothesis that uranium 235 is responsible for fission by slow neutrons. [10]March: University of Birmingham-based scientists Otto Frisch and Rudolf Peierls author the Frisch–Peierls memorandum, calculate that an atomic bomb might need as little as 1 pound (0.45 kg) of enriched uranium to work.
1968 – January 28 – An aircraft accident occurs when an American B-52 bomber armed with a Mark 28 nuclear bomb bound for Thule Air Base, Greenland, has an in-flight fire and is forced to make a crash landing in North Star Bay, resulting in the detonation of the bomb's conventional explosives and the release of radioactive contamination over ...
Australian physicist Mark Oliphant was a key figure in the launching of both the British and United States nuclear weapons programmes. The 1938 discovery of nuclear fission in uranium by Otto Robert Frisch, Fritz Strassmann, Lise Meitner and Otto Hahn, [1] raised the possibility that an extremely powerful atomic bomb could be created. [2]
Even before the first nuclear weapons had been developed, scientists involved with the Manhattan Project were divided over the use of the weapon. The role of the two atomic bombings of the country in Japan's surrender and the U.S.'s ethical justification for them has been the subject of scholarly and popular debate for decades. The question of ...