Word: bomb
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That assumption had animated the creation of the Manhattan Engineering District in the first place. It energized the near manic pace at which Groves ramrodded the project forward. It suffused all thinking about the Bomb's purpose, development and eventual detonation. It was never seriously challenged...
...Germany was trying to develop atomic weapons based on an isotope of uranium, U-235. The American nuclear program thus commenced under the sharp prod of fear that Germany would win the race to be the first atomic power. It is fully reasonable to assume that the first U.S. bomb would have been used against Germany had it been available in time...
...happened, the war in Europe ended before the bomb was built. Stimson appointed the so-called Interim Committee on May 1, 1945, to give advice on the Bomb's use against Japan. Scholars have probed the record of the committee's month-long existence in vain for evidence of the kind of deliberative decision-making process that the resort to nuclear weaponry might seem to have warranted. Stimson asked the committee primarily for recommendations about how, not whether, to use the new weapon. Members spent only about 10 minutes of a lunch break discussing a possible demonstration of the Bomb...
...discomforting truth is that Allied leaders strode unhesitantly into the atomic age. "I regarded the bomb as a military weapon and never had any doubt that it should be used," Truman later wrote. "[N]or did I ever hear the slightest suggestion that we should do otherwise," Winston Churchill added. Nothing in the record contradicts them. Dropping the Bomb on Aug. 6, 1945, was among history's most notorious foregone conclusions...
...Japan the obliteration of Hiroshima did not at first yield conclusive results. Japanese scientists assessing the Hiroshima damage doubted that the Americans could possibly have harvested enough radioactive material to make more than a few bombs. It was even likely, they said, that Hiroshima was a one-off stunt that could not be repeated. (This deprecation of the magnitude of the U.S. Bomb program suggests how ineffective a demonstration would have been.) Only after the Soviet declaration of war against Japan on Aug. 8 and the second nuclear attack on Nagasaki on Aug. 9 did Emperor Hirohito, in an exceedingly...