Nuclear Power

Nuclear power has changed all of our lives for good and for worse. Historically, the arms race that came about due to our discoveries in nuclear physics; under a positive light, all the military spending on producing the nuclear weaponry brought about a type of economic prosperity, job creation, and infrastructure development, as well as a cleaner (if more dangerous) source of energy. Negatively impacted, we did end up furthering Japanese hostilities toward the U.S cause when we dropped bombs that killed thousands of people and has continued to cause environmental issues in those areas. Also, the arms race led to the eventual collapse of the Soviet Union and their military advantage when they attempted to keep up with the U.S on production scale. Did nuclear power cause war? This is still an ongoing debate to this day, but there are many historians that deny this theory -after all, it did end WW2, and only increased tensions during the Cold War without any major nuclear attack.

The Atom: The fascination with nuclear power all boils down to the discovery of the atom. We all know it wasn't as easy as it sounds -many names have contributed to the knowledge we know about this infinitesimal piece of matter that cannot be seen with the naked eye. For example, J.J Thompson discovered the electron and proton with his plum-pudding model; Rutherford essentially discovered an atom's nucleus; Chadwick identified neutrons; and Niels Bohr was the brains behind the image above.  All of this began as early as 1895 when x-rays were first "discovered"by Wilhelm Roentgen under advances in medicine. This new technique -passing electric currents through various mediums- produced the idea of radiation, a term that grew into new phenomenons of radioactivity and a deeper look at the periodic table.
Source: http://www.sparknotes.com/testprep/books/sat2/physics/chapter19section2.rhtml
https://whatisnuclear.com/articles/nuclear_timeline.html

Splitting Uranium: While there were several other scientists throughout the early 1900s that increased our knowledge concerning radioactivity and isotopes, Enrico Fermi's conclusion that "nuclear transformation occurs in almost every element subjected to neutron bombardment," created the incentive for the discovery of nuclear fission that same year. Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassman in Berlin. They were the first to be recorded to have produced barium, a stable isotope, much lighter than uranium that transcended from radioactive decay. What did this all mean? Because barium was believed to have been the product of the neutron bombardment of uranium, it was concluded that Hahn and Strassman had essentially split an atom, officially naming it "nuclear fission." This brought about new possibilities for nuclear power a.k.a the atomic bomb under the Manhattan Project. Interestingly enough, both Hahn and Strassman were unaware that their amazing scientific discovery was being used for such disastrous means and spoke out against the misuse of nuclear energy at the end of World War Two.
Souce: http://www.chemheritage.org/discover/online-resources/chemistry-in-history/themes/atomic-and-nuclear-structure/hahn-meitner-strassman.aspx
http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/1938/fermi-bio.html

Correspondence with President Roosevelt: With the increased experimentation in fission, tensions ran high. Enrico Fermi, an Italian-born physicist at the University of Florence discovered how to speed up neutrons in radioactivity which resulted in new-found radioactive elements. With a Nobel Piece Prize under his belt, collaboration with Leo Szilard  in 1933 resulted in creating a nuclear chain reaction in 1942- in short, building atomic bombs that could do a lot of damage was now possible. With the concerns that this information could be applied to military weaponry, Fermi and a few others persuaded Albert Einstein to sign a letter that warned President Roosevelt of these new atomic bombs as well as a large possibility that the United States could be going to war with Germany who was already exploiting the nuclear weaponry. This letter, written in 1939, essentially launched the arms race that we know as the Cold War and the beginnings of the Manhattan Project in New York.
Source: http://hypertextbook.com/eworld/einstein.shtml
http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/fermi-produces-the-first-nuclear-chain-reaction

Growing Tension: With the breakout of war in Europe, President Roosevelt called for government support for the uranium project. Meanwhile, many scientists were hesitant to rush to the call, as may didn't believe such nuclear weaponry to be possible due to three factors: a strong feeling of "isolationism" to not get the U.S involved, the belief that creating a nuclear bomb was nearly impossibly, especially with their lack of thirty tons of uranium, and finally the conflicting theories being produced in laboratories everywhere which suggested spending unnecessary money. It wasn't until British scientists issued the MAUD report -which explained the feasibility of producing nuclear weaponry- that President Roosevelt officially took action in creating several government committees dedicated to collecting information and people to producing a nuclear bomb and keeping an eye on Western Europe. The first such group was the Uranium Committee in October 1939 (shown above), one of his first that discovered the Germans undertaking massive interest in uranium. With tension slowly increasing, Roosevelt also verified The National Defense Research Committee in June 1940 which essentially wiped out the Uranium Committee. Unlike its predecessor, the NDRU was specifically composed of scientific bodies, did not depend on military funding, excluded foreign scientists, and had more influence and access to nuclear information. Production planning soon led to the development of the U.S Army Corps of Engineers in March of 1942, where they were given responsibility for engineer design, material procurement, and site selection for the atomic bomb. The U.S was officially involved in the arms race.
Source: http://www.atomicheritage.org/history/early-government-support
https://whatisnuclear.com/articles/nuclear_timeline.html

 The Manhattan Project: We all know this was the code name for the first U.S nuclear bomb being produced. At the time, there were very few places that research for it were based: University of Chicago, Columbia University, and University of California (Berkeley). The first controlled nuclear chain reaction was produced by Fermi in December 1942 under the grandstands of Stagg Field at the University of Chicago. With this knowledge in hand, it became obvious that actually producing the bomb would call for a lot more people and several other facilities to produce it; funds were increased and assemblies were built across the U.S (as shown above on the map). Interestingly enough many British scientists visited the US at some point when American research began to outstrip that of the British, a major setback for them as the US Army of Engineers took over production plants and each nation's exchange of information dried up concerning many aspects of the research being done for the nuclear bomb; it was finally agreed in 1943 that both the US and Britain would hand over all reports concerning the building of diffusion plants. It was agreed that secrecy of the Manhattan Project was essential to keep from the Japanese, Germans, and even Stalin, so out of the 120 Americans employed to help build the nuclear bomb, only a small group of four scientists kept the knowledge of their developments (Truman wasn't even aware of the project until he became president). But of course, word eventually leaks out (especially when it involved spies) and Klaus Fuchs, a Soviet spy learned of the U.S secret, much to his delight and dismay.
Fun fact: Most of the uranium the U.S used came from the Belgian Congo.
Source: http://www.ushistory.org/us/51f.asp
http://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/current-and-future-generation/outline-history-of-nuclear-energy.aspx

Trinity Shot: Three years later since the beginning developments of the Manhattan Project, the bomb was officially tested on July 16th, 1945 at the Trinity Site near Alamogordo, Mexico. It was attached to a 100-foot tower and detonated at dawn. As a result? A blinding flash of light seen 200 miles away, a mushroom cloud reaching 40,000 feet into the air, the shattering of all windows of civilian homes 100 miles away, and a half-mile wide crater in the ground that turned all the surrounding sand to glass. Their cover-up story? That a "huge ammunition dump had just exploded in the desert". Though this doubtlessly made everyone suspicious of what was going on in Mexico.
Source:  http://www.ushistory.org/us/51f.asp

Russian Nuclear History: Interest in nuclear physics goes as far back as 1918 at the collaboration of Department Number One with the Academy of Sciences Committee to "organize exploration of rare and radioactive material". The first Soviet conference was in Leningrad in 1933, and when nuclear chain reactions were determined feasible in 1939, the Academy of Sciences Committee's President agreed to the Soviet uranium project on September 28th, 1940. Interestingly enough many German scientists were recruited after the defeat of Nazi Germany in 1945 to aid the USSR in their isotope separation in uranium  (since they'd been constantly testing between using plutonium or uranium for the the bomb) and it wasn't until the U.S bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in November 1945 that increased the speed of the program for the Russians; in a little less than four years ten secret nuclear cities were built in the Soviet Union to house plutonium production reactors. On August 9th, 1949, the first Soviet bomb, RSD-1 was successfully discharged in Semipalatinsk. This led to the USSR's fast-paced mode to constructing nuclear power plants and led to the historically catastrophic melt-down of the Chernobyl power plant April 1986 that led the Soviet into a severe recession in nuclear advancement.
Source: http://www.globalatom.ru/en/rnuclear
www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/current-and-future-generation/outline-history-of-nuclear-energy.aspx

Britain Nuclear History: The British are considered as the first country to have built a successful atomic bomb in the 1940s. The British physicists, Otto Frisch and Rudolf Peierls published the Frisch-Peierls Memorandum, a very famous three page document that confirmed the feasibility of the atomic bomb, as well as the irresistibility of its production, creating a quick response opposed to the U.S at the time, as Britain had more to lose; after all England was facing the Nazi problem alone. In response the MAUD committee was formed to oversee all research being done, funded by the universities. Basically, most of the discoveries of nuclear chain reactions was to the credit of the British, who published their results in later MAUD reports and ended up transferring their research to the U.S, where it wasn't truly put to good use until the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. (There's more specificity to the science behind all of this, but I don't think it's necessary to include that here. Just know that Great Britain was the secret genius behind the discoveries of what was feasible and what is not).
Source: http://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/current-and-future-generation/outline-history-of-nuclear-energy.aspx
http://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-profiles/countries-t-z/appendices/nuclear-development-in-the-united-kingdom.aspx
http://www.atomicheritage.org/history/britains-early-input-1940-41

Bombing of Japan: The U.S bombing of Japan marked the end of World War Two and only worsened the Cold War. With the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor that increased tension between the U.S and Japan; President Truman, knowing that invading Japan would result in serious American casualties, called for the use of the atomic bombs. August 6th, 1945 marks the day in which Little Boy was dropped on Hiroshima, and Fat Man on Nagasaki three days later. Both devastated the Japanese population and environment -the first killed nearly 80,000 people, not including the tens of thousands of others by radiation and wounds, or the 40,000+ in Nagasaki. Each blast was the equivalent of 15,000 tons of TNT and resulted in Japanese surrender and the end of WW2. Many believe the other objective to using the bombs was also to demonstrate the U.S's power to the Soviet Union, as their relations began to deteriorate in earlier that month. Hostilities between USSR and US only increased with the nuclear arms race that relayed soon afterward.
Source: https://whatisnuclear.com/articles/nuclear_timeline.html
http://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/current-and-future-generation/outline-history-of-nuclear-energy.aspx
http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/atomic-bomb-dropped-on-hiroshima

Nuclear Power Revival: Despite the negative effects of the nuclear arms race, there was also the production of harnessing nuclear power in relation to steam and electricity, a cleaner energy in lieu of coal or oil. This was emphasised more at President Eisenhower's "Atoms for Peace" program in 1953 which redirected their research energies toward electricity generation; this eventually brought about change not only in the U.S or the Soviet Union, but also Japan.
Source: www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/current-and-future-generation/outline-history-of-nuclear-energy.aspx
http://ourworld.unu.edu/en/japan-approves-revival-plan-for-fukushima-nuclear-power-plant