Atomic bomb
Bomba atómica
- Date
- 1945 · confidence high
- Place
- Los Alamos, New Mexico, United States (Trinity test at Alamogordo, 16-7-1945)
- Credited to
- Manhattan Project: J. Robert Oppenheimer (Los Alamos), Leslie Groves, Enrico Fermi, Leo Szilard, Hans Bethe, Richard Feynman; fission discovered by Hahn, Strassmann, Meitner and Frisch (1938)
- People
- 👤 Enrico Fermi1901–1954👤 Fritz Strassmann1902–1980👤 Hans Bethe1906–2005👤 Leó Szilárd1898–1964👤 Leslie Groves1896–1970👤 Otto Robert Frisch1904–1979👤 Richard Feynman1918–1988
- Field
- Conflict
What it is
Nuclear fission weapon using uranium-235 (Hiroshima) and implosion-triggered plutonium-239 (Trinity, Nagasaki). First weapon capable of destroying a city in a single blow.
Merged with 'Atomic bomb (Trinity test, Hiroshima and Nagasaki)' (duplicate, 23-09-2026).
What it led to
- Cold War, nuclear deterrence and the arms race
- Big Science: state-funded national laboratories
- The anti-nuclear movement and civil nuclear power
- The Cold War, nuclear deterrence and the arms race
- Civil nuclear power and state-funded Big Science
- The anti-nuclear movement and non-proliferation treaties
Built on
- Uranium1789
- Radioactivity and radium1896–1898
- Mass-energy equivalence (E = mc²)1905
- Cyclotron1930–1932
- The neutron1932
- Nuclear fission1938
- Teflon (PTFE)1938
- Nuclear reactor (Chicago Pile-1)1942
- Chicago Pile-1 nuclear reactor
- Fermi's pile (1942)
Made possible
- Monte Carlo method1946
- Hydrogen bomb (Ivy Mike)1952
- Civil nuclear power plant1954-1957
- Nuclear-powered submarine (USS Nautilus)1954
- Orbital launch vehicle and ICBM (R-7 Semyorka)1957
- Civil nuclear power
- Nuclear ballistic missile
- Nuclear submarine
- civil nuclear reactor